Clash Yard
A world of enough
The world is at peace, and it wants for little. Fields yield, rivers run clean, winters pass — helped along by magic, and by the mages who put it to work.
The World
The Myth
The game born of those three, people came to call Clash Yard.
Three stories every child in this world grows up hearing: how the world began, the day the Order that touches people was split in five, and how a game came to end for good the quarrels that blood had been settling.
Read the myth→Life
What the myth left behind: a life at peace, and wanting for little.
Quarrels end at the Clash Yard
Peace does not mean a world without disputes. What talk, negotiation and the courts cannot settle, Clash Yard does — a quarrel inside a family, a feud between villages, a standoff between countries. The unresolvable ones all end on the field.
No money — only barter
There is no money in this world, and nobody misses it. Things move by trade: a catch for a repair, a harvest for a winter’s firewood. A thing is worth what someone will give for it. Coins do exist — good for deciding who takes the ball first at the Clash Yard, and for nothing else.
Most stay. Merchants and yarders go.
Most people are born, live and die in the same place, and are happy to — the land gives them little reason to leave. The exceptions are merchants and yarders. Yarders dream of the Royal Match: held once every four years at the First Yard, where they say the gods made Clash Yard and the first game was played.
Geography
The shape of the world, as far as anyone knows it.
The Span
People believe the world is one great continent, ringed by countless small islands. It has no proper name — there is only the one — so scholars call it the Span, and everyone else just calls it the land.
A wild ocean
The ocean is never calm, and sailing it is never routine. Even the short crossings between islands are the kind of journey sailors tell stories about.
Weider Island — Elga’s Lantern
The story begins on Weider Island, low and center-south on the map. It is round as a lamp, which is why it also goes by another name: Elga’s Lantern.