Aerb

**Aerb** is the infinitely tessellating hexagon upon which the vast majority of the mortal species live. Colloquially, the word "Aerb" is sometimes used to encompass every plane of existence.

It seems to be an amalgamation of the various tabletop settings created by Juniper Smith on Earth.

An at least somewhat canon map of Aerb in it's entirety, approved by Alexander Wales and created using private info he provided, can be found here (interactive version here) courtesy of Bacontime.

## Cosmology

***I could see the air quotes out of the corner of my eye.***

*The following is an extract from* Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb*.*

### The Prime Material Plane

The base level of existence, also known as “Aerb”, though “Aerb” can colloquially refer to all planes of existence. Aerb can be represented as an infinitely tessellating hexagon with an edge length of approximately twenty-seven thousand miles and a surface area of 1.9 billion square miles. Traditional directions on Aerb are determined taking the direction of travel of the sun as one axis (“east” and “west”) and then establishing a second axis perpendicular to the first (“north” and “south”). For technical purposes, a six cardinals directional system, with the three axes sixty degrees offset from each other, is used.

Aerb contains forty-four continents, divided by eleven major oceans. Biomes are largely determined by the super-atmospheric projection layer, which changes the amount of available light from the sun, while seasons are largely determined by the fact that the sun’s apparent size grows in the summer and diminishes in the winter. The shape and properties of the projection layer, now well-mapped, are largely responsible for hexal weather patterns. In certain areas, the projection layer is inwardly warped, providing hotter climates, or outwardly warped, providing cooler climates.

Notable features:

* At the bottoms of the six largest oceans are the Gelid Depths, vast expanses of pseudo-ice which range from 200 ft. to 1 mile thick and which lay on the ocean floors.
* The largest of Aerb’s continents is Auberlo, which contains a vast grassland laced with sedate rivers. In the center of the Auberlo lies the Spine of the World (sometimes, World Spine), both the tallest and longest mountain range on Aerb.
* The longest river is the Jesh, which spans three different continents, and is also part of the world’s largest rain basin, in an area known as the ‘Second Cradle’ for its prominence in imperial politics (the first cradle being Anglecynn and the continent of Bretaigne).
* The deepest body of water on Aerb is Fathom Lake, near the city of Remar. While the lake is fairly small, it’s estimated to be more than a thousand miles deep, with labyrinth caves on the sides starting a mile down. The lake is home to a number of indigenous species found nowhere else.
* Aerb only has a “center” by convention, but that convention is dictated by what’s known as the Perimeter Route, a perfect hexagonal path that a ship could take without ever touching land, the only such route in existence. Portions of the Perimeter Route have been used for trade for several centuries, though other portions are more treacherous (and shipping is somewhat rare following the advent of bulk teleport).

### The Ethereal Plane

The Ethereal Plane, typically accessed by star magic, is the plane most directly adjacent to the Prime Material Plane. The Prime Material Plane is clearly visible from the Ethereal Plane, making it historically useful for spying. The world of the Ethereal Plane doesn’t fully map to that of the Prime Material, namely, the geographical features are distinct, making it difficult or dangerous to enter the Ethereal Plane in all but a few locations. Ethereal ecology is distinct from that of the Prime Material plane, with the ethereal having a number of magical creatures, flora and fauna, and two of their own mortal species.

### The Elemental Planes

There are twenty-eight elemental planes connected to Aerb: acid, base, blood, bone, chitin, clay, earth, electricity, fire, flesh, glass, gold, ice, iron, lava, light, magnetism, mist, rust, salt, sand, shadow, smoke, steam, stone, vacuum, water, and wood. Each of the elemental planes consists of roughly 90% of the given elemental, with the remaining 10% being divided up into foreign materials that have arrived through planar travel, adjacent elements, and air (breathable or otherwise). Creatures native to the elemental planes are often called “elementals”, but they’re so different from one another that the label is largely useless.

