Meine Exalted Kampange
First Day of Calibration in Realm Year 768
Diese Welt dient als Kampangnenwelt für meine Exalted 3rd Runde.
The First and Final Days
It has been said that Creation is doomed.
The world was raised from chaos, and one day it will fall
just the same, returning to the chaos that birthed it. All
the works of men and gods and all the spirits of Creation
will be no more. This is how the story ends, they say, and
none, not even the mightiest of the Chosen can change
it. This is the tale of woe that is the capstone of this
fallen era; this is why the world now lives in an Age of
Sorrows.
But it was not always that way.
The Age of the Exalted
In the time before record, in the blank vastness of prehistory,
the gods of Heaven created champions to carry their
power and glory, wage wars in their name, and fight the
battles they never could. These heroic men and women
were called the Exalted, for they had been uplifted. For
their service, the gods gave the Exalted rule over all Creation—
over all the peoples and the beasts and the spirits
dwelling there. All the lands which they could see and
grasp were theirs. Having done this, the gods of Heaven
retired to Yu-Shan, the Celestial City, and left the world
of man to the Exalted.
The Exalted were many, their powers as diverse and unique
as the gods who bore them. However, one caste of Exalted—
the Solar Exalted—rose through the ranks of the Chosen
to become their masters. With unsurpassed skill and power,
the Solars conquered every corner of Creation. With
umatched magic and sorcery, they raised up a glorious
First Age.
The First Age was an age of wonders and glories long lost to
the current age. These splendors flowed from the hands and
minds of the Solar Exalted, who ruled the world, its gods, and
its Chosen as benevolent masters for five thousand years.
But then something went terribly wrong.
The Solars had labored for millennia under a great curse
lain upon them by the vanquished enemies of the gods.
In time the Solars grew wicked, deceitful and mad; their
magnanimity turned to spite, their justice to tyranny. They
began to turn against their subjects and each other, and
the world was soon threatened by the very sorceries and
machinations the Solars had used to protect it. As civil
war loomed, the other Exalted saw no choice but to
remove their masters. The Dragon-Blooded rose up
against the Solars and slew them as they feasted the
turning of the year.
Most of the Solars were murdered and their Essences
sealed away in a jade prison—for such was their power
that they could reincarnate upon death. But some escaped
this initial ambush, and in the decades that followed the
survivors waged terrible wars against the host of the usurpers.
During that time, much of the magic of the First Age
was lost—expended or destroyed in cataclysmic acts of
revenge. In time, the last of the Solars were hunted down
and killed, and with them died the First Age.
Nothing lasts forever.
The fall of the Solars left their Realm a smoking ruin. The
curse that had eaten away at them had also eaten away at
their works. Without the Solars to steady the sorcerous
mechanisms that ran their world, the Realm began to disintegrate.
This was no slow winding down, but the agonal
throes of a beast mortally wounded. Cities collapsed.
Manses rained brimstone on farmlands. Mountains buried
themselves, dragging down nations with them. Whole
islands were blasted from the seas as the sorceries that
birthed them unwound themselves. The Sidereals, allies
to the Dragon-Blooded, helped to steady the world against
the First Age’s dying. In the end, the world survived, yet
it was vastly reduced.
In the ruins the Dragon-Blooded set up a military government
and ruled for centuries. Their rule was without the
grandeur of the Solars’ shining Realm, but also without
the horror and madness that heralded its fall.
The Sidereals, a powerful group of Celestial Exalted, were
the authors of the Usurpation. After helping the Dragon-
Blooded rise to power, the Sidereals erased themselves from
the pages of history, destroying records of their own existence
and twisting the very stars in the sky to bring about a
forgetting. To maintain their influence, the Sidereals spun
the Immaculate Philosophy, a religion that teaches the inherent
spiritual perfection of the Dragon-Blooded. Posing
as monks and servants of the Philosophy, the Sidereals wove
themselves into the shadows of Dragon-Blooded politics.
The Sidereals kept a close watch for the few Solars who
continued to be reborn into the world. With powerful astrology
and mystical instruments of detection, the Sidereals
guided armed strike forces of Dragon-Blooded to destroy
newly emergent Solars before they had a chance to gain
power. Such groups came to be called the Wyld Hunt, and
their inquisitions became inseparable from the Immaculate
religion. For centuries, the Wyld Hunt rode down, captured
and slaughtered the Solar Exalted with impunity.
The Doom Out of the Darkness
Then the Great Contagion came.
A virulent disease that traveled by blood and by lung, the
Great Contagion spread a black blanket of death across
Creation. Nine tenths of all people and animals perished.
There was no cure and no one to burn the bodies. Cities
were draped and filled with corpses, and the screams of
the bereaved soon gave way to silence. Those left alive believed
it their darkest hour. They knew nothing.
Creation, it has been said, is doomed to fall into the chaos
that birthed it. The Wyld—chaos, the inchoate precursor
of reality—surrounds Creation. Creation floats upon it like
an island. The Wyld licks at the borders of the world,
forever nibbling away at its edges, always held back by
the solid substance of human beliefs and mystical armaments
that were remnants of the Solar Realm.
The Great Contagion put paid to these. Entire nations fell
to ruin, and those who were charged with unleashing the
defensive sorceries of the Realm had died at their posts.
The borders of Creation cracked and fractured, and the
Wyld flooded in. With it came the armies of the Fair Folk,
who had always lurked beyond the edges of the world:
watching, waiting, and hungry.
