Shadows of Eternity [OPEN] [WIP]

[The Glyphstone]

This is going to be my new posting hub for writings and documents connected to my D&D-adjacent fantasy world. This has been an extensive and long-running project that I've worked on in bits and pieces over far too many years, so I find myself revising and replacing old material as often as I do creating new stuff. Someday, I hope to run an actual game set in the world, but for now this is simply world-building for its own sake and the joy I get out of doing so.

The 'elevator pitch', so to speak, is of a world built in layers both literal and metaphorical atop the ruins of what came before. A mighty empire once ruled the entire known world, only to eventually crumble and shatter under its own weight. In the aftermath a number of successor states have arisen, separated by a vast gulf of now-untamed wilderness filled with ruins, monsters, and lost ancient mysteries.

Most of my writing will be in GoogleDocs, which I'll link to here when various stuff is completed with an Index. In the meantime, I very actively and wholeheartedly encourage - beg, even - anyone who's interested to read stuff over and offer their opinions, comments, or questions. The more I know what people care about learning, the better my future work will be.


MAP OF THE WORLD( V.1.04)

Spoiler

Show

Master Index:
Wanui - Eternity's Legacy

COMING SOON:
Aegeos - Burning Sands of Ambition
Nadira-Jami - A Hundred Rivers, A Thousand Names




Revision/Addition Log:
N/A

[The Glyphstone]

Okay. So, before I do anything else, I think I'll launch into a brief summary of the important bits that underlie the setting, particularly the major ways it will differ thematically - and thus indirectly mechanically - from your average D&D/PF-oriented world. I'm a bit of a minimalist in some senses, I want stuff to exist in the world because it has an appropriate reason to do so more than because your typical kitchen-sink setting has a place for anything and everything. At the same time, I'm also a large proponent of 'games exist to have fun' - so if a player came to me with something that sounded really, really fun but didn't already exist I can keep enough mystery and 'maybe' rooted into the world to fit stuff I didn't include from the start.

Setting Fundamentals

Worlds Are Built Upon Ruins: From the perspective of mortals, the current-day political arrangement is an collection of successor states grown from the remains of a continent-spanning empire. All of them have ambitions to fill the power vacuum that exists, even if that would be destabilizing the current balance of power, and there are plenty of relics, ruins, and lost treasures from the old empire waiting to be found and put to use again. But it also goes further than that - on a metacosmic level, the universe itself is built atop previous failed attempts. The now-deceased over-deity who brought the entire universe into being created a universe of pure chaos first, then one of pure order, before settling on a stable mixture between the two for its third and successful attempt.

Order Vs. Chaos Over Good vs. Evil: I'm not a fan of objective, universal morality (or alignment, but that's for later), so I've chosen to sideline the Good vs. Evil question in favor of Order vs. Chaos. Both are inherently destructive and hostile to life if taken to their extremes, and different cultures and nations will express differing degrees of sympathy towards one or the other.

The Gods Are Silent: A typical setting would see either one pantheon or a series of competing pantheons operating in parallel. Rather than take that route, I've chosen to have the cosmic-level entities - what would be considered gods - almost entirely detached from the world. They exist, but on a level that makes their actions all but irrelevant to the lives of most people. Almost no one directly worships them; instead, the predominant religions of the major states are all nontheistic philosophies of one sort or another, or small cults devoted to direct worship of extremely powerful magical beings.

Numbers Have Power: Specifically, the numbers 3 and 5 are interwoven into the design and metaphysics of the setting in various ways. 3 is a number of power - The old empire was at its peak for three centuries, and there are three great successor states. three types of quasi-deific immortal beings exist, three attempts were made at building a universe by the Creator, and oaths repeated three times can form a geas if worded poorly. Five, in contrast, is a number of stability - there are five elemental planes forming a solid foundation for the planar pyramid, and five dominant sapient mortal races. The period of stalemate since the old empire's collapse has lasted five centuries.

Magic Must Be Bargained For: Rather than having wizards, clerics, druid, sorcerers, psions, warlocks, and all the other myriad routes for mortals to gain magical ability, I've condensed it all down to one. In-setting magic is universally called sorcery, but all sorcerers gain their magic the same way - they must go on an otherworldly journey into the home plane of one of the three types of great immortals - the dragons, the fey, or the elementals, and swear a pact of power with the immortal they find. Each type of pact has different effects on the new sorcerer's body or behavior, and influences what types of magic come to them more naturally, but beyond that any sorcerer can learn any 'school' of magic.

Humans Dominate The World: All of the major great states of the land are human-centric. The demihuman races, which I'll elaborate on next, are content to exist in small scattered groups, with the exception of one. In contrast, humans have a drive to impose structure and spread their reach and influence. They've grown beyond their essentially tribal origins, for the most part.

[The Glyphstone]

Civilized Races

I've already established that there are five different species both civilized enough and organized enough to have a visible presence in the world. Each of them has a certain essence underlying their origins - the building blocks they were created from by the gods, so to speak. This essence shapes their nature and instincts to some degree, as well as influencing their natural tendencies towards order or chaos. Each will get their own detailed article later in the project, but for now a brief summary will suffice.