The elemental planes were discovered slowly over time, with the first three (earth, fire, water) being plainly obvious, and the others requiring some level of research or magic to discover. In the past hundred years, it’s become more common for planes to be “discovered” through theory or philosophy and only confirmed much later.

Direct corporeal access to the elemental planes is difficult, especially because so many of them are hostile to life, but it’s somewhat common for entads and specific spells within different schools to be discovered accessing one of them rather than creating matter or energy ex nihilo. Beynard’s conjecture states that all magic which appears to violate conservation of mass or conservation of energy is, rather, interacting with one of the planes in some way.

[Juniper’s Notes: There’s some parallel to the discovery of elements on Earth here, which is funny. Not funny enough to laugh at though. Also, I’m sad that my truly exotic planes never made it in there, like the plane of slime, the plane of slugs, or the plane of leaves. Maybe they just haven’t been discovered yet.]

### M-space

M-space is a plane of nigh-infinite energy, all densely packed together; the ‘m’ originally stood for ‘mana’, but the term was truncated. All research into m-space was permanently banned during the First Empire, a ban which has (officially) persisted in every polity on Aerb since its inception. While m-space is sometimes called the “elemental plane of energy”, this is incorrect.

### N-space

N-space is a plane of concentrated, “raw” negentropy, which is theoretically (but unprovably) drawn upon by a number of entads and magics, with revision magic chief among them. All research into n-space is currently banned, but the prohibitions are less strict than on m-space.

### P-space

P-space is a plane where raw concepts are located. As it’s not a physical plane but a conceptual one, making observations with instrumentation is difficult, and actually visiting it is right out. P-space is, in theory, the plane magics connect to when they need definitional assistance (e.g. “Is this a chair?”), though differences in ostensibly identical requests throw some doubt as to what’s actually going on, and some magics which appear to use definitional assistance will, in fact, use rigid mathematical models instead.

[Juniper’s Notes: The ‘p’ was for Platonic, though annoyingly, I haven’t been able to track down whether the same is true on Aerb. Was ‘p’ just picked out of a hat?]

### G-space

G-space is the dumping ground for nearly everything that “disappears” from Aerb, save for those things which are erased from existence by the void. Attempts to observe g-space have routinely failed for unclear reasons, but a number of observations of magics from Aerb appear to confirm its existence.

### The Disjoint Planes

This collection of thirty-seven planes share little in common, save that none of them have the sweeping variety of climates and life seen on Aerb. They range from the low gravity and wandering mountains of Kantvarld, to the undulating, wave-like fields of Masqwa, to the glass forests of Erborea. What the Disjoint Planes have in common is that they’re monobiomes (in rare cases, dual biomes), smaller than Aerb, and considerably more hostile to life than Aerb is on average. None of the disjoint planes connect to each other in any meaningful way.

Following Uther’s Interdiction, none of the disjoint planes are accessible from Aerb, though it’s theoretically possible to get to them by first passing through one of the elemental planes. There has been no known successful attempt at doing so.

[Juniper’s Notes: Looking into it further, it appears that Uther’s Interdiction might actually have been an exclusion? I can’t figure out why no one calls it an exclusion though, except perhaps that Uther declared that he’d done it for the safety of Aerb, so maybe this one time he just took credit? It’s also weirdly underplayed in the history books, maybe because the disjoint planes weren’t really interacted with all that much by anyone but Uther, and had little impact on the average person’s life. Really, the disjoint planes themselves are a big cliffnote in Aerb’s history.

Incidentally, the disjoint planes appear to have been a dumping ground for some of my less-adaptable ideas. In my Critter Islands campaign, the world was an endless desert with miles-long magical creatures with singular biomes on them, and maybe half of the disjoint planes appear to be plane-sized versions of those. Similarly, there’s a disjoint plane with ‘thick cilia’ that I’m pretty sure is the Plane of Cocks from flesh.txt, my never-shown-to-anyone pornographic campaign setting.]

