Author: Primal Sword & Sorcery

  • The Vandyrian Codex: Volume I [OST]

    The Vandyrian Codex: Volume I [OST]

    FULL ALBUM
    Coming Soon

    PREVIEW TRACK LIST

    Before We Begin…
    On The Vandyrians
    The Greater Vandyrian Empire [Album Version]
    Vanguard
    Tyvexian Life
    Vandyrian Cosmology I

    More tracks to be added as content expands.

    2025

  • Primal Sword & Sorcery [OST]

    Primal Sword & Sorcery [OST]

    Primal Sword & Sorcery [OST]

    2026

    An Ongoing Playlist
    -Check back for Updates-

    PREVIEW TRACK LIST

    Tales of a Vandyrian Civilization [Original]
    Vulsa Unchained [Codex Version]
    Roedon’s Beauty [Album Version – Male Vocals]

    More tracks to be added as content expands.

  • Varduun – The Hyenalands

    Varduun – The Hyenalands

    Varduun is a land cursed twice. Once by fire, when Drael fell and split the earth, vomiting up vents, ash rivers, and poisoned plains. Again by its folk, for the hyenas claimed the land and made it theirs.

    It is a land of cracked savannah, fever-swamps, scorched plains, and wasted rivers. Disease prowls through its camps as easily as raiders do. Unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and deaths in childbirth are common; the alleys swarm with half-starved pups and abandoned ferals. Life here is cheap, short, and cruel—and the hyenas laugh at the cruelty not because it is funny, but because it is all they know.

    The Hyenalands are no kingdom, no empire. They are a trinity of strongholds and hordes—Gorzanth, Zarnack, and Krothuum—locked in endless rivalry. Only when all three are threatened at once do they bare their teeth outward, and then the savannah burns.

    And always, on the horizon, the whisper of a fourth city—Old Kartong, not theirs, not of Varduun, but a ruin that mocks them all.

  • Bantos – The Doglands

    Bantos – The Doglands

    In almost complete contrast to the hyena wastes of the Zhurian East stand the Realms of the Doglands — a loose constellation of citadels and town-states nestled between the ridges of Izhura and the guarded frontiers of the Lions’ territorial dominions.

    Where the hyena tribes thrive on terror, filth, and frenzy, the folk of the Doglands labor toward the illusion — and perhaps the first true experiment — of civilization. Their walls are high, their gates fortified, their plazas swept and sunlit. Within, sandstone towers rise over clay-tiled streets; bazaars spill with spice, silver, and textiles traded freely among breeds once enslaved.

    The population itself is a breed-born refuge of runaways and freed thralls, their collective memory steeped in the hunger for autonomy. Every law in their realm speaks to the preservation of the self — and the punishment of those who would erase it. Execution and treason are the two pillars upon which their justice rests, and mercy is measured not in pity, but in restraint from cruelty.

    Yet for all their civility, they remain a young and precarious nation. The Dogfolk abhor conscription, reject state labor drafts, and refuse to bind service to punishment. Their armies are few, their militia undisciplined, and their reliance on coin and contract makes them slow to rally. They are merchants before soldiers, architects before conquerors, and in that inversion lies both their nobility and their doom.

    Still, their hatred of both Jackals & hyenas runs hotter than any forge in Vandyrus. No treaty, no creed, no trade route is ever permitted to cross the filth of those carrion plains. To the Dogfolk, coexistence with Wolves is a cautious truce; with Horses, a mutual respect. But with Hyenas — only eternal war, declared in silence, and fought in every child’s bedtime story.

    For mistakes, even noble ones, do not require frequency to accumulate ruin. And the Lions across the western sea, in their cruel provinces of Gamandor, have long delighted in watching fledgling nations stumble — savoring, with almost culinary patience, the pleasure of playing with their food.

    RELATED

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    A Tale of ‘The Bantos Uprising’

  • Gunran – The Labyrinthian Hell-Jungle

    Gunran – The Labyrinthian Hell-Jungle

    Gunran sprawls across the eastern rim of Zhuru, its boundaries less drawn by rivers or cliffs than by gradients of misery—when the biting flies give way to biting things, when the mud turns from black to bone-white, when the air grows thick with the stink of rot and alkali. This is not a green, life-affirming jungle; it’s a fever-dream of gnarled trees and choked undergrowth, where every step promises a new kind of suffering. Even the light here feels wrong—filtered through canopies of predatory vines, fractured by steam, infested with motes of insect wings and fungal spores. It’s the kind of land that refuses to be tamed or charted, a jungle-swamp labyrinth both lethal and lush, its perils as much ecological as social.

    Only Gunrang City endures near the coast, a half-drowned relic perched at the edge of this mire. Once a tenuous refuge for exiles and the desperate, it survives more out of inertia than intent, its upper tiers lashed together atop rotting mangrove and fungus-choked foundation. Every season, another walkway collapses, another home is swallowed by the rising muck; the city’s lower levels are already lost to mold, biting insects, and the slow, relentless encroachment of the swamp. What remains of civilization there clings to the heights, even as the whole settlement sags, sinks, and rots, year by year, into the filth. Gunrang is no outpost of order, merely the last gasp of habitation before the jungle claims everything.

