The War of the Beginning

The war officially began when the God of Moderation approached the entity and was savagely attacked and corrupted by the entity. The gods took the act as an affront on their power and massed to battle it, but were similarly savaged by the entity. It simultaneously attacked their immortal bodies, their inviolable souls, and supreme wills and disassembled them to fragments thought unknowable. Though heavily one-sided, the gods were able to gather enough power among survivors of the first assault to empower the previous Ruler of the Pantheon, Itoris, and allow him to buy time for an escape. With this increased power, Itoris was able to withstand the entity’s influence enough to strike and weaken it.   Meanwhile the remainder of the gods surrounded and beseech the young God of Trickery, Javel - with the blessing of Itoris - to create a refuge for them. However, the death cries of Itoris broke Javel’s concentration and caused the ritual to awry. Instead of forming stable vortexes that - instead of remaining open and allowing gods and mortals to flee into them and closing as the entity approached, the New World created siphons that began pulling anyone and anything nearby into it to be used as the fuel for its creation and the seeds of what inhabits it.   On the Old World, the war began with pandemonium. The cults of the Cataclysm took to the communities to revel in the destruction that was to be brought by their eldritch God, setting fire to buildings and sacrificing people in the streets. The chaos was so complete that no organized defense could stand up to the wanton and endless abuse for long, and society quickly broke down. Then, the gods began to fall from the heavens, impacting regions of the world and causing yet more devastation, their bodies creating craters and dispersing into raw magic too powerful for any single mortal or engine to resist.   The siphons appeared before the sky was set ablaze by Itoris’ death throes, and snatched mortal, god, aberration, cultist, and fragments of the entity alike. Some were destroyed in transit, others were deposited at the magical core of the New World to be used as fuel, and more found themselves now stranded in a completely unfamiliar and jarringly serene world. Others still were lost in the currents between worlds and are occasionally dropped into the New World seconds after being rescued from the Cataclysm. Most of the mortal races failed to escape the Cataclysm. What few gods remained after the siphons expired managed to recover Itoris’s body, still overcharged with the power of combined deities, and used a fraction to send it to the New World, hoping it’s almost limitless reserves of energy could be used to power the new realm for millennia or longer. Instead, much of the raw magic was ripped from the corpse and fused with Telemenathor, god of Magic and Storms, and it instead was bound by the ritual and used to fuel the world. The now magicless corpse was filled with the natural magic of the New World and was reborn as Mory, the god of Life.   The entity, weakened by Itoris' last assault, was unable to follow the gods into the New World. Instead, it used the dregs of its remaining power to open a tiny breach and forced Kalerdraia through to weaken the defenses from the other side. Then, its power exhausted, the entity fell dormant and its assault on the Old World ceased.

The new world was created. The inhabitants snatched moments before disaster were safe from imminent danger, but were scattered and stranded on an entirely new continent with no knowledge of what dangers lurk in any shadow. Centuries of magitech and millennia of history were lost. The gods were shattered, licking their wounds and exerting control over mortals to regain some of their wounded pride. Everyone was trapped, waiting for the barrier to shatter and for the Cataclysm to reach in and finish the job.

The knowledge and infrastructure to create magitech and modern technology was lost, with barely enough left alive to maintain it and pass that information on to future generations. The gods grew into new domains and behavioral patterns to deal with the trauma of such an overwhelming defeat.The mortals expanded out into the world, exploring and beginning to lay claim to regions, establishing new settlements and nations. Society is still fractured with long distance travel being a feat only adventurers, explorers, ambitious merchants, and the desperate do. There do not yet exist world maps, only regional maps and approximations based on combined information and word of mouth.