World History

Eras

• 0E Prehistory — unknown; even scrying magic cannot see so far back.
• 1E The Era of the Ancients — language, farming, domestication; tens of
  thousands of years, records sparse.
• 2E The Era of Magic — magic discovered; exploration unchained from farmland
  (two druids casting Goodberry could feed forty explorers). Ended when no
  unexplored land remained.
• The Hollow House (late 2E, into early 3E) — the one document the campaign holds from between the Ancients and the Era of Kings: the parish gravekeeper's diary "The Loge of ye Gravekeeper", recovered sealed inside The Hollow House in Session 42. Four scholar Meisters — Corvene, Vaela, Halren, Jerris — spent generations deciphering black stone-slabs in "the speech of the Ancients", and stopped aging somewhere inside that work. Its own wording dates it: the first entry celebrates the newly-invented calendar as "the greatest invention since magic" (so magic was already old — these were latecomers reading the Elder race, not their contemporaries), and the last entry watches the Era of Kings arrive — "Lords ride armed, roads fill with soldiers, and every tongue speaks of conquest. None speak now of the old age. My time was a time of discovery and research. The time now is of war and little else." Its dating system is pre-numeric: the Year of the Bane Elme, the Walled Crooke, the Creaked Gibbe, the Sloughed Bedde, the Praised Reache, and the Year of the Tired Gravekeeper.
  • How old the survivors are: if the diary sits at the 2E/3E turn, then Halren — still climbing out of a sarcophagus to fight the party in 4E 1396 — predates the current era by a wide margin, and Jerris, who walked out of the sealed hall alive and was never recorded dead, would be on the same order of longevity as The Autarch. Inference from the record's wording, not a stated date.
• 3E The Era of Kings — war, conquest, crowns. The God-Emperor
  built a Final Empire that conquered most known lands; he killed the other gods and
  burned their texts and temples (the Firebrand Church's All-Flame Queen survived by
  hiding). He was slain when an elven woman — The Autarch — armed herself with the green
  Shard of the Autarch (god-slaying material) and stabbed him, making him explode;
  the leaderless empire then collapsed. His death rolled the calendar from the Third Era
  into the Fourth — 4E year 0 is the slaying, and Godfall. (The Autarch is the
  god-slayer, not the God-Emperor she killed; the Shard is named for her. Session 19
  said so from the start — an early vault gloss misread it; corrected 2026-07-26.)
  The Final Empire's reach shows up in Orathi geology as well as its politics: the volcanic island of Gogoro is recorded disrupting imperial shipping lanes in the third era "as it sacked the island to take its population as slaves" (see Orathos — the volcanic arc).
• The Foredwellers — the vanished pre-Fall Ancients (also "Prehistorians,"
  "Before People," the Elder race) who mastered the green shard
  substance — the "panache" that both grants immortality and slays gods (the
  immortality elixir and the Shard of the Autarch are the same Foredweller
  craft). Their buried ruins run deep beneath the Tors; a hidden
  research facility studies them below the
  Middle Tor (Session 52).
  • What they were, from their own wardrobe. The facility's storeroom holds the Ancients'
    day-to-day belongings: trousers reverse-tapered at the ankle for a hoof, a tail hole
    in almost everything, and every garment cut for a creature standing well taller than any
    race of man — the build of the horned fisherman under Gwyndinas.
    They had lavatories with footrests, so they ate and had mouths (Session 53).
  • The Ascension was a funeral. The horned fisherman described the inland
    Shrine of the Immortals as a place where none are buried because they ascended. The
    facility's chief translator Minimika reads the runes around the Ascension as mourning,
    loss and leaving behind: "I do not think many people survived the Ascension." Whatever
    emptied the ruins, the Ancients wrote it down as a bereavement (Session 53).
  • Depth is magnitude. Foredweller engraving encodes scale in how deep it is cut — the same
    glyph pair means cupboard at half a millimetre and prison cut deep. On that rule the
    Ankley Island runes read back in Session 13 came from an uneducated speaker, and
    their "door" is properly "door with hinges"; the depths themselves have never been
    measured (Session 53).
  • The stock is older than the woman who used it. The reservoir of liquid panache under the
    Middle Tor has been filling one drop at a time for several hundred thousand years, and
    perhaps a hundred loose shards of it are scattered across the world — a child digging in
    beach sand might turn one up.
    (The hundred-shards figure and the beach-sand detail are Dr. Xiao Li's, given in the corridor after Malaika had dismissed the party from the pool room — not part of Malaika's own account, which is vaguer.)
    The Autarch armed herself from that stock in 4E 0,
    which leaves the question of how a woman first recorded fourteen centuries ago came by
    machinery half a million years older than she is (Session 53). Restated plainly in
    Session 55: the shard is not the Autarch's own substance but "a resource of the Ancients
    that the Autarch has learned to process or weaponise" — she post-dates the facility that
    makes it.
• 4E The Current Era — begins at the God-Emperor's death (year 0 = Godfall); the game is
  set in 1396, ~14 centuries later. The Autarch did not vanish with the era she
  started: she is recorded killing a tyrant dragon that had enslaved a micronation in the
  late 1200s, and fighting a sea-beast at Komorin, Varickshire during a blood moon
  in the early 1300s — the latest barely a century before the present. She is alive.

