Age of Ruin

The Age of Light was the first age after The Awakening. Taking place about 3.2 billion years after the forming of the planet, **-800 AB** to **1 AB** on the Aves Belief Calendar OR between the year **2,400** to **3,199** on the core timeline.

Surface world population near end of the age: 140 million

## Themes

#### Chronicle

Waste Age, Lost Age, Rise of the Moon, Lodestone Age

#### Storytelling

Core central themes to use in campaign building or storytelling. The ideas that I believe are key to what I want each Age to explore and reflect to the audience.

* How descendants, and eventually the entire universe, reckons with a man's legacy. Historical consequence.
* Equivalent Exchange; Something cannot be gained without giving something up.
* The perspective of sacrifice. *Example: if a cat must be sacrificed for power, who determines the value of that sacrifice and what power it gives? The person who is sacrificing the cat? The cat's value on its own life? The value of the life to the deities of the world?*
* Partnership and selfishness. The need for the first, the motivation of the latter.
* How do individuals deal with sin when it enters their life suddenly? Why do they react this way?
* Don't let your personal demons destroy your loved ones.

*(Dune, Fullmetal Alchemist, The Last of Us, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Shining)*

#### Aesthetics

*Islamic-inspired architecture, east orthodoxy, Celtic art, Romanesque, Gothic, Carolingian Renaissance, Heavenly mosaics*

## Key Events

* The creation of the moon causes the world's rotation to align with it's orbit around the three sols, causing half the world to burn as the other froze. The humans, responsible for this calamity, benefited by occupying the small band of survival environment along the equator.
* Populations are in heavy decline and races become more separated and independent. With half the world in a sever ice age and the other half a scorching wasteland the non-human races adapt by tunneling below the surface or innovating ways to survive in the harsh surface conditions. Overall they grow stronger in this hardship.
* While the other races struggled to survive the humans grew arrogant. Forming a faith around the worship of their moon goddess they summoned a great hurricane with their civilization safely at its center.
* After nearly a hundred years the magic storm fades revealing an army of assembled sol races in a surprise strike against the human empire.
* The No'Qi first appear.
* The lazuli begin to awaken upon finding their "partners".
* The roden create bronze automatons known as Lodestars to protect innocent civilians during the fight against the humans.
* The human empire is defeated, gathered up, and marched down to Deneb's Rest to await exile in the Great Below.
* Using the light of the moon one last time to defeat the armies from below, the humans are sent down the same opening the invading army came from.
* Before the humans descend the lazuli use their power to shatter the moon, which restores the world to its rotation but at the cost of tearing the great continent apart.

## Timeline

This timeline uses the common calendar of the Aves Belief (AB) and places its year 1 at the start of the fifth age, the Age of Discovery (3,200 years after the start of recorded history). This is the first year following the destruction of the moon, the exile of the human empire, and the breaking apart of the old world into the new.

*Circa -800 AB to 1 AB*

* **-800 AB**
	+ **Dawn of the Age of Ruin:**
* **1 AB**
	+ **Dawn of the Age of Discovery:**