EPT
The origin of Khranos is unknown, even to the High Gods. The Silent Watcher is a mystery to all, worshippers and fellow divinities alike. Some claim that Khranos was born of the Great Clock, that he is a cog of that wondrous machine without which the starbound realms that rely upon it would plunge into ruin. Others believe he built the divine artifact himself and now spends the time he created admiring and guarding his invention, knowing that were it ever to fail, the multiverse would be changed in ways incomprehensible to mortal minds. There are those who believe that Khranos is Iris’ tyrannical jailor, a malicious tormentor who ensnared gods and mortals alike within the crushing curse of Time. Certain sects assert that Khranos is the Clock and that the planar manifestation of the machine is merely a vast extension of his own being. While his origin and purpose are an enigma, all on Iris know what the eldest of the High Gods does. Khranos is The One Who Waits. He watches the Clock and anticipates the Moments.
The Moments occur when the manifold gears of the Great Clock align and its bells ring out through the whole of the multiverse. Just as their watcher is a mystery, no one can be quite sure of what the Moments portend, save that their voices sound only at times of great significance. Yet how the Clock determines what is significant is known only to Khranos. No bells rang out when the Archwyrre concluded nor when the Children of Xa and Dys received the Shards of Anima. No chimes sounded when the World Dragons emerged or when the first stars appeared in the night sky. There was no knell when Harell faded or when Alenna vanished, no toll when the Everroad was completed or the last Giant fell beneath Dwarven hammer. Only two Moments are known to the Animata. The first Moment was the birth of Iris herself. As the High Gods reflected upon their beautiful world, the Great Clock chimed along with their revelry and Khranos gave a rare smile of satisfaction. The second Moment came eons later, after many of the Animata had long since settled in the comforting arms of Iris. In an unprecedented display of activity, Khranos’ eyes left the Clock and turned toward Iris, to which he whispered unintelligible and inevitable truths. When his oration ended, a new race came forth from the oceans surrounding Carnora: Humanity. When the first Human footsteps marked the sands of Iris, the bells rang out again, heralding the end of the Age Wondrous and the beginning of our own unnamed epoch.
Humans are the youngest of the Animata and are the least shaped by the Gods. While even Orcs are defined in part by the cruel departure of their mother Morkul, Humanity is entirely unburdened of divine expectations. As the mechanical heart of Neutrality, Khranos’ choice to observe and never influence his scions is as expected as his sudden creation of the race was unpredictable. In spite of the clockwork heart of their creator, Humanity itself could not be more diverse. Their lack of godly guidance manifests itself in an inability to be characterized or generalized save by their adaptability, ambition, and tireless pursuit of change. Humans are cowards and heroes, sycophants and sages, and murderers and miracle-workers in equal numbers. They follow no paths but their own, and, with little inborn direction or morality, those paths can lead from the heights of hallowed peaks to the lows of blighted valleys. The cruel irony of Humanity is that, of the Animata on Iris, Humans are among the shortest lived. The greatest enemy of their ambitions is time, a poetic paradox that is certainly not lost on the Keeper of the Clock.
While Human villages and adventurers can be found almost everywhere on Iris, the center of their civilization is the Dominion of the Four Kingdoms in Southern Carnora. Long have Almirad, Bedros, Fordran, and Vorshal struggled over power and territory in the fertile fields and bountiful mines of the central continent, but the nations currently maintain an uneasy truce. The largest of these cities lies in the largest of the Kingdoms: Cornucopia, the City of Plenty, capitol of Almirad. Cornucopia spans the Rockclaw Ridge and only the strength of the Goddess Cornucopia herself prevents the ridge and the city from falling into Lake Relwyn below. Fordran’s eponymous capitol boasts the home of Humanity’s most enduring dynasty, House Fordran, though odd rumors abound regarding the longevity of the family’s mighty kings. Merelon, the capitol of Bedros, is the most secluded of the Dominion’s great metropolises, yet it is the most well-defended, as it is host to the Emerald Legion, an army of noble paladins. Vorshal’s capitol, Cormain, is the closest of the Kingdoms’ capitols to the Everroad and a trade hub of Southern Carnora, but it also lies perilously close to the Sickle Swamp, a foul expanse of diseased wetlands claimed by none.
