Kerebra, The Sapient Land

The world is called Kerebra, and it is alive. Or atleast it's sentient, perhaps even sapient. The whole world is enveloped in a field of psionic energy, like an enormous, unfathomable consciousness that touches all thinking minds. The people of Kerebra call it the Worldmind, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is there. 

All intelligent beings in Kerebra (and most animals) share a connection with the Worldmind. Some learn to harness their innate connection to the Worldmind and become psionicists, but all who live in Kerebra share a bond with it. People sometimes experience prophetic dreams, visions and sensations that clearly come from somewhere outside of their own consciousness. Such experiences are called gleanings or glimpses, and they are common enough that everyone knows about them.

What isn't common knowledge is that Kerebra itself is an immensely powerful psionic being. The entire plane is a slumbering entity that manifests everything within it from it's vast stores of psionic power. In essence, Kerebra is dreaming the world, and dreaming it brings it into physical existence through psionic power.

Life in Kerebra is peaceful. Or it was, once.

There are no kingdoms, empires or nations, only small cities and villages. People live in harmony with each other and nature, a gift of the Worldmind and the link it provides between all thinking beings. Everyone is connected, and they feel this connection in a vague way and instinctively know that negativity, harmful acts and any kind of evil would harm themselves as much as it would harm others. Villages and towns are guided by their elders, and the rare crimes are adjudicated by the elders and the community.

That was the way it used to be.

Now, a darkness has crept into Kerebra, spreading from the edges of the land towards the centre. The once lush and beautiful crystal forests are being consumed by a creeping rot, a wrongness that infects plants and wildlife and twists them into nightmarish creatures who thirst for blood. This Rot is starting to affect the Worldmind, and some people exibit dark, twisted urges and behaviours previously unknown in Kerebra.

As the rot spreads and grows, the people are looking for ways to defend themselves. Two organizations have emerged, and spread through most of the inhabited world.

The Purple Knights are a brotherhood of warriors and mystics who wield psionic power in order to defend their people. Purple Knights are found all over Kerebra, and they are building strongholds at the edges of the rot and trying to contain it's corruption. The Knights are divided into Orders with different responsibilities, like the Knights of the Crossroads who patrol the roads and pathways between communities, defending farmers and travellers from marauding beasts of the rot, and the Knights of the Glade who delve into the rot-infested forests to seek an answer to the mystery of what the rot is and how it might be stopped.

The other organization are the Executores Justitia. The Executores arose when crime and violence started becoming a problem as the Rot spread it's influence through the edges of the Worldmind, and some people started becoming affected. They fill the role of travelling police officers, solving crimes, making arrests and carrying out sentences. Unfortunately, those who become affected by the Rot cannot be cured, and it is the responsibility of the Executor Knights to carry out final sentencing on the perpetrators they catch.

The Executores Justitia are led by the Praetor General, the most powerful psion in the order, and every vigiles patrol has a praetor that accompanies the Executor Knights and carries out the sentencing. Each praetor is a powerful psionicist, and he or she is both judge and jury.

Nobody knows exactly what the rot is or why it has afflicted Kerebra and the Worldmind. The psions who have attempted to plumb the depths of the Worldmind for answers have reported being attacked by strange dreamlike creatures of darkness and fear, and the deepest reaches of the Worldmind are inaccessible to all but the most powerful and foolhardy of dreamdivers.

The Rot started about 100 years ago, but it spreads very slowly. The Purple Knights and the Executores Justitia began as groups of concerned villagers and townsfolk who saw a gradual frightening change in the world. The Purple Knights arose as farmers and villagers armed with tools and psionic talent banded together for protection, and evolved over a thirty year period into fully fledged knights. They had to learn how to forge tools into weapons, how to wield them and how to combat the rot based on experience, trial and error. Many of them had some measure of psionic power, but the combat applications of those powers had to be developed from nothing. They are still more armed idealists than true knights, but they have enough experience fighting the Rot that they have begun to train new recruits based on the knowledge and techniques they have gathered and developed. It was not easy for a peaceful people to develop the trade of war, but the Purple Knights have managed to do so.

The Executores Justitia are much younger, and grew out of the Purple Knights about ten years ago. The Praetor General was one of the founding members of the Knights, but he saw that the idealistic attitudes and methods of the Purple Knights were not enough to deal with the darkness and corruption of the Rot. He was ready to break with the Knights on his own when news began to spread of the Rot affecting people, and that was the push he needed to gather those loyal to him and leave the Order. He took with him the experience with violence he had gotten from his time in the Purple Knights and created a new doctrine of justice and it's execution on which he founded the Executores Justitia.

His methods are brutal but effective, and the men and women of the Executor Knights are taught to show no mercy and to deliver swift and final justice.

The two organizations are often at odds, as the Purple Knights react strongly to the often inhumane methods of the Executors, while the Praetor General and his followers feel the Knights are too idealistic and soft to be dependable for the safety of Kerebra. There have been no violent conflicts between the two organizations yet, but conflict is bubbling beneath the surface.