Player Primer: The World of Aethermourne
The gods went to war. The gods died. We built our world on what was left.
What Is Aethermourne?
Two thousand years ago, the gods destroyed each other. Their war cracked the heavens, broke the divine, and ended an age. When it was over, most of them were dead, and their bodies, colossal beyond mortal comprehension, fell onto the world like burning mountains.
They became the world.
The spine of Solvaen, God of Order, is a mountain range. The corpse of Thyrea, Goddess of Nature, is a continent-spanning wilderness where the trees grow hundreds of feet tall. The shattered skull of Morrhael, God of Death, lies in the frozen north, leaking his dominion into reality so that the dead cannot rest. Everywhere you look, the landscape is shaped by divine remains, bone becoming stone, ichor becoming rivers, the slow decay of godflesh feeding the soil beneath your feet.
Mortal civilizations rose in the aftermath. We built cities inside ribcages. We mine crystallized divine blood for fuel and power. We channel the energy that bleeds from the dead gods and call it magic. For two thousand years, we have lived this way, in the shadow of dead divinity, building something fragile and remarkable from the ruins of heaven.
But now, something is changing.
Stars are going dark. The seas are turning black. The dead are stirring in the frozen north, and a silence is settling over the world, heavy, patient, and wrong.
Your characters live in this world. What they do about what’s coming is up to them.
The Four Regions
Aethermourne’s known world is a single continent, shaped by the four divine corpses that define its geography, cultures, and dangers. Each region is distinct, not just in climate, but in how its people relate to magic, faith, power, and survival.
The Ashen Dominion
Central and Eastern Aethermourne, A theocratic empire built on the bones of Order
The God of Order fell here. Solvaen’s skeleton stretches across the heartland like a second geography, his spine a mountain range, his ribs arcing over the capital city, his crystallized blood veining the earth in seams of pale, luminous mineral called Ashite. The Ashen Dominion rose around these remains, and everything about this civilization reflects the god it was built upon: rigid, hierarchical, and unyielding.
What You’d Know:
- The Dominion is ruled by the Hierarch, a theocratic monarch who claims to interpret the lingering will of Solvaen. The current Hierarch is old, and the question of succession is a quiet tension that touches everything.
- Society is organized into a strict caste system: the Anointed (clergy and ruling class), Flame-Bearers (military and administrators), Keepers (scholars and archivists), the Hewn (laborers, miners, artisans), and the Ashless (the casteless, criminals, exiles, and the inconvenient). Movement between castes is theoretically possible. In practice, it almost never happens.
- The Order of the Ashen Flame serves as both military and religious institution. They enforce the law, defend the borders, and guard Ashite mining operations. They are disciplined, well-equipped, and everywhere.
- Life in the Dominion is structured and safe, in the way that a cage is safe. Crime is low. Dissent is lower. The trains run on time. The cost is freedom.
- A growing movement called the Unbound Congregation pushes for reform, loosening the caste system, questioning the Hierarch’s divine authority, advocating for the Ashless. The Dominion considers them somewhere between misguided and treasonous.
- The capital, Ostivaar, is built inside Solvaen’s ribcage. Massive arcs of divine bone curve over the city like the vaulting of a cathedral the size of a mountain. It is, by all accounts, breathtaking.
Who Comes From Here: Soldiers who believe in duty. Scholars who love knowledge but chafe under censorship. Priests questioning a dead god’s will. Miners who’ve breathed Ashite dust their whole lives. Bureaucrats, reformers, loyalists, and exiles. If structure shaped you, whether you embraced it or broke against it, you’re from the Dominion.
The Verdant Marches
Western and Southwestern Aethermourne, Untamed wildlands where nature became something more
When Thyrea, Goddess of Nature, fell, her divine essence soaked into the earth and never stopped growing. The Verdant Marches are what happened next: a wilderness of impossible scale, where the forests climb hundreds of feet toward the canopy, the rivers run warm with residual life-force, and the ecosystem behaves less like a collection of organisms and more like a single vast intelligence slowly waking up.
