History of Orizon

The modern understanding of prehistory is all but lost. There are few records of the times of the ancient world surviving, and even fewer that predate them. What is known is shared as a mixture of legend, myth, or fractured accounts from divination. All details are lost, but some of the broad strokes survive.

The Beginning

The earliest years of Orizon are lost in a confounding haze of history, myth, and legend. What is known is that the ancient gods arrived from some place far distant and assembled the structure of magic, then built a world on top of it.

The ancient gods also either anticipated or precipitated the development of life. It seems that they occasionally stepped in to advance the natural process of evolution, but for the most part the ancient gods left their system to work itself, observing and making their own slight adjustments to better suit their needs.

The Eon of Dragons

After the world had developed for millennia, the gods took creatures and determined that they had the potential for greatness. The gods took various dinosaurs and manipulated their form, amalgamating them and tying them to raw magic, granting these new creatures incredible power. They had made dragons. Unfortunately for the gods, they had expected subservience from the dragons. Dragons saw the gods as equals or simply as powerful beings, not gods to be worshiped. The more the gods pushed the dragons to worship, the more the dragons opposed them. Eventually, the dragons rose up. Dragons briefly ceased their rivalries and feuds to direct their attention against the gods.

The gods responded harshly. The power of the dragons protected them from much, but not from the full wrath of the gods. They brought down fire and brimstone down from the heavens, killing many dragons and totally devastating their food supplies. The dinosaurs were no more, and the dragons nearly followed them. Those that survived fed off smaller creatures or fled to other planes, hoping for refuge there, other dragons took to hibernating for long extended periods, significantly longer than they once had before. The age of dragons was over, though they survived they would never return to the numbers or the power they held in this ancient time.

The Rise of Man

Millions of years later, the world returned to some semblance of the prosperity it once held. Life had regrown, small mammals that had survived the mass extinction became megafauna like mastodon, cave bears, and auroch. The distant ancestors of the surviving dragons were again able to sustain themselves comfortably, but the gods saw little humility and decided to try again. They found a creature on the verge of awareness and “nudged” it. What were apes were now the first humans.

Humanity followed the divine scheme much more closely than the dragons had. They grew, they learned, they worshiped. Humans were a varied, curious and unpredictable species, they learned from their experiments with the natural world, they learned from communion with the gods and spirits of the natural world, they even learned from the dragons that deigned to teach them.

But the gods were not immediately satisfied with simple man. They decided to use this successful experiment as a baseline and make new peoples. They made elves to tend to magical energy and knowledge, they made dwarves to work the earth, gnomes to craft intricate tools, halflings to tend to the fields, orcs to tame the wilderness, and giants to defend against the dragons. Many went outside of their roles, which were at most vague guidelines, but they began to find places for themselves in the world. This early meddling and creation is believed to be the reason why humans are able to breed with nearly every mortal race, they are the common ancestor.

The age of wonders was a utopia, magnificent cities, feats of epic magic, and technological peaks were the order of the day. During this time vast continental empires stretched all the way across the world and worked in collaboration on works of spectacular magical infrastructure.

This era is also referred to as the old world or the ancient world. The cities, now ruins, of the old world are one of the few places where people can find very rare and legendary magical items, and are the source of powerful artifacts and valuable knowledge. During this time the gods walked among mortals and shared their perspectives and knowledge, allowing mortal knowledge to advance by leaps and bounds beyond what they otherwise would have been capable of.

The people of the old world stopped the spread of chaotic monsters by exterminating or enslaving them, or by sealing the most powerful ones away. Their campaigns pushed the monstrous races of the world to the fringes of the continents, or the bottom of society. And the other races prospered immensely from this new freedom from these dangers.

The period of peace and prosperity unfortunately began to crumble as more aggressive individuals began small attacks and territory disputes or rebellions against their empire. These eventually descended into all out war as treaties and promises dragged other nations into the conflict. Nations began turning their productions from public good to offensive might. They developed war machines and technomagical weapons that they then turned on each other. This war continued for years, some believe for almost a century, each continental nation turned against each other in massive war.

The war culminated with the development of the grandest of the ancient war machines, the titans, massive biomechanical and technomagical war machines that stood at the size of a skyscraper and left swathes of destruction. The titans were the most devastating thing the war had brought on its combatants, but fortunately no nation was ever able to produce more than one.

The war finally ended when a small resistance group composed of members of each nation tried to stop the fighting, they targeted the technomagical infrastructure that had been spread across the world and hoped to shut it down, ceasing any nation’s ability to function. Instead they overloaded it, sparking off a massive explosion that encompassed the entire globe.

The Breaking

This overload unleashed powerful cascading explosions of raw wild magic. This energy created tremendous devastation across the world. Spurring natural disasters on an unprecedented scale, causing tidal waves and droughts, earthquakes and hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires.

