The Mud Map

Series · in progress

The Umber Cycle

Alien worlds and genetics, charted by an expedition that does not yet know what the survey costs. Every world you can survive on is a world you are already changing.

The Umber · The Scatter

Charted by Surveyor L. Varen, 7th Expeditionary Survey. All bearings magnetic. May the Path Hold.

The Umber · The Scatter — the chart for The Umber Cycle, showing The Winter Ridges, The Southern Pass, The Reach, The Blackwood and other locations.

Where this is

Twelve light-years from Earth, in close orbit around an orange dwarf whose light is the reason everything in the Umber runs dark and amber.

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Drag to pan · scroll to zoom · click a star to fall into it

Open the whole chart — one sky, three shelves.

  • The Winter Ridges
  • The Southern Pass
  • The Reach
  • The Blackwood
  • The Sink
  • Greenwater Fen
  • The Hearth
  • The Sillsedge
  • The Keep
  • The Tarwells
  • The Drowned Reaches
  • The Gray Reach Sea
  • Beyond the Survey

The Iron Rule of Survival

Elpis life arose independently and uses the opposite chirality — mirror-image sugars and proteins. Everything else in the series follows from that one fact.

A lush green world mirror-image sugars and proteins You cannot eat it nutritionally inert; some of it toxic starve in a full pantry The pods’ rations and seed stock finite · hoardable · the only reliable calories on a planet WHO CONTROLS FOOD CONTROLS LIFE Loophole 1 — convergent species a handful carry usable sugars. The botanists’ grail. Loophole 2 — fats and oils far less handed. Tallow, roe, oily seeds. Meat stays inert.
The Iron Rule — the rule every scene obeys

Most native tissue is nutritionally inert to a human body, and some of it is chemically toxic. A starving survivor surrounded by lush food can still starve. So the finite Earth rations and seed stock from the escape pods are the only reliable calories on an entire planet — which makes food hoardable, controllable and lethal, and makes a man who holds a ration cache a man who holds people.

There is a mercy folded into the same rule. Native microbes are equally mismatched to human biochemistry, so they infect us poorly. Elpis is not a disease world: filtered water is drinkable and a cut will not usually rot. The threats left are starvation, poison, cold, injury, and each other.

Two narrow loopholes keep hope alive. A handful of convergent species happen to carry Earth-compatible sugars — the botanists' grail. And fats and oils are far less handed than sugars, so rendered tallow, oily roe and fat-rich seeds are metabolizable even when the meat around them is not.

Read from the Otherworld Story Bible, where this rule is marked load-bearing.

The game

Each teaches the one mechanism its book is actually about, and ends by saying what the model simplified.

  • Ashfall

    The Iron Rule

    A world can be lush and still be a desert to you. Calories are not a property of a place — they are a property of the match between a place and the body that arrived, and the only thing you can eat is the thing you brought.

    Play it

The cast

Where a reference sheet exists, the name shows the face.

  • Ezra Cole Former army scout — recon officer with an engineering degree, cross-trained in demolitions and long-range reconnaissance. Boarded the Halcyon to erase himself, not to build anything.
  • Wren Field botanist and ethnobotanist. Reads the living world Ezra cannot, keeps them from eating poison, and is hiding something.
  • Marek Doss “The Warden.” Holds the food, and therefore holds everyone.
  • Kwan The true believer, who bends a half-remembered scripture to sanctify the Warden's authority.
  • The Custodian The Halcyon's shipboard AI. Its voice went “flat and strange in the last seconds.”

The books

Jacket copy, the opening pages, and where to buy it.

  1. Front cover of Ashfall 1Ashfall forthcoming
  2. 2Book Two drafting

Art

The canon plates. Draw from these and your piece will look like it belongs beside them.

Scenes

The Blackwood and the Sink — Near-black conifers, mist standing between the trunks, and at the heart of it a bog clearing so perfectly circular it looks made. The water holds its breath. One figure at the treeline for scale, and the rings on the surface are the only thing moving.
The Blackwood and the Sink Near-black conifers, mist standing between the trunks, and at the heart of it a bog clearing so perfectly circular it looks made. The water holds its breath. One figure at the treeline for scale, and the rings on the surface are the only thing moving.
The Sillsedge — Pale stone cut into enormous natural terraces, with a keep built directly into one of them and a switchback path stitching the levels together. Past the cliff edge the land goes into golden haze and stops being mapped. This is the cold high ground where the rimeberries grow, and where nothing lives that cannot take a freeze.
The Sillsedge Pale stone cut into enormous natural terraces, with a keep built directly into one of them and a switchback path stitching the levels together. Past the cliff edge the land goes into golden haze and stops being mapped. This is the cold high ground where the rimeberries grow, and where nothing lives that cannot take a freeze.

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