What You’d Know:
- There is no central government. The Marches are divided into clan territories, each led by a Marchwarden, part chieftain, part military commander, part judge. Clans cooperate, compete, and occasionally fight. This is normal.
- The Greensingers are druids and spiritual leaders who claim to commune with the land’s awareness, the dim, enormous consciousness left behind by Thyrea’s decay. Whether the land is truly aware or the Greensingers are interpreting patterns as intention is a matter of heated debate. The land does seem to respond to them, though.
- Survival is the primary virtue. The Marches don’t care about your bloodline, your wealth, or your opinions. Can you endure? Can you contribute? Then you belong. If not, the forest will take you.
- The Marrow Bogs are a region of mutagenic wetland where Thyrea’s marrow seeped into the water table. The water there changes living things, sometimes beneficially, sometimes catastrophically. People go in desperate. They don’t always come out recognizable.
- A leader named Kaelith Thornborn is attempting to unite the clans under a single banner for the first time in history. This is unprecedented, and opinions range from hopeful to violently opposed.
- The border between the Marches and the Dominion is marked by the Scarwall, a miles-long barrier of living thorns that grew on its own, without any mortal hand. Neither side planted it. Neither side can remove it. It serves as a natural border and a reminder that the land has its own agenda.
Who Comes From Here: Hunters who read the forest like a book. Warriors whose scars tell their history. Herbalists who know which moss stops bleeding and which moss causes it. Outcasts who found a home where survival is the only credential. If the wild shaped you, if you earned your place through grit and instinct, you’re from the Marches.
The Hollowed Reach
Southern and Southeastern Coast, A maritime republic where wealth flows and darkness gathers beneath the waves
The Hollowed Reach stretches along the southern coast and out across a sprawling island archipelago, a civilization built on trade, tide, and the uneasy relationship between mortals and the sea. It is the continent’s mercantile heart, cosmopolitan, wealthy, opportunistic, and haunted by something vast and patient in the deep water.
What You’d Know:
- The Reach is governed by the Concord of Tides, a council of elected merchant-princes called Tidekeepers. Power is theoretically democratic. In practice, it belongs to whoever controls the most trade routes.
- This is the continent’s crossroads. Goods, people, information, and trouble all flow through the Reach. If something exists in Aethermourne, someone in the Reach is buying or selling it.
- The Lantern-Keepers are an order of coastal defenders, part lighthouse-keepers, part monster-hunters, part first responders. When things come out of the water (and things do come out of the water), the Lantern-Keepers are the ones standing between the coast and catastrophe.
- Black Tides are periodic events where the sea turns dark, oily, and wrong. Marine life dies or flees. Ships that sail during a Black Tide sometimes don’t come back, and the ones that do carry crews who can’t stop whispering. These events are getting worse, more frequent, more intense, reaching further inland.
- People along the coast have been sleepwalking into the sea. They walk calmly into the water at night and disappear beneath the surface. Some come back days later, soaking wet and unable to explain where they were. Some don’t come back at all.
- An independent floating city called Driftmere exists in the outer islands, a lashed-together sprawl of decommissioned ships and repurposed hulls. It is a pirate haven, a free port, and exactly as lawless as you’d expect.
- The Weeping Isles, where Belara, Goddess of Love and Mercy, died shielding mortals from the divine war, are a place of miraculous healing. The waters there can cure diseases, mend old wounds, even restore lost senses. But everyone who is healed there carries a permanent, bone-deep melancholy afterward, as if they absorbed a fragment of a goddess’s grief.
Who Comes From Here: Sailors who’ve seen the horizon do things it shouldn’t. Merchants who know that information is worth more than gold. Smugglers, pirates, and drifters from Driftmere. Monster-hunters who volunteered for the Lantern-Keepers because someone had to. Scholars drawn to the mysteries of the deep. If opportunity, ambition, or restlessness shaped you, and you don’t mind the fog, you’re from the Reach.