The first is the Kraznal. They're very dwarven in general thematics, but with an essence tied to Earth they're more like a race of humanoid earth elementals - beings of living, flexible stone who dwell in great mountain-fortress cities, with a tendency towards slow and introspective thinking that makes them very reactive and poor at taking proactive decisions.

The second is the Aquarians. As would be expected, they're an amphibious race of toadlike humanoids who originally hail from an island chain south and east from the setting's main continent. Their water-influenced Essence makes them extremely mercurial and prone to outbursts of incredible overwrought emotion, a tendency they suppress with ruthless discipline and an intense clannishness. The land-dwellers only know them as coastal traders and occasional explorers, but in reality they are fighting a constant ocean-wide war against krakens and other underwater-dwelling slave races that is kept hidden and secret from everyone else.

The third is the Scalekin. Their essence is draconic in nature, essentially making them Dragonborn by another name. They live in extended clan villages scattered across the more inhospitable regions of the world, and suffer from a sort of racial inferiority complex in being unworthy of the power they are heirs to.

The fourth is the Sidhelings. Their essence is drawn from fey energies, which curses them to a degree. Each individual sidheling has a fixation, a driving obsession to learn all they can about a subject or master a specific skill. If they ever manage to achieve what they're fixated on, they become fixated on something new and different instead. Unlike any of the other demihumans, sidhelings can interbreed with humans; the offspring are always sidhelings regardless of parentage.

The last, obviously, is Humans. Their essence is a dual-natured blend of Order and Chaos, and unlike the demihumans they weren't a deliberate creation of the gods as much as they were a spontaneous product of energies from the First and Second Worlds bleeding through into the Third.

I won't have any other races who are both intelligent enough and organized enough to have civilizations of their own for now, leaving aside the nature of the world under the sea for a much later time. The wilderness areas are populated by all manner of solitary monsters or primitive creatures, but they all have some manner of essence connected to either dragons, fey, law, chaos, or one of the five elements as well.

[SushiJaguar]

From what I've read in the second post, the brief summary, it at first look seems to me that the old Chinese elements are in use? Earth, Water, Metal, Fire and Wood? I assume these are the forms that the Elementals take, and if so, do these classical elements also inform the Essence of any other races besides the ones listed? Do you have plans for metal, fire, and wood-infused racial essences?

Additionally, are you going to have the Plane of Elementals provide spells associated with all the elements once a sorceror has made a pact with say, a Fire Elemental? Do dragons breathe fire in this setting or does their draconic essence not encroach upon the realm of elements?

Sorry for the deluge of questions, but this fledgling setting is really quite interesting already.

[The Glyphstone]

From what I've read in the second post, the brief summary, it at first look seems to me that the old Chinese elements are in use? Earth, Water, Metal, Fire and Wood? I assume these are the forms that the Elementals take, and if so, do these classical elements also inform the Essence of any other races besides the ones listed? Do you have plans for metal, fire, and wood-infused racial essences?

Additionally, are you going to have the Plane of Elementals provide spells associated with all the elements once a sorceror has made a pact with say, a Fire Elemental? Do dragons breathe fire in this setting or does their draconic essence not encroach upon the realm of elements?

Sorry for the deluge of questions, but this fledgling setting is really quite interesting already.

I was going to do an update on Planar Structure this weekend, actually, but I can answer this now. I am using a five-element structure, though it's not specifically the Chinese arrangement. My five planes are Earth, Water, Air, Life, and Death, with Life combining plants/nature and parts of the Positive Energy Plane into its vision and Death including parts of the Negative Energy plane.

As far as sorcerers, being pacted to an elemental would give an affinity for that sort of spell or magic, and possibly penalties to 'opposed' elements. So that Firepact sorcerer would find that fire spells are easier to learn and more powerful, while water-aligned spells might be weaker (indecisive here).

Dragons are...unusual, which is another point I'll need to elaborate on. They're more like the Chinese ideal of dragons than the Western one - quasi-divine beings instead of big scaly monster lizards, very rare and extremely secretive/private. They are fonts of raw magical power, and their 'breath' is expelling this power in whatever form they want - casting a spell, or raw destructive energy that could be elemental or not.

[SushiJaguar]

Dragons sound pretty neat! Do all beings currently in the setting sit somewhere on the scale between Order and Chaos when it comes to essence, too? You mentioned Humans have both Order and Chaos in their essence - does that mean those concepts will have tangible effects and be subject to manipulation?

[The Glyphstone]

The Planar Pyramid

Spoiler: The Planes

Show

The orientation of the planes can be imagined as a rough pyramidal shape. At the bottom are the five Elemental Planes, the most solid and fundamentally stable. Portals to each of the Elemental Planes can be found in various places on the Material Plane, though most are temporary in nature. Only a rare few locations host permanent, stable portals and they are inevitably guarded jealously by the nations surrounding them. On the Elemental Planes themselves, there are only ever temporary portals between them.

