History of Edenn

The ages of the world as Ironport's scholars tell them.

1. Pre-history, more than 10,000 years ago

   The Primordial Era

   The Age of Chaos

   Andala was a single great landmass dominated by the Elemental Primordials of air, earth, fire and water. There were no gods, only elemental chaos. Mortals were scarce, hiding in caves or hunted by elementals.

   The Primordial Betrayal: the first Archfey offered to save mortals. Rather than kill the Primordials, they imprisoned them, using the Leylines as shackles, and bound that infinite power into a separate, similar realm: the Feywild. The chaotic elements calmed, and life flourished.

2. About 10,000 to 6,000 years ago

   The Age of Divinity

   The Arrival

   With the Primordials silenced, the gods manifested and descended to the peaks of Mount Celestia. Bahamut brought law to the chaotic tribes, Dura taught them to farm the newly fertile earth, and Asgorath showed them the threads of magic that held the world together.

   Under divine tutelage, mortals built the first civilization, the Ancients: vast cities of marble and gold, and magic of a potency never seen since. They did not need machines; they shaped reality with words.

3. About 6,000 to 2,500 years ago

   The Golden Age of Arcanum

   The Hubris

   Over millennia the Ancients grew arrogant, seeing the gods not as parents but as gatekeepers.

   The Shattering: the ruling magi of the Ancients raised the Spire of Ascension and tried to force open the gates of Mount Celestia with the power of the shackled Primordials. The Leyline Lattice snapped. The continent fractured, the oceans filled the Bronze Expanse, and the debris of the world was hurled into the sky to become the skylands. The Ancients' civilization was wiped out in an instant.

4. About 2,500 to 1,487 years ago

   The Age of Silence

   The Long Dark

   A millennium of regression and terror. Drifting islands crashed from the sky, and magic was feared and blamed for the destruction of the world.

   Humanity was reduced to scattered tribes hiding in the Ancients' ruins, fighting to survive a flood of horrors from the magical fallout: aberrations, devils, demons, elementals and rogue constructs left behind by their dead masters.

5. Year 1 to the present, 1487

   The Age of Restoration

   The current era

   The Anchoring (Year 1): after a thousand years of darkness, the warlord Hadrin the Unbound united the coastal tribes. His engineers melted down the indestructible alloys of the Ancients and forged the Great Chain, then launched it to snare the drifting skyland of Unus and anchor it to the earth. The act steadied the region's weather and gave Ironport its foundation.

   The Dynastic Shift (Year 350): the original royal line grew weak and complacent. After a civil war known as the Iron War, House Dederic, a noble military family, took the throne. Its line has ruled ever since.