The Pale Wastes
Northern Aethermourne, A frozen land where Death itself broke open
Morrhael, God of Death, hit the north like a hammer striking glass. His body shattered the landscape into frozen tundra and barren stone. His skull, massive, cracked, still faintly glowing with a light that isn’t light, lies at the bottom of a crater called the Hollowdeep. And his domain, the force that governed the boundary between life and death, leaked out of his broken corpse and soaked into everything.
In The Pale Wastes, the dead do not stay dead.
What You’d Know:
- There is no central government. Survival doesn’t allow for that kind of luxury. Communities organize around fortified settlements called Holds, each led by a Holdwarden, a leader chosen for competence, not bloodline.
- The Ashen Vigil is a warrior-order devoted to one purpose: keeping the dead down. They patrol, they fight, they burn, and they endure. Joining the Vigil is considered one of the most honorable things a person can do. It is also one of the shortest career paths available.
- The dead must be burned. This is not custom, it is survival. Any corpse left unburned in the Wastes will rise, animated by the ambient necromantic energy that saturates the region. Funerary rites are the most important cultural practice in the north. Denying someone a proper burning is the worst crime imaginable.
- The Hollowdeep, the crater where Morrhael’s skull rests, is the most dangerous place on the continent. Undead emerge from it in waves. The ambient death-energy there is strong enough to snuff torches, freeze water in seconds, and raise corpses within minutes of death. No expedition to the skull’s interior has ever returned.
- Some undead are different. Called Remnants, these are the dead who rose but retained their minds, their memories, their personalities. They are, by every meaningful measure, still the people they were, except that they are dead, they do not age, and the living are often terrified of them. Remnants seek acceptance in a world that doesn’t know what to do with them. Some communities tolerate them. Others don’t.
- Magic is dangerous here. Every spell cast in the Wastes risks necromantic contamination, the ambient death-energy bleeds into magical workings, warping them, tainting them, sometimes animating things that should stay still. Casters in the Wastes learn caution or learn regret.
- Life in the Wastes is about three things: survival, community, and endurance. The land doesn’t reward ambition or cleverness. It rewards stubbornness, the refusal to lie down, even when everything around you is trying to make you.
Who Comes From Here: Warriors who’ve fought the dead since they could hold a blade. Vigil members who burn the bodies and say the words. Hunters who track across frozen stone and read the wind for the smell of decay. Remnants seeking a reason to keep existing. If you’ve stared death in the face every single day and kept going anyway, you’re from the Wastes.
The Gods: What Everyone Knows
The Godfall happened two thousand years ago. The details are debated, mythologized, and politically weaponized, but certain facts are broadly accepted across all cultures.
The Dead Gods
| God | Domain | What Remains |
|---|---|---|
| Solvaen | Order, Law, Structure | His skeleton forms the Dominion’s mountains. His blood crystallized into Ashite. |
| Thyrea | Nature, Growth, Life | Her body became the Marches’ ecosystem. The land itself carries her essence. |
| Morrhael | Death, Passage, Rest | His skull lies in the Hollowdeep. His broken domain prevents the dead from resting. |
| Kaevroth | War, Conquest, Wrath | He started the war. His iron body shattered across the world. Fragments of him surface occasionally, and drive people mad. |
| Vorrhyn | Chaos, Change, Entropy | Destroyed so completely that reality itself cracked. The wound is called the Maelstrom, a roiling tear in the sky visible from the eastern coast. |
| Thalvor | Fire, Craft, Creation | Sacrificed himself willingly to reignite the world’s core after the war nearly froze it. His forge still burns deep underground. Dwarven cultures revere him above all others. |
| Belara | Love, Mercy, Compassion | Died shielding mortals from the crossfire. Her tears still fall on the Weeping Isles. She is mourned more than any other god. |
The Survivors
