World Setting

[yxanthymir]

 

The Demon Lord wears many masks. It is the One Foretold, the Destroyer of Worlds, the Hunger, the Shuddering One, the One Who Whispers, the Shadow in the Void, the Dark Between the Stars, and the Unspeakable One. Its will alone snuffs out the stars and its shadow ends realities.

This is a game set in a fantasy world’s last days. Reality frays as time and space unravel, weakening the laws governing what’s possible and what isn’t. As a result of this deterioration, threats from beyond the universe intrude, vile demons spawned in the endless Void, hungering for the utter destruction of all things. Where they tumble free into the mortal lands, they bring death and doom to all.

These are dark times foretold by the oracles and prophets, shouted by preachers on their pulpits, and whispered on the hot winds swirling out from the gates of Hell. All the unrest, suffering, doom, and decline spread from the Demon Lord’s shadow that creeps across the mortal world. It corrupts whatever it touches, twisting it to evil ends, fomenting madness, and quickening the doom this being demands. The resulting chaos has seen horrors long forgotten to rise up from their tombs to roam the lands as they once did. Armies muster over the most minor slights, bringing war, famine, plague, and death across the civilized lands.

As bad as things are, all is not yet lost. Exceptional men and women have a chance to delay or possibly avert the looming disaster. They come from all backgrounds. They are hard-bitten mercenaries, power-hungry sorcerers, and priests of inscrutable gods. They are the people living in the bowels of the earth and the cities’ slums. They rise from the fighting pits, emerge from the academies, and venture from the farms and fields that sustain the great cities. These peoples, from all across the lands, come together in the world’s hour of need to be its champions, its defenders, and, perhaps, its saviors.

The fate of the universe will be decided on Urth, a small planet swinging around a relatively young star in a remote corner of the galaxy. The Shadow of the Demon Lord falls over many worlds, but Urth has most recently drawn its fell attention. Here, reality’s boundaries have weakened enough to permit the darkness of the Void to escape and set in motion a series of disasters that, unless stopped, will culminate in the end of all things.

The waters of four oceans divide the lands into eight continents, with numerous islands of varying sizes scattered among them. The continents boast diverse landscapes, with towering mountains, pestilential swamps, rolling plains, and primeval forests as old as the
world. Deserts and badlands, prairies, hills, rivers, lakes, and jungles sustain a wide range of life.

Beneath the mortal world’s surface stretches a vast labyrinth of tunnels, caverns, great galleries, and bottomless chasms. In these lightless grottos lies a violent and often terrifying world that the peoples living above have never conquered. Into the subterranean depths the wicked flee. Here also, exiles might find refuge and misguided people hope to bury evils from another age. 

Arching over the world is a vast, azure expanse by day and deep blackness speckled with stars by night. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and a single moon, Tarterus, is a whole other world, its surface obscured by boiling clouds in which lightning dances. Some believe Tarterus is a dark cousin to Urth, a world inhabited by all manner of warped and terrifying things. Others believe the gods created it to hold those primordial deities they cast down at the dawn of time.

Edited March 21, 2023 by yxanthymir (see edit history)