A Short History of the World

The End of Godwhen

Time sequence and causality are meaningless terms when speaking of the various wherewhens outside of Time as we know it. We perceive an apparent sequence in the events of Godwhen that never truly could exist. It is an artefact caused by our inability to see the Godwhen other than through the glass called Time. Suffice to say, the other side of the Time/Godwhen interface, events had conspired to produce a situation where most of the gods involved in the conflicts were desperate to seek any means to end them and remove direct deific competition. To this end, from our point of view, negotiations resulted in the Great Pact and the Dawn of Time.

The Dawn Age: 1 - 562, Necropolitan Calendar.

Conditions post-Dawn

Once Time became an actuality, events happened in a causal sequence and became rational from our Time-based perspective.

Conditions in the Mundane World were extreme. It had been ravaged by the Chaos Wars and deprived of the Sun for so long. The Moon was new. Races were scattered across the World and intermingled with the dead. People were confused by the new sense of Time. Several early manuscripts express surprise at the fact that many actions always seemed to result in the same effects. This sense of cause and effect took some time to grow used to. The earliest alchemists were experimenting with it for at least two generations after the Dawn; it only died out when the last few mortal witnesses to the Godwhen died.

Initial trends

The Dawn Age was marked by the rise of the great cities of the period. As the cult of Azrael led the way in the separation of the quick from the dead, the Death-rune oriented cultures rose to prominence first. Necropolis is still with us and the Necropolitan calendar has supposedly run unbroken since the Dawn. Modern scholars believe it merely dates from the founding of Necropolis but this may have been closer to the Dawn than is generally supposed.

As well as Necropolis, there were many other cities and civilisations, now lost, which sprang up in the wake of Azraeli shaman missionaries putting the dead to rest. Azrael was revered and Death worshipping cities and states were everywhere. The Azrael Pantheon then dominated places we now associate with religions of Air, Moon, Earth and Sun: Anatolia, Carthage, Moonguard, etc. These states became mighty and within a few hundred years of the Dawn, civilisation, (as in the art of living in cities), had spread right around the Middle Ocean. Barbarians provided buffers between the city-states and the chaos savages. Records of the time hardly mention chaos until more than halfway through the era. Reading between the lines, it seems clear that the Chaos zones, deep inland from the cleansing oceans, had been even more badly ravaged by the Chaos Wars than the littoral. Without the Azraelites to lead the way and Matari agriculture, the Chaos savages took longer to recover.

Later developments

However, recover they did and by 350 DA were beginning to press hard upon certain civilised areas, notable Eastern Anatolia and the areas now dominated by Moonguard and Karnak.

Simultaneous with this Chaos encroachment, two other factors contrived to generally weaken the cities from within. The first was religious intolerance. Lunar forces had been instrumental at the Godwhen/Time interface and were doubtless present in great numbers just after. But caught between the Trolls of the Trollands and the Azraelites, they found themselves persecuted with no place in the World. It is clear that persecution was rife and systematic, resulting in the extermination of upwards of 80% of Lunar worshippers. Those that remained resorted to a refugee existence, as many still do today. The second influence was the insidious rise of perverted Death-rune cults. Thanatar and Ma Fear were active at the time but Humaktis and Azraeli Templars kept them in check. More serious was the rise of Wraithe worship in several places, most notably to the East of what is now Moonguard. There is evidence that the Baboon Jungles were cleared from their present Western boundary and much of the local nobility was given over to Wraithe worship under their leader, Thanatos. Transylvania, evidently feeling threatened, sired several daughter vampire enclaves, Lamia, north of Heliopolis being the most infamous.

The Lightbringer Crusades

Things came to a head toward the end of the Dawn Age. Humakti heroes, realising they were overreached, enlisted the aid of Rhadamanthus heroes in anti-undead crusades. As Rhadamanthus is a just god, his worshippers were able to turn the fear of the undead into a tool to force many states to allow free passage for Lunar refugees. The Lunar crusaders that answered the call to arms against Thanatos created Moonguard. Heliopolis exerted its influence to drive the vampires from Lamia. Ma Fear and Thanatar were suppressed wherever they were found.

The result of the turmoil at the end of the Dawn Age was a change in the nature of civilisation along the Northern Littoral. Moonguard replaced Thanatos’ capital near what is now Freetown. Azraeli Karnak was destroyed in a fury of fire and Moonlight; volcanoes are still active on the peninsula now. Carthage was destroyed to be rebuilt again as a Death-rune state. But in Anatolia, the hordes of Chaos savages swept across the plateau and overwhelmed civilisation for a thousand years.