The Fair Folk swept across the lands in endless legions,
and Wyld storms and vortices of pure chaos came with
them, rending apart the landscape. Vast stretches of Creation
crumbed and were lost forever. The lands and seas
were reshaped, and everywhere the Fair Folk camped,
Creation was left twisted. The beleaguered and sick-ravaged
Exalted expended even more of the lost First Age’s
magic in trying to throw back the legions of chaos. Even
the mighty Lunar Exalted, the former mates of the Solars,
could do little more than slow their monstrous advance.
As the armies of the Fair Folk marched toward the center
of Creation, a lone Dragon-Blooded officer braved the
nigh-impenetrable defenses of an ancient Solar weapon
system. By luck or by fate, she took control of one of
the mightiest weapons the world has ever known,
awakening it from its slumber. With the power of the
Realm Defense Grid, she annihilated the Fair Folk hosts
and sent them screaming and boiling back out of
Creation.
With control of the Realm Defense Grid, the officer was
now the mightiest being in Creation. There was little left
of the old shogunate—the shogun whom she had served,
and most of his children and children’s children were
gone. With fire and fury, she wrested the remnants of her
world from the hands of her enemies and cowed oaths of
fealty from the rest. From her isle at the center of Creation,
she consolidated allies and resources and named
herself Empress.
The Birth of the Realm
Through alliances and coups, the Scarlet Empress brought
her enemies to heel. Through marriages and liaisons, she
gave birth to a dynasty of heroes, who formed lesser and
greater houses through which the Empress could filter
her power. To keep her place, she set her children against
one another in endless bids for power, resources, and
favor. In time she seeded her legions with soldiers and
commanders from her own household and from the
houses of her closest children. In a matter of decades, her
forces marched out into the Threshold—all the lands that
were not her island—and forced her enemies to kneel.
One coalition of heroes in the East managed to resist her
conquest. Of the rest, only the most remote barbarian
kingdoms of the Lunar Exalted escaped her rule. Vowing
fire and steel to her enemies, the Empress threaded the
boundaries of her empire with legions and set about draining
conquered lands of their resources so that her Realm
could grow mighty and wroth for a return.
Throughout the centuries, the Empress kept the Sidereals
close at hand. Their advice and protection afforded
her great advantages in governing her mighty nation. In
return for their service, she made the Immaculate Philosophy
the state religion of the Realm, and through the
Immaculate Order the Sidereals maintained the Wyld
Hunt. In all the 763 years of her reign, the Wyld Hunt
never once faltered, and the Dynasty grew vast and powerful
on the yolk of Creation.
Into the Time of Tumult
Five years ago the Empress vanished. Almost overnight,
the Realm began to deteriorate. Through her sorcerous
might, the Empress had planned to live forever. With no
order of succession, the Realm entered into chaos. Some
thought that the Empress had been assassinated, or fallen
prey to the fell magic that gave her such power. Others
believed she was watching from the shadows to see who
might try to take her place, or that she had reached a state
of perfection and had left her Realm behind. There were
rumors without end, but only one thing was certain: the
Empress was gone, and her throne sat empty.
The Great Houses of the Scarlet Dynasty—each longing
to place one of their own on the throne—began to summon
their forces. Legions were recalled from the frontiers, satrapies
were bled for every obol, and the heroes of the
Realm were called home from vigil and from quest to take
up the banners of their families.
A political stalemate saw a figurehead Regent placed on
the throne while the Houses marshalled their resources
and maneuvered their forces, built alliances and seeded
the feasting halls of their enemies with spies and traitors.
Forests were stripped to build siege weapons and ships,
war machines were constructed, the old spells were
chanted, and old warstriders rose from torpor to shake
off their rust.
Meanwhile, the massive recall of Realm forces left certain
borders of the empire manned by skeleton crews, often
consisting of poorly-trained citizen soldiers and conscripts
forced into service at spear-point. Sensing the mystical
and military defenses of the Realm had weakened, many
of the Dynasty’s subject states began to withhold tribute,
while others fell into open rebellion. At the same time,
the Lunar Exalted, who had fought a long and bitter war
with the Dragon-Blooded, began escalating their attacks.
Barbarian hordes emerged from the outlands of the
Threshold to test the might of the remaining legions, while
the Realm’s ancient enemies unveiled new fighting forces
from states beyond the Realm’s borders.
But the Empress’s disappearance presages even more dire
consequences than these.
In the dark heart of the Scavenger Lands, the Deathlord
called Mask of Winters rose on his living corpse-mountain
throne to march an army of the dead against the citystate
of Thorns. It was sacked and taken. A tributary of
the Realm, its Dragon-Blooded defenders died to a man,
and their bodies were dragged into the corpse-flesh
kingdom of the Deathlord’s thrall.
Far and near, the enemies of the world have begun to rumble
and quake, testing the chains of their bondage. The Fair
Folk, still fuming from their last bitter defeat, have begun
to speak war words and sing the chaunts of battle, from
their septs within Creation and from within their halls in
the deep Wyld, while the dark lords of the Underworld
unleash horror and cataclysm never before seen.
The Return of the Solar Exalted
After a millennia of vigilance, the Wyld Hunt has lapsed.
This is the world into which the Solar Exalted have returned.
After centuries of imprisonment, the doors of the
jade prison have been kicked open, and the heroes of old
have come again.
It has been said that Creation is doomed.
The world will end in fire and flames. Darkness will
descend. The seas will dry up and the land will crumble
into the maw of chaos. Nothing can stop this.
Nor could the Solar Exalted slay the enemies of the gods.
Nor could they master the sorceries which wrought the
world.
Nor could they ever return from their endless death
amongst the stars.
This is the world into which the Solar Exalted have
returned — but will they save the world, or will they
destroy it?