Getting Lost in the Melodious World of the Ballads of Oræd

This feature is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #179. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Exalted Funeral. While Exalted Funeral puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story.

Unable to sleep, you rise and make your way downstairs, where a candle already burns upon the table, as though someone has been here just before you. Outside, the storm rages and hurls the sea against the rocks, but here you are safe and warm.

On the table next to the candle is a book that you don’t remember seeing before, its cover depicting a bard with pale skin, surrounded by figures both sinister and mundane. Like the images on its cover, the book itself feels at once familiar and strange, as though you have read it before, perhaps in a dream. The title is Ballads of Oræd.

> Pick the book up and begin reading. 

Go to the window and watch the storm.

After an aside about a map drawn by a starling, the book opens with an atlas to a strange land called Oræd. Oræd is a place of islands and magic, peopled by fantastical beasts and equally fantastical individuals. Here, you can find chariots drawn by batdogs, cloud-giant vampires and entire islands poisoned by the blood of a wyvern, but you will also encounter ordinary (and sometimes not-so-ordinary) people engaged in mundane tasks – catching fish, blowing glass, harvesting herbs, racing rabbits.

All of this the book makes clear within its first few pages. The folk of Oræd are as familiar as your own neighbors and as strange as swanfolk, snake elves and an awakened stone with the gift of prophecy. Even before you opened the book, you could tell that this would be a tome filled with fantastic adventures in unfamiliar lands, and some of the inhabitants described in the opening pages are recognizable to you from other such volumes you have perused over the years – though even they always seem to come with some odd twist. Orc pirates and kobolds who live in a city made of rafts, druids who sail the seas on tamed leviathans and a civilization of self-willed golems.

Looking at the hand-drawn maps which make up the atlas, you are tempted to skip ahead in the book to try to find some of the locales depicted. There is what looks to be the silhouette of a dinosaur in Shadowed Lake, while something about the dark trees surrounding Vizarobbe Castle makes you want to know who or what dwells there . . .

Skip ahead looking for specific locations.

> Keep reading the book in order.

Resisting temptation, you move beyond the atlas and into the book’s first proper chapter, “Six Teeth and Other Tales of the Sea.” As the book says, “Islands surround Oræd and water divides it, making travel by ship a near necessity.” In the pages that follow are boats and their crews, from familiar galleys to ships fashioned from the empty shells of enormous deep-sea creatures and even a simple barrel, “the last vessel of a stow-away thrown overboard.”

This chapter also illustrates the various factions, weather and individuals that one might meet when sailing upon the seas of Oræd. And “illustrates” is not a word used lightly, for the text is accompanied by drawings at once detailed and hazy, maintaining the sensation that these are all items brought back with you from a waking dream. There are descriptions here of the work to be had for sailors, the troubles that one might encounter on the high seas, and even sea shanties to be sung, without which “the days at sea would last forever.”

Sing a sea shanty from the book.

> Resist the lure of song.

Though you are alone in the isolated lighthouse, so far as you know – despite the evidence of the solitary candle by which you now read – something makes you feel that breaking out into song at this late hour would be unseemly. Instead, you keep reading, passing beyond the chapter about sailing and into adventures to be had on the various isles which make up the lands of Oræd.

These adventures somehow seem of a piece with the illustrations that accompany them – at once vivid with detail and dreamily indistinct. You are an old hand at these sorts of adventure stories, and typically they are laden with the minutiae of their surroundings. What is in each room, what can be found if one searches beneath a loose stone, the names and vital statistics of the people in the taverns, in the castle keeps and so on.

Here, however, each stop on the journey is sketched out across only a single page, accompanied by imaginative illustrations which suggest as much as they depict. Sometimes, this includes the names of key individuals who might be met along the way, or the details of how difficult a certain threat might be to overcome. Other times, however, it seems to skip over these, instead offering tidbits that make you feel as though you’ve already read this before, but can’t fully remember when or where.

> Read on about the Last Snake Elves.

Go back and try to reestablish your bearings.

This first adventure concerns a group of elves who worship a snakelike deity. It also establishes what will, you quickly discover, become a trademark of the tales contained herein – their solutions are not always as cut-and-dried as you are accustomed to. There are no clear villains to be found, no evil forces to thwart. Everyone here has a motivation of their own, even if it is, at times, inscrutable, and in virtually every case, a way forward can be found without resorting to violence.

Just as in real life, however, each choice that you make has repercussions for a future choice. If you choose not to help the orcish raiders who attack the snake elves, you may instead find yourself the target of their wrath, as well.

Subsequent chapters feature awakened plants, unlikely oracles, wish-granting wyrms, sewer-dwelling mummies, problematic imps, ominous iron pillars, lands devastated by mutating poisons, a tree that walks like a man, the World Serpent Bazaar, dragon worshippers, vampires in disguise, giant ants, a tower of bones and much more. As you read on, you feel as though something is pulling you toward the end of the book, and yet you find yourself wanting to stay and spend more time on each of the islands and realms that make up Oræd.

Dawdle and pore over the illustrations in the adventures.

> You must reach the end before… something happens!

After adventures on virtually all the various islands of Oræd, you find that the book has taken a new direction. On red-backed pages are excerpts from something called the “Tome of Bestial Strength +1,” a book by an unknown author which details some of the creatures which populate these lands.

These are often well-known to you and yet, as the book itself warns, “The land’s isolated nature has led to many changes in otherwise familiar creatures.” Take, for example, the batdogs, which you formerly saw pulling a wagon in the Stomping Grounds, populated by giants and vampires. Here can also be found local variants of creatures such as trolls, goblins, minotaurs, treants and even mimics.

Each entry contains a breakdown of the creatures themselves and how difficult it might be to fight them. The nature of this breakdown tickles something in your mind – a series of letters, OSE. What does it mean?

> Stop to research OSE.

Perhaps it will be clearer in the morning…

You remember where you saw those letters in that order, and take down another book from the shelves which line the library. Old-School Essentials, you recall now, is a way of quantifying the dangers faced in an adventure. How hard is an enemy to hit? How likely are they to hit you?

These guidelines, you know, have been used to help countless adventurers brave perilous lands. Now you see how the various breakdowns in Ballads of Oræd are compatible with these OSE guidelines. It all makes sense to you, and yet, at the same time, you have the feeling that the stories in Ballads of Oræd are distinctive enough, and flexible enough, that they could be applied to almost any set of similar guidelines and still provide an enjoyable adventure yarn.

Now that you’ve put the book down for a moment, that sense of urgency seems to have departed. Do you pick it back up and finish reading, or try to return to bed for the night?

Head to bed. It will still be here tomorrow.

> But… you’re almost to the end!

“Reading” is perhaps something of a misnomer, however. The remainder of the book appears to be given over to beautiful, full-color images depicting life and personalities from Oræd, all made possible by an item known as the “Box of One Thousand Paintings,” which imprisons an imp who must paint whatever it sees beyond the box in order to obtain its freedom.

Even more so than those that came before, these images depict a world at once familiar and strange, a land that, though you have read through all the ballads contained within these pages, you feel you have only begun to guess at or understand.

Finally, you close the book, extinguish the candle that you never lit and ascend back up the stairs to your bed. The storm outside the windows has blown itself out, and you think now that you will be able to sleep, sure that you’ll have bizarre and fantastical dreams. When you awake in the morning, will it be in the land you know, or will it be in Oræd? Or were they one and the same, all along?

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Ballads of Oræd is coming soon from Exalted Funeral: https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/ballads-of-oraed

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.