History of Utopia
In the time before the catastrophe, Utopia was the wonder of the world. A sprawling island metropolis in the vast ocean of Tethys, connected to all continents and lands by clever transport devices that moved people and objects across space instantaneously.
In the land of Utopia all the races of man lived in peace and harmony, free to pursue intellectual and artistic pursuits as the great, magical machines at the heart of Utopia provided transport, sustenance, shelter, and unlimited power. Eventually the Utopians forgot the secrets of making and maintaining the machines that made their lifestyles possible, taking it for granted that their material and temporal needs would always be provided for.
It was then that the catastrophe struck: a simple error, replicating again and again through the perpetual motion systems of the machines, with no Utopian capable of attending to the repairs. The people fled their island capital, hiding in every corner of the world, as the machines swelled and throbbed. The towering engines made terrible grinding and shearing noises, belched incandescent smoke and emitted piercing, ever changing light through rapidly growing cracks. There was no escape for the terrified Utopians.
The machines were engulfed in an expanding maelstrom of their own bleeding energies. The vortex grew and swallowed the island, then the ocean, and then the world, shattering it into an infinity of fragments. Utopia’s only sign of passing was a brief flare in the black emptiness of the Cosmos.
Utopia Kingdoms
Incredibly, the catastrophe was not the end for Utopia. The very magic that had wrought such apocalyptic ruin also proved the salvation of the Utopians, protecting them from the soul-annihilating emptiness of the void into which they had been dragged.
Somehow, the power that maintained the integrity of things moved by the transport devices, served to maintain the integrity of the pieces of shattered world. This was particularly true of the people, who the original designers of the transport machines had included special safeguards to protect.
However, the error that had infected the system replicated the broken shards of the world and its terrified inhabitants over, and over, and over again. As the magical matrix responsible for holding all things together sought to repair the world, it had an infinite number of pieces to assemble in a finite space. This process fundamentally changed many of the people and animals of Utopia, warping them into the new forms we now recognise, such as the grotesquely disfigured Orcs, the squat, hirsute dwarves and the ectomorphic, gracile Elves. Most of the Utopians though survived the ordeal, in their true, ethnically-diverse human forms.
For a time Utopia had an ever shifting geography, where the borders of lands changed constantly and seemingly at a random. Eventually the flux subsided and a new world, or perhaps many new worlds, coalesced from the seething chaos. Kingdoms and people were distributed like a patchwork across the new, stable territories, some building feudal networks like those of old, and others roaming and raiding, like barbarians. In the north a reminder of the catastrophe persists; a vast, gaping wound in the world covering half a continent. It is called the Sacrificial Pits, and none who witness the base, savage rituals of the degenerate tribes in the twisted, buckled landscape around the rim of that fiery abyss return to tell the tale.
The catastrophe had other strange wonderful and terrible consequences. Ancient artefacts, treasures from the pre-Utopian civilisation that built the machines, let us call them the Old Utopians were disgorged from long forgotten and irrevocably sealed tombs. And with them came their wraith-like guardians, inscrutable avatars seemingly prepared to advise and assist their descendents in whatever manner they require.
The Peoples of Utopia
The catastrophe brought about profound changes in many of the peoples that inhabited the original world of Utopia. The inhabitants of some lands were subjected to powerful forces that changed their physical forms, and in some cases altered them in more subtle and terrifying ways.
Human Empire
Humans are the original inhabitants of a world destroyed by a terrible catastrophe, and the progenitor of the rest of the races in Utopia Kingdoms. The humans retain their diversity of races and cultures, but it is the original Utopians who wield power in their kingdoms. They were quick to build a functioning civilisation following the catastrophe, operating a classical style Republic in which the core of the military is made up of Old Utopians, with auxiliaries drawn from all over the Utopian Empire.
In battle the humans are versatile, capable of fielding all military unit types, and their army is built around a core of well-trained professional soldiers called the Utopian Guard.
Orc Tribes
The orc tribes emerged from an arid and dusty continent in the southern hemisphere of the world. In the catastrophe, this land was wracked and buckled by especially violent storms of magical energy that hideously mutated the Orc people, swelling their flesh and twisting their tendons and bones into agonised parodies of the human form. Their minds degenerated too, becoming as savage as their horrible new bodies.
Within their own kingdoms the orcs multiply rapidly and incessantly, tearing each other apart over limited resources when the population pressures become too great. They are constantly spilling over their own borders into other kingdoms where they raid and pillage. They make nothing of their own, but appropriate the detritus and plunder of other peoples’ for their own basic needs.
Dwarven Guilds
Just to the north of the equator, and with well established trade routes to the island of Utopia, lie the lands of the people that became the dwarves. During the catastrophe their bodies changed to become short, powerful and hairy. Their minds became especially calculating and attuned to commerce and trade, as though the trading culture at the heart of their pre-catastrophe civilisation became magnified into a defining feature of this new race.
They wear their prodigious beards in ringlets decorated with beads and gold charms, and all of their goods and chattels tend to be blocky and functional, albeit opulent, chased and filigreed with gold and gems. Dwarves scorn bows for the use of their newly invented black powder weapons, and instead of cavalry they have chariots drawn by powerful wardogs.
Elven Realms
The elves hail from a land far to the east of Utopia, where another sophisticated island empire dwelt in the world’s second great ocean, Valusia. The catastrophe changed the physiques of these people, causing them to become attenuated, tall and thin. Also their lifespan increased dramatically, but with an attendant crash in their birth rate that has left them a people in decline.
Their feudal culture maintains its rituals and sense of philosophy, applying them to art and war with equal aplomb. They dream their mystical dreams in elegant palaces and decorate their bodies and faces with glowing, sinuous tattoos. In battle the troops wear laminated armour and carry rectangular banners on their backs to display their feudal allegiances.
Dark Elf Cults
Not all of the people that became the elves shared the same fate. A distinct section of that population fled underground during the catastrophe, and became trapped in an expanding pocket of time. An instant later as the catastrophe subsided, they had been trapped in limbo for the whole span of time. All the while they were conscious, and driven irrevocably mad by it. Emerging on the other side of eternity, they were a base and corrupted version of their elvish cousins.
They are driven by unspeakable lusts and the compulsion to experience all sensation through the lens of pain, the only means left by which they can fleetingly feel anything. The Dark Elves dress in a style that blends Gothic and oriental, and their weapons and armour are designed to be intricate and cause maximum pain to both the wielder and victim alike.
Avian Colonies
The avian race was born out of the great continent in the west of the world, where the people somehow became infused with the spirits and physical features of birds. Or perhaps it was vice-versa. Of all the strange mutations caused by the catastrophe, the creation of the avians is surely the strangest. The avians organise their society along tribal lines, and build their colonies on sheer cliff faces, inaccessible to all but the most determined enemies.
They are a ferociously proud warrior culture, with the different grades of fighter denoted by war paint that the avians mark their beaks and faces with. There are many diverse avian forms, each of which is suited to a different task in battle, for example the mystical Owl Tribe makes up the ranks of the Airweaver battle wizards.