The Plane of Earth is a vast, infinite expanse of rock and soil riven by countless tunnels and caverns. Most of the native elementals are disinterested in visitors, but the Plane itself is enough of a danger to unwary travellers. Cave-ins and collapses can come without warning, or solid ground suddenly crumble into a plunging crevasse.

The Plane of Air is a similarly infinite stretch of empty air, broken up only by floating islands where material from the Plane of Earth passed through a natural portal. Native elementals run the range from aggressive and hostile to invitingly benevolent, but can unpredictably shift from one to the other with little warning. Other hazards include spontaneous thunderstorms and clouds of poisonous or acidic gases, some of which can be very hard to spot from a distance.

The Plane of Water is an endless ocean, with no breathable air except that a traveler provides themselves and almost no visible landmarks to navigate by. Elementals of the plane of water tend to be highly territorial, defending their particular portion of the plane against any intruders including others of their kind but not otherwise aggressive. Few other dangers present themselves - the lack of breathable air alone is enough to make the plane a dangerous place to visit.

The Plane of Life is a massive, primordial forest filled with endless layers of trees and jungle canopies that stack endlessly upon each other, with no discernable ceiling or floor to the growths. The elementals here are more varied in shape and form than any other plane, manifesting as a limitless variety of plants and animals that grow, crawl, and fly between the interwoven branches. Many are predatory as well, making them the most outwardly dangerous of any elemental plane's natives in contrast to the comparatively welcoming environment.

The Plane of Death is an enigma, even to its dedicated scholars. To start with, no mortal can survive inside it - entering a portal to the plane is instantly lethal to any living being. Those souls who are resurrected from death retain no memories of their time on the plane, nor are summoned death elementals ever willing to share details of their home. Only the undead revenant-sorcerers of Wanui have traveled the Plane of Death and returned, and no two of them have ever experienced exactly the same environment - bone-dry deserts of sand, howling icy wastelands, and seething hellscapes of ash and flame have all been described in writing.

'Above' the Elemental Planes sits the Material Plane, home to all sapient mortal life and associated with Present. It is orbited in turn by the Temporal Planes.

The Plane of Dreams is associated with Future, infinite branching possibilities of what might yet become Present.

Its twin is the Plane of Memory, associated with Past and fading echos of what was before. All mortal minds briefly brush against one of the two Temporal planes when waking or asleep, but there are no natural portals to either.

At the very tip of the pyramidal arrangement is the Plane of Faerie, the most fragile and insubstantial of planes. Much like its fae inhabitants, Faerie is an ephemeral and ever-changing place of illusions and phantasms made real. It is highly prone to altering itself in response to the emotions and willpower of sapient minds within it, at time seeming to sport a deliberately malevolent nature and other times merely whimsical. Natural portals between Faerie and the Material Plane open and close seemingly at random, though the magical power of the greater Fae lords allows them to heavily influence such formations. The Fae are also prone to traipsing though Dream and Memory at will, drinking greedily of the sights and emotions they encounter.


Lastly, there are the two quasi-realms referred to as the First World and Second World. Neither are coherent worlds in their own right - rather they are an uncountable number of broken shards from previous iterations of reality, drifting and intermingling in a cloud of non-existence around the pyramid of planes. From time to time, a shard of one or the other will overlap with a plane, temporarily overwriting and altering the laws of physics in its proximity and disgorging its own inhabitants hungry to exist, however destructive and corrupting their presence is to natives. Only concentrated effort of will and violence can force these Outsiders back where they came from, ending the incursion and letting the world begin to heal. The longer an incursion lasts, the more enduring the changes to the area it overlapped with and the harder they are to reverse.

The First World was a place of shifting, seething Chaos, that collapsed due to a lack of Order to give its form any coherency or permanency. Outsiders from the First World are similarly protean, roiling shapeshifters of protomatter that sprout features or appendages without rhyme or reason. The Second World was an impossibly rigid construction of pure Order, build of countless paradoxical contradictions that shatted from a lack of Chaos to give its rules context and flexibility. Outsiders of the Second World are unnatural constructs of crystalline edges and fractal patterns, bending light and space around themselves or fracturing it entirely.

No portals exist to either of the Outside realms, nor can portals be formed. Some deranged cults exist who deliberately attempt to invoke incursions, worshipping the unnatural beings found there, but outside of such activities no travel between a plane and a shard of Outside is possible.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

My five planes are Earth, Water, Air, Life, and Death, with Life combining plants/nature and parts of the Positive Energy Plane into its vision and Death including parts of the Negative Energy plane.

As far as sorcerers, being pacted to an elemental would give an affinity for that sort of spell or magic, and possibly penalties to 'opposed' elements. So that Firepact sorcerer would find that fire spells are easier to learn and more powerful, while water-aligned spells might be weaker (indecisive here).

