The Weird in the Lakelands

09 Jul, 2025

What is the Weird? Theories abound: it is miracle, or witchcraft, or emergent phenomena as the physics of one world collides with the physics of another. In practice, the Weird is anything that violates humanity's pre-Arrival understanding of the universe, starting with the Unbound themselves.¹

Source: Patrick Mueller on Unsplash, 2021

The Unbound

The world as we knew it ended when a door was opened somewhere in the middle of the continental United States and fourteen eldritch horrors passed through it into our world. These beings served the Unfolding Emperor until the uncanniness of their being, with all of them concentrated in a small area, put such strain on our reality that it broke the world and the door slammed shut. That freed them from their service to the Emperor and they scattered across North America.

The Unbound, as they are called in their free state, are alien, incorporeal, undying, and extraordinarily powerful. They do not cooperate, instead carving out their own territories over which they rule as terrible gods. Though each Unbound's desires are unique in their particulars, all of them seek some combination of worship, domination, or novelty; to one end or another, they all bend mortals to their will. Subjects sometimes escape and flee for other parts, but so far none have found a way to oppose the Unbound directly.

Six Unbound are especially relevant to the Lakelands:

1. The Hallowed Instar, who was responsible for the geminites;
2. The Howling Rustic, who made the new hominids;
3. The Sulphur Herald, who brought the amazons, drakemantids, and psanzomv to Earth;
4. The Concord of Dust, who manipulates the Rochester Dyarchy in secret;
5. The Key of Ash and Lime, who made the Aurora Veil, separating the Lakelands from the western half of the continent; and
6. The Gemstone Flesh, who is thought to have created the parasitic crystals that infect animals – and people – across North America.

Dreamzones

The Unbound come from another reality and every place for kilometres around them becomes warped and strange. It is as though the weight of their alien nature bends the world toward their desires and obsessions. It is also as though the tension this places on reality causes other distortions far from the Unbound, like a weight placed on a bedsheet causes folds to radiate out through the fabric. Across North America there are places where things are, quite simply, strange. These pockets of eldritch power respond to the minds of those inside them, operating on something like the dream logic of the subconscious; for this reason, Lakelanders call them dreamzones. In these Weird patches, anyone within will find their nightmares and fantasies slowly coming to life as animals turn into monstrous beasts, buildings become impossible mazes, shadowy spirits manifest their most basic fears, and in time their own bodies slowly begin to morph.

Dreamzones can appear anywhere in North America, including wilderness and farmland, but one will inevitably form wherever too many sapient beings congregate together. Although the Unbound have seized most of the United States, it was the dreamzones that caused Canada and Mexico to fall, as the cities became supernatural realms full of monsters, spirits, and paradoxical architecture.

Ephemeral Beings: Spectres and Ghosts

Dreamzones manifest the psychic content of anyone within. Although this might involve the physical transformation of an animal, object, or person to resemble or represent someone's mental furniture, the dreamzone is just as likely to create an ephemeral being or spirit. Spectres are among the most common of these spirits, born of a sapient creature's most fundamental anxieties. Driven by a need to terrorize, spectres wield an array of potent psychic abilities. Most insidiously, spectres can possess an animal or living person, which they can ride out of the dreamzone in which it would otherwise be trapped. The body of their host will, over time, change into a form more fitting for the spectre's particular horrific nature.

The other most common ephemeral beings are ghosts, a psychic duplicate of a person released into a dreamzone at their death. They are more varied in motive than spectres and are not necessarily malicious, and they are more prosaic in form, but an explorer would still be wise to fear them: ghosts can still manipulate dreamzones like spectres can, and the diversity of their motivations makes them unpredictable.

Idols and Egregores

Weaker by far than the Unbound but more terrible than spectres and ghosts, idols and egregores act much like the former, ruling over and warping a small area as alien local gods. Egregores and idols are superficially similar, sitting at the centre of a dreamzone and trying to gather bands of devoted followers. Unlike the Unbound, they can also both be killed. However, idols and egregores are otherwise quite different.

Egregores, like spectres and ghosts, reflect the contents of sapient minds, forming when many people have strong ideas about the same object; an egregore might take the shape of a celebrated folk hero, a feared and reviled urban legend, or a city as imagined by its residents. Always ephemeral, an egregore rules over a region by manipulating its people. Many command a gang or a cult, but others prefer more subtle influence.

An idol was once a regular person, until an ephemeral alien parasite took them as its host. This parasite creates a dreamzone around its victim; at the same time, it warps their mind, turning their interests into obsessions. Soon enough the person becomes an idol, an eldritch horror driven by its own particular compulsions and surrounded by a nightmare realm of its own making. Any who enter the idol's dreamzone are caught in its preoccupations.

Occult Practices

Dreamzones respond to sapient minds, though often in perverse and unpredictable ways. This makes them hazardous and terrifying, but it also means that a person with some control over their thoughts and emotions can try to manipulate the dreamzone. Pay attention to the right desire at the right time and the dreamzone might make it so. In other words, in Weird places mere mortals can wield occult powers: they can read minds, cloak themselves in illusions, divine the location of secret objects, curse or conjure objects, cast out possessing spirits, or directly assault an enemy's psyche. Manipulating dreamzones, however, requires unusual mental discipline, commitment to a set of symbols, and at least partial understanding of the Weird. As far as anyone can tell, only dedicated practice of a religious tradition, or something similar, can allow an aspiring occultist to meet these requirements and a diverse crop of esoteric religious movements now flourish in the Lakelands.

Dangerous Beasts

Many deadly creatures roam the Lakelands now. Animals changed by a dreamzone into something more monstrous do not always stay in that dreamzone; some have wandered far and established populations across the Lakelands. Unbound, idols, and egregores create experimental species that escape into the wider world – or that the eldritch god releases on purpose. The Sulphur Herald also brought several domesticated alien species with the drakemantids, amazons, and psanzomv, all of which now have feral populations in North America. Travellers arm themselves against more than brigands when they pass through the wild spaces, and so too must those brigands beware what stalks the woods and fields.

Sarladhiner and Psanzomv Tech

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote Arthur C. Clarke, and the weapons and devices of the extraterrestrials now living on Earth may well count. A handful of the drakemantids and amazons, whose cultural sphere is called Sarladhiner (sur-luh-thine-eer), remember how to make or use a little of their technology, like blastlances and sonic shields. The enigmatic psanzomv, known more commonly as "spacegnomes," carry and use scientific marvels that not even the other aliens can reverse engineer. Although all of this technology operates according to the normal physics of the universe, it does not work according to known scientific laws, and so alien tech is lumped in with the Weird in many Lakelanders' imaginations.

History and Hrönir

The rest of the Weird is bad enough, but one little-known terror gnaws at a few archivists' and librarians' minds late at night: history seems to have gone awry. It's not just that time seems to move differently nearer the Unbound than elsewhere, though that does make record-keeping difficult. What really strains their tolerance are the hrönir: anomalous historical artifacts from a false past. Getting their name from similar objects in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, the hrönir appear to be perfect hoaxes, or perhaps objects from alternate or fictional timelines.² No one knows how they form or appear. What's worse, because of the mass unrest and collapse of institutions in the first post-Arrival decades, it isn't always possible to tell which records are genuine and which are hrönir. If a scrounger brings to the archives two brittle, yellowed editions of a newspaper reporting contradictory versions of an event, and the archivist does not have enough other evidence to decide between them, which account should they take as fact? And if they do have evidence that favours one over the other, how do they know that evidence isn't also made up of hrönir?

As with all other Lakelands posts, everything here is provisional.

#Fate Core #post-apocalyptic #the Lakelands #the Weird