| God | Domain | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Aelindra | Knowledge, Stars, Foresight | Retreated to the stars after the war. Still watches, her constellations shift in patterns her followers, the Star-Readers, spend their lives interpreting. She is the most actively worshipped surviving deity. |
| Yvenne | Sea, Tides, Storms | Lives in the deep ocean. Erratic, unpredictable, and possibly unhinged by the war. Sailors pray to her. Whether she listens is anyone’s guess. |
| Orenthas | Time, Fate, Inevitability | Went silent 2,200 years ago, before the Godfall. No one knows why. No one knows if he’s alive, dead, or something else entirely. His temples stand empty. |
| Nethys | Magic, the Arcane, the Weave | Shattered during the war. Not dead, her consciousness is fragmented across the world’s ley lines. Magic works because of her, but it works poorly, unpredictably, because she is broken. Every magical tradition is, in a sense, working with the pieces of a shattered mind. |
The Imprisoned
| God | Domain | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Serith | Shadow, Secrets, Deception | Imprisoned beneath the sea after the war by the surviving gods. This is common knowledge in the Reach, less widely known elsewhere. Most people consider her a cautionary tale, a warning about the cost of divine treachery. Not an active threat. Just a story. |
Magic in Aethermourne
All magic in this world flows, ultimately, from the remains of the dead gods. The ley lines are Nethys’s shattered nervous system. The ambient energy that makes spells possible is divine decay. Every magical tradition is a different approach to working with the same terrible, beautiful source.
The Three Traditions
Calculism, The Dominion’s Approach Magic as mathematics. Calculists use precise formulas, geometric arrays, and Ashite crystals to channel and shape magical energy. It is reliable, repeatable, and powerful, but rigid. Calculism doesn’t improvise well, and it depends on access to Ashite, which the Dominion controls. If your magic looks like an engineer solving an equation, you’re a Calculist.
Primal Communion, The Marches’ Approach Magic as relationship. Primal practitioners commune with the living awareness left behind by Thyrea’s decay, the dim, vast consciousness of the land itself. This magic is intuitive, emotional, and deeply personal. It is powerful in ways that Calculism can’t replicate, but it demands vulnerability. You don’t command primal magic. You ask, and the land decides. If your magic feels like a conversation with something enormous and only half-awake, you practice Communion.
Tidal Sorcery, The Reach’s Approach Magic that breathes with the sea. Tidal Sorcerers draw power from the ocean’s rhythms, stronger at high tide, weaker at low, wild and unpredictable during Black Tides. It is the most flexible tradition, adapting fluidly to circumstances, but it is also the least consistent. A Tidal Sorcerer at high tide is formidable. The same sorcerer during a Black Tide is either terrifyingly powerful or a danger to everyone nearby, including themselves. If your magic ebbs and flows like the sea, you’re a Tidal Sorcerer.
A Note on the Pale Wastes: There is no formal magical tradition in the north. There are only survivors. Any magic cast in the Wastes risks necromantic contamination, the ambient death-energy that saturates the region bleeds into spellwork, warping effects, raising unintended undead, or marking the caster with traces of Morrhael’s broken domain. Casters in the Wastes learn to work carefully, quickly, and with an exit plan.
Divine Materials
The gods left behind more than geography. Their remains include substances of extraordinary power:
- Ashite, Crystallized blood of Solvaen. Amplifies and stabilizes magic. The Dominion’s most precious resource and primary export. Pale, luminous, and cool to the touch.
- Morrhaelite, Bone fragments of Morrhael. Absorbs and nullifies magical energy. Incredibly dangerous to handle. Used in anti-magic wards and, controversially, weapons.
- Thyrea’s Amber, Fossilized sap from the goddess’s body. Preserves living things in a state of suspended animation. Used in medicine and, less ethically, in certain kinds of imprisonment.
These materials are valuable, powerful, and not to be trifled with. You will encounter them. Treat them with the respect you’d give anything that used to be part of a god.