Magical disasters spread from the cascade, releasing, wild, random enchantments. Uncontrolled summonings and banishings were common and ruptures were broken into to the fabric of the plane itself, although many of those were sealed by the old gods, most of the old pantheon died in the struggle to seal the plane against intruding monstrosities. The disaster cast entire landmasses up into the sky, enchanting the very dirt and stone and leaving them to hang forever in the sky, never to fall.

The Breaking turned the once great empires immediately into ruins, destroyed the entirety of infrastructure and society and all the systems for crafting magical items and technological equipment. Some of the few survivors were warped by the explosion of magical energy, others found themselves stranded. Monsters that had been enslaved or sealed away suddenly found themselves free to terrorize the world again and did so with a terrible vengeance.

The breaking is a period "remembered" with awe and fear, and many cultures have since used the breaking as a defense for policies of moderation or anti-magic.

0 AB - (~5 AB - ~500 AB)

Following the breaking there was still hope that the old world could be reclaimed, that their wonders could be rebuilt. The war had ended, the toll was too high, but perhaps the cost could be reclaimed. The salvage period is characterized by the tragically few survivors climbing out of the rubble and trying to collect whatever they could and piece together their lives.

This is also the period when the monstrous races, such as orcs, and goblins realized that the shackles that bound them had been released, and the monsters that had been driven to the fringes, such as mind flayers, dragons, and others, realized what the breaking signified, though the more powerful of these beings were killed immediately by the breaking’s energies. All of these beasts were full in their wrath of the old world and decided that the breaking marked the time to claim their piece.

The storms of wild magic, most potent within the ruins of the ancient cities, and the return of monsters, eventually forced the salvagers away from the old cities and out to fend for themselves in the wilderness, abandoning whatever treasures that they couldn’t recover from the wreck.

The close of the salvage period saw the beginning of the gods’ war, the war of aggression from Incancatus in its attempts to destroy the world. The surviving gods of the old world massed together and assembled the living mortal champions to oppose the gods and fiends of Incancatus’ armies.

The God's War

(~10 AB - ~300 AB)

Following the breaking, the god Incancatus was incensed with mortals, they saw the arrogance of mortals as the sole reason for the breaking. Incancatus sought to conclude the breaking and reduce the world to a blank slate. First, Incancatus turned to the other surviving gods, hoping to recruit them to its cause, some few came to join him, but none of the other ancient gods would join them. The other ancient gods were focused on repairing the damage of the breaking and the surviving old gods were dedicated to defending the plane. So instead Incancatus turned to the varying devils and demons, promising them divinity in its new world if they assist the mad god in destroying this one. Incancatus raised its armies and brought them in to fight, in response the other gods raised armies of their own, drawing in mortal champions to fight with them.

For the duration of the God’s War, the people of Orizon were deprived of their greatest heroes, and whatever leaders they could rally behind in their hopes to rebuild after the breaking. The god’s war also deprived the people of Orizon of divine magic. There were many who believed that the god’s war’s effect meant that the gods were dead. Few saw the true mass of the destruction of the godswar, it was fought at the edges of the plane, but the destruction was felt by many as divine weapons lanced across worlds.

At the conclusion of the war all but the ancient gods, who seemingly could not die, were obliterated. The old gods were dead, the heroes gone, but Incancatus was sealed away in the deepest pit and the war had ended. The gods returned to the world and to their attempts to restore Incancatus’ old infrastructure of magic. When the gods returned to the world, so did divine magic, and so did faith. New gods began to rise at the fall of the god’s war, though none are entirely sure why it did not happen until the end of the war, or what enabled mortals to rise to gods.

Fallout

(~200 AB - ~400 AB) - (~400 AB - ~500 AB)

Eventually the Orcs and Goblins realized that they too could not stand the dangers of the old world’s ruins, and their took their looted reward out, to eradicate the remnants of the people that had enslaved them. The Monsters sought out the huddled survivors in their make-shift fortifications and turned the looted weapons against them. Blaster rifles fired plasma bolts and the volleys lit up the nights, monsters sent powerful beasts, recovered from cages and caves, against the survivor’s magic. Some tried to hide in the new skylands, but were never able to travel much father than a few feet off the ground.

Most of this savage period was spent in these conflicts, the survivor races against their former slaves. Monsters began carving out their own territory while survivors built fortifications. Through it all, storms of wild magic that wouldn’t begin to calm for decades to come ravaged both sides.

Above the world, and in the planes beyond it. The godswar raged. The heroes of the old world battled the gods themselves and all manner of monsters and demons. The war raged for decades, further devastating the world and leaving powerful weapons and the corpses of fallen gods scattered through Orizon and its cosmology. Only the six greatest of old gods and a few other survivors stumbled away, weakened and wounded, from the godswar.

During this period the knowledge of the old world was gradually lost, as the things collected during the salvage period began to rust and break, or were drained of power or destroyed in the conflict. Both sides worked to rediscover truly ancient techniques as laser rifles were gradually replaced with bows and arrows. Plastics and ceramics were replaced with bronze and iron.