### The Plane of Dreams

It’s often said that the plane of dreams is excluded, but this doesn’t fully convey the reality of the situation. What instead happened was that the magic of dream-walking was apparently excluded, to an unknown exclusion zone, if there is one, which cut off the ability of anyone on Aerb to step into the plane of dreams through that method. However, some entads on Aerb still function within the plane of dreams, and of course, the phenomenon of dreaming relies on interaction between sleeping mortals in the material plane and the plane of dreams itself.

### The Plane of Mirrors

Like the ethereal plane, the plane of mirrors connects more directly to the material plane than many of the others do, being almost entirely dependent on what happens within the material plane. Before mirror magic was excluded, every reflection on Aerb (man-made or otherwise, despite the name) was a link to the plane of mirrors. On the other side of these reflections is a copy of the material plane, though the copy is only exact in the places that are reflected. In places where no reflection falls lives the true heart of the plane, colored in shades of blue and home to all manner of exotic flora and fauna, typically adapted to slowly grow back from the sterilizing effects of a mirror penetrating their realm. Larger specimens can fully withstand a reflection and either interact with material counterparts that a reflection reveals in the plane of mirrors, or cross over to the other side. When mirror magic was excluded, apparently all forms of access to the plane of mirrors went with it.

### The Plane of Drift

Things that are magically erased from existence go to g-space, but things that are magically lost end up in the plane of drift. The plane of drift has little in the way of gravity, and little in the way of features, aside from the various lost things that float through the air. While some of the detritus comes from heavy magic, a greater portion comes from a species of magical creatures that gained power by shunting things off to the plane. The only place of note in the plane of drift is the City of the Lost, a community made up of people who have crossed over to the the plane of drift and made a makeshift society for themselves. Following Uther’s discovery of the plane, a permanent link to the City of the Lost was created, and it currently holds member status in the Empire of Common Cause.

### Alternate Aerbs

Throughout recorded history there have been a few suggestions that there are “alternate timelines” out there, parallel planes which contain duplicates or near-duplicates of much of the material plane. In a few of these instances, the evidence that something has happened are incontrovertible; there are two of the Castle Trull, with exactly the same layout, brickwork, and blemishes, and historical records indicate that at some point during the First Empire, the second Castle Trull appeared beside the first, with a history diverging some twenty years prior. There are, of course, other explanations for these phenomena, but no scientific research has borne fruit.

### The Hells

By far the most numerous of the planes, the hells can be accessed by only a very few methods. The most important among these is that an unattended soul on Aerb will quickly transfer to one of the hells, as will the soul of a deceased person if not removed within approximately thirty minutes. Souls placed in glass containers with glass stoppers will eventually decay, bypassing the hells, a process that takes approximately three years.

There are nine thousand of these hells, each with its own peculiarities. The common thread between hells is that magic is almost completely non-functional, devils and demons (collectively, infernals) live there, there are some number of mortal species who are deposited by means of abyssal transversal, mortal species are under a regeneration effect, and almost all flora, fauna, and natural conditions exist to cause mortal suffering.

Beyond those elements, there is wide variation among the hells, with some being hotter or colder, having lower or higher gravity, or otherwise expressing divergent physics. Flora and fauna run the gamut, beyond even the wide variety found on Aerb, and different natural phenomena present themselves. Most of this variation is unstructured, with no particular rhyme or reason to why each hell is different from the others.

The nine thousand hells are usually spoken of as being “below” Aerb, a consequence of early superstition about the hells, later codified in mathematical notations relating to infernal energy. As more began to be understood about the hells, scientists began to refer to some hells as being ‘above’ or ‘below’ each other, terminology which seeped out into the popular vernacular. Unfortunately, this terminology is misleading, as we would be better served in thinking of it as directionless ‘distance’ as determined by energy needed for access.