    The region’s true natives are the red panda tribes—arboreal, cunning, ferociously territorial. These folk are not gentle tricksters; they are expert guerrillas, masters of ambush and sabotage, their villages strung high above the worst of the swamp’s dangers, woven into the upper boughs where even the largest predators struggle to follow. Their feuds are legendary, as much with one another as with outsiders, and every turn of the season is marked by new raids, arson, and the taking of captives as rivals clash and alliances shift in the shadows of the trees.

    Travel in Gunran is a test of both will and wit. Roads are illusions; at best, they’re trails half-swallowed by the jungle, staked by lost traders, mercenary patrols, or the ruins of failed settlements. Raiders—often outcast mutts, desperate lion sons, or failed panda chiefs—prowl the margins, making alliances of convenience with whichever tribe holds the nearest high ground. It’s not uncommon for a caravan to pay toll to one warband at dawn and be bled dry by another by dusk.

    The ruins are what remain of forgotten empires—stone causeways sinking into the mire, vine-draped temples that once channeled sacrifice and power, ziggurats now nesting grounds for spectral insects the size of a hound. Every expedition into the swamp uncovers something new—old gold, forbidden relics, or simply a quicker death. Disease is a certainty: fever, rash, rot, and worse. Swamp plagues that have no name outside Gunran, parasites that drive their hosts mad before devouring them, and fungal infections that bloom under the skin like white fire.

  • The History of Bantos

    The History of Bantos

    This volume stands as the rough dawn after the long, smoldering night of Empire.

    What follows is not the legend of a bloodline or the boast of some vanished royal house, but the hard account of a land and a people who refused to be buried with their masters. This is the story of those who survived the jackal yoke and the ashes of Old Jantara—not to restore what was lost, but to build what had never been tried.

    In these pages, there are no crowned heroes or ancient thrones, only the beginnings of kinship forged on the open steppe, in stolen fields and new-won villages, among folk who decided that freedom was not a gift but a task to be hammered out day by day.

    Related

    Beyond The Codex

    NEW Expanded Content from the Library of Primal Sword & Sorcery

    The Black Jackal King
  • The Outland City of Ajeros

    The Outland City of Ajeros

    Ajeros exists because it must, not because it should. It is a city pressed into service by geography and history alike, a hard knot of stone and wet iron driven into the southern edge of Yir’s long shadow. Though counted among the holdings of Izhura, it is an outland city in every meaningful sense: distant, inconvenient, and perpetually half-forgotten by those who live in safer latitudes.

    The routes that reach it do so grudgingly, slipping through vine-choked corridors and old jungle descents that once flowed south from Yir in elder ages, when the land was wilder and the borders less certain. Even now, those jungles have not fully released their claim. They cling. They creep. They remember.

    The city itself is civilized only by constant effort. Stone streets exist, but they are never fully dry. Walls stand, but they are webbed with roots and lichen, their mortar forever tested by moisture and slow green pressure. Rain is not an event here; it is a condition. It seeps into roofs, beads along beams, and darkens cloth until even the poorest can tell by touch alone whether a garment has ever truly dried.

    Homes are built with this knowledge carved into them. Windows are screened not for comfort but survival, their metal meshes fine enough to bar the bird-sized mosquitos that rise from the low green reaches at dusk, drawn by heat, breath, and blood. To leave a window unguarded is not negligence but folly, and folly does not live long in Ajeros.

    Yet for all this, Ajeros is not lawless. Its merchants are Izhuran by custom and reputation, their measures honest, their contracts respected even by those who grumble at the city’s isolation. Trade here is practical rather than ambitious. Goods are moved because they must be, not because fortunes will be made.

    The guards are much the same—strong, disciplined, and unromantic about their duty. They do not posture as heroes. They stand watch because the watch must be stood, and because everyone in Ajeros understands what happens when it is not.

    For the truth, known to every stonecutter and shopkeeper, is that Ajeros is not merely a city. It is a warning bell. It is the northernmost civilized finger extended toward Yir, and the first knuckle that will be broken if something terrible decides to move south.

    The badlands above do not loom merely in distance but in intent, a region whose ferocity eclipses Ajeros not just in violence, but in scale, in logistics, in the simple capacity to endure and deliver ruin. Ajeros knows this. There is no delusion here of matching Yir blow for blow, nor of holding against a true descent. Its purpose is earlier and bleaker: to see first, to bleed first, and to send word while there is still time for others to prepare.

    This awareness shapes the city’s character more than any charter or banner. Ajeros does not indulge in grand monuments or idle excess. Beauty exists here, but it is the beauty of persistence—of lantern light reflected on wet stone, of vines cut back each morning only to be cut again the next, of rooftops patched so many times they resemble quilts of iron and tar.

