Historian’s Guide to Aret and Ara
According to one source, the world
of Aret was originally settled by neoluddite space travelers from Earth,
including a number of people who we’d call gamers. These people found
themselves on a world where magic was ‘easy,’ and it quickly replaced
technology (which they used only grudgingly.) The elves, dwarves, halflings and
other ‘native’ races are the result of intentional genetic manipulation of
human stock to better survive the erratic climate of Aret before The
Equilibrium, where the Font (the place where all magic intersects with the
Prime Material Plane) spawned storms of wild magic, dead magic, and even
anti-magic. This technology-based starting point is said to explain both why
the occasional high-tech ruin is found, and why the language has words which
should be meaningless to people not from Earth. (Spartan, for example, is a
word which would require a Sparta in the history to be meaningful.)
Likewise, many of the deities of
Aret are similar to Earth deities in name or appearance (some, such as Fortuna,
have the same name, but are much more important in the Aretor Pantheon) and the
explanation that the planet was settled by earthlings is a good explanation for
this. Other explanations involve the idea that both Earth and Aret were settled
by the same beings, or that both are reflections of the one true world.
The elves and dragons, who have
been here since the beginning, tell a different story, that the humans,
dwarves, gnomes and other older races, as well as technology that seems out of
place, slipped into the world because of the world’s loose connection to the
Border Ethereal, which regularly takes various peoples from other places
(especially ships at sea and flying vessels) who’ve become lost on the Ethereal
Plane, and dumps them onto the planet. This theory is made credible by the fact
that those lost at sea or in airships on Aret regularly find themselves
slipping into the Ethereal Plane, and many large ships have crews which include
clerics or mages skilled in steering away from such rips in the fabric of space-time.
The sea between Misty Cross and Northern Conteria is especially notorious for
these such rips, and about one in four ships will encounter them if they
attempt to go the ‘short’ way across the sea.
Ships, particularly airships, which
find their way into Aretspace are often stuck because the laws of physics work
ever so slightly differently here. The powders, oils and compressed gasses
which fuel them are often non-explosive or even inert once they’ve transcended
space and landed here. Even those substances which still burn often burn less
effectively, and some ‘inert’ substances that should not burn explosively
explode with impunity. With magic so effective and predictable, many of the
technologies that rely on gunpowder or petroleum products in the mundane world
are simply passed up or replaced with magic in Aretspace. Alchemists from other
worlds coming into Aret find that this combustion suppression has something to
do with the magic or the atmosphere, because in tightly controlled labs or
small amounts the mixtures might work, but when scaled up, they often fail.
Alchemists from other places have a -50% to their alchemy scores when trying to
use them on Aret.
Calendars
The most frequently used
non-academic calendar on Aret is the civic calendar of Misty Cross, which dates
the first year as the first year of peace after the Racial wars that tore the
city apart. It is dated from the completion of the castle in the city center,
and is frequently called PW, or Post War, with year before then going backwards
(as with our BCE) and ending at year one PW. Before then, the city used the
founding of the city (CF) itself as a start date, having been founded (according to both the
city mythology and Grey Elven historians) in the year 2056 PM (pre-Modern.) The
castle, then, was completed in 2057 CF, or 1PW.
As if this wasn’t confusing enough,
there exists a Grey Elven Calendar, a Shom-Rainian Calendar, a calendar that
dates from the creation of the Equilibrium and several dozen others, each with
a different set of abbreviations, but most commonly found without any such
thing. Each of these gives the year in a different number, and only the Grey
Elven and Misty Cross Calendars share a starting date.
In general, conversion between
calendars works thuswise (pretending they all start on same day.) As if this
wasn’t confusing enough, some of the more obscure calendars don’t even agree on
what date it is now. :
|
Converting from→
Converting to↓
|
GE
|
Eq
|
CF
|
SH
|
MW
|
PW
|
|
Grey Elven Calendar (GE)
|
N/A
|
+32376
|
+33724
|
+35464
|
+35649
|
+35784
|
|
Creation of the Equilibrium (Eq)
|
-32376
|
N/A
|
+1352
|
+3088
|
+3273
|
+3408
|
|
Founding of Misty Cross (CF)
|
-33724
|
-1352
|
N/A
|
+1736
|
+1921
|
+2056
|
|
Shom-Ra/Haran (SH)
|
-34626
|
-3088
|
-1736
|
N/A
|
+185
|
+320
|
|
After Mage War (MW)
|
-35649
|
-3273
|
-1921
|
-185
|
N/A
|
+135
|
|
Misty Cross Calendar (PW)
|
-35784
|
-3408
|
-2056
|
-320
|
-135
|
N/A
|
The Equilibrium
1352 years before the city of Misty Cross was founded, the
Equilibrium was created. The Equilibrium is an incredibly important aspect of
magical culture (and, indeed, all culture) in Aretspace. Before it was created,
frequent wild magic storms blew forth from the intersection of the two poles of
magic (near what is now the Crystal Desert on the Continent of Tia.) Magic
would sometimes surge in power, wiping out large areas of land, mages would
find themselves overflowing with power one day (sometimes destroying themselves
in the process) and completely without magic the next.
It was a hardscrabble and chaotic existence. Magical surges
would generate monsters and areas of dead magic, flying castles would fall out
of the sky, cities would sink into the ground, people would teleport into
blocks of stone…not an easy way to live. Sometimes magic would disappear
altogether, and using it would draw the innate magic out of the land around it,
turning it to dust, other times, magic would surge so powerfully that it would
leave a coating of a somewhat explosive residue on everything. This residue
could be used to make something rather like a drug that boosts magic power and is
incredibly illegal in Aretspace. This substance, Rhizen, absolutely does not
exist, according to all official sources, and if you ever encounter it, you
should tell someone in The Inquest.