“Higher” hells are more likely to contain weak infernals, including imps (the weakest of them). Higher hells tend to have lower rates of regeneration for the mortals there, and perhaps as a consequence of this, they have less hardy and robust flora and fauna. Generally, suffering is lower in these places. As such, the ‘Alpha Hell’, the hell which is closest to Aerb, is considered not too much worse than living in an exclusion zone. Because these hells are closer, it takes much less effort for an infernal to take on physical presence on Aerb. “Lower” hells contain strong infernals, stronger regeneration for mortals, and more aggressive and pervasive flora and fauna.

Though mortals are offered some regenerative protection in the hells, this does not appear to be to their benefit, as this regeneration is often used against them by the flora, fauna, or infernals. Because a mortal can survive having a finger removed and will slowly, painfully regrow it, there is considerable leeway for organisms to repeatedly harvest fingers, for example. Similar rules apply to harvest and consumption of blood, skin, flesh, bones, eyes, vital organs, infliction of pain, and to a lesser extent, a wide variety of emotional, intellectual, epistemic, social, and other horrors, given the mental resilience of mortals.

A mortal’s placement in the hells was initially thought to be determined by some qualities of their moral character, with those of poor moral character being sent to lower hells than those with good moral character. Later intensive studies have shown this to be false, and distribution of abyssal arrival follows a probabilistic curve that peaks around five hundred hells below Aerb, with a long tail toward the Omega Hell. A similar rule applies to any mortal who suffers enough damage to kill them in one of the hells, with the same curve being apparent, and the same peak at roughly five hundred hells below where they started. Any chart of abyssal travel will show a sharp spike at the Omega Hell, which is the ultimate destination for any mortal who dies enough times.

As the ultimate destination of any mortal, Omega Hell deserves special mention. There, death is truly impossible for any mortal, and even so extreme of circumstances as being completely atomized will result in the mortal reforming somewhere within the hell. In the Omega Hell, tortures and suffering can be much more abstract than elsewhere, with nervous systems taken apart and smeared out over a field, or a body taken apart into its component pieces. Paradoxically, the surplus of mortals in the Omega Hell, as well as the fact that it’s a seat of power both make that hell a home to some of the most well-kept mortals within the hells (though they’re held in reserve primarily to be tortured at a later date, or to facilitate the torture of others).

Abyssal travel is a complicated affair. Mortals can, obviously, travel to lower hells by the process of death. For infernals, abyssal travel is difficult and labor-intensive, and non-native planes can be physically uncomfortable. It is still possible for infernals to traverse the planes, but each transfer must be taken individually, and travel is largely relegated to rare instances of permanent relocation. Goods can be moved somewhat easier, though many of the same restrictions apply, and infernal governance being what it is, there’s a severe lack of the infrastructure that would allow rapid transit of those goods.

Communication between the hells is much easier: the infernals simply use infernoscopes, in a similar method to how the same technology is used on Aerb. Because the lower hells are difficult to see using an infernoscope on Aerb, much of what’s known about the lower hells comes from using terrestrial infernoscopes to watch abyssal infernoscopes.

[Juniper’s Notes: Obviously the hells aren’t great. They also seem like complete overkill to me, given that a single monolithic hell would be just as terrifying and seems like it would serve the same purpose. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, thinking about the worldbuilding instead of the people down there, but the worldbuilding … well, I can’t say that I get it, if there’s anything to get. A lot of what I read of the hells marks them as being something like I would come up with, but nine thousand is more variety than I’d think you’d ever need unless you were just throwing off a big number. Also, there’s the obvious ‘over nine thousand’ meme, but I’m hoping that Aerb is built a little more solidly than that.]

