Lore Interludes

6 pages. Tap a page's title to see its notes and comments.

Cover

Cover art with the title Anno Arcana in rough black letters. In a sunlit alley between tall buildings, Javi, a young man with long locs in a dark hoodie, stands with his hands raised like a marionette, glowing strings running from his fingers up to the long clawed hands of Sigil, a towering fox spirit with a huge mane of hair in a tattered tan robe. Behind Javi, a long-haired man in a pentagram T-shirt peeks around a graffitied wall, and Bedelia, a small blue-skinned elf in a red dress, stands holding a wand.

Page 12

Lore interlude, end of prologue: The World of Anno Arcana. Text explains that faeries are living bits of magic, biologically immortal and found in most worlds doing almost anything, from serving political figures to ruling kingdoms to kidnapping kids. They vary wildly in appearance, from small and humanoid to colossal and beast-like, and bleed a colored miasma instead of blood. Faeries gather in loose communes called Courts, bound together by Pacts that ensure loyalty, protection and the sharing of arcane energy. Illustrated with Sigil the fox spirit, a teal dragon-like faerie, the worried boy, and small winged faeries trapped in glass jars.

Lore Interlude: Elves

Lore interlude title page: The World of Anno Arcana: Elves. Six portraits of blue-, green- and grey-skinned elves with pointed ears: a smiling white-haired woman in a red dress, a stern crowned queen in gold armor, a scowling bearded man, a grinning moss-green elf with glowing yellow eyes, a hooded elf in a fanged red mask, and a cheeky purple-haired elf with beaded braids.

Lore Interlude: Elves (cont.)

Lore interlude text: No one knows the exact origin of how elves came to be, but every elf will tell you with copious amounts of pride exactly what they are. Elves are mortal nature-spirit hybrids that are the most common species in the wider Nexus space. This is partially due to their long natural life span (with the average lifespan being around 700), but also because magic is more accessible to them. Making things like long-lasting magical artifacts, arcane constructs, and most importantly, dimensional travel a bit easier. While they are what we would call humanoid with pointed ears, due to their spirit-half their size and complexion change depending on where they are born. Most elves are on the shorter side with the average elf being around 1.4m (or 4ft 5in), but can reach up to 1.82m (6ft) or as short as 1.1m (3ft 7in), with ocean elves on the taller side while forest elves tend to be shorter. Their diverse skintones are all technicolor in nature with blue, green, red just some examples of what you may find regularly. Most elves are a part of a wider internexus empire called the Harmonious Elven Confederacy, a collection of small cities, kingdoms, and empires headed by a god-queen, who is chosen from any noble house in the empire in a VERY high-stakes royal election.

Lore Interlude: Dragons

Lore interlude text: Dragons in Anno Arcana are, on the surface, more or less what you'd expect: large, flying, magical, chimeric reptiles capable of breathing what they believe to be one of the building blocks of nature. Metal, fire, uranium, rubber ducks... whatever their odd minds end up coming up with. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that their spirits are born from the ley lines of their home dimensions. The process is highly unpredictable, to the point that most dragons alive today are actually artificial in origin, like that Earth hybrid you've been following here. These spirits can either merge with a living being or manifest independently. From there, dragons reproduce the old-fashioned way. There is some speculation that their instinct to hoard serves an ecological function, triggering trophic cascades that help keep a nexus healthy. Considering the damage a fully grown dragon can do to a dimension by simply continuing to hoard, this is probably just propaganda from their empires. Despite their penchant for founding kingdoms, dragons are mostly solitary creatures, aside from sharing family groups in a way that may remind Earthlings of polar bears. When they need assistants, servants, or an entire workforce, they generally prefer to make slaves of their own rather than rely on allies. This is why we have ghaals (a short amphibious gremlin creature they made for gathering deep-sea treasures like pearls). They are (relative to many other creatures in the wider multiverse) rare beasts, but the reputation they garnered as empire-destroying monsters still haunts the mind of many an elven monarch or hogwalker merchant, even if their heyday across the multiverse has long since faded. Woe betide the fool who mistakes endangered for extinct. For these creatures are stronger, faster, and older than most.

Lore Interlude: Dragons (cont.)

Four dragon portraits: a tawny, tiger-striped dragon with a red nose, golden crest and feathered wings on a sandy shore; a long, serpentine grey dragon with a tusked, eel-like head in a dusty desert; a green dragon with black horns, a glowing mint mane and a pale belly against a purple sky; and a crimson dragon covered in cream-colored spikes and plates with long whiskers in grey fog.

That's the end of Lore Interludes!