Malianen

Intro

The world today sits in a liminal place. Trapped between the golden heights of civilization and the oncoming storm of global war. The glimmer of new technologies and an ever expanding economy have faded over the past decades, and the world has settled into an uneasy peace. In this restless night conflict looms over the horizon like the sun waiting to rise, a great and terrible catastrophe seems inevitable. The people of this world, divided into countless nations, await this inevitability with a mix of fervor, dread, anxiety, and hope. But that is the future. Today, we must navigate a complex world. The final hours of old world colonialism, rising ethnic tensions and their roots in national identity, a diverse range of political ideology, and everything else one expects to find in a modernizing world.  

Setting Description

Malianen is a high fantasy, deiselpunk adjacent setting set in a world on the brink of global war. Malianen is designed to serve as a real world analogy, primarily aimed at delivering an experience similar to the early twentieth century. The nation state reigns supreme, and the old world empires are slowly transitioning (or collapsing) into modern nations. Political ideology splits the world almost as much as imperialism and economic disparity. In this world you'll find a wide variety of cultures, ethnicity, national identities, alliances, and companies., all competing to gain or retain control.  

Cataclysmic Past

Malianen's history is commonly divided into three eras. The emergent age, the expansive age, and the enkindled age. The historians of Malianen have a unique advantage in being able to easily agree on the exact markers of these eras, that being the cataclysms. These events were world-shattering catastrophes that claimed thousands to millions of lives, destroyed kingdoms, and also introduced new life to this world.  

Remains of the Past

There is still some magic inside this world. Dungeons, tombs, palaces of monsters, and other enticingly lootable structures designed to lure adventurers to their doom seem to crop up out of nowhere, as if growing from the ground itself. These structures, which come and go without warning, are hodgepodge creations of past relics and architecture. They almost always contain some kind of historically relevant relic. A king's crown, an old treaty, perhaps a legendary weapon. No scholar has ever been able to determine why this occurs, but many attribute it to the Divine. In a period of cultural identity crisis, they have never been more valuable. The scholars of the old world seek to loot them. The modernist fascists of the new world want to destroy them. But most of all, mercenaries want to ransak them for all their worth and sell their remains to the highest bidder.  

The Key Players

Two major powers have emerged in the past decades. The Old World nations have coalesced themselves into the Confederacy of Liberated Nations, a group of allies that seek to defend democracy from the encroaching wave of fascism. They stand opposed to the New World fascists, the United Eastern States, a group led by the modernist dictatorship known as the Coronada Empire.  

Side Players

Some parties remain neutral, noteably the communist society Poromlya and geopolitically vital Suwlook Archipelago. These parties may remain neutral for now, but when the bombs start falling, they will inevitably take one side or the other.