*Extracted text ends here.*

## History

***I could see the air quotes out of the corner of my eye.***

*The following is an extract from* Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb*.*

### Prehistory

It’s commonly accepted that the world began in 30,000 BE, though there are a handful of historical records that claim much different dates, some more authoritative than others. Among entities that claim to have been present at (roughly) the start of prehistory:

* The gods all claim to have “arrived” around 30,000 BE, though they refuse to say where they had been before that time. Invreizen describes Aerb as being “thawed out”, Karakter describes it as a “fracture”, Skaduwee says “a lightening”, Aarde refers to it as a “mudslide”, and Truuk has never told the same story twice. These variable descriptions are difficult to reconcile with each other, though it’s possible that they arrived in different places on Aerb, or perhaps came at different times.
* The three eldest dragons all claim to be roughly thirty millennia old, and all describe Aerb as a place constantly in motion, with sweeping changes on a weekly basis, sometimes with mountains appearing from nothing. Shadowfang’s theory is that the world of Aerb was “pieced together” from other worlds, but she offers no suggestions on the mechanism for this to have happened, nor for the source of these other worlds, nor does she have any evidence besides what she saw with her own eyes.
* The earliest memories of the renacim date to approximately 30,000 BE, and reveal much of early efforts of the mortal species to civilize, as well as the various monsters that prevented much in the way of that happening for thousands of years.
* The elves claim that Celestar has its own history distinct from that of Aerb, and that Aerb “appeared” one day as a round jewel in the sky. That said, there were thousands of years between elven accounts of the appearance of Aerb and the first successful attempts at traveling there, and the history of Celestar is considered suspect, as much of it was written by those who emigrated from it.
* The city of Cidium claims to have existed in perpetuity, not just thirty thousand years old, but *millions* of years old, if not billions, or, at the extreme end of claims, without end. This would be easy to dismiss as impossible if not for several sources of independent corroboration.
* Demons and devils have been, predictably, unhelpful, but their estimates of the age of Aerb do sometimes conform to the standard thinking on the matter.

[Juniper’s Notes: Aerb kind of looks like it was literally hacked together from bits and pieces while the simulation was running, which I guess is as good a creation story as you could ask for. But it’s kind of funny, since a lot of the speciation is consistent with longer time spans. They don’t really have genetics on Aerb, at least, not yet, but you can take a look at the differences between island populations and see that logically, this group of finches is consistent with having a common ancestor with this other group of finches. There’s a similar thing for plate tectonics, where a lot of the geography follows the rules, but there’s not enough time for it to have happened in if you accept the ~30,000 BE start date. So I don’t know what’s really going on here, and none of my theories really illuminate anything, nor are they testable. I assume that “everything hacked together from different sources” is commentary rather than literally what happened, but that’s a matter of theology.]

### Pre-Imperial Era

The First Empire was erroneously named, because there were many empires before it, though none quite so large or successful. The history of Aerb prior to the First Empire is one of civilizations rising and falling, each time leaving behind a little of themselves. As most varieties of magic require extensive education, which in turn requires large civic support structures, most of these large-scale nations and small-scale empires were supported by magic in one way or another until their collapse, which typically took working knowledge of the magic with them. While many of the great nations were felled by internal structural factors, there were also occasionally outside factors in play, typically monstrous but occasionally as a consequence of the magics being used to sustain the large civilization.

The origins of the athenaeums lie in this rising and falling action that preceded the First Empire. From time to time, a crumbling nation or empire would be able to maintain a single city-state that was able to weather the civic collapse of the rest of the nation. These city-states typically remained as centers of learning and knowledge, with the most accomplished mages often sitting at the top of the power structures. These proto-athenaeums didn’t always last, but those that did carved out a place for themselves that could weather the centuries of political change and plan for different contingencies, making them some of the most resilient organizations on Aerb for their time.

It’s sometimes theorized that even without Uther Penndraig, Aerb might have been heading for a revolution anyway. The majority of the athenaeums had been founded and were firmly entrenched, a number of “enabling” entads had either been created or were soon on the horizon, and the “two steps forward, one step back” path that civilization had been on was heading toward technologies that would help to stabilize civilization and better ensure that the single step back wasn’t so catastrophic.

[Juniper’s Notes: Interesting that so many people think that Uther was just a cog in the machine of history. I mean, he clearly wasn’t just that, but it seems like he was set up so that was a plausible excuse for at least some of his successes. Aerb doesn’t have the long history of stagnation that some fantasy worlds have. Kind of curious how much of the ebb and flow was DM machinations, and how much is just how histories work; it calls to mind the fall of the Roman Empire, fall of the Ottoman Empire, et cetera?]

