Introduction

Once the world was a haven of advanced magic. The center of the continent was one enormous city spun from multi-colored Etherglass with sorcery, ruled by great sorcerers that travelled between realities and brought the greatest treasures of each back to their wondrous city.

That world ended 150 years ago, when all the wonders of Etherglass turned black and exploded in an event called the Shattering. It left behind a vast desert of shifting black Etherglass dust.

No one in the center of the black desert survived the end. Only those living on the outskirts of the great civilization, near the wild coasts of the continent survived. After the Shattering, no one could remember what was before, except as snatches of a dream. It was as if the magical explosion wiped even the memories of the time before from the heads of those who survived. Few written texts survived the shattering. What is known today comes from those few inscriptions and texts that survived in small outposts on the brim of the desert, and from the cellars and ruins buried under the shifting sands.

When the age of high sorcery ended, something happened to the very world. The sun grew pale in the sky and the weather grew colder. Strange tendrils of ghostly light can be seen in a halo around the sun when viewed through smoked glass, and black spots drift across its surface. Even on the surface of the moon, a great cancerous spot is visible. Common people call it the Eye of the Overseer, but sages speculate that it might be a sister desert to the one on earth.

To the north, a great glacier cuts across the continent from east to west. Around the continent the oceans foam in high winds around unnatural reefs that jut from the seabed like black glass spikes. A range of mountains follow both the western and eastern coast of the continent, forming a natural bowl, with the glacier as the northern border, and the rocky coasts as the southern.

In spring the winds blow predominantly from the east, and in the fall they blow predominantly from the west. In the central continent, the dunes of black sand slowly drift, following the wind, and as they do, remnants of older stone buildings and cellars are sometimes unearthed.

The new lands

Humans of many different creeds and colors live bunched together in the thin green bands of verdant land on each coast, and only through heroic effort is a tenuous connection maintained between the two coasts, when great caravans are able to cross the black desert in the summer and in the spring.

The society that was rebuilt, is based on the faded memories of the survivors, the knowledge brought back from explorers of the desert, and the scrying of necromancers. Magic still exists, but what is considered the pinnacle of sorcery today is mere cantrips compared to the magic of old.

A number of city states have formed on each coast, usually around some great ruin of the old days, surrounded by a network of villages. Society is rigidly stratified. One such city is Ortuxl, meaning "the ossuary". The Underseers are the ruling caste, sorcerers, warlords, and viceroys for the mythical Overseers that disappeared in the Shattering. Below them toil the various castes of artisans and merchants with farmers and fishers near the bottom, only above the slaves. Everyone does their duty to their clan and their master, for those who keep the faith will be taken to the airy High Chambers to serve the Overseers in the next life, while those who break the covenant will be taken to the Darkness Below, the place of chains and thirst.

Almost everyone does their duty. On the fringes of each city, and in the wilds between, are groups of masterless men and woman. They serve no one, and are thus lower than the meanest debt-slave. But at the same time, they are not bound by the taboos of whole men. Because they already damned, they serve as the grease that lets the great wheels of the Underseers run smoothly — as assassins, thieves, spies, and messengers.