The Silver Steppes: A History of Gothic Grasslands
The Tragedy of Macbeth, Dir. Joel Coen, Apple Original Films, 2021
Cold fog rolls through the tall grass. The scent of honeysuckle wafts across the low hills. A blackened tree, struck through with lightning, stretches into the very lowest cloud. As your mount pads by, you see that it’s not a tree at all but the ruins of a castle. Like the talon of something buried under the loam, the castle curls into the sky with sinister abandon. The locals warned you not to stray so close to old Castle Iriorum. When you asked who lives there, they were quick to assure you of its vacancy. A single light twinkles through one of the cracks in the gothic crenellations, the first star of the evening. The realization is twofold: your mount has wandered within striking distance of the castle’s open gates… and there are no stars in the sky of the Silver Steppes. You look up into the black stones again, and the candlelight is gone.
As a lifelong fan of the Ravenloft campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, as well as twisted systems like Malifaux and the The Savage World of Solomon Kane, I found myself desperate to find a place for horror storytelling in Mytyrra. While the classic gothic phantasmagorias have been a love of mine since birth, I wanted there to be room for the folk horror storytelling I’ve grown to love as well as the cosmic spookiness of HPL. Someday I’ll write about how much I hate the current use of the term “cosmic horror,” but I can never shake my love of Haunter of the Dark, Rats in the Walls, or The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
I got to thinking where in my world I could set some of my favorite horror one shots. While there could be witches’ huts and ghoulish mausoleums anywhere in the world, I wanted them to have their own Transylvania, a mythical tapestry of all the good stuff in one place. The kind of village I could put my one shot based on Don Cascarelli’s Phantasm (1979), but also a castle I could pull some classic Ravenloft encounters into. The result was the reworking of a somewhat unfinished region I’d been toying with since day one.
While I’d originally envisioned the Silver Steppes as exactly the Central Asian stereotype the name calls to mind, I became tempted to push myself to be more original. While there are no wholly original ideas, I quite like the spooktacular vistas I ended up with. I envisioned a land under which lay the corpse of an alien war-baron, the echo of whose death would call countless horrors into being to watch over its grave. Where the formless shadow of space, the quiet horror of human unconsciousness, and the constructed terrors of mortal and immortal dread lords intersect, I could tell all these stories and more. The result was a misty country where even night itself refuses to die in daylight, and its woeful history goes a little something like this…
The plains of the Silver Steppes were once home to numerous entrepreneurial Camparan dragon lords. In the time before the elves rose against their draconic masters in the pillared temples of Campara, the seat of the northern empire belonged to dragonkind alone. Under the yoke of slavery, the elves that would one day rule the fertile north were put to work in the quarries and mines of Campara and the nearby Silver Steppes. These two regions are separated by the dense fungal forest of Rhyoll, but this mattered little when the lords of Campara could fly. Enslaved elves were often sent to the cattle pastures of the steppes by their dragon masters as a punishment for frailty or general incompetence. Few understood why the reassignment was punitive. It was the final discovery of many an elf that the very land itself hungers.
The liberation of the Camparan elves by their own hand was swift, their hard-fought slaughter of their former masters now a matter of legend. The dragons of the Silver Steppes were culled by their slaves, and the draconic frontier was no more. But as the cracked columns were repaired by the hands of free elves, there were those who saw the potential in the steppes. Quick to forget the warnings of their ancestors, swathes of the first free elves migrated south to build grand villas in the grassland. They mingled with the nomadic humans of the heartlands and formed a conglomerate human-elven culture over generations. By the twilight of the first Camparan Age of Alves, the people of the steppes were known as their own tribe: the Agyars.
The Agyars of the Silver Steppes were prosperous beyond their wildest dreams. Land sprawled in abundance, weather was moderate year-round, and every hillside stroll came with a discovery of draconic gold. Among the Agyars, some wore their elven heritage in their features while others bore the marks of a predominantly human bloodline. Under the loose jurisdiction of power-holding warrior noblemen called Khans, villages and cities enjoyed law and order. The fears of their distant ancestors had not been unwarranted, however, and the nightly disappearances were still as prominent as before. The Khans promised their respective villages that whatever was going bump in the night would be dead by cavalry spear before the year was out. While many skilled Agyar hunters yielded the heads of unspeakable creatures, the disappearances never ceased.
The power of the Khans was centralized at “The Table,” an order of stewardship that bound all the disparate homestead settlements to a code. The exploits and triumphs of the many Khans have been bound in historical volumes, stage dramatizations, and farmhand poetry… but like the dragons before them, their time has passed.
The annual harvest festival began as usual that year, with the fanfare of flutes and drums. Cavalrymen paraded through the cobble streets, spurred on by the sweet smells of seasonal pastries. Banners of dyed burlap billowed in the breeze, and tick-bites were at an all-time low. Such was the tradition of the Fallow Festival, when the harvest was conducted under the watchful gaze of The Table. On the final day of the festival, a fog unlike any other swept across the land.
Foul desires stirred in the minds of the Khans as they looked amongst their celebrating cousins. Dreams of expansion, promises of glorious conquest, and the bloodlust of ancient wars danced in their heads. Before the sun had set on the Fallow Festival, the armies of the Khans had been launched against one another. Villages were razed, hills were scoured, and the warriors of the Silver Steppes fought as though possessed. The gluttonous flames burned low as bodies were heaped upon the pyres. In the nights that followed, none of the bulbous-eyed aberrations of the Steppes reared their twisted heads. Nothing by tooth or claw could they do to rival the evils of the sword and crown.
When the dust settled and not a single Khan drew breath, the survivors picked themselves up from under The Table and rebuilt. A land tormented by the grand ghost of memory, the Silver Steppes limped into their future. Now the region is scarcely populated by permanent residents, and never by any but the Agyars. The old bloodlines remain, if only to keep watch over the tombs of their ancient kin. These tombs rattle in the night, their denizens desperate to inflict their pain upon a sleeping world. But what do the lives of the locals look like when the castles flicker with the hearths of vampires, the nights wilt under the howling of werewolves, and the smiles of their fellows become the grins of alien gods?
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