A Brief History of the Post-Sunder World...
Hundreds of years ago, the future wasn't neon - it was arcane. Back then, the stars belonged to the Empire, and we ran a tight interstellar civilization at the whim of Great Houses, Guilds, the works. The bleeding edge of tech back then wasn't silicon, no, it was thaumium cores, gravweaves, leylinked constructs. Even arcane wasn't that rare - it was currency (why do you think we still call our money aetherbits?) You'd have sorcerers filing tax returns, there were strict limits on AI, and the guilds hadn't really gone full corpo yet, even if they were on their way there. Our old folk had a good life.
But then the Oberon War struck - the first of many, in hindsight. Freaky interstellar beings, that lot - no one knows where they came from, but we barely understood them, and against their might, we didn't stand a chance. The stars went out, one by one. And then, 150 years ago, without warning - the Sunder, this mind-shattering blast that destroyed our world for the second time. Boom, just like that - every arcanist's brain nuked, every piece of magitek melted. In one blink, our world went belly-up. Craters for cities, slag for starports, screaming husks for rulers, and the whole empire crashed into the ground. No more arcane and no more interstellar civilization.
But our story didn't end there.
Because, after the Sunder nuked the global spellgrid, and after our world went full flatline, we survived. Out of the wreckage, the NuEmpire booted itself back up - sorry, that's the New Empire of Southern Kalimdia for you, and NESA for short. Little to salvage from the northern wastes. A liberterian's wet dream, it dished out corporate charters to the surviving Imperial guilds, who immediately rebranded themselves into preem new megacorps. Shiny teeth, attractive packages, and zero scruples. Fell to them to rebuild our world, and charge us for the privilege.
What followed was a mess of declared and undeclared wars. There were corporate wars and straight-up secessionist brawls. The NuEmpire lost the stars and could barely hold onto itself, and many countries reasserted their independance. That's when the Free Aerie States jacked out, and Heaven's Fall became an independant city-state, breaking away from Imperial control during the chaos. Civil unrest, corpo backstabs, proxy wars - all part of the same bloody game.
But then came the Fourth Guild War. Aurum and Vanguard, top-shelf corpos both, figured fragging each other's infrastructure was like a fast lane to undisputed market dominance. Remember the Internet? Well, both corpos decided to spill out ever-evolving numbers of rogue AIs, which spilled and bred like black ICE, corrupting everything they touched. In just a day, the Internet was devoured from the inside. It didn't die clean, it lingered, still does in fact, in forgotten server farms, buried bunkers, and abandonned data centres.
That Fourth Guild War - your parents probably remember it well. It ended when the gonks that ran the Free Aerie States (or the Aurum corposuits that supported them) thought it a great idea to nuke the Imperial city of Esaree. Naturally, NESA fought back. They hired Vanguard to raze the Aerie's Luvaluna City to the ground. But something went wrong, and many of the missiles hit the corpo centre of Heaven's Fall instead. That's when the grown ups left in the room decided to sit down and agree a truce, because this corporate war was fast leading the entire world's nations into a giant conflict we really couldn't afford.
Now, twenty years down the line, corporate skirmishes still happen. The Fifth Guild War saw corpo forces fight for control of independent Luvaluna's remaining wheat fields, and the mines that dot the rugged landscape of Orcish Wyvernia. And we're more fragmented than ever. The subnets run everything, all physically unplugged from the old Net. Safer that way, honestly. You jack into the old grid raw? That's asking to get your brain fried, turned into glitchbait by rogue code or ghost-AIs.
But when profit and power are the bywords of our new society, you'll always get someone trying to shit on your frown lawn. Enter PRAXIS, a corpo with too many credits and a serious god complex. They want to "sanitize" the old web, restore it to its glory, but we all know they're just corpo bootlickers. And then you've got the White Rabbit Cabal, a cult of netrunners and new age mystics who see rogue AIs as divinities to be worshipped. Both are racing to build something called the Omniwall, some kind of mega-firewall that could safely allow for the subnets to be plugged back into the old Net's infrastructure. PRAXIS want control. The Cabal wants communion. And as for the rest of us? We chow on kibble, let the other corpos exploit us, but really we live to see if the world blows up again when they flip the switch.
