The world is a scary place. Outside the geomantically-protected cities, there are dangerous monsters everywhere, in the finest JRPG tradition. Dealing with them is a fact of life (and spirit mages often find themselves set to that task, one way or another). There are three continents. There is contact and trade between them, but not huge amounts, and what exists is slow: the best form of intercontinental travel is the sailing ship, and the pelagic zones of the ocean are infested with super-powerful monsters, so safe routes of travel are often very roundabout and indirect.
Nivveas, often thought to be where humanity originated, is dominated by the massive, millennia-old
Empire of Nivveas. The Nivveans view themselves as the only civilization worthy of the name. The Imperial capital,
Kharan, is indisputably the largest and wealthiest city in the world.
The Empire is stable in the sense that there's no external force remotely capable of threatening it. Its internal politics, however, are complicated and fractious. There are three distinct power structures in Nivveas, all of them with extensive governmental powers and prerogatives, bound up in dizzyingly byzantine intrigues:
- The bureaucratic civil service, which acquires its members through competitive examination, and which administrates and regulates the Empire;
- The great corporations, which are state-backed and largely monopolistic in their various spheres of commerce, and which own a staggering amount of the land; and
- The military, which comprises a large number of mostly-independent martial fraternities and knightly orders, bound together by a baroque hierarchy of prestige and fealty. (Often, a military order is associated with some specific form of magic, and seeks out young teenagers who have just manifested that kind of magic for recruitment.)
(It should be noted that the civil service and the corporations maintain their own armed "security forces.")
The Emperor or Empress notionally has executive command over everything. In practice, this mostly means that supreme power goes back and forth amongst the three "branches of government," because -- by law and custom -- the Imperium rotates between them. The current Empress,
Archelada Serafin, was formerly the President of the Dazzling Smile Corporation, and when she dies or retires, she will be succeeded by the grandmaster of one of the military orders.
On the fringes of the continent of Nivveas, and in the jungles and mountains, various independent nomadic peoples and small kingdoms maintain a precariously independent existence. Border wars are constant.
Morleas, the largest continent, is currently divided up between eight different sovereign nations and assorted city-states. Never unified as Nivveas has been since time immemorial, their history is defined by the shifts in wars, alliances, and rivalries. Fifty years ago, the three strongest nations of central Morleas -- Fatharol, Borlion, and Gavis -- formed an aggressive military alliance called the
League of Chivalry and began seizing vulnerable territory. The League's wars were notionally religious in motivation; prophets of all three nation's deities were calling for various sacred treasures and holy sites to be reclaimed, for various blasphemies to be avenged, and so on. Many commentators at the time purported that the League's real purposes were far more worldly, and many historians have supported that contention.
This prompted the formation of two defensive coalitions against them: to the south, the mercantile nations of Drovos, Caruva, and Lorania formed the
Republican Entente, and to the north and east, the massive Vespalonia and its much weaker neighbor Omone announced the
Vespalonian Pact. The League wasn't well-prepared to face powerful unified enemies on two fronts, and it floundered for a few years, until its ambitions met a decisive end when the Church of Borlion collapsed in a nasty violent schism. That having happened, the "Morlean tripod" remained mostly stable for a few decades, during which period the continent rebuilt from the wars and returned to something like its former level of prosperity.
The equilibrium ended when a man named
Pilpyas came to power in Omone. Pilpyas was a phenomenally-powerful spirit mage of an unknown kind, with versatile and far-reaching mind-control magics. He renamed the country to the Grand Duchy of Omonezh, and -- with extensive use of mind-control on his own people, especially the military and economic elites -- rebuilt his nation along efficient, collectivist, militaristic lines. This project took about a decade, and the rest of Morleas eyed it with some trepidation and loathing, but did not interfere. He then turned his attention outward, and his armies swept forth to seize every scrap of land to which Omonezh had the barest historical claim, primarily within the League of Chivalry's conquered lands, but also some of the northern reaches of Lorania.
Many assumed that in the face of such blatant aggression, and such disturbing magics, Vespalonia would abandon its longstanding ally. It did not. With Vespalonian power protecting it from counterattack, the Grand Duchy annexed its way to its greatest historical extent before stopping to consolidate. It has been most of a decade since then, but nobody thinks the Grand Duke's appetite for conquest has been satisfied.
Zareas is, by far, the least-populated of the three continents. While it is rich in mineral wealth and exotic plant life and other natural bounties, its ley lines are poor, and the monsters who dwell there are generally much more dangerous than those on Nivveas or Morleas. Most of the settlements on Zareas can be found along or near the northern coastlines, especially in the northeast, where the climate is mostly tropical. There are many such settlements, most of them very small; the anemic Zarean geomancy makes it difficult for cities to expand.
Vindar, where the quest takes place, is one of the largest towns on the entire continent.
These settlements fall into a few categories. There are lawless towns, hives of scum and villainy -- often run by local crime families or syndicates -- that cater to prospectors, pirates, monster-hunters, treasure-hunters, and other kinds of fringe figures (ex. Skintown, Port Laughter, Northwick). There are settlements founded as utopian communities by religious or political movements, some of which retain their intended character as the years pass, and some of which don't (ex. New Hayera, Alleluia, Axtempo). And in recent years, more and more, there are resource-extraction outposts of Nivvean megacorps, often built around plantations or factories.
Zareas is, of course, famous for its ruins. These come in two general types.
There are the "recent ruins" (some of them thousands of years old), which are the derelict abandoned shells of failed settlements built by Nivvean and Morlean colonists over the years. There are a lot of these, and they often contain surprising treasure troves, especially for those who value historical lore. Obviously, they are mostly to be found in the north.
Then there are the "ancient ruins," the bizarre stone cities and temples constructed by an unknown people generally referred to as the "indigenous Zareans" (which they may or may not have actually been). These ruins can be found all over the continent. They are incredibly old; some of them are believed to have been inhabited centuries or millennia before the founding of the Nivvean Empire. Very little is known about the people who fashioned them. The "indigenous Zareans" seem to have written extensively, which is to say, they left lengthy inscriptions on many of the things they built -- but their language does not appear to be related to any known in the modern day, and their script has proven impenetrable thus far. The "ancient ruins" are also bafflingly resistant to mnemonism and other forms of divinatory/investigative magic.