It is difficult to make Humans interesting in a fantasy setting. It’s for that reason that I’ve always shied away from Human characters or factions in fantasy and sci-fi media. It’s why I find the Human and Terran campaigns in Warcraft III and Starcraft fairly boring, why I chose Tarutaru and Elezen avatars in Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV (respectively), why I think Peter Parker is cooler when he grows web glands instead of inventing mechanized web shooters (though that is still pretty cool), and why I prefer races other than Human when creating tabletop characters. In the end, I am human so I rarely want to act as one when a more fantastic option is available. I mean, why would one want to “remain” Human when they could be a far more interesting creature? This is the same line of reasoning that pushes me toward playing magic users: plenty of knights and thieves existed, but sorcerers? Not so much.* However, in recent years I’ve thought more about my preferences in fantasy worlds and changed some of my opinions about “normal” human characters. Playing as human in a world where elves and dragons and magicks exist presents an intriguing challenge. What would we be like were we not the only sentient species on our planet? What if we weren’t the apex predator? How would our lives be changed if our gods manifested and literally walked alongside us? Even keeping this change of perspective in mind, I’m still not prone to playing as a Human. The existential questions implied by a fantasy world should allow talented role-players to create some very interesting Human characters, but they still won’t have demonic tails or supernatural strength or innate elemental affinities.
While I’m rarely interested in playing as a “regular” Human, I also didn’t want Humans on Iris to differ significantly from their base D&D descriptions or from our species in general. The standard Human traits of ceaseless changeability and a frantic desire to leave a mark on the world are tropes, but they’re good ones that represent defining elements of the human experience. It’s what we do. With that in mind, I crafted the origin of Humanity on Iris so that those traits would “naturally” develop. This is why Humanity came from a god of Neutrality with a no-interference policy: lacking innate influences, Humans venture down the paths of good or evil, law or chaos, and everything in between. The pursuit of the standard human traits also led to the relative impermanence of Humans on Iris. On Iris, none of the PC races are as naturally short-lived as Humans. The lifespans of Orcs are similar, but Humans are the ones that spend the least time in the wonder that is Iris (when not magically altered). Humanity’s awareness of its brevity, combined with the boundless imagination borne of freedom from divine influence, gives our species the drive to accomplish feats both great and terrible. It’s this drive that fueled the swift rise of the Dominion of the Four Kingdoms and lends purpose to the many Human adventurers that wander the vast continents of Iris. In this way, the goals of Humans on Iris align nicely with the goals of the PCs who play them: they want more than anything to grow and to change the spectacular and unfamiliar world in which they live.
Gods of Time such as Khranos are also rather common in fantasy worlds, and while he is as inspired by the old man at the End of Time in Chrono Trigger as anything else, there are some details of his character that I enjoyed contemplating. The first of them is the Great Clock. The Great Clock occupies its own plane that highly resembles Mechanus, a realm that is part of the vanilla 5E multiverse. The Great Clock consists of the same endlessly ticking gears as the clockwork plane, but the similarities end there.** Actually, The Great Clock shares as many characteristics with the Loom of Fate from the Exalted setting (a piece of Sidereal buggery) as it does with Mechanus, as demonstrated by the mysteriously-predictive Moments. One essential difference between the Clock and the others is that Clock is eternally empty, save for the unfortunate fools who accidentally wander within. The arcane oddities that plague the Great Clock are part of why Khranos is True Neutral rather than Lawful Neutral, the alignment typically associated with clockwork planes like Mechanus. Even within the seeming order of the clock many mysteries remain, the greatest of which is the reason for the creation of the Clock and the time it counts. There’s a fantastic author named Alan Lightman who writes incredible books combining physics and philosophy, one of which is called Einstein’s Dreams. The book is a fictional chronicle of the dreams of Albert Einstein in which the scientist imagines other ways in which time could function. Time is such an elemental force within The Great Clock that venturing within is like experiencing time from all of Einstein’s myriad perspectives at once. It is a dimension of enigma and improbability, a plane bound by perfect law which nevertheless conveys an impression of chaos. As a result, time on Iris moves like it does on Earth, but when time is flying or slows to a crawl on Iris, it may be the result of active interference rather than perception. The Watcher of the Clock and his machine are inscrutable even to the gods, who must also answer to Khranos’ chronological dictates.
Now that the stories of all the base 5E player character races are told, the “Building Iris” saga is complete!
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the lore of Iris is finished, but now we can move on from the big stories to smaller and more subtle fare. In the past few months, the blog over at Goblin Punch became a favorite of mine, and I intend to update Iris’ lore moving forward in a similar way: with shorter pieces about the strange details that one can find on Iris and in Iris-based campaigns. The only one of those currently [read: probably ever] is my own, but it’s called The Chronicles of Iris and it’s open for all to see every Tuesday at 8:30 PM CST on my Twitch channel, twitch.tv/djforeclosure. I hope everyone’s enjoyed the Building Iris series and continues to be interested in Iris as we delve into the even stranger elements of the godtouched world.
Next time we visit Iris, we’ll talk about magic: the what, the how, and perhaps even the why.
* That and because there’s nothing a young nerd enjoys more than to have power because of his brain.
** In fact, Mechanus also exists in the Iris setting (as do the other “standard” planes), but it is the creation of a lesser being attempting to mimic the grandeur of Khranos’ device. That’s why it needs the Modrons; it can’t function on its own like the Clock does.
You can read the final part of this LONG series and a few other things at the N3rd Dimension.