The Moon Age: 563 - 1159 Necropolitan Calendar, 1 - 597 Lunar Calendar

The rise of culture

The Moon Age is customarily dated from the founding of Moonguard in 563 DA/NC. It is marked by the rise of the religions of light and the first beginnings of the acceptance of certain Chaos cults within civilisation. The period saw a rise in arts and culture, philosophy and mysticism. It is from this time that the Lunar religion began to form a definite church structure. (The same structure that Azraeli theologists see as a perverted, chaotic imitation of their own religion, based upon scripture directly handed down by Azrael.)

It is certain that for many living on the North Littoral, the Moon Age saw a richer, more fulfilled life but at the price of Chaos infesting civilisation to a degree impossible in the Dawn Age. Chaotics only rarely met with acceptance in polite society but still they could be seen to walk the streets openly in many towns. Lüneport spent much of the Moon Age under the yoke of Transylvanian interference.

Under Moonguard’s watchful eye, Karnak was refounded as a Phoenician city. Further west, a truly chaotic state spread southward to the Littoral and sought recognition by the major states of the East and South littorals, much to their horror.

Upon the Anatolian Plateau, an influx of barbarian tribes curbed the hordes of chaos, driving them back to the eastern mountains or underground.

The backlash

This is what led to the great crisis at the end of the second era, the infiltration of chaos. In Moonguard, the original founding dynasty was replaced many times, the final dynasty of Counts, the Aldrins, became infested with chaos and this opened the floodgates to the rise of fashionable chaos-features. Society folk came to compete for who could gain the grossest chaos features. The people lost faith in their rulers.

But not everyone in Moonguard embraced chaos so openly. Many upright folk, great and small, still felt a gut revulsion at the thought of this infestation. This led to the civil wars that almost destroyed the area again. Eventually, Geoffrey Plantagenet deposed Count Buzz Aldrin. [His name is believed to refer to a chaos-feature the details of which have been lost.]

Elsewhere, the Typhonian crusades resulted in the barbarian suppression of chaos in the Anatolian Plateau and the founding of Stormhaven east of Karnak.

The Third Age: 1160 - 1739 Necropolitan Calendar, 598 - 1177 Lunar Calendar, 1 - 580 TA.

Held to date from the founding of Stormhaven and the coronation of Geoffrey I, Duke of Moonguard in 1160 NC or 598 LC. The Third Age has been an age of exploration, geographically and philosophically.

Around the shores of the Sea of Fortune, various towns grew from trading settlements born from barbarian settlers, merchant venturers and crusading chaos-rievers. Eastward, explorers made contact with far lands where the gods are worshipped under strange names and peculiar rites. Westward, Poseidon adventurers ventured out of the Great Middle Ocean and discovered stranger lands where even the reality of the world seemed peculiar and men’s hearts felt eclipsed by a spiritual darkness. Southward, beyond the Great Southern Desert, a bare handful of explorers reported hot, moist lands where dragons still ruled.

Intellectually, alchemists vigorously pursued the "Seven Great Questions" of alchemy. It also saw many new philosophies that questioned traditional beliefs in many religions. In Necropolis, various cults grew up, all claiming true worship of Azrael and most claiming all others to be heretical. The Lunar religion also spawned various heresies but generally without the intolerance of the Death Rune cults. Several abbeys of worshippers of Demosthenes twinned with other religions were founded to explore the nature of the various forms of reality and their attendant philosophies. Even in Transylvania, heresy reared its head as the Blood Heresy arose in all ranks to threaten the established order.

Finally, a genuinely novel way of looking at spiritual development rose with the teachings of the Mahatman. His Way of the Eightfold Path denies the Gods and leads worshippers toward spiritual humanism whereby they improve themselves in successive reincarnations until attaining Nirvana. The Way of the Eightfold Path spread across the Northern Littoral in the last few decades of the Age.

But intense exploration led to the disturbing of ancient forces, long forgotten, as well as the creation of new threats. Several of the Demosthenes dual-worship abbeys uncovered things Man was not meant to know of and suffered destruction: Monbury Abbey of the Gilbertine Order and the Voidic Priory of Slime are the best known.

After many centuries, Thanatos’ tomb was discovered by a chance adventuring Swordpriest of Humakt and this horror rose to plague the world again, this time as the Ultimate Undead. Thanatos forged alliances and performed darkly evil sorceries seeking to turn the World into a frozen wasteland inhabited only by the undead under his rule as a wraithe. He nearly succeeded, stopping Time for a subjective three years and only a grand alliance of such strange bedfellows as Heliopolis, Transylvania, Mahatman and Phoenix herself finally overcame him at Flambards Tower. Thanatos was not destroyed but his power was broken and his spirit fled away to hide in darkness as the Sun rose again.

The Fourth Age: 1740+ Necropolitan Calendar, 1178 + Lunar Calendar, 581 + TA.

Held to start with the beginning of the Timestop or Mahatman’s passing. Marked by the rise of the Anatolian Empire. Also known as the Transcendental Age, Age of Blood or Age of the Common Man. Very controversial, most sages deny its existence and claim we’re still in the Third Age.