Eluseus

Eluseus. A verdant, diverse world centered around three grand continents and their outlying islands, it was once the homeland of myriad human kingdoms trapped in continual squabbles over resources, religion, and  riches. In an instant, all this would change. In the Great Schism, unholy communions would open across Eluseus, allowing floods of humanoids egress into the pure world of man. Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Tieflings and Halflings flooded into the realms of man, bringing with them a new weapon; magic. This unprecedented edge would put humanity on the backfoot, as the invaders, who would come to be collectively known as Magi, haphazardly conquered new swathes of land and subjugated people of all cultures. This conquest would not go on unimpeded however. Some groups of men would band together in confederations to hold back the tide of invaders, utilizing the twin advantages of home terrain and gunpowder to stem the tide of invaders. One more edge would slowly emerge among the realms of men; the manifestation of their own magical abilities, both naturally and through careful study. After a century of strife, the new borders of Eluseus had been drawn, and uneasy truces began to emerge between humans and humanoids, a phenomenon called the Armistice by its contemporaries. Peace gradually began to return, an alien feeling to the generation born since the Schism. Yet just as equilibrium seemed inevitable, everything would once again change in an instant with the start of the Wounding, 111 years to the day after the first Schism. The faces which would emerge from this new calamity would be anything but familiar.

From the wounds came a host of horrifically powerful aberrations like nothing seen before. At each cardinal point seeped hideous beings hellbent on absolute conquest. From the west came the Beholders, abominable creatures with a terrifying command of magic. From the east the Aboleth, mysterious beings who would subdue the isles from their abyssal throne. From the north the Illithids, parasitic overlords with an unrelenting lust for sentient skulls. From the south the Neogi, psychic slavers with the ability to bend any being to their will. And from countless wounds seeped the fantastical, terrific and horrific from dimensions untold, bearing wild magic which would commune with and irreparably alter the lifeforms of Eleseus. These aberrant conquistadors would come to be known as the DOMINAR, absolute rulers who would subjugate the races of man and Magi to their own mysterious and nefarious ends.

But their conquest was not total. The most powerful and elusive of these new masters would be the Dragons, five flights of which would slip through the wounds, each led by a proud and dreadful Elder Drake. Unlike the other four conqueror races, each Dragonflight held little interest in empire building, instead carving out its own swathe of territory with fire and blood and then ruling by proxy through local men and Magi. The Dragons are uniquely powerful in the ways of magic, commanding the occult so completely that the very presence of the Elder Drakes is said to bend reality and open up minor wounds in the dimensional fabric of Eluseus. As a result of this, each sapient perceives dragons differently, although for most men they take the form of the massive winged reptilians of pre-Schism mythos.

These 5 Dominar would each proceed to conquer and consolidate their own realms, although this was not done as allies, but as competitors. It took barely a decade for the kingdoms of men and Magi to be completely wiped away, replaced with five spheres of influence each on the brink of outright war with each other, yet always just scared enough of their neighbors to avoid making any move bolder than a border skirmish. As a result, a paradoxical peace has settled over Eluseus, although violence is still a daily fact of life as the wilds teem with all manner of viscous fantastical fauna and cities are steadily subdued under the vice grip of the Dominar. This peace has persisted for eighty years, during which the five realms have constructed radically different forms of government, all with only one shared trait; absolute rule. Yet as the sun rises on the two hundred and first anniversary of the Schism, the fragile truce seems to be teetering on the verge of collapse, while in each of the massive metropolises which serve as refuges for millions of men and Magi from the unforgiving wilds discontent brews and powderkegs are steadily stacked. The same question seems to be on everyone’s lips; how long can a peace this bloody truly persist?