The Plane of Life is a massive, primordial forest filled with endless layers of trees and jungle canopies that stack endlessly upon each other, with no discernable ceiling or floor to the growths. The elementals here are more varied in shape and form than any other plane, manifesting as a limitless variety of plants and animals that grow, crawl, and fly between the interwoven branches. Many are predatory as well, making them the most outwardly dangerous of any elemental plane's natives in contrast to the comparatively welcoming environment.
[...]
The Plane of Dreams is associated with Future, infinite branching possibilities of what might yet become Present.
[...]
At the very tip of the pyramidal arrangement is the Plane of Faerie, the most fragile and insubstantial of planes. Much like its fae inhabitants, Faerie is an ephemeral and ever-changing place of illusions and phantasms made real. It is highly prone to altering itself in response to the emotions and willpower of sapient minds within it, at time seeming to sport a deliberately malevolent nature and other times merely whimsical. Natural portals between Faerie and the Material Plane open and close seemingly at random, though the magical power of the greater Fae lords allows them to heavily influence such formations. The Fae are also prone to traipsing though Dream and Memory at will, drinking greedily of the sights and emotions they encounter.

It's interesting to see someone use a slightly different elemental system other than the Western four, the Chinese five, the Japanese five, or the video game six (the classic four plus light and darkness), but I see a few potential issues:

1) I note that the Plane of Faerie is much like the classic take on the Plane of Dreams (responds to mortals' thoughts, possibly "alive" in some way, etc.) while the Plane of Life is much like classic Faerie (very nature-y, deceptively "safe" compared to the Material, etc.), so anyone to whom you give a quick Cosmology 101 overview is likely to mix those up really easily, and the fact that the fey are in Dream all the time but can't easily access the nature-y plane is a bit odd.

2) I also note that you haven't explained where Fire fits into the elemental planes despite mentioning dragons and firepact sorcerers, and fire doesn't fit as a good intermediary or para-element to any of the five in the way that it could if you were using, say, Light instead of Life so Fire could be Light/Air or something.

3) Going with Life and Death as elements instead of Positive and Negative Energy seems a bit strange if you're trying to emphasize Order and Chaos, since the "positive energy is the generative structuring force, negative energy is the dissolving entropic force, and the two of them form a big cosmic battery keeping the universe running" setup from the Great Wheel wonderfully reinforces the message that both too much Law and too much Chaos are bad.

Plus, as it stands, the planes of Life and Death don't feel much like their own elemental planes, since the jungle in Life feels like it should be an Air+Earth+Water paraplane (because trees grow out of the earth and get rained on and respire) even if theoretically it's trees upon trees upon trees forever, and the winds-or-sands-or-ice of Death feel like quasielements of Air, Earth, and Water. In fact, if you were to just give me descriptions of each plane and ask me to match them to their names, I might assume that the bountiful nature of Life is actually Faerie and the subjective experience of Death is actually Memory, and then match Life with the First World and its bountiful lifeforms and Death with the Second World and its crystalline lifelessness.

So, if I could suggest two slight tweaks to the cosmology:

1) Instead of having the two temporal planes orbit the Material, have them orbit Faerie and make Faerie explicitly the plane of the Present the same way that Dream is Future and Memory is Past. Describing the fey as actors in a grand cosmic play who always live in the moment, care nothing for their past, and don't think of their future makes the Faerie/Dream and Faerie/Memory ties much more understandable, and three ephemeral temporal planes ties in with 3 being the number of power without stability.

2a) Associate positive and negative energy with the First and Second Worlds. Whether it's First = positive (because being infused with the generative power of positive energy allows protean beings to exist with their aberrant biology) and Second = negative (because being infused with the stasis of uniform entropy strongly resists change) or First = negative (because being infused with the decay of negative energy doesn't allow the inhabitants to maintain singular forms) and Second = positive (because being infused with the structure of positive energy allows the shards of a broken world to survive indefinitely) is up to you--and whether it's one or the other or somehow both could be an in-world debate between scholars, since no one can go there and check.

2b) With positive and negative energy moved around, rename Life to Wood and exchange its actual animals with animal-like wood elementals (which keeps the "infinite jungle" theme without it feeling like a mishmash) and Death with...well, it's hard to say, because the multiple-choice existence thing is a really good fit for the temporal planes and not so much for an elemental plane, so perhaps Void might work: it kills you when you go there because, y'know, lack of existence, and if someone somehow does manage to go there the only thing they find is what they bring with them.

That still leaves you without an explicit Fire element, but having Fire come from Wood or Wood/Air because trees burn (in the same way Wood gives rise to Air in the Wu Xing because trees wave in the wind) is probably good enough.

[The Glyphstone]

In no particular order:

I didnt elaborate on it, which was my error, but the planes of Life and Death are also the sources of Positive and Negative energy. Raw soulstuff flows from Life, and Death is a transitory underworld where souls go upon death.

I do like linking Positive and Negative energies to the Outside somehow though, I'll have to think on that. And your idea of renaming them to fit more completely with the Chinese cycle has some strong merits.

Mentioning firepact was a bad idea I shouldn't have used for an example, because fire isnt an element. As Redcloak would say, they're not called Reactionals. A fire specialist would probably be either airpact (hot air) or earth pact (molten lava).

