Ossuaire: City of the Dreaming God, a TTRPG Setting Book

Hey! There is something new in town!

For the past year, Fablehart Forge has been a map studio. We drew castles and coastlines, dungeons and more... But we wanted to something else, something more deep, more into writing and thinking. 

So we stopped making maps for a while and started writing a city.

Ossuaire is the result. It's 50 pages, it's finished, and we think it's the best thing we've ever made. This Kickstarter is how we're putting it into your hands.

The city, in one breath

A god fell from the sky a long time ago. He didn't rot. People moved into his bones. They're still there.

That's the pitch. The book is everything that comes after.

The lore (the long version, because you asked... Yeah yeah... You asked!)

Here is what they teach the children in the Sacristy schools, and here is what's actually true. The two stories disagree in places, and that disagreement is the engine of the entire city.

Aethrave was not the god of anything in particular. He was a minor deity, a patron of sleep and forgetting, tended by a small order of cantors who sang him his daily rites in a language nobody else spoke. He had maybe a thousand devout followers in his best years. Gods like him existed everywhere in the old world, the way mushrooms exist in a wet forest: too many to name, most of them harmless.

Then, one evening, in a year that no calendar agrees on, Aethrave fell out of the sky.

He did not fall the way a star falls, brief and bright. He fell slowly, over the course of three nights, growing larger in the southern sky until the people in the valley below understood that what they were watching was a body. When he hit the earth he did not explode. He did not leave a crater. He simply arrived, impossibly large, crumpled across seven miles of plain, and the ground rose up to meet him like a mother catching a dropped child. Rivers changed course. A forest was folded underneath his left shoulder and is still there, petrified, sometimes audible if you press your ear to the right kind of stone.

Nobody killed him. That's the part the scholars can't let go of. There's no wound. No weapon. No rival deity claiming the kill. He simply stopped being alive in the sky and started being a landscape on the ground, and his face when they found it was peaceful, almost amused, as if he'd heard a joke on the way down.

The cantors arrived first, of course. They had felt him fall. They walked for weeks to find the body and when they did, they did what cantors do: they sang to him. And here is the thing that changed everything, the thing that made Ossuaire possible and terrible: he sang back.

Not through his mouth, which was the size of a cathedral and has never opened. He sang back through dreams. The cantors fell asleep around his body on the first night and woke up knowing things they hadn't known before. Some woke up laughing. Some woke up unable to speak their own names. One woke up old, though she had been young the evening before. They understood, collectively and without needing to discuss it, that Aethrave was not dead. He was dreaming. And the dream had room in it for them.

The first settlement went up inside his ribcage within a year. Stone masons found that the bones, though hard as granite, could be shaped if you sang the right notes while you worked. A pale mineral began to grow on the inner surfaces of the skeleton, sweating out of the marrow like frost. They called it osite. It was warm to the touch. It held a charge. Ground up and swallowed, it gave you vivid dreams; worn as jewelry, it made you beautiful in a way that people found hard to describe and harder to trust. Within a generation, osite was the most valuable substance on the continent, and a city had grown inside the god.

The Sacristy of Aethrave, descended from those original cantors, became the city's spiritual authority. They maintain the rites. They sing the old songs in the old language at the old hours, and they insist, loudly and often, that the dreams leaking out of the god are holy, that the dream-touched citizens wandering the streets muttering in tongues are blessed, that the occasional districts that vanish overnight and reappear rearranged are miracles.

The Osite Consortium grew up alongside them, and they are the Sacristy's quiet enemies. The Consortium mines the god. They carve osite out of his marrow and sell it to foreign courts for terrifying sums. They dress well. They employ the best guards. They do not love Aethrave, and they do not particularly hate him either; to them, he is an extraordinarily profitable deposit of a rare mineral, and his continued dreaming is a production schedule. The Sacristy calls this blasphemy. The Consortium calls it economics. 

