From publisher blurb:
Childhood Wonder and Adventure
I have always been infatuated with the Atlantis legends, ever since I first watched Atlantis: The Lost Empire. I longed to be Milo Thatch, to go on wild expeditions and discover lost places and learn from them. As I got older, though, I came to uncover how much those old stories had been co opted by Nazi and Aryan narratives during the rise of Hitler - especially when I wrote a paper on Himmler and the SS in college. This made me sad, but opened my eyes to the effects of facism, xenophobia, and bigotry and how it can consume and destroy things. This was something we had to work with on our cosmic fantasy setting Yndurvaetra in how to represent and pay homage to Norse mythology without touching on the endangered parts. So, as we were wrapping up a bunch of projects towards the beginning of 2023, I felt the itch to dive back into my obsession with Atlantis and science fiction, and thus - Ixla Tanis was born.
Ixla Tanis is a reimagination of the Atlantis myth that removes the fascist ethnocentric story threads, and instead focuses on themes of revitalization, conservation, and environmentalism. You will notice that these tend to pop up in a lot of our “post apocalyptic” style settings, because so often those kinds of worlds are seeded as terrible and horrible with almost no compassion left - we want to do what we can to change that. Wanderers and Alders are dropped onto the laboratory island of Avon-15, once the final stronghold before terrifying blizzards and colossal storms wreathed the planet in an ice age that lasted millions of years and has now slowly begun to thaw and become Ixla Tanis. The great icy walls of the glaciers and frigid seas ring the front of the island, while deep forests and mountains are slowly being revealed on the upper lands of the island as the glacier recedes. Here, renewable energy and agriculture are everywhere, so you could easily spend your whole campaign arc just worrying about the daily tasks of tending to your farms, or perhaps do something more deep and explore the ancient lab ruins scattered across the island.
Welcome to the future.
Cam
World Reborn
When a young scientist named Krego Var warned their world that their continual reliance on desctructive power sources would be their ruining, they were laughed at until elemental chaos broke out and buried the world in a catastrophic ice age. Millions of years passed, the ice never thawing, clutching tighter and tighter around the planet, until finally, sun began to peek through those black clouds, and start to melt. One place had survived, its volcanic core too hot and too tall to be completely buried, and so it too began to wake up, freeing the once shimmering landscape of Avon-15 from its clutches. The once magnificent biospheres had been destroyed, and life had somehow survived beneath the ice, landscapes with new creatures and new plants greeting the sun. Deep within the central labs, cryo chambers began to open, and Krego Var was the first to step out into the sun, brought to tears by the light, and then even more by the new world their work had accidentally created.
They were even more in wonder when they beheld people who had survived being trapped beneath the ice outside the lab, yet, they were not the same. They were new lineages, new bloodlines, new genomes, created over millions of years of survival and hardship. Krego and their scientists became the pupils, and learned of the new name and languages and customs of the place they now knew to be their sanctuary. The work began by bringing together two times, past and present, to make a better future. Since the awakening of the scientists under Krego Var, almost five hundred years have passed within the boundaries of what is now called Ixla Tanis, and today, renewable energy technology and traditional agrarian traditions have married into a new way of life.
What's In Store?
Within this book, you are given the opportuinty to explore and help rebuild a world that is beginning to explore and expand beyond its borders to rediscover the world that lies beneath the ice. Whether the green fields of Farmfarrow or the sandy canyons of Dustdwemml, Ixla Tanis is an island nation where community and teamwork are key. Arcs here could take the Wanderers into deep lost laboratories and vaults for biotechnical horror adventures, or help to rebuild destoryed farms in the wake of a megasaur stampede.
24 new lineages - such as the Gaylwin or the Wisp - make up the people of Ixla Tanis, who can work as one of 7 careers - like the Glacial Surveyor or Peacekeeper. Will you help to ensure that the island of your home remains strong and in balance with nature, or strike out to uncover the lost?