### The First Empire

Following his defeat of the Dark King (a minor emperor in his own right), Uther Penndraig began making overtures of cooperation to the kingdoms surrounding Anglecynn, some of which had been under the Dark King’s control. The Meeting of the Seventeen Swords established a pact of mutual protection, trade, and cooperation that would quickly lead to the formation of the First Empire, with Uther at its head as the Secretary General. Following the adoption of Uther’s new calendar, this would become 0 FE. The First Empire committed enormous resources to its own improvement, partly in the form of education, partly in research and development (a process that had been created from whole cloth by Uther), and partly in new social, cultural, and physical infrastructures that would allow the empire to knit itself ever more tightly.

Uther’s inventions are often overshadowed by his other feats, but the wood-burning steam engine and the moveable type printing press were the two primary innovations that set the foundation for the next hundred years of the First Empire. The spread of Anglish as the common tongue was controversial at the time, but helped enormously by the flood of incredibly cheap books into foreign cities. More than that, Uther seemed to have an endless supply of stories, and even after he went missing, his pamphlet stories kept landing by the bale in the major cities of the Empire.

Wherever he went, Uther sought to revitalize and reform, and the oft-heard term ‘Penndraig reforms’ refers to any of hundreds of different schemes, some of them on the level of the empire, others in less grand arenas, like mail systems or bureaucratic codes. In general terms, the Penndraig reforms were focused on making things “efficient, consistent, and redundant”, meaning that they would produce the most possible with the least resources, they would hardly ever fail, and when they did fail, they could be easily repaired or replaced.

As another point of order, the exclusionary principle started around the time Uther first came on the scene and somewhat marred the First Empire, both in the way it occasionally removed useful magic from availability, and in how it negatively impacted the involved economies (both in terms of the land/infrastructure/resources/people it removed from the hexal market, and in the magics that were made unusable anywhere else).

### First Interimperium

There is some debate over whether Uther was the lynchpin of the First Empire by design, negligence, or necessity, but in the wake of his disappearance in 30 FE, it became clear that the First Empire wouldn’t outlive him for long. Part of the problem was the short-sightedness of his sons and their near-war with each other over control of Anglecynn, which had calamitous effects on the rest of the Empire, namely in how they attempted to hold their resources hostage or extract capital from goods and services that had once been held in common trust. This began a cycle of withdrawals from imperial agreements and escalating tensions between the various polities of the Empire, which eventually led to the Imperial Remnants period circa 48 FE, marked largely by small groups of polities holding each other as close allies, typically in open hostilities with other groups (and usually grouped according to species similarity or shared cultural values).

It wasn’t quite a period of complete regression. The athenaeums held strong, weathering the imperial collapse as they’d done in the past, and most now abiding by the cooperation agreements that Uther had set in place. They were also acting under (most of) the Penndraig reforms, which proved a boon to their continued operations. Similarly, a number of initiatives started under the First Empire continued in modified or partial form after its collapse, either under the directives of individual polities, through amended agreements, or by individual actors. Notably among those were the railway systems, the Draconic Accords, international mail, and the vast increase in literacy (much of it focused on the Anglish language, which continued to cement itself as the lingua franca of Aerb).

While culture was generally regressive during this time, as nationalist ideologies clawed back territory, many of the measures that Uther had put in place began to take hold, bringing the major centers of population into greater conformity with Utherian ideals of cooperation and understanding. Similarly, technology was able to progress, largely as a result of Utherian advancements being percolated out into the rest of Aerb.

