General World Info

About the Fog
The fog is thick and heavy but is not poisonous. People can and do live in it, sometimes for their whole lives. The cities in the low-lying regions have been filling up with fog since the beginning of this age (which on the Marino calendar is year 1, about 1500 years ago). But for even longer than that, the fog has risen and fallen in this world, going back basically forever.
Fog rises with temperature, basically, so when the fog is high the high altitudes become more livable. The darkest low points grow cold, however, from a lack of sunlight. They have temperatures like caves.
The fog flows like water, making lakes and streams as it rises and falls. So there is not a single fog level around the world, but a level at which it will form and pool, which changes slowly over time. It rises and falls with the seasons and with other changes to the land and sky.
Most scientists believe that there is a multi-millennial cycle that causes the fog to rise and fall, sometimes covering the highest mountains, sometimes being blown clear away. Ancient ruins on the tops of cold mountains would seem to suggest this is true. Before the modern era, people brought every stone for those mountaintop villages by hand and pack animal. But this modern era is different. This time, we can fly.
This means not only can we build higher, better mountaintop cities, but also that we are uniquely gifted with the means to study them. And through this study a few of us realize that this time is different. In this cycle, the fog will only rise. It’s the Armageddon predicted in ancient texts, and all we can do is watch it happen.
Everyone prays that they are wrong
Cities
Large cities rise and fall with the fog, relocating their populations to higher and lower ground. As it encroaches, they move uphill, building towers on their tallest hills, and running lighter-than-air cable cars from the hilltops to the fog-bound centers of town. If the fog recedes, those towers fall into disrepair. If it rises, a new little city often pops up around the hilltop.
When even the highest tower can’t reach out of the fog, the city dies. By this time most of the residents have already moved on. There are empty city streets and a few lonely residents still too poor or too stubborn to move away. They sit in quiet homes and navigate their empty streets by the sound of bells, waiting for the sunlight to return.
Some cities plan ahead, creating "Cachet Cities" (Pronounced CATCH-it or ca-SHAY depending on the region). These are usually started as high-ground retreats for the most affluent citizens, and eventually build to replace most or all of the "Sain," the older city center. Sometimes the landscape doesn't permit this, and the city simply struggles and dies.
Airships
Around the year 1450, improved technology for lighter-than-air travel emerged, starting as a dangerous hobby and evolving into the primary means of travel and commerce throughout the world. The ancient shipyards at Marino and Tenpin were revitalized, and the ship factories of the Highlands began serving double-duty, both as shipworks and airshipworks.
One hundred years later, the skies are full with all types of airships, from giant freighters to nimble fighters, including some fixed-wing heavier-than-air skycraft which can fly at high altitudes and which are sometimes launched from larger carriers.
The primary means of propulsion is large, inefficient steam engines, usually powered by coal or wood and built around a powerful turbine or other form of propeller.
Airships can be keep aloft by various lighter-than-air gases and have many configurations, including those with balloons above the crew areas, and those where the balloon itself serves as the crew area. This depends on the type of gas being used.
Ancient Tech
Marino is an ancient city, having risen and fallen at least three times through the eras of fog. That would place its founding sometime over 4500 years ago. Buried in its oldest parts, in collapsed buildings by the edge of the sea, are technologies only imagined by modern people.
Wood- and coal-burning steam engines are a technology of the previous age. Now we burn burweed to unlock its lighter-than-air gas. The last age had steam-powered locomotives and railroad lines, some of which still crisscross the valleys of the Highlands, now anchoring wind-powered rail kites.
Mechanical computers, on the order of a jacquard loom or an Antikythera mechanism, can be found in ancient city sites. Most are ruined and even if they worked, modern people could probably not puzzle them out.
The previous generation also had the means to extract and refine Berite, a lightweight and strong metal, which they mostly used in rail cars and sailing ships. Ours is the first age that has learned how to fly.
Lighter than Air
The air in this world is considerably more dense than ours. This makes it easier to build airships, but also sometimes makes the world look more like an undersea world than one above the ground.
