Introduction
The Campaign world is one undergoing a slow awakening from a
thousand-year dark age. In the civilized lands the technology,
such as it is, is early midieval. Other lands remain
hunter-gatherer. Many legends worldwide speak of a distant past
of great, glittering empires. Most people regard such tales as
faerie-stories or fables whose moral lessons concern either magical
temptations (viewed as ultimately destructive) or the perils of
overreaching and upsetting the natural order. However, the few
who are deeply educated or well-traveled have seen things that the old
empires left behind. They have read the dessicated, yellowed
parchments, seen the silt-filled artificial harbors or walked the
cunningly fitted foundation stones of ancient cities and know them to
be the works of a great civilization of men. But of those who
know this truth, even fewer suspect the multiple cycles of empire,
collapse, and renewal that shaped the world -- nor guess at the era of
the Elves at a time before Men.
The practical, campaign consequences of this setting are many.
Foremost, magic ("arcanum") is almost universally regarded as taboo and
practitioners are regarded with suspicion at best, hostility more
often. Magical knowledge is not generally available nor
promulgated. Consequently, the populations of Pure and Hybrid
character classes are extremely low. Semi-spell-user classes
often have no spell knowledge at all, and the few that do tend to
disguise or deny the fact that any magic is being employed. The
standard of living endured by the common man under early-midieval tech
and with no magical relief can be guessed at.
Magic, then, is dabbled in by rigorously secretive guilds or by adept
loners who take few (if any) apprentices. Even among these highly
isolated, often ostracized bubbles of talent, the real level of
spell-list knowledge varies widely. The brutish nature of the
wide world usually snuffs out the nascent spellcaster before he can
develop the cooperative relationships with other adepts that would
build knowledge and help one another survive. In such a world, a
group of novices that can tap into a fount of old, unspoilt knowledge
would have a powerful lever that could move nations. If they can
live long enough to master that knowledge, that is.
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