The fey are clearly something I need to elaborate on further, which I'll do in my next post. What they are, how they became that way, and the nature of the home plane they built for themselves are strongly tied into the cosmic history. Stay tuned, I guess.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I didnt elaborate on it, which was my error, but the planes of Life and Death are also the sources of Positive and Negative energy. Raw soulstuff flows from Life, and Death is a transitory underworld where souls go upon death.

I do like linking Positive and Negative energies to the Outside somehow though, I'll have to think on that. And your idea of renaming them to fit more completely with the Chinese cycle has some strong merits.

If Life and Death are not just "living stuff" and "dead stuff" but also "start of the vital cycle" and "end of the vital cycle," then leaning on the idea of an elemental cycle definitely has merit. Not the Wu Xing exactly, of course, since you don't have Metal and Void is a Japanese element, but something like Life -> Water -> Air -> Death -> Earth to mirror a plant's lifecycle or a human's cycle of birth -> growth -> maturity -> death -> burial could definitely work.

Then you can associate positive and negative energy with the Outside by differentiating between positive-energy-as-vital-force and positive-energy-as-cosmic-principle because the "inside" planes are in motion and closely related to "adjacent" planes (elemental cycle and past/present/future) while the Outside planes are unmoving and self-contained, or something like that.

Mentioning firepact was a bad idea I shouldn't have used for an example, because fire isnt an element. As Redcloak would say, they're not called Reactionals. A fire specialist would probably be either airpact (hot air) or earth pact (molten lava).

How much are you planning to explicitly bring the Law/Chaos dichotomy into magic and races and such? Because it occurs to me that mixing elements with Law and Chaos could be a good way to conceptualize traditionally "elemental" things that aren't elements in this system without going the paraelemental route. For instance, lightning could be Air+Chaos and fire could be Life/Wood+Chaos (as both are volatile and unpredictable energies) while cold/ice could be Water+Law and sonic could be Air+Law (as both are structure and patterns imposed onto the elements).

And you mentioned that sorcerous pacts would influence a sorcerer's body, behavior, and strongest magical talents, so grouping things into Law-leaning pacts, Chaos-leaning pacts, and pacts that lean in neither direction (Balance-leaning, if you will) in addition to the dragon/fey/elemental split would give you an easy and intuitive way to categorize things.

[The Glyphstone]

If Life and Death are not just "living stuff" and "dead stuff" but also "start of the vital cycle" and "end of the vital cycle," then leaning on the idea of an elemental cycle definitely has merit. Not the Wu Xing exactly, of course, since you don't have Metal and Void is a Japanese element, but something like Life -> Water -> Air -> Death -> Earth to mirror a plant's lifecycle or a human's cycle of birth -> growth -> maturity -> death -> burial could definitely work.

Then you can associate positive and negative energy with the Outside by differentiating between positive-energy-as-vital-force and positive-energy-as-cosmic-principle because the "inside" planes are in motion and closely related to "adjacent" planes (elemental cycle and past/present/future) while the Outside planes are unmoving and self-contained, or something like that.

I like this a lot, actually. I'll probably re-order the Elemental Planes into a circle to match that, rather than the simple polar opposites positioning I'm using currently.

How much are you planning to explicitly bring the Law/Chaos dichotomy into magic and races and such? Because it occurs to me that mixing elements with Law and Chaos could be a good way to conceptualize traditionally "elemental" things that aren't elements in this system without going the paraelemental route. For instance, lightning could be Air+Chaos and fire could be Life/Wood+Chaos (as both are volatile and unpredictable energies) while cold/ice could be Water+Law and sonic could be Air+Law (as both are structure and patterns imposed onto the elements).

Also a good idea, especially the idea of quasi-elements being a product of slightly shifting the balance between Order and Chaos. Not enough to have permanent effects on the world, but enough to produce magical results.

And you mentioned that sorcerous pacts would influence a sorcerer's body, behavior, and strongest magical talents, so grouping things into Law-leaning pacts, Chaos-leaning pacts, and pacts that lean in neither direction (Balance-leaning, if you will) in addition to the dragon/fey/elemental split would give you an easy and intuitive way to categorize things.

The only true sorcerous pacts are gained through the lesser immortals - Dragons, Fae, Elementals.That's gotta stick, for metahistorical reasons as well as the Rule of 3. Some crazy cultists might try to summon Anarchs or Axioms - the names I'm giving to the two types of Outsiders - but it's like summoning Cthulhu to bargain for power. You just get eaten.

[The Glyphstone]

Okay, next up is settling some historical background. Very little of this is known in-universe by anyone except a tiny handful of scholars, and even the Caretakers themselves don't know the full truths of the First Age, but here it is rendered in fact to clarify some important points of the cosmic design principles I'm working by.

Metacosmic History

At The Dawn of Time.....(dun dun DUN...(ELAN!))

Spoiler: The Age of Eternity

Show

In the beginning, there was nothing. Out of nothing came the Creator.
It spoke once, and said “I Am”, creating Present.
It spoke twice, and said “I Was”, creating Past.
It spoke thrice, and said, “I Will Be”, creating Future.