And then there are the Dreamtouched. These are the citizens who have slept too long, or too close to the Crown, or who simply have the wrong kind of head for a city like this one. They see things the rest of the citizens can't. Some of what they see is true, in a way that later becomes undeniable, and some of it is the private furniture of a dreaming god's subconscious, and telling the two apart is a full-time job for every serious scholar in Ossuaire. The Dreamtouched have no organization, no leader, no manifesto. They recognize each other on the street and they sometimes gather in unofficial clusters in the Warrens, and they are the single most feared and most courted group in the city, depending on who you ask.

The Anatomists are the newest faction and, to many citizens, the most alarming. They are foreign scholars, mostly, drawn to Ossuaire by the scientific puzzle of a god who refuses to be only one thing. They dissect. They measure. They have drawn full maps of Aethrave's circulatory system even though, officially, he doesn't have one. They are polite, well-funded, and almost certainly going to cause a catastrophe, and the Sacristy would very much like them to leave, and the Consortium would very much like them to share their findings.

All of this sits on top of the central, unanswered question that nobody in Ossuaire is brave enough to ask out loud for very long: what happens when he wakes up?

Some say he never will. Some say he already has, and the city is simply part of the dream now, and none of them are real in any sense that matters. Some say the dreams are leaking faster every year and that one day soon the boundary between what Aethrave imagines and what actually is will fail completely, and nobody knows what will be on the other side of that failure.

In the meantime, they sing the rites. They sell the osite. They try not to dream too deeply. And they live, generation after generation, inside the body of a god who is almost certainly listening.

This is the city your players are about to walk into!

What's actually in the book

Fifty pages. Fully laid out, ready to run. 

Here's the breakdown:

The opening chapter gives you tone and inspiration and sets up the central mystery for the GM. Then comes the full history of Aethrave, deeper than what you just read, including the theological schism that split the Sacristy two hundred years ago and still hasn't healed. After that: life in Ossuaire, which covers everything you need to make the city feel inhabited. What the food tastes like. How the language works. What people say when they greet each other and what they say when they're scared. How the laws function and, more importantly, how they don't.

Then the districts, six of them, each with their own character. The Crown, inside the skull, where the Sacristy rules and the dreams are strongest. The Span, along the ribcage, where most citizens actually live. The Marrow Warrens, deep inside, lightless and old. The Left Hand, the merchant quarter. The Cage, the pelvis, mostly Consortium territory. The Roots, along the spine, where the Anatomists have set up their laboratories and nobody is entirely comfortable about it.

Then factions, NPCs (ten of them, each with enough motivation and hidden agenda to carry a session or a whole arc), and a big pile of random tables. Street encounters by district. Rumors. Dream manifestations. Strange properties of osite. The kind of tables you actually reach for at the table, not the kind that get written to fill space.

Then the signature mechanic: the Dreams of Aethrave. A light, system-agnostic subsystem for handling dream intensity zones, exposure, and what happens when your PCs spend too long in the wrong part of the Crown. Five minutes to learn, scales cleanly with whatever system you're running.

Fifteen-plus quest hooks to close it out, each tagged to a faction, each scalable to any tier of play. And a short appendix with 5E, Pathfinder 2e, and system-agnostic stat references for the key creatures and NPCs.

That's the book.

We kept it simple

Stretch goals

We don't want to struggle with printing unless we create a real community around these uncommon cities. That's why our stretch will be about printing!

Delivery

All digital rewards go out through Kickstarter Manager within 7 days of the campaign ending. The book is already done, so there's no writing phase to wait through. If print unlocks, print options will be able after the campaign ends with extra cost of course, also handled through Kickstarter Manager.

You will not be sent to BackerKit. You will not be asked to create an account somewhere else. Everything on Kickstarter without any struggle! 

Who we are

Fablehart Forge is a small team. We've spent the last year making hand-drawn fantasy maps that ended up in other people's games, which has been a genuinely lovely way to make a living. Ossuaire is our first real book. We made it because we wanted to read it, and we figured we probably weren't alone in that.

If weird cities and dreaming gods are your thing, pick a tier and come with us.

See you in Ossuaire.