Prakaethion

Prakaethion is a world cursed, a world where civilization seems to have recently peaked, depending on who you speak to. The Eastern Continent is divided between the Larostrian Empire and the Eastern Federated Nations. For a time, they were on the brink of an all out war, and tensions still remain high, but fifty years ago, the Great Plague swept across the world, culling the population, creating ghost towns, and causing chaos. Since then, orc raids have become more frequent and deliberate. Kobolds and Goblins have begun founding true nations of their own. The borders of existing civilizations have been pushed back, and while some towns and cities are merely more isolated from each other, some remain as ghost towns, forgotten by modern peoples.   Several Nations have, roughly 70 years past, developed different but equally effective methods to traverse the vast oceans, and thus the world has grown larger. New continents full of strange things have recently become known and peoples have only just begun to intermingle. Some rich or powerful individuals have begun to fund expeditions to these new places to scout for resources and new avenues of expansion, but it will be decades before large scale expeditions could be conducted without enormous risk.   In the past two centuries, the most knowledgeable researchers and scholars have discovered some disturbing details regarding the history of Prakaethion: This world's peoples have only barely survived numerous calamities, each of which has completely wiped out all institutions of civilization, and killed all but a fraction of a percent of the world population. The ancient ruins of these deceased cultures and peoples now house more sinister denizens, and wealth and knowledge beyond imagining. The repercussions from these calamities still echo through the world, and may again rise to destroy that which has been built. Some scholars and philosophers theorize that the Great Plague may have been a calamity avoided, while others hypothesize that something worse may be yet to come.