Age of Monotheism—The Age of Spirituality—The Age of the Fish

Greater Powers of the Age include the good goddess of Magic; the neutral Goddess of Naga; and the evil unified god of Death, Strife, and Tyranny.

This period emphasizes the continued advances in commerce and communication throughout various world regions. During this period, cross-cultural interactions led to the diffusion of new ideas and technologies. The state assumed a central role in promoting commerce. Innovations in industry and agriculture spread throughout the continents.

1 CE: Banishment of the Gods

In this, the current age, A•OM banishes the Powers themselves to live in mortal, but still Powerful, avatar form on Urthe. The Powers set upon each other in what comes to be known as the Godswar. The Powers of the Elder races seek communion with their people. It is from this event that the Common Era is reckoned as beginning. The Elves and Dwarves, in awe at this supernatural crisis gripping the planet, and faced with their own gods standing before them, declare a truce amongst themselves. Elves credit the Sea Elven King of the time with this successful negotiation, and name the Age for him, but both Elves and Dwarves are equally proud of taking the high road, as deemed befitting the nobility of the Elder Races. But the wars of men carry on, and they often still do to this day.

1 CE, the Godswar — The First Hunger. As the Powers themselves walk mortal and vulnerable during the thirty years of the Godswar, one being, mortal or something closer to divine, no surviving account agrees which, discovers that a portion of that vulnerability can be stolen and kept. The first vampire emerges from the Godswar’s own chaos, and by the time the war ends with the Power of Endurance’s martyrdom, the first vampire spawn already serve at its side.

30 CE: The Martyrdom and the Ascension

The Godswar itself lasts thirty years, ending finally with the martyrdom of the Power of Endurance in mortal form. Born on Urthe as the avatar Saroshan, translated as “A•OM redeems” in the Old Tongue, in the last years of the Age of Fire, the Power of Endurance chose to be born as an almost powerless mortal infant, and goes to his death willingly, in an act of sacrifice still commemorated each year on the day of his passing. When A•OM raises the Power of Endurance again, an immortal god once more, the Godswar ends. The Ascension of the Power of Endurance is reckoned to have happened forty days after his return.

60 CE: The Anointed

Some of the Elder Gods lie slain in the war’s aftermath, and their portfolios are taken over by others. Many of the leaders of the nations of men renounce the gods they had previously served, and cults of Saroshan, known collectively as the Anointed, sweep across Urthe, alongside a handful of minor cults devoted to A•OM directly.

100 CE: The Cults of A•OM Fade

The cults of A•OM die out within the first century of the age, but some form of Anointed faith becomes the official religion of many human lands for many centuries to come. Although this widespread state of virtually monotheistic worship has persisted until this day, wars still break out among human nations over the years, often with different factions of the Anointed warring amongst themselves.

340 CE — The Mages’ Reckoning

A cabal of vampiric spellcasters, grown arrogant in the settled peace following the Godswar, are hunted down and destroyed together by a coalition they underestimated. Rather than ending them, the act of their mutual, violent destruction fuses their combined malice into something new: the first crimson death, a mist with no single body left to claim, formed from several endings at once rather than from any one.

570 CE: The Prophet of the Unnamed

Centuries after the Godswar, a solitary desert prophet claims a single revelation from a Power he names the Unnamed, unifying the scattered tribes of the southern deserts beneath one faith within a single generation. This new faith, built around his teachings, spreads rapidly across the southern reaches of Urthe.

630 CE: The Sundering Wars Begin

Clashes between the followers of the Unnamed and the older Anointed churches become common in the decades following the prophet’s death, wars remembered in later centuries as the Sundering Wars, a recurring feature of the age from this point forward.

774 CE: The Cosmic Event

A great event takes place at this time, the radiation of which is recorded in the tree rings of Urthe. Most sages attribute a share of responsibility to Kaldrec, an Anointed warlord of legendary renown, who begins subduing the whole region around the river-city of Vessalane in the early months of that year. Also known as Kaldrec the Great, he is granted the powers of a Patrician in the spring of 774 by the High Anointed Prelate in the old capital, and likely uses his new powers to defeat the last of the resistance.

No neighboring lords make any attempt at relief, and the city’s own duke makes no strong counterattack. By the tenth month of the siege, famine is hitting Vessalane hard, and its ruler, realizing he is left on his own, opens the gates to Kaldrec’s army and surrenders.

