Battlesongs of Hope World Almanac: Part 1 - The World

Battlesongs of Hope takes place in a world that most readers will recognize as Earth, even though it isn’t. Most readers would also recognize the time period as mid-20th century, but those years mean nothing there.

Battlesongs takes place on a large continent that is demarcated primarily into those lands which have been recently under Wizard influence, and those that have not. The boundary between these lands is fuzzy, primarily because the Wizards' lands were so vast and their power so great that there were no other powers on the continent to whom a boundary would be useful, and also because the Wizards are now dead, and so their influence has been waning of late.

The Wizard continent is presumably surrounded by an ocean, although because its role in the book is solely to help regulate the weather, it warrants little more mention.

The Wizard lands span mountains and coastlines, swamps and forests, but the greatest area of land is occupied by vast rolling fields that experience a temperate four seasons. Few cities dot the plains, due to the Wizards’ tendency to consolidate people and resources. Expansive farms turn the fields into a checkerboard of crops from horizon to horizon. The characters of BSOH are not particularly educated regarding life outside of the city, and therefore unfortunately do not know the proper names for many of the landmarks and features in the hinterlands.

The largest Wizard city, which the characters usually refer to as “the sprawl” when discussing it in aggregate, forms a centerpiece in BSOH. This city is so massive that it is much more useful to refer to the districts within the city, which take the names given by the Wizard clan that presides (or rather, presided) over them. The size and population of each district is variable, as Wizards control territory in the city according to their clan’s relative strength and favorability in the eyes of the Two Houses.

Resources and technology in the Wizard lands generally tend to obey the laws of physics. If there is oil in the Wizard lands, it has not yet been found. Liquid fuel is instead produced from algae or plant material, and is generally far more valuable than gasoline. Oddly, electronic computing does not work at all in the BSOH world, despite all theories and calculations indicating that it is possible. The Wizards and most other scholars have concluded that this one discrepancy in natural law must be due to magic.