In some respects, the first interimperium was gentler than the second and more famous period that would follow the Second Empire, but it was still a time of calamitous changes, even if some of that was regression toward what had been before. Popular among amateur historians is the idea of a Great Snapback, as though the world had been pushed out of shape against tension and was destructively returning to its old form, but the truth is more complex, as many of the problems of the interimperium cannot be attributed to Uther ‘pushing things out of shape’, but rather, to the greater interconnectedness of the world, to advances in technology and magecraft, and to changes in social structures. It is likely that the Internecine Wars and the attendant loss of life would have happened regardless of whether there had ever been a First Empire; they would simply have been between dissociated polities rather than former imperial members.

### The Second Empire

The rise of the Second Empire happened largely as a result of the discovery of the bulk teleportation spell, which made organized warfare between countries much more deadly while at the same time greatly lubricating the frictions of trade. The Athenaeum of Barriers was put to work fortifying cities against attack by bulk teleportation as best as possible, and pacts of mutual defense and/or teleportation-in-warfare bans were put into place, which, along with trade agreements and enforcement mechanisms, formed the basis for the rise of the Second Empire and its eventually legal formation in 176 FE.

Ideologically, the Second Empire took quite a bit from the writings and thinking of Uther Penndraig, usually taking them a step further or showing less in the way of restraint. Uther had worked to demystify any number of phenomena, and beyond that, spent a great deal of his time challenging stagnant or corrupt institutions, along with those traditions and practices he considered “barbaric”. The Second Empire put funds and personnel into full unification of Aerb, sometimes at swordpoint when there were disagreements with rulers who sought to have their nation stand as a pillar of independence.

Soul magic provided the backbone of imperial power, and skilled soul mages stood as force multipliers in both military and political realms. Soul mages were used to enact bloodless coups where possible, as well as produce a variety of soul-manipulated creatures that served various utility and combat roles. One unfortunate feature of soul magic is that the soul is resistant to change and will regress toward the mean unless manipulated extremely carefully over a long period of time; this feature meant that it was more economical and logistically simple to consolidate power in a single place so that soul mages wouldn’t have to be constantly on the move, refreshing their manipulated subjects. This consolidation of power and soul mages helps to explain why so many important people were in Lankwon when it became an exclusion zone.

Scientific research in the Second Empire was conducted with a fevered intensity. Some of these efforts bore fruit, increasing scientific understanding, especially in regards to the various schools of magic, but many simply resulted in wasted resources, events that would later be deemed atrocities, and the creation of new exclusion zones. Beyond that, the Second Empire’s general defiance of conventional wisdom and lack of respect for established institutions and traditions resulted in a number of high-profile failures when those institutions and traditions turned out to have served some useful function after all.

The action of the exclusionary principle engulfed Lankwon, the Imperial City, in 324 FE despite the best efforts to prevent such a thing (research bans within 500 miles, restrictions on entad creation within 300 miles), and the nature of the calamity was such that there was a near-total decapitation of imperial leadership. This came at a time of heavy criticism of the empire and its various failures and a strong counter-imperial movement, effectively bringing about a swift end to the Second Empire (which was arguably on its way out anyway as its various mechanisms of cohesion and economic prosperity had been coming undone). Counter-imperialists began purges in a large number of member polities, sometimes trying people for post facto crimes and other times swiftly executing the opposition.

Special note must be made of the many deaths during the Second Imperial period. Some were a result of imperial “misadventures”, some were intentional extermination campaigns, and others came in the wake of imperial fracture. Hexal population was approximately seventeen billion at the time the Second Empire was founded, but dropped to ten billion at the time Manifest took the Imperial City. Imperial supporters will point out that much of this century-long drop can be attributed not to malice or incompetence, but rather disease, increased prophylaxis, and a deliberate attempt to curb birth-rates of the most populous species following projected labor surpluses.

[Juniper’s Notes: It’s pretty interesting to think that a bunch of the people who were in the Second Empire are still around, given how long-lived some of the species are on Aerb. Hells, some of them were around for Uther’s time too. I guess the word I would use is “complicity”, and there seems to be an awful lot of it going around in that time period. I’m sure that it was just like the Nazis, which the Second Empire is kind of sort of patterned on; a lot of people would say that they were just pressured, or trying to work within the system, or that they were secretly double agents when really they were just trying to play the odds. Then you’ve got institutions like the athenaeums, which actively worked with the Second Empire, a fact that usually gets swept under the rug or attributed to a period of bad leadership. Hard to know how much everyone knew and who was actually buying into some of the more reprehensible shit they got up to.