Aside from the Creator, there was still nothing. Time had no meaning without Space to act upon, and so the Creator sought to expand upon what it had made.

From itself the Creator drew forth power and built the First World. A bountiful universe of endless possibility and pure, unfettered Chaos, where no sooner did something exist than it would change into something new. But it was not balanced, for Present had no value of context, and when the Creator ceased to focus on holding the First World together it collapsed and died.

The Creator learned and tried again, drawing forth more power and building the Second World. A beautiful place of unyielding Order this time, rigid and unyielding in structure and form and everything that was would persist forever. But it was not balanced, for without Future there could be no Past, and too many of the Second World's laws resulted in mutually incompatible paradoxes. When the Creator ceased to focus on holding the Second World together it shattered and died.

Once more, the Creator learned and drew forth power to create the Third World. This time, it took equal measures of Chaos and Order and balanced them against each other. Past led through Present into Future. Five elemental planes formed a steady foundation to balance reality upon, and the Creator thought Itself content. But in time this too changed, and the Creator found Itself alone. It created life to populate the world it had devised, but was unsatisfied, for its creations were finite. They could barely comprehend Its existence, and when It removed them from the world It was lonelier than ever. But creating an equal was beyond even Its power. It could not multiply, so instead It chose to divide, permanently sundering its own essence into a number of lesser selves. These were the Caretakers, and what they lacked in potency they replaced with community. They knew little of their origins, but they had their purpose – to protect and maintain what their progenitor had left for them to enjoy.

Spoiler: The Age of Immortals

Show

In time this too would be a test, for while the First and Second Worlds had been destroyed, they had left countless pieces behind. Those shards were of a higher and older nature, able to overwrite the balance of the Third World with their own pure nature wherever they collided with it. Left unchecked they would break the Third World as thoroughly as they had broken themselves, but the Caretakers found their power was too great to cleanly separate a shard once it had attached. They could only blast it apart, inflicting damage of their own on the structure of the world. Seeing to their duty would require intermediaries with a smaller measure of power and even greater finesse. Three races of immortals they built for this purpose – Elementals, Dragons, and Fae.

The elementals came first, pieces of their respective planes imbued directly with life and will. They were well-suited to defending their homes, being extensions of the planes as much as independent beings, but that intimate link also made them poorly-suited to defending the Material Plane itself. Outside their native realms the elementals were formless spirits, capable of inhabiting temporary construct bodies but greatly weakened while doing so.

The dragons came second, forged of a five-way elemental gestalt and gifted with powers of destruction second only to the Caretakers themselves. They possessed of both immense power and limitless wisdom, to be the Caretakers' commanders and generals in the war against Outside. When a shard threatened the Third World, the dragons were the first into a breach and the bulwark against which a defense rested.

Third came the Fae, spun out of the raw powers of Past and Future. Instead of physical might, the fae embodied mastery of the nature of creation as it changed through time. They could turn illusions into reality, or make reality synonymous with illusion, and when a battle had concluded it was the Fae charged with repairing the scars of damage inflicted upon the world.

For an eon, the situation again seemed stable. But the Caretakers were not their Creator, and though they could create, what they made was not without its flaws. The Fae became increasingly fickle and apathetic. What was real mattered less to them than the reality they could choose to make for themselves, and their immortality meant that they cared little for a world they would outlast eternally. They ceased to fight the incursions from Outside, and instead wrought a grand magical working across their entire species. Transforming themselves into living phantasms, they created an entirely illusory plane to inhabit where they could redesign it at will to whatever whims of the moment they felt like indulging.

In their absence, the dragons fought ever harder despite being alone. But before long they too began to falter, prone to melancholy and despair. Even the battles they won were still lost in the long run, for they could not repair what damage had been done and so every fight was still a step into ruin. Being immortal, they could no longer bear the pain of seeing what they defended slowly crumble before them. One by one, they succumbed to their fatalism and withdrew from the struggle, each building an extraplanar pocket reality to inhabit while they waited for the end to come.

Only the Elementals remained, and their nature made them almost impotent beyond the boundaries of their homes. A new generation of defenders was needed, and though the Caretakers had failed, like the Creator they could learn from their mistakes.

Spoiler: The Age of Supremacy

Show

Chief among errors the Caretakers had made, in their eyes, was gifting their creations with immortality. It had seemed logical, but the flaws in this were now clear. The new generation of defenders would experience life and death like the plants and animals already present on the Material, dedicated to protecting it not simply for their own sake but for the generations that would follow them. While the fey and dragons were no longer able to continue the fight, they were willing to both contribute towards the creation of successors and serve as conduits for power to those worthy of bearing it. Additionally, they would spread the burden across five groups instead of three, trading raw power for resilience of spirit.

From the essence of dragons, the Caretakers produced a race of bipedal reptiles, brave and hearty. These scalekin were well-suited to dwelling in the harshest regions of the world in both body and temperament, for their heritage instilled in them a deep sense of inadequacy and a determination to live up to that legacy of power.

