A brief history

The World that Was

It has been over a hundred years since the Long Fall and all we have left are the nightmares.

In the World that Was, humanity lived in unimaginable luxury. None now live that remember those halcyon days and even the dead have forgotten. But the few records that escaped the horrors of the Long Fall spoke of an era where humans ruled over land, sea, and air. Through high medicine and mechanical art, our ancestors had conquered Famine and Pestilence, and were poised to eradicate Death. Even War trembled at the hard-fought peace between the nations of the old World. 

Then the skies darkened and the first magnetic manastorms raged across the planet. The seas roiled, the earth shook, and humanity perished by the millions.

We do not know which came first: the magnetic mana-storms that destroyed the old societies or the moon-sized monstrosities that blackened the skies with their writhing bulk. But we do know that the end was mercifully swift for many and reality was changed forever after.

Unbent and unbroken

We now call it the Long Fall, the Ravening, and the Desolation. It should have ended us, but we endured.

When the screaming stopped and consciousness returned to our ancestors, they looked up at a sky that was cleared of those abominable horrors. Raw and aching, they turned to the slithering monstrosities lurking at the edge of their campfires, nodded at each other, and went to work. 

The survivors carved out homes and a hard life in the ruins of the World that Was. They leaned on each other, wrought tools out of scrap, and drove away the unnatural things that hunted them.

Slowly, the remnants of humanity -- whether they resembled their ancestors before the Long Fall or bore sorcerous bloodlines within them -- learned to walk again. Campfires and lonely hearths became nomadic tribes and fortified villages. Those villages that were not snuffed out by flesh-takers, hiveling swarms, or any other monstrosity from Beyond the Fall grew into sturdy city-states. This was especially true in the Mid-Atlantic area between what was once Tidewater and New England -- the fortified communities were distant enough from one another so that they did not compete for resources, but they were also close enough so that trade with each other remained viable.

The Archfactions

Elsewhere in the American continents, two mighty Archfactions arose: 

From their hallowed Ziggurat beside the Pacific Northwest, the Temple of the Shattered Mother cast away the old ways. Instead, its adherents put their faith in their God-Empress, Her Oracle-Avatar, and in hallowed sorcery. Where their armies marched and their shadow-gates opened, converts were allowed to join them in their holy crusade of destroying the horrors that caused the Long Fall. 

The Illustrados Union (La Union de los Illustrados) of the Caribbean wrought civilization out of the new sciences. They harnessed the magnetic mana-storms, powering their towns with the same energy that wiped out the records of the past. Each community they encountered was given a chance to partake of their Union and march into a new history for humanity.

Eighty years after the Long Fall, the Illustrados and the Temple made their own in-roads into the Mid-Atlantic. Shortly after, the disparate towns and tribes allied themselves to face these new intruders, calling themselves “the Free Tribes.” 

Soon, there were rumors of bloody, butcherous war on the horizon. There were those who tried to keep the peace, but the call to battle grew ever louder with minor skirmishes and bickering conflicts. 

The War over Embers

We now see that history would prove these rumormongers correct -- yet, war would come not from the north nor the south.

Ragged warbands of armored soldiers appeared and began battering at town gates and meeting with nomadic tribes of the Mid-Atlantic. Many initially believed that they were invaders, and when they were allowed within a town’s walls or among a tribe’s tents, most folk thought them to be beggars. The truth was far worse.

Their citadel of Grailhome in the midwest had been besieged by the Harbingers, four sorcerous entities that wiped out the remnants of humanity wherever they found it. Besides their own immense power, each of these fell sorcerers also directed a monstrous host to do their bidding, whether it was a swarm of brain-stealing insects, an army of the hungry dead, or several dozen floating God-Flesh homunculi. 

What followed was half a dozen years of desperate battles and pyrrhic victories, spilling rivers of blood over the ruins of a broken world. Time and time again, the Harbingers shattered armies or evaded death. The seventh year of this “War of Embers” saw crushing defeats and one brutal victory over the Harbinger Hosts, clinched by the Temple’s own Oracle-Avatar at the battle of the Broken Bell.   

Weakened by artillery and experimental sorcery, the Harbingers were ripped asunder one by one. Xhibal the Lightless and his homunculi wrought retribution in kind by obliterating the area around them with fell magics. Burned and blinded, only the Oracle-Avatar and those around them survived both Xhibal’s onslaught and the desperate, point-blank detonation of an Illustrados explosive by a Grail Paladin.

The three-fold Armistice

When the dust settled, most of Libertina city had been reduced to an irradiated corpse-ridden wreck, with no sign of the last Harbinger. A few months later, the Armistice at Libertina was signed adjacent to the city’s fractured bell. Thus, the Free Tribes, the Illustrados Union, and the Temple of the Shattered Mother would elude war. At least, such was the hope of most that were there.

It has been three years since the Armistice. The monstrous things beyond the campfire light have grown strong from the carrion of war and the loss of so many of humanity’s protectors. Many soldiers have returned to their homes and in their place have arrived the traders, the explorers, and the builders. Seraphs, Psions, and Chimera worked shoulder to shoulder with Forged, Eidolons, and Risen, all members of the resilient human race. 

We have built homes and lives upon the ruin of ruins. Humanity still endures and Humanity still persists, hoping against hope for a brighter future and a new path in a World Beyond the Fall.