  • Izhura – The Grassland Courts

    Izhura – The Grassland Courts

    AUDIOBOOK

    Izhura stands as a battered but enduring wedge of territory carved out of the chaos and competition that defines central Zhuru. Unlike the realms that rise and fall with seasonal tides or the city-states that vanish into mud and memory, Izhura endures, neither the most powerful nor the most desperate, but a constant presence where so many others have flickered out.

    On a map, the realm is a long, crooked lance of grassland and border, reaching north toward the thick, haunted forests of Yir, sloping south until it meets the restless surf of the Craterian Sea.

    It is surrounded on all sides by realms that are either richer, wilder, or more dangerous—Yir’s uplands and poison woods to the north, the mires and uncertain loyalties of Gunran to the east, the crowded guild-dominated coast of Elder Ruselon to the south, and the rough dog-lands of Bantos to the west. The horsefolk of Izhura have survived not by outshining their neighbors, but by learning the virtues of patience, adaptation, and, when the time comes, sudden, blinding action.

    For outsiders, Izhura often blurs into a single patch of green, a corridor between more exotic realms. But for those who live on its soil, the land is divided into three major territories, each shaped by history, climate, and proximity to other powers: Uyarin, Vessara, and Elleas.

    These divisions are not just political—they are environmental, cultural, and psychological, with boundaries that run deeper than any border stone or old decree. The grassland spine that links them is both a blessing and a curse. It binds the realm together, but it also exposes it: armies, caravans, raiders, and rumor all travel the same broad corridors.

    CITY-STATES OF IZHURA

    IN PRODUCTION

    • More Cities
    • Encounters & Modules
    • The Gates of Yir
  • Konara – The Highland Realms

    Konara – The Highland Realms

    Konara rises as a wall of jagged peaks where the continent fractures, its snow-capped crest a deadly border between the wind-raked north and the grasslands that roll southward toward the deserts.

    The mountains are cruel, their passes narrow and uncertain, their storms sudden and merciless. To the North, the air is cold and thin, carrying only the howl of wind and goat horns echoing through the ridges. To the south, the land softens into vast plains, but even here the winds bite, and life bends hard beneath them.

    This is the realm of the goat and boar folk, horned and tusked, sure-footed upon the cliffs and relentless upon the steppes. Among them dwell the elder cervine kingdoms, proud antlered dynasts whose lineages are etched as deep as the stone.

    Konarans are riders and herders, hunters and raiders, their blood hardened by altitudes where weaker folk would perish. They bow to no throne beyond their own kin-claims, and their isolationist pride makes them scornful of the south.

    Trade caravans from decadent Zhuru are eyed with suspicion, tolerated only when salt, iron, or furs are worth the trouble. Of Bantos and its Dogs, the Konarans barely speak, dismissing them as rutting scavengers undeserving of notice.

    IN PRODUCTION:

    • The Crown of Iron
    • The Northern Elk Lords
    • A Darkness Over Konara
    • The Antlered Crest of Endless Rule
    • The Reign of King Haros Elkyre XI
    • The Rule of Nye Rheiyos VI
    • The Highland Wars
  • Yir – The Tower-Jungle Swamps

    Yir – The Tower-Jungle Swamps

    The Lost Regions of Yir

    DANGER: Yir is virtually unexplored & almost completely unmapped in any reliable way. The known “Cities” lie in crumbling vine- haunted ruins that haven’t been reached by anyone sane or returned in generations.

    Ghu

    Anar

    Rakka

    Yir is a kingdom of vapor perched high above the world. Cold rainforests sprawl across shattered uplands where the land itself rises in broken cliffs, thousands of feet above the grasslands below. Mazes of mangroves knot with drowned forests, and black pools yawn like mouths between their roots. Paths vanish overnight, swallowed by shifting waters, and the cliffs themselves bleed waterfalls that vanish into the mists beneath. To descend from Yir is near suicide. The plateau was not meant for escape, only endurance.

    The folk of Yir are scattered and sparse. Small mammals dart through the undergrowth, preyed upon by tall, sharp-beaked bird clans who prowl with spear and arrow. Between them stalk the lizard-folk, chameleon-skinned and silent, hunters who thrive in ambush and camouflage. None bend to any empire, and all live uneasily amid ruins far older than themselves.

    Everywhere in Yir rise the shattered remains of temples—stone long claimed by moss and rot. Their carvings are worn, their rites forgotten, but still the swampfolk whisper of the beings once worshipped there. The old priests promised change, spoke of transformation as a gift. Yet the stories linger of shapes half-formed, of folk who shed their skins endlessly, never complete, never at peace. In the black pools, the locals say, something still waits.

    Conflict festers even in isolation. The Bird–Civit Wars rage, tall hunters clashing against nimble arboreal fighters in ambush and reprisal. In the drowned forests, the Arboreal Kingdoms feud endlessly, their skirmishes as frequent as the storms.

    For Yir is a land that breeds no peace; its folk are too busy surviving one another, too busy fearing the return of whatever once ruled here.