The world
Calderis occupies its own Western Reaches — four hundred miles of shattered coast and reclaimed plain, walled off to the east by the Great Accursed Mountains, beyond which a wider continent lies off the charts. It opened, like every Flood Chronicles world, on the first day of Year 1, with a circle of surviving city-states scattered across the ruin and a ring of lesser powers between them. From that low, equal beginning its rulers have begun to carve out kingdoms, faiths, feuds and fortunes.
The beta filled, and its players took the world somewhere we did not expect. Five city-states were raised — a cliff-built sea power, a mountain fastness, a drowned harbour rebuilt among its own ruins, a green trading bay, a storm-lashed castle of the coast — and each ruler pushed at the edges of what the game could hold, in the best way a game master can hope for.
The happiest surprise was at the table itself. Two of the rulers of Calderis are returning players — people who first played this game more than thirty years ago, when it ran by post, and who have come back to it now: a new engine beneath the world, a renewed game master at the helm, and the same pleasure of ruling a city and seeing what the week brings. To have them writing turns again, three decades on, is the kind of thing this whole revival was for.