Ages

Vareth’s recorded history is divided into four major Ages.

These divisions are retrospective. People living through an Age do not necessarily recognize that a new historical period has begun. Later scholars establish the boundaries by identifying changes large enough to alter the political, economic, military, or social structure of the continent.

The year count does not reset between Ages.

Age of Foundations

The Age of Foundations begins with AF 1.

It is the period in which Vareth’s increasingly connected regions develop durable continental systems.

Long-distance roads become dependable enough to outlive individual rulers. Trade regularly crosses multiple borders. States develop agreements governing merchants, claims, travelers, diplomacy, and shared routes. Major kingdoms, holds, leagues, and other lasting powers consolidate.

Records from distant regions become increasingly comparable, allowing a continuous continental chronology to emerge.

The Age is not peaceful. Many of the institutions that define it are established through conquest, rivalry, negotiation, and major interstate wars.

The Age ends when these systems are no longer new. The connected political order has become established, and the great powers that grew within it begin dominating continental affairs.

Age of Realms

The Age of Realms is the height of the old continental order.

Large kingdoms, leagues, holds, and regional powers become wealthier, more organized, and more capable of projecting power far beyond their immediate borders.

Trade networks expand. Roads and ports support large-scale commerce. Diplomatic alliances become increasingly complex. Professional armies, magical institutions, religious authorities, merchant interests, and long-lived dynasties shape relations between states.

Wars become larger because the realms fighting them possess greater populations, resources, infrastructure, and magical capability than the powers of earlier centuries.

Demonology also becomes increasingly practiced in parts of Vareth, despite its dangers and the restrictions placed upon it by many states.

The Age ends when conflict between the great powers grows into a continental war that the existing political order cannot contain.

Age of Sundering

The Age of Sundering begins with the Great War.

Major powers across Vareth are drawn into a conflict that exceeds the scale of earlier interstate wars. Alliances expand, old rivalries intensify, and warfare spreads across multiple regions at once.

As the war becomes increasingly destructive, some powers turn to more dangerous forms of magic.

Demonology is militarized on an unprecedented scale.

Repeated summoning and increasingly powerful rituals eventually tear open lasting rifts through which demons enter Vareth independently of mortal control.

The Great War becomes a struggle for survival.

Former enemies fight against organized demonic forces that threaten every people and territory they encounter. Dragons and wyrms are drawn into the conflict because their own domains and survival are threatened.

The destruction is immense.

Entire dragonflights are lost. Dragon populations collapse to a small fraction of their former numbers.

Every surviving wyrm population is destroyed during the conflict, ending a lineage that had existed in Vareth since before dragons or mortal peoples.

The old continental political order also breaks apart. Kingdoms fall, cities are destroyed, populations are displaced, roads and trade networks collapse, and institutions that had survived for centuries disappear.

The major rifts are eventually closed and the demonic invasion is broken, but Vareth emerges fundamentally changed.

Age of Crowns

The Age of Crowns begins in the aftermath of the Sundering.

The surviving peoples inherit a continent filled with ruined states, abandoned settlements, broken infrastructure, displaced populations, and enormous areas whose former political claims can no longer be enforced.

New kingdoms, holds, leagues, cities, and regional powers emerge from the survivors.

Some restore older institutions. Others are founded by refugees, military commands, merchants, surviving dynasties, frontier communities, or populations that gained independence during the collapse.

Starfall Reach becomes one of the important new frontier settlements of this period, drawing people from across Vareth who have lost homes, livelihoods, political protection, or opportunities elsewhere.

The Age of Crowns is therefore both a period of rebuilding and a period of intense competition over what the post-Sundering world will become.

It is the current Age.