The Realm of Rust Gate

http://steampowerpublishing.com/memories-madness/

Tonight, my friends and I again played what we call "the elf memory game", Lost Days of Memories & Madness. It is an indie tabletop PVP RPG, with quite evocative PC creation rules that involve scripting one sentence memories that begin with the phrase "I remember."

From tonight's game, I see a realm taking shape: The Rust Gate.

Some of the things that came up in the memories were:

• A city-state that has diplomatic relations with an apparently quite civilized Troll-state which has a President, a Minister of Rhetoric, and a Minister of Defense
• The city-state is ruled by an unscrupulous King and a treacherous court 
• Relations between the court of the city-state and the Troll-state include intermarriage
• The city-state is infamous for its deadly fanged Rust Portcullis, which has at least once been used by the realm to kill peasant refugees fleeing disorder in the countryside
• Peasants who have been terrorized by a plague of zombies
• A King with a Necromancer-Concubine
• A King with a set of keys to most locked places and spaces within the city-state (e.g., the dry and deafening House of the Stolen Waterfalls)  
• A strange form of elemental magic which uses "metallic air"
• Courtiers and lovers who have been murdered by being trapped within coagulated metallic air

All-in-all, this has the makings of a rather treacherous, grim place and is very consistent with our Janus-Faced prophesy for 2013. 

Next time, we'll put these memory fragments together with some Fortune Cards and give the realm more shape.