Dev Journal #27: The World of Elemental

You’ve loaded up the game, created your sovereign and started playing. You are alone. Well, kind of alone. There’s lots of monsters and goodie huts. The question is, why?

Today, I want to give you a bit of a lore dump. Why is the world filled with bandits and ruffians at the start? Why can you only found cities in a few areas? The answer requires us to go back thousands of years..

The First Age: The Age of the Magi

Before the first kingdoms, before the first armies, there was Ereog.

Ereog was the second son of a chieftain named Hallas, and by all accounts, he was useless at everything his father valued. Things like war, leadership, administration. He was, however, obsessed with something no one else had thought much about: how magic worked. Not just that it worked. Why.

At this point in Elemental’s history, the world was filled with Magic. The best analogy I can think of is the book series called Xanth. Everyone could use magic. It was everywhere. But why?

While his brothers prepared for battle, Ereog was out in the wilderness studying the world. When his father was killed and the survivors of his clan were hunted through the forests, Ereog was the one who emerged with actual answers. He had spent years in exile learning to channel the raw magical energy that suffuses the world, and he used that knowledge to strike back against Az-Adora, the Dark Prince who had destroyed his city.

Ereog was the first of what would be latter called The Magi. There’s a lot more to his history, such as the Padars and those who worshipped the Elemental Lords, but the point was that Ereog was the first who made the study of magic a rigorous endeavor.

The Magi who came after Ereog built something genuinely remarkable. Kingdoms like Athica, Zabril, Hallas, and Neshin rose to heights of art, architecture, and magical achievement that haven't been matched since. The Aivernach carved tunnel systems through entire mountain ranges. The Illuna built libraries containing the sum of human knowledge.

But the Magi did something foolish. They built The Forge of Overlord. This forge is a recurring quest goal in the Elemental games because it allows the crafting of immensely powerful magical items.

The Forge of Making was a structure of such immense magical power that its creation echoed across the cosmos. The Magic were proud of it. It was a great achievement.

It was also a beacon.

Fundamentally, while Ereog and the Magi understood magic, they didn’t really consider the source of it. And that others might be interested in it.

The Second Age: The Age of the Titans

The Titans (called the Dred'nir in older texts) weren't from Elemental. They were drawn here by the Forge's power, crossing from their own world seeking the source of what they sensed. When they arrived, mankind's age of glory ended essentially overnight.

Not all of the Titans were monsters. Pariden, the first to arrive, presided over what survivors later called a golden age -- an era of genuine flourishing, of exploration, of Titans and men learning from each other. Pariden treated the people of Elemental as something worth knowing.

Then Curgen murdered him.

Curgen is the shadow that falls over the entire Second Age. He built the greatest empire the world had ever seen: The Imperium. With its fortress network, its slave races, and its dungeons.

Here’s a secret that few players realize: The Titans made the various races of Elemental. Before the Titans there were only Men, Dragons and the Quendar who were in-between. There were no Urxen, Trogs, Darklings, Mites, Trolls, etc. The Titans made them.

One can imagine an entire game based on creating fantasy races. The Titans got to play that game. And the first player would have been Curgen.

He shaped the Quendar, the Urxen, and the Trog from raw magic, creating entire peoples designed to serve him. He carved the Pit of Lost Voices from black obsidian, where thousands of "imperfect" experiments were destroyed. He turned the Titan Tar-Thela into a tool, binding her essence to his will.

And yet even Curgen fell.

His former ally, the Titan Kir-Tion once freed from Curgen's influence after discovering spells hidden in the ruins of Al-Ashteroth rose against him. Their war lasted years and ended in the kind of violence that leaves scars in the landscape for centuries. The battlefield where it concluded is still identifiable today: twisted rock formations and craters that no natural force could explain.

Throughout all this, the world’s magic was being bottled up. The various magical shards that players see in Elemental were not always there. The Titans made them. They took the magic of the world and trapped it within these shards, depriving the Magi of their primary source of power.

For a time, only the Titans and their minions could use magic because they controlled the Elemental Shards.

Then came the Cataclysm.

There are different accounts on what triggered it. Some say it was the last gasp of the Magi fighting against the Titans. Others say that the first Channelers rising up and triggering a climatic battle. Still others claim that it was a battle between Tandis the Arnor and Kir-Tion triggered it. I really am not sure.

Nobody alive remembers exactly what caused it. What we know: oceans appeared where mountains stood. Entire continents split. The Pit of Lost Voices was sealed and foul things were trapped inside it. Most of what had built over the First Age was simply gone. The greatest libraries: ash. The bridge networks of Neshin: rubble. Athica, the greatest city of men: swamp.

The few survivors called what followed "the Eternal March" – a desperate journey west by the remnants of the armies of men, led by Procipinee (the only surviving member of the royal family), searching for somewhere to rebuild.

The Third Age: The Age of the Channelers

This is where you come in.

The Third Age (our age) is called the Age of the Channelers because the Titans are gone, and what's left are the mortals who learned to harness the power of the Elemental Shards: physical crystals containing concentrated magical energy, created by the Titans from the raw essence that flows through the world.

The Channelers are sovereigns, magi, and champions who can tap into that power. Well, provided they control the territory around a shard. They're the most powerful figures alive. And "most powerful alive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the world looks like this:

• No central authority

• Ten factions competing for land, resources, and survival

• Ruins of two previous civilizations scattered across every landscape

• Former slave races (the Quendar, Urxen, Trog) now running empires of their own in the East

• Monster lairs filling territory that used to be farmland

• Ancient wards and magical protections failing, twisted, or simply gone

The game takes place roughly a century after the Cataclysm. Long enough that new kingdoms have formed. Not long enough that anyone's forgotten what was lost.

Queen Procipinee of New Pariden is two centuries old and still ruling; her channeling ability has kept her alive and has literally restored life to dead land around her capital. Lord Relias of Altar built his kingdom from the ruins of the Athican Empire. General Carrodus of Capitar is nearing seventy and still fighting alongside his troops.

And somewhere in the East, in ancient Imperium, Magnar III: the oldest of the Fallen who stood at Curgen's side when that empire was built and has spent a century gathering power and conducting experiments that reportedly surpass his former master's "in cruelty and dark imagination."

This is a world, a universe, that I’ve spent much of my adult life working with in various forms. If you have any thoughts or questions, please share them below.