From Introduction: The city lies in ruins, as it has for centuries. Only a fool would believe this can ever change! There is no going back to the olden days of gilded palaces and crowded markets, for the doom covers everything. But what of the future? Not even doom lasts forever, and not even death can conquer life until it has had its chance to live. This city, though long destroyed, is far from lifeless. And while there seems no shortage of foolish adventurers who come here to die in search of treasure, there are others, too (far fewer in number), who come here to live. Chief among them are the knights that make up the Esoteric Order of the Riders of Chaos. They abandoned their oaths to lords and kings, and turned their backs on civilization itself, with all of its useless trappings. Now they live in the wild, just like the wild things do. But they are more than mere animals. To join the Order, a knight must not only be physically altered by the magical nature of the ruined city and its wastelands, they must also befriend a local creature to employ as a steed. For how can one be called a knight while one walks upon the earth with one’s own two feet? Even growing new sets of legs is not enough to make one a mounted knight. But chaos riders do not keep domesticated animals for their steeds, far from it. They raise no elk nor horses in these blighted lands — instead, a chaos rider must convince another creature to carry them around. It is not enough to merely have a steed. To be a true and proper knight, you must also pay that steed a proper wage. The most common steed among the chaos riders is the mighty land lobster. Much more intelligent than most animals, but still without language, these hard-shelled creatures lurk inside the basements and tunnels beneath the streets of Ardoussarlis. Land lobsters are equally at home underwater as they are on land, preferring freshwater lakes and rivers, but humans have named them after the place where they are most likely to be encountered. They have a surprising number of enemies and food sources in common with the knights of the Order, and so the two groups see an alliance between them as boon to both sides.