Out of the essence of fey came the slim and agile sidhelings. While they lacked the innate control of illusions the Fae claimed for their own, they were as flexible mentally as they were physically – the perfect adaptable tools to serve whatever task was needed. But where the fae lacked permanency of body, the sidhelings were afflicted with an unpredictable mania of focus.

Attuned to the elemental essence of water were the amphibious, frog-like aquarians. Much of the world was covered by water, and it would fall to them to guard the undersea regions from incursions of the Outside. The seas are tumultuous though, with an innate tendency towards Chaos that found itself replicated in the mercurial and hair-trigger emotions of the aquarian species.

From the elemental essence of earth were molded the stoneborn. Warriors and craftsmen who would not falter from their duty, they patient and sturdy. Unlike the other three, the stoneborn were far more heavily influenced by their extraplanar essence – their bodies composed of living stone rather than flesh and blood, and at times very slow and cautious to act.

The Caretakers intended their fifth and final race of mortals to be air-aspected, but they unexpectedly found themselves pre-empted by the Material Plane itself. The struggles of the Age of Immortals had left scars upon the Material; even after healing and repairs elements of the Outside remained. From these traces, the plane spontaneously produced defenders of its own, much like a body might produce antibodies to defend against a virus. These humans embodied traces of both Order and Chaos, instinctively repelled by energies of the First and Second World and uniquely resistant to their more insidiously corrupting influences.

Having brought forth their newest children, unfortunately, the Caretakers could no more directly interact with them than they could directly intervene against incursions from Outside. It would be the elder immortals taking up the role of beings directly seen and even worshipped, while the Caretakers settled in to fulfill the duties of their name directly.

[The Glyphstone]

Magic

So, let's talk magic. As mentioned in the Fundamentals, all magical abilities must be gained via a pact with a powerful, immortal magical being. There are three types of pacts available to would-be sorcerers depending on the type of being they bargain with, each of which are one of the immortal races the Caretakers made to be their agents and proxies. They've either withdrawn from direct conflict or restricted in their movements, but they are still willing to share a trickle of their own power with a mortal who shows sufficient dedication to earning it. Each has both a Boon, specific types of magic that will come more naturally to the sorcerer - and a Burden, the cost paid for linking their mortal soul to a shard of immortal power.

Dragonpacts
The most relatively accessible option for a pact is the Dragons. Unlike portals to other true planes, the Wyrmgates that tie each dragon's personal demiplane to the Material is located in a fixed and permanent location. Most are situated in remote or inhospitable locations, but they are easy located by a seeker. The difficulty lies beyond the wyrmgate, for the dragons lost none of their skill at designing defensive works when they succumbed to their fatalistic despair. Every dragon's lair is a dizzying and complex maze of traps and obstacles both physical and magical, designed to repel even the reality-warping horrors of Outside to whatever degree possible. Surviving the gauntlet requires skill, fortitude, and no small amount of luck to reach the dragon that dwells within.

A dragonpact's Boon is oriented towards enhancement spells that improve the sorcerer's own capabilities in battle, or that of their allies. They can resort to destructive magic freely, but find spells of illusion or healing more difficult to master.

The Burden of a dragonpact is to seek out opportunities for great challenges and heroic deeds, and overcome them. Thus defeated, it must be made known to the world that this was accomplished by way of the power of their patron - a dragonpact sorcerer will forever be known as the proxy of the dragon they bonded to, and whose unique sigil is indelibly etched upon their body. The sigil is a magical effect, visible through any article of clothing or disguise short of total invisibility - a sorcerer can hide their presence entirely, or lie about their personal identity, but they cannot hide who they fight on behalf of.

Feypacts
The fey, in contrast, are far more difficult to reach. There are no permanent portals to Faerie anywhere in the Material, and the temporary portals are subject to the whims of the High Fey as much as they are to random chance. If a mortal is sufficiently determined to pursue such a pact, though, it will reflect in their dreams, and thus on the Plane of Dreams that the fey are known to wander. A seeker might wander fruitlessly for months only to wake up and find themselves in Faerie, being drawn through a portal in their sleep. There, the mortal must demonstrate their strength of will by imposing order on the plane around them as they travel, turning formless chaos into a survivable environment. At times other fey will block their path from curiosity or amusement, and only by wresting control of the local plane away from them can the mortal proceed. At the end of their journey lies one of the High Fey, who delight in finding agents by which they can enrich their experiences.

The Boon of a feypact lies in spells of illusion, misdirection, and healing, as befits the fey themselves. They find spells of fortitude and enhancement more challenging, but can channel destructive magic if they wish.

The Burden of a feypact is twofold. Feypact sorcerers are driven to explore and discover, seeking out new experiences and unfamiliar environments and remembering everything they encounter along the way with near-photographic detail. Additionally, they are periodically struck with a geas to return to Faerie and have the memories they have accumulated examined and pored over by their patron and other fey, copied to provide new material for the fey's endless games and stories. Said memories are often returned imperfectly, though, either flawed or out of order. The longer a feypact sorcerer lives, and the more trips to Faerie they make, the worse the consequences this has on their state of mind.

