Presentation of Loss
“You are no longer on Earth; welcome to Loss.”
A Lossyan scholar addressing a Lost Earthling in his own language
What are the Songs of Loss?
The Songs of Loss is a series of novels, a universe and a Da Vinci-punk (Clockpunk) fantasy role-playing game set in an stranger and distant world: Loss.
Loss is a world where deadly creatures, mysterious powers, forgotten secrets and ancient civilizations rub shoulders with Renaissance science, the technological wonders of geniuses and engineers, the exploits of levitating ships, pulse weapons and early electrical machines, and the horrors of early experiments on life.
Loss is populated and explored only in the lands forming a subcontinent around the Seas of Separation. A thousand years after the Long Winter provoked by the Singers of Loss, which threatened to wipe out all mankind, societies have flourished in some twenty cultures, most often run by city-states. One empire dominates the Seas of Separation: the Hegemony of Anqimenes, fiefdom of the all-powerful Church of the Divine Council. The Church used its empire to crush almost all other forms of worship, which had become marginalized, and has since imposed its law everywhere by word and military force. It decides what is moral and what is impious.
And only one city-state truly overshadows its omnipotence: Armanth, capital of Athémaïs. The City of the Master Merchants is the haven of scholars and free thinkers, the city of a hundred thousand slaves, the largest and freest city in all of Loss.
The world of two suns
Loss is a distant and alien planet, hostile and savage, with exuberant and dangerous flora and fauna. A world that was never meant for humans. No one knows how humans got here millennia ago, or how long they’ve lived here. But all Lossyans know that they come from the Stars. Only the myth about their arrival and origins has changed.
A world of drama and wonder
Lossyans say that the first gods gave them Loss as a gift. Others say it was a punishment or the consequences of a divine war. In any case, they managed to survive this hostile world. Coming from the ancient peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe, they colonized the coasts of the Seas of Separation, a vast inland sea dotted with archipelagos. They founded new cultures and great city-states.
And they discovered loss-metal: a metal with marvellous properties, used in a number of lossyan technologies. Its strangest ability is that of serving as a catalyst for the Song of Loss, which only a very few people, mostly women and especially redheads, know how to handle. A rare and poorly understood power that can control gravity, magnetism, elemental forces and even life itself. A frightening gift that evokes the magic and exploits of ancient gods and heroes.
And above all, a devastating force that nearly destroyed all Lossyan civilizations. It was the day Antiva was destroyed by the terrible, demonic Orchys de Parcia; it was the day of a world-wide cataclysm: it was the day the suns disappeared and remained veiled for years. It was the Long Winter, a thousand years ago.
When it ended after five years, almost all the Loss Singers were dead, exterminated by terror and hatred of their power. The city-states were abandoned ruins, the Lossyans mere survivors of hunger, cold and epidemics.
The first Prophets of the Church of the Divine Council came to proclaim that the gods had failed them, letting the Loss Singers enslave the Lossyans to the point of destruction, even though they had been created to serve them. The Church re-established a semblance of social order, then a veritable hegemony that radiated from their first temples in Anqimenès. Crusade after conquest, the Church imposed its dogmas, its faith and its authority on all the Seas of Separation. Those who resisted were crushed without mercy.
But this conquest was never completely successful. Over the centuries, new city-states and empires were built. Some peoples defended their beliefs in the face of the Crusades, while others fought mercilessly for their independence. While some peoples embraced the Council’s faith, most were subjected to it. Finally, some still resist it angrily and victoriously, while other, more progressive currents of thought grow up among the city-states.
A world of conflict and struggle
Loss is a world constantly at war. Each city-state fights to seize the other’s resources and ensure its own subsistence. Peace is rare, death violent and frequent, from disease, the sword and hunger. It’s a world of raids, armadas and armies on the march, a world where even nature is in conflict with man, and where men know that it takes all their renewed genius to triumph.
It’s a world of struggle: between the tyranny of the Church of the Divine Council, an authoritarian religion with hundreds of fanatical legions, whose armed arm is Anqimenès, capital of the Hegemony; and the irresistible momentum of progress, knowledge and innovation embodied by the Merchants’ Guild. An immense consortium of brotherhoods, land lords and city-states of the Athemaïs, which has made Armanth its capital, from where it spreads its subversive and heretical ideas.
Loss is a harsh, unjust world, permanently burdened by the legacy of Church dogma, even as it crumbles before the theories and books of modern philosophers, scholars and intellectuals. These Dogmas make slavery a sacred practice originally intended to ensure absolute control over the Loss Singers. High Art, as it is also known, is intended for them, while all male Loss Singers are killed. After loss-metal, the most valuable thing is women, who are often enslaved. And no one can imagine a world without slaves.
These same dogmas, backed by patriarchal traditions, leave little room for women in society and the family if they are followed to the letter. They also refute ancient cults, innovative ideas and certain scientific and historical research. Woe betide anyone who dares defy the Dogmas, for the Church will hunt him and all his kind down.
A world of Honor, Courage and Wisdom
Lossyans hold three virtues in high esteem: Honor, Courage and Wisdom, the three qualities that for them define the world and humanity; this is what makes them Lossyans. Not knowing or understanding them, not demonstrating them, makes the individual a barbarian, a beast without any rights.
Everywhere, these virtues are more respected than loss-metal, wealth or material goods; they surpass and even contradict the Dogmas of the Divine Council: Lossyans consider it of greater value to respect, honor and recognize the Virtues and those who bear them, than to respect the Dogmas. For these three qualities – Honor, Courage and Wisdom – demand that men and women be weighed at their fair value, without regard for anything else. Neither origin, nor race, nor rank, nor even the word of the Church are taken into account, much to its dismay.
If Lossyans are macho and sexist, if the value of women is often underestimated except as slaves and therefore merchandise, if the Dogmas of the Council impose cruel laws, the Virtues always offer a way out; an opportunity to rise above one’s rank and break the shackles of society. Thus, women captains of ships or military officers, warriors, scholars and intellectuals, heads of families and companies are women who have brandished honor, courage and wisdom in the face of men, on an equal footing, until they are recognized. These are the Swordswomen, viewed with suspicion, sometimes disdain, but oh so respected.
A world of conspiracies and forgotten secrets
Finally, Loss is a world of pretense, forgotten pasts, rewritten histories and reinvented myths.
In the depths of the forests and deserts of Loss lie the ruins of the Ancients, predecessor peoples of the Lossyans, places of legend where daring explorers can find wondrous or fearsome artifacts.
It’s also a world of secret societies, conspiracies between merchant families and aristocratic lineages. Complex, hidden battles rage between the dark designs of the Church’s sects, and the dark mysteries of the occult societies of the Merchants’ Guild. The truth is never clear-cut, appearances are often deceptive and certainties are always challenged. And even the antagonisms between the powers hide sinister truths of frightening complexity. Nothing is ever what it seems on Loss, starting with the past lost and then rewritten by the Church, which the Lossyans are only just beginning to rediscover.
Loss’s levitating ships travel the oceans and plains, sailing above the herds of giant animals and predators that follow them, mapping more and more of the world. Scientists and geniuses explore the mysteries of science and matter, discovering the movement of stars, the mysteries of engineering and medicine, the secrets of loss-metal; and the most reckless and heretical explore the knowledge and mysteries of the Ancients. Each discovery is a new enigma and a new challenge in the struggle between obscurantism and progress… a struggle that heralds a coming large-scale war that does not wish to speak its name.
