Cosmology & Concepts

“You wish to understand how Aethryn works? Very well. Just remember: you asked.”

— Seraphis Nightvale, Librarian of the Last Home

Aethryn does not operate on laws.
It performs expectations.

This world is stitched together from mortal superstition, divine vanity, runaway narrative momentum, and the collective refusal of its inhabitants to stop making things interesting. The gods, for their part, shape reality not through wisdom or duty, but through engagement. They meddle with the tireless desperation of immortals who know that irrelevance is the only true death.

They watch the world from their Domains — reality-bending sanctums hidden in impossible places, each one a concentrated blast zone of divine personality. Within these Domains, the god’s identity becomes geography, their mood becomes physics, and any mortal who wanders too close risks having their story overwritten by the deity’s own.

The gods cannot step fully into the world without breaking it.
(They tried. Once. It was… reviewed poorly.)

So they project avatars, finely throttled echoes of themselves, safe enough for the landscape and just dangerous enough for everyone else. Through these forms they poke, prod, provoke, improvise new “content,” and stir fresh disasters whenever attention dips.

This is why storms develop moods.
Why dungeons materialise out of divine boredom.
Why ruins stack atop older ruins like geological fanfiction.
Why prophecy behaves like improvised theatre.
Why adventure happens to bystanders who were simply trying to buy bread.

Aethryn is a world shaped by belief, stabilised by narrative, and sabotaged regularly by the gods who claim to be maintaining it.

If you insist on understanding the machinery behind this chaos, the concepts linked below will carry you deeper into the metaphysics Aethryn pretends to have.
Whether clarity or further confusion awaits you is, frankly, not my problem.

“If the truths shift beneath your feet, that is simply Aethryn adjusting its story to keep the gods entertained.”

Note: This section is under active revision.
Aethryn rearranges itself frequently.
I do my best to keep up. I do not promise success.