This section documents the world of The Story Cauldron and The HoneyComb Engine — a single world across multiple eras, built on animist physics, inhabited by the Kye, and shaped by a cycling history of cataclysm, emergence, and return.
The world is called Bhaloidam, representing Mind (bha), Spirit (loid) and Body (dam). Bha, loid, and dam are also Proto-Indo European words meaning to tell, to play, and the family, respectively.
Everything here is downstream of one premise: everything has a certain amount of sentience. The implications of that premise, worked outward through geology, biology, history, and social structure, produce the world as described in these pages.
The primary storytelling home — the era where most Story Cauldron play is set — is the Sixth Age: a modern, politically charged moment in which a dominant society has decided that difference is defect, and that care means correction. The other ages exist and can be played in, but the Sixth Age is where the game's central tensions are most legible.
Start with the Animist Ontology. Everything else follows from there.