As long-held avarice and new ideas clash on the Peninsula, an ancient flame reignites.
On a world broken to shards, in a land bounded by the Gated Sea, amidst the rolling hills and sunlit ruins, armies clash and ambitions collide.
And at the forefront of these forces are great harnesses, mighty suits of armor invested with supernatural power and worn by martial champions.
Find its stories here:
Chapter 2 [Forthcoming]
About the Author
Michael Gernes is a game designer and sometimes fiction writer who lives in the Twin Cities. He is co-designer of Star Trek: Into the Unknown (with longtime creative partner Max Brooke) and Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. He has also designed or produced for many other game lines. Michael's fiction and setting writing have previously appeared in games including Runewars Miniatures Game, Star Wars: Force and Destiny, and Dust: Warfare.
Although Michael was raised in and loves the Midwest, he has been escaping into other places and times for most of his life—and is lucky enough to do it professionally now. For Precipice, he is the Harness setting creator. His non-gaming obsessions include history, speculative fiction, and art of all brow-levels and many eras. He is also a former medieval armored sport fighter.
A list of his works can be found on BoardGameGeek.
The Republic of Premonta
The so-called “Republic of the Hills” is known for its its verdant fields and splendid weaving—the foundations of its envied banking houses. Despite its influence across the Peninsula and beyond, the threat of conquest by the Occhscien Kingdom looms over Premonta.
The Republic has been riven by bitter infighting among the families of its jealous elites in the past, and has often entrusted its military strength and great harnesses to mercenaries as a result. But some of Premonta’s thinkers—close to its current First Citizen—hope to build a more enduring foundation. To this end, the Lordship Councils have funded the creation of Gatewatcher, a new great harness to be worn by a citizen of the Republic.
Great Harnesses
A warrior on foot or on horseback dons a harness for protection. But to face the greatest threats of this world, one must don a great harness. Each of these massive suits of armor is created in pieces by skilled artisans. A frame of hardened timbers is connected and controlled by pulleys and wires and clad in fine steel. In the chest, the wearer’s movements are carried across the mechanism by an articulating loom. And all of this is made possible by an Aephygean plinth, a relic of a lost era that gives motion to the great harness.
The Kingdom of Occhscien
Across the mountains to the southwest live the Occhscene people. There, bards sing about the glorious deeds of gentle-born warriors to the masses who toil on their lands. Though his subjects' tongue and ways are different, the Occhscene king nonetheless has set his sights on conquest of the region. Armed with their own great harnesses of ancient renown and advanced cannons alike, Occhscene forces threaten not just Premonta, but all of the Peninsula.
The Aephygeans
The builders of old, the Aephygeans once ruled the whole of the Peninsula and lands across the Gated Sea. Though their power waned long ago and their great domain fragmented into bickering kingdoms and duchies, wonders wrought by their hands persist. It is their wondrous plinths that are housed in the reliquary of each great harness to grant motion to its gears, wires, and pulleys. Though these plinths are jealously guarded relics, they are said to reflect only a tiny fraction of the knowledge and power the Aephygeans once possessed.