Children of a Broken Age

Before mortals

The gods did not create Agdaron from nothing.

They came to it as a family and found a world dominated by immense elemental beings, the Primordial Spirits. In the earliest age, gods and Primordials worked together to tame the world's chaotic elements and make it habitable.

The great rupture came only after the gods created mortal life.

The mortal races were fragile, brief-lived things compared with either gods or Primordials. Nevertheless, the gods loved what they had made. More consequentially, one of them chose to give mortals something that had previously belonged to beings far greater than themselves.

Althea, Goddess of Light, gave mortals magic.

That gift transformed the relationship between mortals and the world. It also precipitated the first great divine war.

The Primordials rebelled against the gods' creations, and several gods turned against their own siblings. These Betrayer Gods sided with the Primordials and sought to undo mortal civilization entirely.

Foremost among them was Asmodeus, once himself a Prime Deity.

Asmodeus believed that mortals were a mistake.

The Betrayers lost.

The surviving Primordials were killed, diminished, or banished into the Elemental Planes and bound from walking freely upon the Prime Material. The Betrayer Gods were defeated and imprisoned.

Asmodeus was cast into the Nine Hells, where imprisonment eventually became dominion. He reshaped Hell into an infernal engine capable of consuming and exploiting the souls of the wicked.

His threat to the mortal world did not end there. At some later point, Asmodeus attempted once more to shatter the Material Plane. This effort was stopped by a pair of mortal twins who eventually transcended mortality themselves.

They became Aphiel and Uphia.

The pantheon as it stands

The twins joined a large pantheon whose numbers once included gods such as Corellon and Arathis. That pantheon is considerably smaller now.

The surviving divine order is the one the campaign's characters understand:

• Aphiel, God of Life, Light, and Redemption, leader of the divine council.
• Uphia, Goddess of Death, Shadow, and Repentance, Aphiel's twin sister.
• Morudin, God of Forge, Craft, Artifice, Honor, and Family, creator of the dwarves.
• Melorah, Goddess of Nature, Rebirth, and Balance.
• Malyr, God of Battle, Might, Justice, and Defense.

It is already the product of multiple catastrophes.

The Age of High Arcana

With the Primordials removed and the Betrayers imprisoned, mortals inherited an extraordinary world.

Althea's gift flowered.

Magic became not merely the province of isolated sorcerers and temple priests, but the foundation of civilization itself. Mortal societies advanced into an age of high arcana and magitechnology far beyond what most modern nations can reproduce.

This lost age is essential to the physical logic of Agdaron. The world's greatest treasures are ancient because the ancient world was, in many respects, more advanced than the present one.

The impossible weapons buried beneath mountains, the magical transportation systems, the forgotten laboratories, the divine artifacts lying in collapsed ruins, and the powerful devices recovered from dungeons all belong to civilizations that had climbed higher than their descendants.

Then those civilizations reached too high.

The Cataclysm

The Cataclysm was not an arbitrary apocalypse inflicted upon innocent mortals from outside.

Its origin lay in the great achievement that Althea herself had made possible.

Mortal mages began pursuing ascension. They reached for immortality, divine power, and forms of existence they did not fully understand. Their experiments exceeded the limits of mortal knowledge and opened the way for entities from beyond the world's ordered reality.

The Outsiders came through the Gates of the World.

The consequences were almost unimaginable. The gods themselves went to war against them. Civilizations were destroyed. Entire regions of Agdaron were twisted by magical backlash. Knowledge accumulated across centuries disappeared almost overnight.

Many gods died.

And Althea was forced to confront the consequence of her own greatest gift. Mortals had used magic to reach toward godhood, and the result killed her siblings and countless millions of the beings she regarded as her children.

To end the Cataclysm, Althea expended her divine essence to destroy the Outsiders remaining within Agdaron and seal the Gates.

She succeeded.

The price was her identity.

Her True Name was stripped from her, leaving the Goddess of Light trapped in a state between existence and nonexistence.

To the world, Althea died.

Afterward, the surviving Prime Deities swore the Pact of Non-Interference and withdrew from direct governance of mortal affairs. Gods might still answer prayers, empower clerics, send signs, or work through mortal agents, but they would no longer openly direct the history of Agdaron.

Civilization began again amid the ruins.

The secret tragedy of Althea

Althea did not experience what happened to her as a noble death.

She experienced it.

For centuries.

Nameless, bodiless, and trapped between realities, she remained conscious of what had been lost.

Eventually a group of mortal mages attempting their own ascension inadvertently gave her a path back toward material existence.

The irony could scarcely have been crueler. The very thing that had caused the Cataclysm was now being attempted again.

Althea emerged from her imprisonment profoundly damaged.

But she did not emerge hating mortals.

That distinction is fundamental to the Gray Lady.

She still loves them. She loves the mortals of Agdaron as her creations and her children. She sees their ingenuity, courage, curiosity, and capacity for growth. The Veil Piercers themselves become extraordinary examples of what mortals can accomplish with her gift.

And she is proud of them for it.

Her conclusion, however, is that this proves nothing about whether mortals were ever ready to possess magic. The Cataclysm taught Althea something she considers incontrovertible: she gave dangerous power to children who could not understand its consequences.

Her solution is not conquest.

It is correction.

The Gray Lady intends to unwind history to the moment she gifted mortals magic and prevent herself from making that choice.

From her perspective, this is an act of mercy. The great civilizations of the arcane age would never exist. Neither would the Cataclysm. Her siblings would live. Countless generations would never die in magical wars, magical accidents, failed ascensions, or supernatural catastrophes.

Her children would be weaker.

They would also be safe.

That is why her relationship with the party is so unusual for the campaign's principal antagonist. She need not snarl at them or despise them. She can be patient, affectionate, even genuinely delighted by them.

They are brilliant children arguing that they should be allowed to keep playing with the fire that once burned the world down.

She knows they disagree.

She simply does not believe they are old enough to make that decision.

A thousand years later

The modern world of Agdaron has rebuilt atop the ruins.

The campaign opens in the aftermath of another, much smaller war.

The elven Kingdom of Elleria and neighboring Kingdom of Malinar have spent roughly twenty years fighting one another. The conflict has only recently ended.

The consequences linger everywhere.

Elleria remains outwardly prosperous, but its social structure has suffered severely. Its middle class has diminished, poverty has become harder to escape, and agricultural yields have begun declining.

Malinar has spent years under martial law. Its king is mysteriously indisposed, while the Church and Paladin Order of Malyr have accumulated considerable political authority.

The Tofordian Treaty, negotiated by the Halfling Council of Elders, has established an uneasy peace. Trade has resumed, but caravans still travel under armed protection.

One of the mechanisms intended to bind that peace together is marriage.

That decision brings Nerissa du Elleri to the threshold of the campaign.