Setting: The Age of Wheelhouse

 

Following a cataclysmic chain of events at the end of the Age of Prophecy, the moon was destroyed in an
act of grief, hubris, and magic, leaving behind only the jagged sickle shape which magicians of the former ages had named the Laughing Moon. Much of the debris blew outward where it became trapped in orbit. The rest fell blazing through the sky like a dethroned god.

The effect was devastating. The world was utterly destroyed in the aftermath of what would become known as the Breaking of the Moon. Mythren was shattered into fragments and bound precariously together by fraying threads of magic woven together in the collapsing Dreamscape in a final, desperate act of survival done by the Spire of Mystics.  The survivors called it the end of the world. Indeed it was, but so much more.

Left behind was a collection of scattered pieces like massive islands on a boundless, yet waterless ocean. These divided land masses were came to be known as “drifts,” and between each drift was an abyss of mystical debris known as the Upfall. The overhead sky remained haunted by the broken moon—a reminder of the consequences of mortal overreach. But littered throughout the drifts were the ruins of what once was. And more, the secrets of the ancient world lay buried there.

Many of the magical races were lost entirely as their innate magic was quenched and their lives withered away in its absence. Those that retained their magic were later hunted for it, reduced to refugees in the wake of the catastrophe. To survive, the mortal races intermingled and the pure elven bloodlines that had existed for thousands of years thinned to a dream-like memory.

Even the immortal races, those that did not perish in the fall, fled the devastation. Religion was extinguished and soon the very memory of divine power slipped away to myth and eventually even their names were virtually forgotten.

But life endured, salvaged somehow from the brink of oblivion and dreamed back into existence. Over time the surviving races of Mythren began to carve out settlements for themselves. Some chose to dwell within the protected walls of the Sanctuary Cities, while others preferred to seek solace beyond the watchful eye of the Wheelhouse. Bit by bit, the shattered lands were remade and the races that inhabited the world beneath the broken moon began a new history.

 

Todd VanHooser

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