There are a larger number of substances and creatures that are lighter than air. Some birds are more like puffer fish, gently floating and moving about on tiny little wings. Some fruits are light or neutrally buoyant, and can be seen hanging in inverted bags in market stalls. Apothecaries have jars of lighter-than-air substances resting on the undersides of their top shelves.
There are at least seven common chemicals that are lighter than air. Most are harvested from natural sources, such as Burweed. Some are extracted from minerals.
Names for these substances include Lift, Cory, Dier, Onier, Fit, Carry, Smoke, Plast, Charge, and Charger. Many of these are regional names for the same things. Some of these materials are natural, some are artificial. Some are breathable and some are toxic. Often a transport will use a mixture of these things, sometimes unaware of the balance or even the toxicity.
Burweed
Known elsewhere by a dozen different names, the floating thistle called Burweed is a ubiquitous weed that grows from the ground but floats out on banks of fog, detaching from its roots to propagate. It has buoyant stalks with large pockets of lighter-than-air gas, and releases this gas along with a sickly sweet smoke when burned.
Burweed is hard to cultivate but can be found in huge clumps along the banks of any lake of fog. It grows like kudzu wherever it takes root, drawing moisture from the fog and energy from the sunlight. Burweed “farmers” are roving harvesters of the stuff, always migrating to chase the edges of the fog. They are sometimes referred to by the derogatory term “dredgers,” which essentially means lowlife scavengers. Which is odd, since most of the ships in the air rely on their work.
Processors: There are multiple ways to convert Burweed into gas for airships. The most basic method is to burn it, which creates a sickly-sweet smoke mixed with the chemical inside its bladders, which is called Corineth, Corelinth, or (usually) Cory. The product is a sooty mess, and neither as breathable nor as buoyant as pure Cory.
To process Burweed more effectively requires crushing, a process by which the stalks are pressed and the Cory separated. In more efficient engines, this process leaves the stalks (the “Crush”) to be burned in the steam engines, and the Cory to be diverted into the gas bladders.
Cory itself isn’t poisonous but can’t be breathed for long. A person would asphyxiate in a bladder of pure Cory, but most work bubbles have a half-and-half mix of normal air and crushed Cory, so people can work inside of them for a reasonable shift. Some crew still require breathing apparatus.
Like helium, Cory raises the pitch of your voice. City folk make fun of navy men by affecting a high-pitched voice (Large navy ships are commonly of the work-bay type) and Navy men are often called bluebirds (or bluebeards), canaries, sterlings, and other derogatory bird names.
Chattel: This is a nickname for the soot and ash that builds up inside the gas cans of a LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) cruiser. Gas Cans, Pipes, Bubbles, Bands, Bends, are some of the names for the type of air bladder that contains a mixture of Burweed smoke and Cory. These are not open to the outside but they do require cleaning from time to time, as they build up layers of caked-on soot and ash.
Other names for various gas containers include Cans, Brooms, Sidelows, Sollerns, and Pockets. Some of these are distinct depending on whether they are filled with hot air, smoke, or clean gas, as well as their size and function.
Rose Onions: This is a white flower related to burweed, whose root bulbs are white and onion-like. It grows at the fogline, and the seed pods are lighter than air. The bulbs are edible, but taste nothing like roses or onions.
Wine and Spirits
Many famous alcoholic beverages, the Champagnes and Burgundies of Skye, have place names from the Dearworth Valley. They are a mix of family and place names, which are often the same.
Centuries ago, before the fog rolled into Dearworth, it was Skye’s foremost wine producing region. Then, starting in around 1200, those famous vintners faced a choice: to change their business or relocate.
Elsewhere in the Highlands, new wineries have opened with “Dearworth seed” and “Flavors of the Valley,” transplanting vines and techniques from the old country.
Other families decided to stay, but branched into ales and spirits that could survive in darker, wetter climates.
Now there is some confusion, and plenty of competition, between branches of the same family who now produce wildly different brands. For example, Tuttin Wines, originally from Tunnin in County Curth, now operates a major winery in Millefleur. But some of the Tuttin family remained in Tunnin and developed a sour mash rum that bears the same name. Now these two halves of the family are engaged in, literally, a “spirit war” to claim that brand and title in the shops and restaurants of Marino.