Trobergs arbetsdagbok

The Spirit World​

The spirit world is not another land so much as the inner truth of this one. It lies beside the waking world like a shadow beside a body, shaped by the same places, the same lives and the same wounds. Shamans reach it through trance, crossing the border between life and death to walk paths of light and shadow where mortal logic grows thin and uncertain.


It has no true colors of its own. The land, the sky and all things within it are drained to shades of black, white and grey. Color belongs to spirits alone, each marked by an aura of its own hue. That color does not reveal anything as simple as good, evil, courage or fear. It appears to be nothing more, and nothing less, than the spirit's own name. There are no noble colors and no wicked ones. A cruel spirit may burn with gold, and a gentle one with red. Only the dead follow a clearer pattern. Their auras always carry a grey cast, and whatever other color remains within them is weak, faded and slowly ebbing away.

Reflection and Exaggeration​

The spirit world reflects the state of the living world, but never plainly. It shows essence rather than surface. A battlefield may appear blasted, dead and broken even generations after the grass has grown back. A place of long sorrow may feel hollow and cold, its shapes thin and distant. A healthy forest, by contrast, does not merely resemble itself. It becomes more fully itself. Trees rise higher, undergrowth crowds thick and lush, and flowers bloom in impossible abundance. The spirit world does not copy the world. It judges it, deepens it and reveals what it means. Places retain spiritual residue and are shaped by what has happened there.


The same is true of living beings. A spirit tends to wear the shape its owner believes to be true. One who sees themselves as mighty may appear tall, broad and radiant with presence. One who lives in fear may become small, hunched and skittish, forever ready to flee. The spirit self is not a disguise. It is self-image laid bare.

Dangers of the Spirit Paths​

The spirit world is no harmless dream. Shamans speak with spirits there, bargain with them and sometimes bind them, but the paths are dangerous and do not forgive carelessness. Some spirits lie. Some spirits lie. Others speak with perfect sincerity and are still wrong. Though they may know things hidden from the waking world, they are no more infallible than any mortal being.


Some mimic the dead. Some are older, darker and hungrier than the shaman intended to meet. Those who walk too deeply may lose part of themselves, returning clouded, changed or not wholly alone.


Among its worst dangers are predatory spirits. These do not kill spirits in any final sense, but seize, enslave and feed upon them. A weaker spirit may be drained for ages, trapped in the service of something stronger and more ravenous. Such predators are a danger to wandering shamans as well. If a shaman lingers too long, a hungry spirit may fasten onto them, block their return and feed instead on their life force. Even if they escape, there remains the risk that something follows them back into the waking world. Some scholars argue that this is the root of hauntings and ghostly infestations, that what people call a haunting is sometimes not the dead returning, but a predatory spirit riding home on a human soul. It is a feared theory, though not a proven one. The fear is well aligned with existing shamanic warnings that no one crosses the veil without bringing something back.


In this way, the spirit world is both revelation and threat. It offers truth, guidance and power, but every step within it carries risk. To walk there is to see the world more clearly, and to place one's own spirit within reach of things that are always watching.

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## Heroica 40000 http://troberg.synology.me/generica...r Packages/Flavor Packages/Heroica 40000.html

In this version, Heroica is the lost ancient past of a far future civilization, and a team of historians is sent back through time to discover what caused its apocalypse. The pitch is dark fantasy colliding with science fiction: rational observers from a cleaner age are forced to walk through a world of slavery, divine terror, and ritual cruelty, only to discover that their own presence may be the cause of the end they came to study.

## The World of the Free http://troberg.synology.me/generica...es/Flavor Packages/The World of the Free.html

This package asks what Heroica looks like when slavery is no longer openly defended as normal, yet exploitation still survives through contracts, dependency, and socially respectable chains. It is a more modern and hypocritical kind of darkness, where people talk about freedom constantly while finding cleaner, more civilized ways to own one another.

## A Fairer World http://troberg.synology.me/generica... Packages/Flavor Packages/A Fairer World.html

This is Heroica with some of its ugliest built-in prejudices stripped away, making it easier for players from cleaner fantasy traditions to step into the setting without losing all of its moral weight. The core idea is that fairness in blood, sex, and faith does not create kindness, it simply removes excuses, leaving ambition, class, power, and chosen cruelty exposed in their purest form.

## Ark Adrift http://troberg.synology.me/generica...avor Packages/Flavor Packages/Ark Adrift.html

Ark Adrift reveals that Heroica is not a natural fantasy world at all, but the broken interior biosphere of an ancient generation ship that has drifted for ages without guidance. Forests, seas, monsters, peoples, and even the world’s metaphysics become the accidental results of failing systems, corrupted biological programs, and a machine intelligence that no longer understands what it was meant to preserve.

## The Bleeding Gods http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ckages/Flavor Packages/The Bleeding Gods.html

This package turns divinity into something more visceral and horrific, where gods and miracles are not distant wonders but active wounds in the world, paid for in blood, flesh, and spiritual ruin. The elevator pitch is a Heroica where faith is still real, but every holy act feels closer to surgery, sacrifice, or butchery than to comfort.

## Dividing the Cake http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ckages/Flavor Packages/Dividing the Cake.html

Dividing the Cake imagines a world where the great powers stop pretending to rule by destiny or virtue and instead openly carve weaker lands into administrative, economic, and colonial pieces. It is Heroica as partition, occupation, treaty theft, and imperial bookkeeping, where conquest feels less like glorious war and more like being quietly written out of ownership by men with ledgers.