Aaron Blackheart
(or so the legends say), who would come to be known as “the mad mage,” traveled
across space and time learning about how magic worked in other places and
eventually ended up on the elemental plane of magic. How he survived there is
anyone’s guess, but one legend is that he was a descendant of some sort of
metahuman family. Certainly the Blackhearts and their descendants have had a
habit of living two, even three hundred years, but whether this is magic or
something else is up for debate. However he survived, when the Mad Mage came
back to Aret, he would sculpt the magic of the land into The Divine Balance, a
rigid balance whereby magic pours into the world in the form of a font of
power, tended to by a Mage-King, initially Trinian the first. Within one
hundred years of the creation of The Divine Balance, a group of mages known as
“the Hand of Divinity” managed to wrest the entirety of
the font over to the power of what they
considered Good, and for forty years the magic of the world, and indeed, the
world itself, was ruled over by the Sorcerer-King Belian the Bold (known as
Bel).
Bel managed to set himself up as a minor deity, enforcing
his ideas of justice and good upon the world. While this worked out well for
the friends of Bel, it drove massive wedges between the humans and other races
of the planet, resulting in a massive decrease in numbers among elves in
particular, and setting up a number of race-based wars, with humans and
approximately half of the planet’s Dwarves (and nearly all that would survive)
fighting for The Sorcerer-King.
Bel’s magical abilities allowed him to see inside the hearts
of men, and he ‘destroyed’ evil by simply wiping out evil beings where he found
them, without trial, without jury, without even law. He would go into a
household, find an infant who would grow to be evil, and dash that child’s head
upon the rocks. Progressively he grew madder and madder, and because of his
powers, the world went mad around him. This time period, called “The Black
Forty” or even “the age of darkness,” reduced the population of the planet to around
5% of its population beforehand.
One area, in what is now Kelara and the Unclaimed Lands,
enraged Bel so much that he caused the entire land to be cast under a cloud of
darkness that would not end for nearly 2500 years. He threatened to extend this
darkness (called The Mists, or sometimes The Murk) over all the lands that did
not comply with his demands. This cloud killed everything that breathed it, and
shore off buildings at their foundations. It was elves in particular that were
Bel’s target, although sources disagree as to why the elves provoked his wrath
(one source claims there was an advanced and thoroughly evil elven subrace,
similar to drow but more prone to work together, at the heart of Kelara.)
Certainly there are many ruins of temples to evil powers within Kelara which
support this belief, but there are also many ruins of temples to deities of
good found there, and the remains of large human cities, and places where the
races clearly lived together in peace.
As Bel went madder and madder with power, he became focused
inward, and this allowed a small group of very powerful figures, including
Uvala and Astra, then two fairly limited deities, to attack him, with the help
of Aaron Blackheart and the Elven King Vanithil Tyllnion, and at least one elemental
of pure magic. At least ten others were involved, but their names are lost to
history, or hidden. Bel ended up divided into two separate beings and removed
from the Prime Material Plane (he would later end up as the deity Bel the Two
Sided) and the font itself was divided into three sections, two parts
representing the directional magics, and a third part which would empower the
cautious balance between all three, which would come to be known as The
Equilibrium. (The planet Ara would be pulled into its current position during
this, but that is another story.)
In order to keep the balance, Blackheart selected the two
most powerful and least alike mages he could find and bound them to the
respective fonts, before binding himself to the third. All three mages would
slowly be consumed by the fonts, but not before bestowing their students with
the maximum amount of power possible without causing their destruction. The
fonts, to this day, retain a great deal of the personalities of those three
mages, and these personalities (and alignments, to a degree) greatly flavor the
Mage-Protectorates. This is why, although it is technically not accurate, the
Mage-Protectorates are said to control the demesnes of good, evil and
neutrality. (Some of the most potent mages in history have actually been ‘cross
wired,’ having a good alignment, for example, but the “sinister” handedness.)
Throughout history the names of the demesnes have gone from ‘good, evil, and
neutral’ to ‘white, black and gray,’ and even ‘dexter, sinister and
balanced.’ Depending on the historian,
and the fashions of the day, you may hear all three.
A Mage Protectorate is largely like a transformer on an
electric grid. Power flows from the Elemental Plane of Magic, through the font,
to the Mage Protectorate, and is distributed through him (or her) to all the
mages in the world who use that flavor of magic (match the Mage Protectorate’s
handedness). S/he is bestowed with enough knowledge and prescience to be able
to control the flow, stopping The Equilibrium from failing.
The Equilibrium has failed three times, and wavered a few
hundred times in its existence. In all three failures, a Mage-Protectorate
found a way to tap into the energy of one of the other fonts. Each time The
Equilibrium has failed, at least two Mage-Protectorates had to sacrifice
themselves to get it back ‘up and running.’ When the Equilibrium is down, there
is no magic in the world, save that stored in items or people. Items cannot be
charged, spells cannot be memorized, and very bad things begin to happen. Every
mage on the plane, including other creatures which use magic, feels when the
Equilibrium wavers or fails. And they know that it is bad.
After the last failure, the Mage Protectorate of Neutrality
developed “The office for the protection and defense of the Equilibrium, and
for the destruction and prevention of any and all threats to the Equili-brium,
by means of Scrying and Inquest,” generally known as The Inquest. Although
politics have driven them out of the public eye on more than one occasion, they
do exist, and no one wants to be on their bad side…All they do is protect The
Equilibrium.