Elemental Pacts
Seeking out one of the Princes of the elementals lies halfway between the other two pact options in difficulty of access and difficulty of the ordeal. Combined with what is seen as a comparatively lighter Burden, most would-be sorcerers without ambitions of wanderlust or adventure end up pursuing elemental pacts. Each elemental plane has its own princes, any of whom are happy to imbue mortals with power to wield where they cannot. Pacts of Air, Earth, and Life are roughly equal in frequency, while Water is more limited by the nature of its plane; almost all water-pact sorcerers are Aquarians. The rarest are Deathpact sorcerers, exclusively limited to the ranks of the undead nobility of Wanui.

All elemental pacts share the same Boon, an affinity for elemental spells related to channeling or manipulating their respective element, including those magical effects created by infusing additional Law or Chaos into an elemental working. They also find summoning their respective elementals easier, calling stronger allies who will provide aid for longer periods.

Likewise, the Burden of elemental pacts is similar in nature. Rather than compelling some form of behavior, an elemental pact slowly changes a sorcerer's personality over time. Airpact sorcerers become flighty and distracted, earthpact sorcerers turn stubborn and sluggish, and waterpact sorcerers are increasingly emotional. Lifepact sorcerers are unusual in that they age more quickly than they would otherwise, channeling their own life energies to exhaustion. Deathpact sorcerers would swiftly sicken and die from the death energies inside them, but this Burden is alleviated by the fact that only people who are already dead can successfully forge the pact in the first place.



Magical Items
The nature of using magic requires an act of will - inanimate objects cannot possess or wield magic. Thus, in order to enchant an item with magical abilities, that must be in some sense alive. Enchanting rituals that create magic items always include an element of death - a living being must be sacrificed, imprinting a magical echo of its life force upon the object being enchanted and allowing it to hold a spell. The nature of the life required depends on the desired result. For a simple item that provides a passive benefit to its wearer, mundane animals are the sacrifice of choice. Stronger enchantments that can replicate magical effects when prompted require an echo of corresponding potency, from a sapient and self-aware being. Enchanters in most nations and cultures use intelligent monsters of one variety or another, and live captures of such creatures can bring exceptional prices. Sacrificing civilized humanoids is illegal everywhere except Wanui, where it is restricted to agents of the state as a means of execution for capital crimes. As a general rule, enchanted items are not genuinely intelligent; at best they may exhibit a vague empathic aura related to the magic they contain. Only the rarest and most powerful of artefacts possess fully self-aware minds of their own, and they are the subject of cautionary legends - the soul of an awakened artefact is inevitably deranged, and deadly unless forced into obedience by a stronger will.

[The Glyphstone]

So while I'm going back and revising previous posts to account for feedback, and rewriting terminology to use the general term "mana" to apply to elementally aligned energies instead of the hodgepodge of terms I had originally....for the tiny segment of audience I might still have here, what should I expand on further before I get down to socio-cultural articles about the major nation-states? I'm going Macro to Micro in terms of worldbuilding scale, here, so big strokes get laid out first.

[The Glyphstone]

Nothing major to write about today, but to elaborate on a few other things that influence worldbuilding with regards to spellcasting.


Raising and Resurrecting the Dead

Returning dead people to life is not a spell or spells, but rather a ritual - specifically one originally derived out of the spells used to create undead. It's much more difficult to find a particular, specific soul than to simply open a gate and let something out, though, and the ritual has a very high cost to perform. Specifically, it requires three living people to willingly give their lives in sacrifice for the return of one person from death. Why, exactly, is interpreted differently according to culture; one society sees it as maintaining karmic balance between the living and the dead, another believes the road to the underworld is lined with obstacles that must be defeated to clear a safe path back. Whatever the local explanation, the metaphysical requirement remains - three lives given to gain back one. Trying to 'cheat' this is one of the most common ways that exotic undead are accidentally created, with powerful death elementals occupying the body instead of its intended recipient.



Long-Distance Travel via Magic

With the lack of an Astral Plane, or any close equivalent, there is no form of practical Teleportation magic to enable instantaneous long-distance travel. The closest equivalent would be taking a portal from the Prime into another plane, then opening a portal back out - distances in one plane do not always correspond directly. That can be very dangerous, though, so while small groups might try it to move around quickly, it's not practical for armies or merchants to rely on. The handful of permanent planar portals have fairly well-mapped routes between their exit points, and routes between appropriately resonant locations for the creation of temporary portals is an exceedingly valuable commodity - a few legendary sorcerers made their fortunes through a life of exploring and mapping the Elemental planes for use in far-travel.

[D&D_Fan]

I was wondering how this setting interacts with other settings if at all, like if it can be visited by spelljammers, or plansewalkers or if it is completely contained and inaccessible to outsiders.

[The Glyphstone]

No, I have no intention of making my world interconnected with WotC-owned settings.