I should note I’m also giving the whole thing with Manifest the stink eye, because it looks more like DM intervention than exclusions usually do.]

### Second Interimperium

In the same way that the First Empire gave way to a wave of reactionary nationalism, the Second Empire gave way to regressive, conservative, and isolationist sentiment, especially as the counter-imperialists were (largely) the ones to take up the reins in the wake of the Second Empire’s dramatic fall. Soul magic was seen as one of the culprits for the Second Empire’s various crimes, and as a consequence, tended to be tightly regulated if not outright banned.

Where the collapse of the First Empire still saw some advancements from the systems that had been put in place, the collapse of the Second Empire left very little of worth behind, not least because virtually no effort had been put into proofing against collapse or maintaining strongly decentralized systems.

As generational churn was putting some of the weight of that era in the past, two developments naturally led to a more strongly united Aerb, in spite of the remaining counter-imperial sentiment. The first was the creation of the teleportation keys through forge frenzy in 389 FE, while the second was the development of radio technologies in 413 FE. The keys in particular were a boon to the nascent empire, given that they were auctioned off in such a way as to be somewhat evenly distributed among the soon-to-be member nations. With those technologies in place, increased communication and cooperation was nearly a given, and after some initial growing pains, many of those in power began once again talking about having a true international community.

### The Empire of Common Cause

The Empire of Common Cause formed at a glacial pace in comparison to its forerunners, being termed an “empire” three full decades after the initial cooperative agreements were in place, and a decade before the Articles of Empire which created the modern governmental structure were signed. The initial “core” of the Empire of Common Cause was seventeen member nations who entered into mutual trade, immigration, and defense agreements. The athenaeums were principled supporters of the early empire, in part because of remaining imperial sentiment there (the athenaeums having not been hit quite as hard by the purges and general violence that marked the second interimperium), and in part because of a need to be able to exert influence beyond their city-states.

Another factor in the rise of the Empire of Common Cause was the falling birth rates around the hex, most of which was due to the policies that had been implemented by the Second Empire. Advances in technology had increased food production and multiplied the effects of labor, which helped lead to greatly increased urbanization as the agricultural labor force moved into the cities, sometimes in protest.

Originally developed as a joint economic zone, the Empire of Common Cause expanded with every passing year, not just inducting new members, but instituting new laws and expanding its purview. In theory, every member polity flew its own flag and abided by its own laws, but the gradual creep of power and responsibility has allowed that principle to go to the wayside. Much ado is still made about sovereignty in the face of exercises of imperial power, but the risk of censure silences all but the most egregious offenses.

[Amaryllis’ Notes: “Utterly dysfunctional” is a pretty apt description of the Empire of Common Cause, which is largely a result of the aftershocks of the Second Empire and unchecked diseases in the underpinnings of imperial law. Of course, there’s no fixing it without consensus from the entire Empire, which is never going to happen, so we’re stuck with what we have. Frighteningly, this might be the best possible Empire we could ever have achieved without someone going on an extensive conquering spree. Let us be thankful that there are islands of competence and utility hidden within the sea of bureaucracy and waste.]

[Juniper’s Notes: The phrase ‘member polity’ shows up a lot in discussions of the Empire of Common Cause, which threw me for a loop at first, since ‘member nation’ is what the UN uses. As it turns out, ‘nation’ has connotations of ethnocultural unity that, apparently, some people really don’t like, mostly because their polity isn’t homogenous. Similarly, ‘state’ doesn’t accurately describe some of the polities, who have weirdo layered governments or oddball politics. So I guess ‘polity’ is the catch-all that everyone has settled on, even though the default in the modern era is nation-states, similar to on Earth.]

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