## The Dreaming http://troberg.synology.me/generica...or Packages/Flavor Packages/The Dreaming.html

In The Dreaming, sleep and waking are no longer separate states, and reality itself begins to dissolve into dream logic, symbols, and nightmare transformation. The pitch is slow, surreal apocalypse: nights lengthen, certainty erodes, and the world does not burn so much as gently lose its grip on being real.

## Dungeons & Dominars http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ages/Flavor Packages/Dungeons & Dominars.html

This package rebuilds Heroica around absolute hierarchy, normalized submission, and a social order where ownership, obedience, status, and erotic power are woven into nearly every relationship. Its core idea is not just “more slavery,” but a world where domination becomes the primary moral language, and where even compassion, beauty, and intimacy are filtered through control.

## The Expanding Silence http://troberg.synology.me/generica...es/Flavor Packages/The Expanding Silence.html

The Expanding Silence takes whatever dead zone, void, or metaphysical emptiness exists at the edge of the setting and makes it grow, swallowing lands, certainty, and perhaps even meaning itself. The pitch is encroaching negation: the world is not being conquered by an enemy with motives, but erased by a spreading absence that nations can neither reason with nor meaningfully defeat.

## The Flesh Market http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ackages/Flavor Packages/The Flesh Market.html

The Flesh Market pushes Heroica’s existing commodification of bodies into outright systemic horror, where identity, continuity, and even immortality become matters of wealth and ownership. It is the world of harvested bodies, inherited flesh, bought selves, and ruling classes who no longer merely exploit the poor, but literally continue living through them.

## The Forest Awakens http://troberg.synology.me/generica...kages/Flavor Packages/The Forest Awakens.html

The Forest Awakens imagines nature no longer as backdrop, resource, or even dangerous wilderness, but as a conscious force finally pushing back against civilization. Cities vanish under roots, spores become weapons, and the natural world stops tolerating mankind, turning the package into a vivid ecological revenge fantasy with strong horror overtones.

## The Hungry Sea http://troberg.synology.me/generica... Packages/Flavor Packages/The Hungry Sea.html

This package makes the ocean itself feel predatory, alive, and spiritually wrong, so that every voyage becomes a negotiation with appetite rather than weather. The pitch is simple and very strong: if baseline Heroica makes the sea dangerous, The Hungry Sea makes it hungry, and that changes trade, travel, piracy, and exploration at the deepest possible level.

## The Last Dawn http://troberg.synology.me/generica...r Packages/Flavor Packages/The Last Dawn.html

The Last Dawn is the end times package, a world in which people know the end is coming soon and society begins to warp around that certainty. The core idea is not just apocalypse, but apocalypse psychology: revelers, penitents, deniers, opportunists, and broken believers all trying to decide what human life means when even the sun seems to have an expiration date.

## The Living Word http://troberg.synology.me/generica...Packages/Flavor Packages/The Living Word.html

In The Living Word, language itself becomes materially real, and words do not merely describe the world but reshape it. This turns Heroica into a setting of dangerous speech, reality-bending dialects, sacred grammar, political philology, and cultures fighting not just over land and faith, but over naming, truth, and who gets to define existence.

## Magic Is Evil http://troberg.synology.me/generica...r Packages/Flavor Packages/Magic Is Evil.html

Magic Is Evil asks what Heroica becomes when people stop seeing sorcery as dangerous but usable and start treating it as fundamentally corrupt, hated, and unforgivable. The pitch is a world where every spellcaster is closer to a contaminant than a wonder worker, and where miracle, curse, fear, and persecution all feed each other until anything magical becomes a public threat.

## Supernatural is a Belief http://troberg.synology.me/generica...Flavor Packages/Supernatural is a Belief.html

This package strips the setting bare by removing real gods, magic, spirits, and demons, leaving only human beings, institutions, frauds, symbols, and the desperate need to believe. It turns Heroica into a world where every miracle is political theater or delusion, and where the most dangerous force left is not magic but conviction.

## The Tikirri Crusade http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ages/Flavor Packages/The Tikirri Crusade.html

The Tikirri Crusade takes the insectoid threat and pushes it to center stage as a civilization-wide enemy that forces kingdoms, faiths, and armies into a desperate holy war. The pitch is Heroica as grim frontline crusade, with resin fields, endless attrition, fanatical rhetoric, and the terrifying possibility that mankind might need to become as monstrous as the swarm to survive it.

## Where’s the Moon http://troberg.synology.me/generica...Packages/Flavor Packages/Wheres the Moon.html

Where’s the Moon begins with the moon shattered or gone, leaving fragments behind that unleash demons, cults, broken tides, and a world robbed of one of its oldest anchors. The elevator pitch is cosmic disaster fantasy: the sky itself has failed, night no longer belongs to the familiar world, and survival means scavenging ritual answers from the wreckage of celestial order.

## World War Heroica http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ckages/Flavor Packages/World War Heroica.html

World War Heroica turns the setting into total war on a continental scale, with fronts, ash lines, burning forts, exhausted armies, and whole societies reoriented around survival, production, and attrition. The core idea is to ask what Heroica looks like when all its cruelty, ambition, and fractured states are pulled into one grinding conflict large enough to redefine the whole world.

## World War Heroica - The Aftermath http://troberg.synology.me/generica...ckages/World War Heroica - The Aftermath.html

The Aftermath is what comes once that total war has ended and nobody really knows how to live afterward. It is a world of ruined states, hollow victories, displaced people, exhausted soldiers, opportunistic outsiders, and a peace so thin and tired that it feels less like healing than like a pause in the collapse.

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