Aetrimonde

In the interest of giving the poll from my previous post time to gather responses, I’m going to insert a post on a different topic today. This will be the first in a series of posts about the history, geography, and nations of Aetrimonde, the titular default setting of the game.

A Brief History of Aetrimonde

Aetrimonde has around 5000 years of recorded history. Its historians divide their past into five eras:

• The Age of Myth (??? to c. 5000 AAC¹) predates written history. The few legends from this time that survived to be written down speak of terrible, recurring cataclysms that plagued ancient mortals until the gods, through their divine messengers, tamed the land and made it safe.
• The Age of Glories (c. 5000 AAC – c. 1200 AAC) saw the development of writing, agriculture, and Aetrimonde’s first cities. These cities grew and merged (and were conquered), forming the great empires of their time:
  • Caras Seidharen, the sorcerous empire of the elves.
  • Gjalerbron, a dwarven empire of unparalleled craftspeople.
  • Arcis Aurum, a human empire of vast cities and great palaces and temples.
  • Gobol Karn, a sprawling empire populated by goblins and their chattel slaves, and unique in that it collapsed of its own accord before the end of the Age of Glories.
• The Collapse (c. 1200 AAC – c. 1100 AAC) saw a terrible war break out between Arcis Aurum and Caras Seidharen. After decades of fighting, as both sides approached exhaustion and considered making peace, they were beset by a great orc horde that marched out of the east without warning. Both empires were overrun in a matter of years, and the dwarves, who had remained neutral for the entire war, were only able to defeat the horde in a pyrrhic victory that resulted in the death of their high king, the destruction of their capital, and the shattering of the horde into hundreds of feuding bands.
• The Interregnum (c. 1100 AAC – 126 AAC), during which survivors of the Collapse built new societies largely intended to avoid the mistakes of the Collapse. Poets and armchair historians lament the Collapse as the end of a golden age, but the truth of the matter is that the empires of the Age of Glories were stagnant, stratified, and oppressive, with Gobol Karn merely the worst of a bad lot. Their successor states, faced with the challenges of rebuilding from the near-total collapse of civilization, were forced to be innovative and (comparatively) egalitarian.
  • The Interregnum is sometimes divided into two parts. The early Interregnum was concerned largely with rebuilding the infrastructure and recovering or rediscovering the knowledge lost in the Collapse. By contrast, the late Interregnum saw the new nations begin to surpass the magic and technology of the old empires, thanks variously to the invention of the gnostic method, the spread of mortalistic philosophy, and increased population density allowing for centers of learning and scholarship.
  • It is generally agreed that the Interregnum truly ended 126 years ago, with the invention of the thaumic turbine allowing for the kinetic energy generated by a water wheel or steam engine to be transformed into magical energies of the sort traditionally wielded by arcanists. While hugely inefficient, the thaumic turbine greatly increased the availability of magic, leading to…
• The Age of Steam (126 AAC – 17 APC²). The sudden abundance of magical energies on an industrial scale led first to the development of weapons and a series of continent-wide wars beginning in 92 AAC and culminating in a brief exchange of magical super-weapons 17 years ago. This exchange, miraculously,³ shocked the belligerents into accepting a cease-fire, which became a truce, and was formalized in the peace treaties now known as the Concilium Accords.

The Present Day

The seven initial signatories of the Accords are now considered to be the great polities of Aetrimonde:

• Caras Elvaren, the magical realm of the “high elves,” where the poorest citizen lives in relative luxury off of the labor of the state’s golem labor force.
• The Dwarven Federation, a loose association of dwarven clans dedicated to the recovery and preservation of their ancient knowledge and culture.
• The Novan Imperium, a technologically advanced successor state to old Arcis Aurum. Nominally ruled by an emperor but in fact administered by a vast (but meritocratic) bureaucracy.
• The Sanctean Primarchy, a theocracy dedicated to the worship of the god of law and civilization, and the second rival successor state to Arcis Aurum.
• Tir Coetir, the isolationist realm of the elves who forswore arcane magic and retreated into the deep woods.
• Victovy, an impoverished nation torn between its tradition of military conquest and its rulers’ desire to modernize and prosper.
• Waystone, a mercantile kingdom with outsized economic clout, extensive diplomatic ties to Aetrimonde’s smaller polities, and a truly impressive espionage network.

There have been no wars in Aetrimonde for the last 17 years. Thus far, despite grievances on all sides, the Concilium Accords appear to be holding. This is not to say that the world is entirely peaceful: the smaller polities rattle their sabers at each other, the great powers sabotage and spy on each other, and there are extremists unsatisfied with how the war ended that have committed atrocities in the name of their causes. Nonetheless, the great powers remain uninterested in having another near-world-ending war break out.

The peace has proven to be profitable for adventurers: during the wars, “minor” problems like organized crime, mad scientists, illicit cults, and monsters up to and including dragons were considered a low priority, and there is now quite a backlog of work for people willing to employ swords and spells in dangerous situations for ample pay–if they’re not already being paid to advance the agendas of some faction plotting in the shadow of the wars.

This is the world an Aetrimonde character is stepping into: shaken by terrible wars, cautiously hopeful for peace, and full of opportunity for people willing to brave danger in the name of justice, ideology, or just plain greed.

1. Anno Ante Concilium, or Year Before the Concilium. ↩︎
2. Anno Post Concilium, or Year After the Concilium. ↩︎
3. The sheer unlikeliness that this event did not escalate into a full-fledged doomsday scenario cannot be overstated. At this point, the wars had been steadily escalating for years, all of the belligerents had grievances against all of the others, and they were all itching to use their secret weapons. The fact that it didn’t lead to the end of the world is so shocking that major religious groups consider it evidence of divine intervention, and restarted the numbering on their calendars. ↩︎