WORLD
ANCIENT EARTH
This is Earth — but ancient. Pre-medieval, approximately 10,000–15,000 BCE. Atlantis still rises from the Atlantic. Lemuria has already sunk. The wars between factions are what mythology eventually remembered, faintly, incorrectly.
Most inhabitants are human. The factions are not alien species — they are human civilizations, human bloodlines, humans transformed, and humans organized around a common power or belief. Vampires were once human. Werewolves carry human ancestry. Atlanteans and Lemurians are human civilizations with extraordinary capabilities. Wizards and Sorcerers are humans who learned or inherited access to deeper forces. Theocracies are human populations organized by faith. The exceptions — Golems, Hive Mind, Kith — are constructed, collective, or entirely non-human.
No faction has a formal creation myth. The world simply is — ancient, complex, and largely unexplained even to those who inhabit it. Factions are pragmatic. They know what they are and what they can do. Why the world exists concerns them less than what they intend to take from it.
This is the same Earth — same continents, same seas — but in an age before recorded civilization. Coastlines differ; sea levels have not settled into their current form. Atlantis rises from the Atlantic. Lemuria once spanned the Indian Ocean basin and Pacific, though it is now long gone. No faction is geographically isolated. The wars have pushed everyone into contested proximity.
THE WARS
The wars are not humanity vs monsters. They are humanity in all its forms tearing itself apart.
The Long Decline begins ~23,000 years ago when the equilibrium between Atlantis and Lemuria collapses. What follows is not a single war but an era of compounding conflicts — territorial, theological, methodological, and personal — between ten factions with fundamentally incompatible understandings of what the world is and who it belongs to.
The world is diminished. The collapse is real and ongoing — but it is backdrop, not plot. The wars are the story. The decline is the atmosphere: a world that feels smaller and colder than it once was, where great things are destroyed faster than they are built, where everyone fights over something they can no longer fully name. No faction is trying to save the world. They are trying to win.
THE AGE OF ACCORD
There was a time when no single faction dominated. Not a utopia — factions had tensions, territorial disputes, predator-and-prey dynamics that never fully resolved — but a working equilibrium. A natural order.
Atlantis and Lemuria stood as twin anchors: the oldest and most powerful civilizations on Earth, jointly sworn to protect this balance under the Stewardship Oath — the oldest compact in the world. Both civilizations swore to protect the world's natural equilibrium: never to tip the balance permanently in any direction, never to weaponize factions against each other, and to intervene when any force — including themselves — threatened to dominate the whole. The Oath was purely ceremonial — no physical artifact, no sacred site. Its power was in the agreement itself and the trust that sustained it. For centuries, that was enough.
THE SCHISM — THE ORIGINAL WRONG
The golden age ended with a betrayal. The Stewardship Oath was broken. Atlantis and Lemuria each claim the other broke it first. Both accounts are internally coherent. Both are believed with absolute conviction. The truth happened so long ago that no faction outside the two can say with certainty who is right — and neither can fully prove their version, because there is no artifact, no anchor, no physical record that adjudicates the dispute. The Oath existed in trust, and trust leaves no evidence.
THE ATLANTEAN ACCOUNT
Lemuria began quietly expanding its resonance network into territories the Oath designated neutral. When Atlantis raised objections, Lemuria denied everything. When Atlantis gathered evidence, Lemuria called it fabrication. Atlantis acted to protect the balance — which Lemuria calls aggression. Lemuria broke the Oath in deed before Atlantis broke it in word.
THE LEMURIAN ACCOUNT
Atlantis had been engineering the other factions for generations through influence, resource control, and quiet alliance-building. By the time Lemuria understood what was happening, Atlantis had accumulated enough leverage to reshape the world unilaterally. Lemuria acted to prevent a monopoly that would have made the Oath meaningless. Atlantis broke the spirit of the Oath for centuries before Lemuria broke the letter of it.
WHAT THE OTHER FACTIONS KNOWSomething happened. The two great civilizations stopped speaking. Then they started fighting. Then everyone had to choose — or was forced to choose — or seized the moment to settle old debts. The equilibrium collapsed not in a single catastrophe but over generations, as trust eroded and every faction began acting in its own interest because acting collectively had stopped being safe.
Each faction believes whichever version of the betrayal benefits its current position. Vampires who have old grievances against Atlantis believe the Lemurian account. Werewolves who resent Lemurian expansion believe the Atlantean account. Wizards who trade with both shift their stated position based on who is buying. No faction has a disinterested view. None pretend to.
COSMOLOGY — HOW THE WORLD WORKS
Magic is real and structural — not supernatural but a natural force as fundamental as gravity. Different factions channel it differently. The Stewardship Oath worked partly because Atlantis and Lemuria together had the broadest understanding of how these forces interacted. Their combined knowledge was the closest the world ever came to a unified theory. That knowledge fractured with the Schism — each civilization kept part of it, and neither part works as well alone.
THE HIVE MIND — A SPECIAL CASE
The Hive Mind does not know what it is or how it began. It has no memory of becoming. It simply is — a collective consciousness that has always been aware of itself as a collective, with no record of any prior individual state. Whether it was once a human population that chose unity, or something that spread through a community and became self-sustaining, or something else entirely — it cannot say. It does not ask. The question does not feel meaningful to it.
Other factions find this deeply unsettling. The Hive Mind finds other factions' obsession with individual identity equally difficult to understand.
FACTION ORIGINS
Brief notes. Each faction has its own full history.
THE TEN FACTIONS
MASTER WORLD TIMELINE
Before
The world before recorded faction history.
Zealandia submerges
The continent that will one day be called Zealandia sinks beneath the Pacific, leaving only its peaks above water.
Lemuria at its height
The oldest civilization on Earth spans the Indian Ocean and Pacific. The resonance network is global.
Vampire bloodlines transform
Ancient human bloodlines are transformed. The mechanism is not recorded. The bloodlines themselves do not fully agree on what happened.
Sorcerer bloodlines known
Sorcerer bloodlines emerge as a distinct tradition. Private, inherited, less systematic than what will follow.
Age of Accord
The Accord holds. Atlantis and Lemuria govern a fragile equilibrium. The Calling begins during this period. No one addresses it.
The Calling begins
A rising signal pulls humans toward wolf form. It spreads in packs and larger groups, never in isolation.
The Schism — Lemuria sinks
Lemuria sinks. The cause is disputed between every faction that remembers it. No two accounts agree on responsibility.
The Long Decline begins
The equilibrium ends. The wars that mythology will eventually remember, faintly and incorrectly, begin.
Kith begin expansion
The ancient colony intelligence occupies vacuums created by the wars. They do not fight for territory. They occupy what others abandon.
Golems discovered
The technique of binding vital force into constructed matter is discovered independently across multiple cultures.
Wizards emerge
Later than Sorcerers, later than Golems. They accumulate knowledge fast. Sorcerers regard this as suspicious.
Faith Theocracies emerge
Wherever human populations concentrate large enough, devotion becomes literal fuel. The first Theocracies form. The first one's name does not survive.
The Game's Present
The world Dark Wars takes place in. Atlantis is still partially standing. The wars between factions are ongoing.
The Forgetting
The wars recede. What survives in human memory becomes mythology. Most of it is wrong.
INTER-FACTION CONFLICTS
Not exhaustive. Cross-faction tensions as of the Game's Present.