The Mixing

When The Mother Goddesses pulled the people of Elthelas into Materia, the lack of care with which they did so had massive repercussions. Due mainly to the following factors:

• They ressurected everyone who had died of unnatural causes in Elthelas in the year before the end of that world, undoing all the deaths caused by the apocolypse of that world. None of these people remembered their own deaths, but remembered all events up until the day before their death.
• They placed people on Materia in a semi-random manner. While no one was placed in truly inhospitable terrain, they gave no respect to pre-existing language or cultural barriers, or community or family bonds. Mixing people of all ancestries in the various habitable locations.
• They brought only the people, without shelter, food stores, materials, tools, or anything else besides the clothes or tools they were wearing at the time of their death or the time the Gods ended the world of Elthelas.

  The panic of people who found themselves appearing in a strange place, with no memory of how they got there, surrounded by people they do not know and do not speak their language, while in their pajamas cannot be overstated.   This event became known in the months after as "The Mixing." The aftermath played out differently in different places. Some notable results in Materia:  

• The vast majority people who were children at the time of the Mixing found themselves relying on whatever adults were around.
• Homogonization of language. While most people still speak their native languages from Elthelas, as communities have grown together new languages have sprouted up mixing words and phrases from the languages that happened to be most prevalent among the people in that area.
• Loss of Esoteric knowledge and histories. While many scholars spent the months after attempting to recreate books of knowledge as best they could, many details were lost. Experts found themselves without their reference materials and notes, and relying on memory could only get them so far. Many technologies, particularly in advanced fields, were lost completely, and many others were set backwards generations. In particular, wizardry and magical knowledge.
• Survival as a first priority. Racial differences have taken a hard back seat in most communities to the struggle to simply survive and the need for cooperation. Governments tend to be local, democratic, and focused on mutual cooperation and need.
• Global mourning, and the search boards. With most people having no knowledge of what happened to their family members, the first merchants of Materia have traded as much in knowledge of who lives where as anything else, as people seek to know what happened to their loved ones in the new world. This has led to a phenomena called the search boards, placed prominantly in town squares, where on one side is listed all those who live in a town, and on the other, the names of those they are searching for and bounties placed for finding them.