The World of Aarn

In the distant past of Aarn, mortal Men, in their hubris, rose against the Gods. Vast power had always been within the grasp of mortals, but sacred laws and holy covenants had kept this hidden from them, when the first of those who called themselves "mages" tapped this well of divine power, and tore down the commandments, proclaiming them false, Aarn rapidly went to hell in a handbasket.

It seemed grand at first, wonders undreamed of were raised from the land and the seas, or called down from the skies. The dead were raised anew, mortal Men lived seemingly endless lives, even those who didn't have the knowledge or gifts of the mages. But then the first wars between the mages happened, and even the Gods and the Heavens, the Hells and the other spiritual realms, felt the destructive fire. Screaming wraiths ravaged the countryside, continents were sunk, moons were split in twain, the sky was red and the sun was black.

The powerful mages who had started everything had died soon after they set in motion the near-destruction of Aarn, however, consumed by their own creations or the spells of their enemies. Soon, the Gods, who had more experience with infinite power than mortal man, began to knit the world back together. It was slow, painstaking work, and many things were lost forever(and others, that should be lost forever, were instead buried deep under the ground, in the oceans, or in other vaults...), but eventually Aarn was stable and livable again. The dead remained where they were meant to stay, man's grasp was reduced to that which he was capable of using, and understanding.

But not even the Gods could take magic out of the world, or seal it away from mortals, it would take only one mortal to discover the ancient secrets, and this time... nothing might remain for Gods to repair.

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There are three classes of magic, Wizardry, Channeling, and Divine magic.

Wizardry, as mentioned before, is about enchantment and industry. It can be akin to basic scripting languages, and if one can learn to program, they can learn to manipulate and exploit the rules of Wizardry.

Channeling is a magical force controlled by one's will, manipulated as if it were your own body, flavored by thematic elements of physicality and energy (on the physical side; gas, liquid, mineral, metal, living tissue, dead tissue, and 'Kanna' - all of the above, and on the energy side, heat, cold, light, dark, electricity, sound and 'mana' - all of the above.) Channelers are sculptors and shapers, manipulating the physical world to their own ends.

Divine magic is magic based on faith, controlled through emotional or artistic expression. It is manipulated by the Gods and fey to their own ends, planting the ideas of how it should work into mortals' heads, but not actually being the source of its power.

There are three major human kingdoms, separated by lands of lawlessness, and minor kingdoms suffering through the growing pains of recent liberty from the old empire:

Cerenbaun, the remnants of the old empire, is a land of industry, ambition, and lasses-faire capitalism. It is inherently corrupt, manipulated behind the scenes by a cabal of Vampires and undead. Cerenbaun's magical technology is more advanced than the other kingdoms, with airships, a "railgate" network, large portals connecting their major cities for the transportation of goods and people, and a magical-based military industrial complex, complete with spellthrowers akin to semiautomatic weapons with refillable magazines with magical energy inside. They seek to rebuild the old Empire, but are held back by political infighting, petty squabbling, and the micromanagement of a wizards' council, lead by the Techno-Lich who invented much of this technology.

Igakari, the old empire's major rival, a scholarly land held back by bureaucracy and beset on all sides by barbarians and encroaching wilderness. They too seek to colonize the world and reclaim their power, and do so by poaching the technology of Cerenbaun, secretly helped by Cerenbaun's Wizard council. This council seeks, more than anything else, to keep the balance of power in the modern world stable, sensing an encroaching cataclysm that all the kingdoms of man will need to band together to prevent.

Rensvan, a southern, isolationist kingdom controlled by a literal hive-mind of channelers, linking their souls together to greatly boost their magical powers.

There are two major non-human kingdoms:

The Valdrex, a slaver race of insects, once thought to be extinct, who recently crawled out of the woodwork and seek to control the human remnants through heartless, pragmatic economic exploitation. They have heavy ties with Igakari, and are in a state of cold war with Rensvan.

The Merfolk, an aquatic race that are also known as naga or medusae when they find their way onto land. The merfolk shun magic and use biotechnology to create living weapons and battleships, and with the help of their literal God King, seek to reclaim the surface.

Other important races, without significant political power of their own, but nevertheless playing important roles in human society:

The aforementioned Ardlins, a younger race with no culture to speak of, who have imprinted off the other races in cargo-cult like ways, but nevertheless show a frightening potential to organize and claim the world, much like Man had, if only they can survive their growing pains.

The Ghorma, a hulking, hippopotamus/penguin-like race of opportunistic treasure-seekers and the Valdrex's major rival in the realm of trying to pillage the Humans' wealth and secrets.

The Orchaeya, a tribal race of carnivorous plant-people whose civilization had been destroyed by humanity, whose youth go on walkabouts to learn about the world, and many of which find themselves integrating for good or for ill into human society.

