An Introduction

Today, the Known Expanse of the Interminate Lands teems with over a thousand nations and civilizations.

Among the nations, the Confederation of Free Nations is the most powerful political force in the Known Expanse. It is in the midst of an industrial revolution and on the cusp of immense societal change. Technologies such as electricity, rail, automata, and radio are revolutionizing daily life, threatening (or augmenting) the established role of magic, or thaumaturgy, within the Confederation.

Yet its dominance is now challenged by the United Domains of Gaea, a technologically transcendent, extrauniversal power with which it fought a cataclysmic two-year war: The Battle of the Glass Sea.

Since the Treaty of Hes-Erg in 450 ASC, an uneasy peace has prevailed. A cold war simmers between the two powers, fought through proxy skirmishes, espionage, and economic rivalry across the contested frontiers of The Western Reaches.

You might call yourself an adventurer, an explorer, a relic-hunter. The Confederation prefers the term pioneer; the United Domains call you a contractor.

Either way, you are a liminal being: too wild for a uniform, too useful to discard.

Most begin as scavengers. There is no shortage of ruin in the Reaches. These places promise treasure: forgotten relics, enchanted weapons, buried trinkets. But vaults breathe. Stone remembers. Many who enter never leave, or worse, return changed, speaking in backwards tongues or leaking black ichor from their eyes.

Others hunt bounties, raid caravans, or sell maps and information to mercenary companies. Entire careers have been made from selling forgeries of impossible places. Entire lives have been lost trying to prove them.

Some prospect. The land is rich in prelapsarian resources. But mining here is a blood rite. The veins are cursed, and the earth resents being opened. Machines rust overnight, workers vanish by noon. There’s always a buyer for what you bring out. There is rarely a grave when you do not.

Above all, all pioneers and contractors are entangled in a war that never ends and never erupts. In the Neutral Territory of the Western Reaches, the Confederation and the United Domains fight a shifting, serpentine cold war with plausible deniability: armed posses, mercenary outfits, and paramilitary companies. They kill in each other's names but never speak it aloud. Skirmishes, and sometimes entire battles involving tens of thousands, flare across unnamed hills and cursed tundras. You may end up working for both sides in the same month, unknowingly.

You will face not just enemies with rifles, but enemies with roots, claws, and sigils. Native confederations, like the Itakaw and the Choponap, fight back with the ferocity of cornered, desperate men. Some tribes parley, others flay or scalp. Some whisper dreams into your sleep and turn you against your comrades.

The fauna ensures you never rest easy. The flora blooms with toxins, songs, curses. The sky can open wrong in certain places. Time itself may freeze in the far north, where the Goetic Line of Väl-Nes precipitates cold fronts which kill a man in seconds. You might find yourself duplicated, then hunted down by your own twin, or left behind by your own shadow in the Mirrorlands of Starfall Lake. Linger too long by the Glass Sea, and glass sickness afflicts you, causing your skin to blacken and your teeth to fall out.

So your kind walks lightly.

Or they do not last.

Most pioneers die poor, drunk, or screaming. Some manage all three at once. But a rare few grow rich, powerful, infamous. They become magnates, buy vast estates and manors, retire to Argostid or Hes-Erg with stolen titles and silver for bones.

Still, you keep walking. Because what else is there? The superpowers despise you, and the wilderness only tolerates you. But between them and the stifling confines of a crumbling, confused civilization, there is space for something like freedom. Something like meaning. Or, if you are lucky, just enough pay to drink yourself to sleep without dreaming of what you saw in that ruin west of the Glass Sea.