History

The world's timeline is broken up roughly into four ages, each culture and tradition has a different perspective and view of what each of these ages mean, below is the standard view that is most commonly held.

## First Age (- 100 000 years ago)

The First Age of Osmodia was a time when "Gods" walked the earth, or rather, the world was connected to some larger cosmic existence and there was a constant interchange of beings between various planes. There were massive gateways that existed which connected entire worlds together. It was a chaotic time and a playground for immense forces. It is not known for sure exactly how the First Age ended, but scholars posit that some event occurred that "shattered" the Astral Sea, the bridge between planes, trapping whatever entities existed onto whichever plane of existence they happened to be on at the time. The entities that were trapped on Osmodia, turned into what later generations would know as "Gods" and other ancient, mythological beings.

## Second Age (100 000 - 10 000 years ago)

The Second Age of Osmodia was a massive power struggle between all these trapped entities, who now had to compete for limited resources. The battle that ensued was extremely destructive and wrought havoc on the world, it lasted for millennia. Over time, the Gods and Beings that fought this war found their own powers dwindling, as whatever connections they had to the planes they originally came from began to fade. They found themselves, suddenly, mortal. However, still retaining a considerable amount of power, they retreated into the dark corners of the world (not separate planes, but corners of the actual world or whatever small pocket dimensions that they could maintain), and began fighting a shadow war with creatures of their own creation (the various races of Osmodia). Never revealing themselves and in constant hiding, these Gods soon became legends, myths and tales, their actual forms fading into stories and religions. Eventually their direct control over the world relinquished enough for peaceful civilization to form, and for the races they created to develop their own empires. Many empires came and went on the various continents. For our purposes on the continent of Umia (eastern continent), the primary great empire that grew was the Empire of Valaria.

## Third Age (10 000 - 3000 years ago)

The Third Age of Osmodia was an age of great and grand empires, such as the Empire of Valaria, and the Empire of Hanshen. These were great civilizations, whose citizens lived in relative peace and harmony besides the occasional incident or war. They remained stable for centuries. However, for reasons unknown, during this period of relative peace, small rifts began to appear, seeping magical energy from the other planes into Osmodia, through the Astral Sea. These magical energies enabled humans, elves, dwarves and other sentient creatures in Osmodia to develop powers independent from that which was given to them by the Gods, and allowed them to circumvent the established system of order that the Gods had settled the world into. It did not take long before powerful sorcerers and wizards began to emerge, under the control of no God, with nobody to take their power away should they fall out of line. Quickly, empires began to fall, and an all out magical war erupted with massive civil unrest sweeping the lands. Everything fell into ruin, and thousands of years of civilization and progress were lost as meteors fell from the skies, and entire cities were buried in earth. The civilized world fell into darkness, as the few survivors of the endless wars huddled in what safe corner they could find, forming basic tribes, in the end nobody really won, and mutual destruction was assured.

## Fourth Age (3000 - now)

The Fourth Age of Osmodia is dark. From the ashes of the fallen civilizations, what factions that could band together tried their best to do so, but they were mere shadows of the past. What mages that were left in the world, banded together to form various collectives to police and order magical use in the world, fearing another catastrophe. One of these collectives, one of the first that were formed, was the Kingdom of Grimrock. A large kingdom in the north of Umia ruled by an extremely powerful mage king. This would later turn into Grimea, a mage state that controlled and policed all magic in Umia, in the name of good and the salvation of civilization. The kingdoms and empires that developed in the Fourth Age were for the most part poorer, more corrupt and less ambitious than their ancestors, and so the Fourth Age was one of poverty and inequality, and a struggle to get civilization back to where it used to be.