The Imps, also known as Satyrs, a race cursed by a god to be living embodiments of the channeling elements, unable to truly live or breed, and must sculpt their children out of the environment around them.

The spirit animals, deathless spirits capable of possessing mortal bodies (usually preferring to take control of animals rather than sapient races) that at one time were the caretakers of knowledge, meant to keep civilizations from forgetting the lessons of the past. But the spirit animals developed an agenda of their own, and preferred keeping secrets and accumulating power in the shadows, to educating the other races, who they believe foolish and unworthy of their aid.

The major hook of the setting is high adventure, pillaging the secrets of the old human empire, as well as collecting overpowered artifacts from the first age of Man, before the wizardry nerf, while maneuvering through the political landscape of the power vacuum left behind by the crumbled human empire. The driving force of the setting, to keep the players interested, is the slow reveal of how much of the information the players believe about the setting was actually wrong, or misinformation. After 10 years of play, however, most of these mysteries have been solved, and it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle so to speak, necessitating the retool I'm working on.

Some of those mysteries that were revealed:

There is no true afterlife as the mortals believe it; instead, the afterlife consists only of nine and a half hells, created by extraplanar demons, commissioned by the Gods to handle the ghosts that had been clogging up the mortal realm after one of the Gods' many mistakes created the phenomenon of undeath, which broke the cycle of spiritual reincarnation that had existed up to that point. The demons, barred from interacting with Aarn directly, nevertheless manipulate it with the help of legendary dead kings, heroes and emperors, treating the mortal realm, effectively, as entertainment and television. Though the hells are certainly hellish, they are this way through bureaucratic incompetence on the demons' part, rather than malice or ill-will.

Fey, Gods, and Mortals are all expressions of the same sort of omnipotent creature, interacting with the world with different, self-imposed limitations. Mortals have voluntarily given up their memory of being omnipotent spirits, and live, die, and then become ghosts, waiting to reincarnate (or be trapped in one of the Hells), and remaining on Aarn, these ghosts would slowly lose their sanity and lose touch with reality, their forms and appearance warping over time to become horrific mockeries of their old selves. The fact that the most primal magic, divine magic, is formed by the most strongly held beliefs of mortals is a hint to mortal's true nature as ignorant fey.

The shapes and limitations of the mortal races are dictated by fey who then become Gods. 'Gods' appear to have dominion over their race of mortals, but in fact, the Gods' behaviors are dictated by the expectations of the mortals who worship their progenitor gods. When a God seems to have an agenda, they are instead simply expressing the subconscious, aggregate desire of their mortal race. Sometimes the same God can have multiple avatars or incarnations, when their race has multiple conflicting expectations of their Gods' behavior.

Fey are the closest to the true essence of what these omnipotent spirits are like, bridging the gap between mortals and gods, but whose powers are much as you'd expect a fey's to be, dictated by strong, arbitrary rules and disproportionate favors and deals with mortals. Without obeying these rules, a fey ceases to function in any meaningful way, and slips beyond the bounds of the mortal realm, no longer able to interact with it.

The mortal world is held together by the aggregate expectations of all mortals, and magic is the expression of individuals going against the inertia of everyone else's expectation of how things should work. The Gods and fey try to carefully control and maintain this illusion, ensuring that mortal expectations generally remain constant. Without this work, their playground of the mortal realm would fall apart, and cease to have meaning. The most important fey God, the progenitor of the entire experiment, from whom all fey, gods, and mortals are born, is dreaming, sleeping, in an expression of self-sacrifice to help keep the fragile world together. Attempting to wake him would cause reality to fall apart, and cease to be, and some Gods, who tire of the game, seek to bring this about. His dreams are already leaking into the "Real" world, unholy, eldritch abominations that warp and distort all they come into contact with, including the sanity of mortals.

Much as the progenitor god dreams the world into being, the dreams of mortals, where they recharge both their sanity and magic, are no different than reality, despite being separate from it - dreams are so unpredictable because dream bubbles are, usually, solitary, individual experiences. With no aggregate belief system to keep things in check, an individual's expectations can drift and drastically change that reality.

With these things in mind, the goal of the retool is to make these mysteries more commonly known, while keeping the world interesting. The other goal is to unify and streamline things, and one of my ideas in doing that was to make everything tie into ghosts and spirits a bit more strongly, especially magic. The conflict of the setting would become one between living mortals who want the waking world to continue, and their dead ancestors, who want the waking world to end, and many of the aforementioned mysteries would be tweaked to be natural, logical conclusions of that conflict, that anyone thinking deeply about the setting would be able to reach on their own if they sat down and thought about it.