How the God-Emperor was described in his own aftermath. The vault's summary is that the God-Emperor killed every god in the world and declared himself the only one remaining. A working document from inside Laewendas's crystal programme — Mine Journal 6/8, the research log of the mine's mage Dillbert — puts it differently and more sharply: The Autarch was "a woman who killed a god that hunted gods." Not a god who happened to outlive the others, but one who hunted them. This is the phrasing a literate Rivalonian spellcaster reached for ~a decade before the present (Menagoles Mine Journal, p.6).

The Dragon War. The story that Laewendas flew a dragon and killed every other dragon in the world now carries a name. Polos supplied it — a scientist who has been to the Acropolis, which puts her propaganda on the far side of the sea. The Gravekeeper holds that anyone who raises the Dragon Wars is talking nonsense. Dr. Xiao Li, who is not religious and does not go north, believed there were no dragons left at all "apart from the really big one they paid tribute to" — Bael'Drakkor, still the only dragon anyone in the record will name as living. She means to put the question to a historian or a dragonologist at the next settlement with scholars in it. The one dragon the party can speak to first-hand had been dead for centuries when they reached it, buried under the Middle Tor with the sword and the arrow that killed it still lodged in the bone (Session 54).

The void, and the count of the stars. The void is barely a school of magic at all — no scrolls, no glyphs, no books, no teachers. Draw the elements as a circle of opposites and allies and the void has no place on it: it is the background noise outside the diagram, and of everything known it sits closest to Fenric's own anti-magic. Its work is disappearance — hiding, and unmaking memory, down to taking a person out of the world so completely that nobody is left who knew them. Both void things the campaign has met, the entity sealed in the Void Stone and the many-handed thing that made Caressa a queen, came from space. Fenric once watched a star blink out on an ordinary evening walk, and the sky he watched it from has been emptying across the campaign's own run of sessions. The GM has given the visible count three times, always as an offhand aside and never as a measurement: "like 8 stars tops" (Session 15, explaining why the Mage's Society's illusion ceiling of hundreds of invented constellations reads as so strange), "like 10 stars tops" (Session 27), and about five by Session 55 — where he adds that the historical records imply many more, and that light takes time to cross that distance, so the suns already dark to the eye died long before anyone saw them go. Set against that: what Viana remembers of the nighttime from before her imprisonment under the Grey Vale is "an infinite, sparkling layer above the planet… stars everywhere. It's beautiful" (Session 27) — the same sky, seen from the far side of the Ancients' world. Treat the count as a falling figure rather than a fact to normalise: the two early numbers are loose and interchangeable, but the drop to five is not, and the shrinkage is itself the plot thread. On that arithmetic this planet and its living, sentient sun may be the last life in the world (Session 55).

Over a hundred sentient species, and the price of the word "humanoid." The research facility's doctor of the physical body, Long Tim, puts the census at well over 100 species of sentient humanoid, and notes that the term itself "has become considerably controversial since the Human Empire performed such horrific things to non-humans." The record does not say whether the Human Empire he means is the God-Emperor's Final Empire; either way the offence is live enough that a scientist apologises for his vocabulary mid-sentence. His taxonomy of the ooze clades, offered as settled science: slimes are dangerous to the touch, goos are sticky and kill by constriction and engulfment, and gelatinous creatures splatter — they live in colonies under rocks and comprehend neither speech nor self. No thinking one had ever been recorded before Jex, which Tim declines to treat as proof that none existed (Session 55).

Timeline (4E)