Knowing these facts, it is likely Kaldrec unleashed some magical force which left its mark for centuries, a mark still legible within the trees.

900 CE: The Long Quiet

In the centuries following the Cosmic Event, much of Urthe’s recorded learning falls into disorder. Kaldrec’s own empire fractures within two generations of his death, divided among heirs who share his blood but none of his ambition, and the great libraries and academies of the age’s earlier centuries are, in more than one kingdom, left to crumble or burn. Sages of later ages call this stretch the Long Quiet, not because nothing happened upon Urthe, but because so little of what happened was thought worth the ink to record it.

1150 CE: The Reckoning of Ledgers

Trade, never fully extinguished even in the Long Quiet’s darkest years, begins to knit the scattered kingdoms back together. Merchant guilds, rather than kings or priesthoods, become the first institutions to reliably cross old borders, and a common system of ledgers and bills of exchange, developed independently by rival trading houses within a single generation of one another, allows debts to be settled between nations that have not spoken peaceably in centuries.

1340 CE: The Grey Sickness

A plague of unprecedented scale sweeps across Urthe in these years, carried, sages later determine, along the very trade routes the Reckoning of Ledgers had only recently restored. Whole cities are emptied within a season, and the Anointed churches, already weakened by the Sundering Wars’ long aftermath, lose no small measure of their remaining authority when prayer alone proves unable to halt the sickness’s spread. It is in the wake of the Grey Sickness that the first formal schools of physicians, rather than priests, begin systematically recording what cures actually work and which do not.

1490 CE: The Reaching Age

Freed from the plague’s worst years, and driven by the same merchant houses that first rebuilt trade after the Long Quiet, shipwrights of several coastal nations begin building vessels capable of crossing open ocean rather than merely hugging familiar coastlines. Within two generations, distant shores previously known only to sailors’ rumor are charted, traded with, and in more than one unhappy case, conquered outright.

1650 CE: The Printing Wheel

Dwarven and Gnomish artificers, working independently but arriving at strikingly similar designs within a decade of one another, perfect a mechanical press capable of setting and reproducing text far faster than any scribe’s hand. Within a century, literacy spreads among common folk of every race at a pace no prior age has matched, and the Anointed churches’ long monopoly on recorded scripture and scholarship is broken for good.

1780 CE: The Age of Engines

Steam and pressure, long understood in principle by alchemists studying elements like Oxygen and Hydrogen, are finally harnessed at industrial scale. Great engines begin to replace muscle and beast alike in mine, mill, and forge, and the first true factories rise in the river valleys of the more advanced human and dwarven nations, drawing workers of every people from the countryside in numbers no city has ever housed before.

1890 CE: The Founding of Hyperion

Amid this new age of engines, a modest concern of artificers, alchemists, and engineers is founded under the name Hyperion, its earliest work limited to reinforced boilers and pressure vessels for the mining and shipping trades. Nothing in its first century of operation suggests the name will one day be known across every settled world of the Solus system; Hyperion is, for most of this period, simply one competent engineering house among many.

1960 CE: The First True Flight

Building on decades of steady, unremarkable progress in pressure-vessel design, Hyperion’s engineers achieve sustained, powered flight for craft heavier than any wind or wing could lift on its own, the first true ancestor of what will one day be called a Hopper. The device is crude, short-ranged, and prone to failure, but it is, for the first time in Urthe’s recorded history, flight achieved by craft rather than by dragon, griffon, or spell.

2050 CE: Beyond the Sky

A full century after its first true flight, Hyperion’s engineers finally push a hardened test vessel past Urthe’s own atmosphere entirely, a brief, harrowing journey that nonetheless proves the principle: a properly built hull can survive the true vacuum beyond the sky, not merely the thin air above the clouds.

2140 CE: The S.T.O.R.M. Breakthrough

In the final decade of the age, Hyperion’s engineers achieve what a century and a half of steady progress had been building toward all along: the S.T.O.R.M. core itself, a single, standardized, endlessly adaptable heart drawing its power from compressed liquid Corazonium, capable of being wrapped in whatever shell a task requires. It is this breakthrough, more than any prior achievement, that will define the age to come.

Recently, worship of the Power of Endurance has been waning, while other faiths are becoming resurgent. The great sages of Urthe alive today see the signs all around them of the Age nearing its end, and, for the first time in living memory, more than a few point specifically to a single engineering concern’s recent, curious success as the reason why.

A•OM looked on…