Below ground a similar story was happening, those civilizations under the soil had been sealed away, and were attempting to rebuild following the disasters, but monsters that had fled to hidden caverns had begun to find access to the cities of the underground and wanted to take their piece. The dwarves began focusing on fortifying their cities rather than reconnecting to the surface, while the elves that would eventually become drow fled deeper, searching for sanctuary in the cave systems.

By the end of this period nearly all of the relics of the old world that had been recovered had decayed to uselessness and the knowledge that had been recovered was similarly lost without anyone adequately able to apply it. The people of Orizon were left to fend for themselves, without the gains of their ancestors.

(~800 AB - ~1,400 AB) - (~2600 AB - ~2,700 AB)

This is the period when the gods began to return to Orizon, the old gods worked to calm the storms of wild magic, and their clerics began to gain the powers to heal the effects of these storms. Some new gods too began to be “born” during this period following the breaking.

This is a period of renewal, the survivors of the breaking abandonded their attempts to rebuild, but their supplies were stripped and depleted, little of the technology they still had worked and all of their infrastructure was gone. Steel and concrete became wood and bronze. People rediscovered the bow and arrow, they hunted and gathered, scratching out farms. The great society had collapsed from a peak of civilization to the bottom of the bronze age. No one of the humanoid races was left alive that was present at the ancient world.

During the elevation, the survivors of the old world discovered the magical properties of floatwood, lumber that ignored the pull of gravity, and began making tentative journeys to the lower skylands. Simple airships were constructed and small groups began fleeing from the fighting on the ground by sailing to the skylands. This flight took decades to take off in full, the tools were lost to construct airships, and old tools of bronze and iron were being reinvented to replace them.

Gradually these fleeing peoples constructed homesteads and grew crops, then more and more of the survivors of the old world fled the fighting, running to the skylands and abandoning the ground to monsters.

This period is largely analogous to terrestrial history some time between the late stone age and the early iron age. Without the great mid-bronze age civilizations.

(~2,600 AB - ~2,700 AB) - (~4,300 AB - ~4,500 AB)

This period is the time when civilization begins its steps to reestablish itself in the skylands. Only the absolute oldest of the people in the skylands had any memory of the world that had come before, and they were few and far between, ancient elves who were believed to be telling myths and legends. Most of the treasures of the old world that had been reclaimed during the salvage period were useless, and those that remained were considered the most powerful of magical items.

The burgeoning civilizations of the skylands were insular, any airships constructed were still simple, designed for travel between the nearest islands. The peoples of the skylands established small communities of a few islands which became the earliest of the new kingdoms. Tools of bronze and iron gradually turned to steel, then improved alloys. These simple agrarian homesteads on the skyland were focused on recycling and conservation, there were few resources available to them on the skylands, and they had to make the best of what they had.

Empires rose slowly along with new technologies, then expanded as airship technologies improved and flying mounts were tamed, or crumbled as monsters, war, or intrigue overwhelmed them. Civilization spread outwards and even had begun to reclaim parts of the ground, firing arrows from their airships as simple air support to reclaim small spaces on the ground from the monsters which were used to harvest the abundant resources of the ground for those on the sky.

On the ground, the monstrous races also began establishing their own societies. As their former oppressors fled to the skylands they turned their rage, the reasons long lost, against each other. The various warbands began establishing fortress cities, ruled by the strongest or the most successful. These monster cultures would band together to attack any incursion of the skyland cultures onto the ground, or any rich dwarven cities, but never developed airships of their own.

Underground the dwarven cities had developed their fortifications and reconnected to the surface, and their cities came under attack by raiders on this new front. To help defend, many dwarves sent emissaries to the people in the skyland to open trade relations and encourage mutual support. The elves of the underdark had truly become drow, constructing cities with layouts like spiderwebs where they ruled through subterfuge and violence over communities of many different races. During this time the drow also began developing their raiding tunnels, conducting raids on the ground territories of the skylands, or the fortress cities of the monsters, or occasionally on the skylands.

Creator’s Note: This period is expansive, and can be drastically different between the different cultures of Orizon, but is broadly analogous to the period of the early empires (Greek, Roman, Mongolian, etc.) to the medieval era.

(~4,300 AB - ~4,500 AB) - Present (~4,835)

During this period, the technologies behind airships had reached a new level, airships could travel further than ever before, and sails had been developed to a point where air travel is more efficient than ever. Nautical sailing techniques have also reached a point where intercontinental travel could be reliable undertaken.

This expansion of trade led to the establishment of large cities and modern kingdoms, some built on the ruins of the old empires or those old empires have more firmly secured their hold on their existing territory. Although these kingdom’s hold over their territories is often tenuous with attacks from monsters, magic, or war.

The same expansion of trade has also helped piracy to become a more viable business plan. The number of active pirates has exploded along with the size of navies and the expansion of trade.

The monstrous races have since developed means of air travel of their own, but they are comparatively simple, balloons lifted by flame used for scouting or nighttime raids.