• 0 Godfall — the God-Emperor slain; the Final Empire collapses
• 4 Orathos declares itself an independent island nation
• 100 First tribute paid to Bael'Drakkor in Baelheim
• 666 The Voivode of Veilwood signs the hellpact
• 704 Atollia splits rulership between Mainland and Island consuls
• 976 The Firebrands established
• 1300 Bael'Drakkor's most recent tribute (next due ~1400)
• 1312 Arcthelion Vaust raises Brineward Tower on the coast of the Southern Reaches of Atollia, and begins an observational journal he keeps for eighty-one years
• 1318 Vaust records "shapes moving beneath the deeper waters beyond the kelp forests. Vast, deliberate" — in no codex he owns
• 1332 The Veilwood curse first appears — and on the opposite coast Arcthelion Vaust wakes feverish and certain that "something somewhere has happened… Something has stirred. I must pray that it does not know I am aware." Two independent sources, one year.
• 1333 A Rivallonian fleet fights an Atollian one off the northern reefs; within seventeen years the Southern Reaches of Atollia have become North Rivallon
• 1339 Glasswood smoke first used to map Orathos's invisible air currents (they "shift with the moon and with strong emotion"); the sky witch Saskia is named
• 1357 Kingfall — Laewendas murders King Aethelric of Rivalon
• 1358 Aethelric's son-in-law Haelric wars against her; assassinated
• 1359–1361 Laewendas's tax terror on the northern coast — armed 'inspectors' tallying nets "as if tallying livestock," floggings, a village elder hanged — while her court purges its own lesser nobility
• 1360s Skirmishes everywhere; pirates sack Atollia; Rivalon sold to bandits;
  refugees flee to Varia
• 1363 Laewendas's army annihilates the fishing village below Brineward Tower; the survivors are bound to their net-frames and drowned by summoned tide; Mirela is killed
• 1364 Vaust is pressed into Laewendas's service; over four decades he builds her ocean wards, sigils her keels, and calculates for her admirals — while copying every chart
• 1369 The last chartered refugee ship leaves Orathos — anyone left is trapped
• 1373 Amelia Bloodworth seizes House Bloodworth (no relative survives)
• 1376 Varia takes in large numbers of Orathi refugees
• 1380–1395 Rinder Mardek's Black Fleet at its height in Orathi waters — incendiary grapeshot on unarmed coastal settlements, then shore raids; allied with Seadog Jon Thomas. Its third mate Pyrirtras alone is charged with 30,000+ dead across the island chains
• 1381 Varia's five shires united; Amelia crowned High Queen
• 1393 Varia's exploratory mission to Orathos does not return — but it arrived: its envoys reached the north Rivallonian coast, sought out Arcthelion Vaust for "the weaknesses in wards I myself designed that lace the oceans," and recruited him. Whether the envoys or his intelligence ever left the island is unrecorded.
• 1395 The reclamation pact (The Coalition) signed; foothold in Rivalon. The Crown's Wake is launched on the 17th of Midsummer — a galleon given by Varia to Orathos as a gift, serving as the reclamation's flagship (see The Expedition Ship) — and Port Quaybay booms into the war's primary supply line on the strength of the pact
• 1395 Pyrirtras goes overboard in battle and is written off as drowned — she is picked up by a reclamation ship, taken to Varia, and conscripted into the reclamation force
• 1396 The campaign begins in Port Quaybay, Varia

Honour and Oaths

Honour is a public measure of a person's trustworthiness — society's read on their decency and loyalty — and it is tracked. Most people sit at a neutral 5: neither trusted nor distrusted, simply unknown. It moves with what you are seen to do.

What high Honour buys. Recognition as an honourable hero. The ability to borrow or purchase goods on your vow alone that they will be used for good. Access to titles, land, and Knighthood. Access to vendors and services who deal only with those in good standing. The trust and respect of the public — and enough standing to strike fear into villains and take a modest, honest share of their hoards.

What low Honour buys. Recognition as a self-interested opportunist. Access to thieves' and assassins' guilds, vendors of illegal goods, and fences for stolen property. And a particular kind of income: foolish heroes come to collect the bounty on your head, and you take their artifacts instead.

Socially it is tested like any other faculty — Honour checks to navigate a room, Honour saves to avoid an accidental breach, to resist goading, or to recognise trickery aimed at your good name.

"Honour and Rivallon" — a criticism by Magus Vadaighn

Rivalon is, in Magus Vadaighn's words, "baked with tales of honourable knights, fair and just traders, and stories of karmic destinies" — a land of people subjected to oaths and vows "in which some, I suspect, regret their choice of words." This is the same culture Sir Danica described to the party: a place where oathbreaking is the worst of all sins, and where many serve Laewendas only because they gave their word. Vadaighn's paper is an open challenge to that culture, and it asks readers to report their results to any Mage's Society archivist. Five quandaries:

• A pair take an oath of marriage, then come to dislike one another. Break the oath, or remain unhappy?
• One renowned for fighting takes an oath of peace. The reclamation force requests his aid. Break it, or stand idle while Rivalon is plundered?
• A group takes an oath to serve no oaths. How do they conduct themselves?
• A farmer swears to duel and slay his rival neighbour. The next day the rival apologises and brings a gift. Should he still slay the man?
• A child makes an oath alone, with none to witness, is kicked by a mule and forgets it. What is the status of his honour?

(A live hook: the second quandary is the Ornston Keep knight's exact situation, and the first and fourth are the kind of thing an oath-bound Rivallonian ally could be argued out of. Answering Vadaighn is also a standing, no-combat way to earn credit with the Mage's Society.)