Other-Mode: Mundaea

Mundaea, chosen bastion of the Wrights. In time immemorial the ancient race came to this planet from far away cosmos riding on the backs of Astral Dragons, and wielding in their hands the instruments with which to build worlds. They wrought their magics over the mountains and the grasses and the sky and the seas, making glorious works and designing a world that might cradle the life that they cherished so.   And life there was. Small, and meager at first, but the Architects were both long of life and great in wisdom, and they contented themselves to tend to this small life, and they changed the world so that the life might be challenged, and threatened, forcing it to develop a higher intellect. And when this occurred, the Architects departed to a place unknown, leaving behind their mark in the shape of the continents and rare devices of great power.   Since then this life has flourished, and diversified. It observed and interpreted a strange but rich world, and with what comprehension that an underdeveloped consciousness could muster tried to assign reason, meaning, and cause to that which it could not inherently understand. This flow of thought and belief created the first impressions in life on Mundaea of baser natural magics, which responded and proliferated in response to being understood. This understanding, given time, had no other conceivable course but to a system of higher magics.   In the current era, magic and the geography of the Architects has influenced and directed the evolution of varying branches of intelligent life. There have been visitors and settlers in Mundaea that the Architects did not anticipate, but they still work their interests in abstract ways, through the devices they left behind when they disappeared.   Magic has seen many long epochs of varying tradition; At different times in history one philosophy might be overthrown by another, combined, fragmented, or forgotten. Magic much like language is a very personal and cultural thing, nuances of which might be lost on mages of another tradition. Its one universal quality is that it is ultimately unique to the caster, and the sources and cost of their power is influenced by their belief and surroundings.   And save for the cryptic puzzles, messages, and powers left behind by the architects of this world, those that now inhabit it have made it wholly their own to do with as they will. They grow, and love, and fight as suits their own historical coincidences. Sometimes they die, and their souls are renewed into the grand cosmic crucible, which churns out new beauty and ordnance and potential with each passing moment, struggling vainly against the overwhelming might of a great otherworldly chaos, that which seeks to undo all that has been wrought by the ancients.