From the days of titanic struggles between giants and dragons, to the time of warring gods, Midgard has been a world of great powers and endless change, triumph, and conflict. Its primary races—dragonkin, dwarves, gearforged, humans, kobolds, minotaurs, ravenfolk, shadow fey, and trollkin—have each held vast kingdoms, while just as many lesser races have fought to establish nations of their own, from goblin warbands to nomadic gnolls. And even among those that have held sway over entire realms, glory can be fleeting and no nation lasts forever. The giants rose and fell long ago. More recently, the elves have largely abandoned the mortal world, having retreated to the Summer Lands of the fey and the Shadow Realm for darker courts and minions.
The world of Midgard resembles a coin surrounded by a snake. The serpent
is Veles, the Father of Serpents, who girds the edges of the earth. One
face of the coin is the land most people know. The elves claim the
obverse is the Bright Land, also called the Elflands, the Summer Lands,
and the Fair Place. Here lies the homeland of the elves (and gnomes, and
other fey), a land both more magical and wilder than the known world.
Between
the two sides of this coin lies the Shadow Realm. It is a land of grays
and darkness untouched by Khors’s lamp. It is a plane of long shadows
and unending dusk. It is a land of nightmares, in which the unready and
unprepared can be lost forever. And it is not empty. This shaded
desolation was pierced by the magic of the elves, which allowed them to
arrive in Midgard among the savage races living in the wreckage of
Ankeshel. They wove a web of passages between their world and this one.
These were the fey roads, built using the power of Ley Lines and strengthened by that magic.
The world’s magic is powered by Ley Lines, rivers of pure magical energy that can fuel a wizard’s power, or can help a villain’s plan unfold. This magic enables swift travel along shadow roads and down catslide alleys, connecting distant realms for those daring enough to find, unlock, and travel on these roads.