Building Your Character
Ancestries
All standard Nimble ancestries exist in Aethermourne. Humans are the most widespread, but elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and others live in every region. No ancestry is locked to a specific area, two thousand years of post-Godfall history have mixed populations thoroughly.
Archetypes and Regional Fit
Every Nimble archetype works in Aethermourne. Here are some suggestions for how different character types might connect to the world:
- Warriors and Martial Characters thrive everywhere. The Ashen Flame in the Dominion, clan warriors in the Marches, Lantern-Keepers in the Reach, and the Ashen Vigil in the Wastes all need people who can fight.
- Arcane Casters are powerful but face unique challenges depending on where they trained. A Calculist from the Dominion operates very differently from a Primal practitioner from the Marches. Choose your tradition, it shapes how your magic feels, what it costs, and what it can’t do.
- Divine Casters face the most interesting question in Aethermourne: your gods are dead, diminished, or silent. You can still channel divine power, the gods’ remains radiate energy that faith can shape, but your relationship with the divine is complicated, personal, and potentially heretical depending on who’s asking. This is a feature, not a limitation. Lean into it.
- Rogues and Skill-Focused Characters find the Hollowed Reach particularly welcoming. Information, cunning, and connections are currencies there. But every region has shadows, and every society has cracks.
- Nature-Focused Characters feel the Marches’ pull most strongly, but Thyrea’s influence extends beyond the Scarwall. Wherever things grow, something of her remains.
Tone and Expectations
Aethermourne is a world of dark grandeur. It is beautiful and terrible, and your character has lived in it long enough to know both faces.
Some guidance for the tone:
- Hope exists, but it is earned. Nobody is coming to save the world, the beings who might have are dead. If things get better, it will be because mortals made them better. That’s not bleak. That’s empowering.
- Power has a cost. Always. Magic flows from dead gods. Political authority rests on divine bones. Strength comes from surviving things that should have killed you. Nothing in Aethermourne is free.
- Moral simplicity is rare. The Dominion’s order provides safety but crushes freedom. The Marches’ freedom is exhilarating but brutal. The Reach’s opportunity is shadowed by something in the deep. The Wastes’ community is forged by constant, grinding threat. Your character will face hard choices. That’s where the good stories live.
- The world is worth fighting for. This is important. Aethermourne is dark, but it is not hopeless. People love, build, create, argue, laugh, and dream here. They do it in the ribcage of a dead god, on soil fed by divine decay, under stars that are slowly going out, and they do it anyway. That’s the spirit of this world.
Backstory Questions
Consider these when building your character:
- Where are you from? Which region shaped you? What did it teach you, and what did it cost you?
- How do you relate to the gods? Do you worship the survivors? Mourn the dead? Resent them all for the mess they left? Ignore the question entirely?
- Have you encountered the strange? Have you seen a Black Tide roll in? Met a Remnant? Touched Ashite? Heard the forest whisper in the Marches? The world is full of divine echoes, has one touched your life?
- What do you want? In a world built on decay and legacy, what are you building, seeking, protecting, or running from?
What’s Happening Now
These are things your character would know, the common talk of taverns, market squares, and campfires across the continent.
The stars are dimming. Aelindra’s constellations are going dark, one by one. The Star-Readers are alarmed. Most ordinary people haven’t noticed yet, or have noticed and shrugged. Stars are far away. Rent is due now.
The Black Tides are getting worse. What used to be a rare coastal phenomenon is now happening monthly along the Reach’s southern shore. The Tidekeepers are investing heavily in the Lantern-Keepers. Coastal towns are emptying. The sea smells wrong.
The Dominion is restless. The Hierarch is aging and has named no successor. The Unbound Congregation grows bolder. The Order of the Ashen Flame is restless, some want reform, others want to crush the reformers. The Ashless are more numerous than ever. Something is going to give.
The Marches are stirring. Kaelith Thornborn’s attempt to unite the clans has gained real traction, and real enemies. A united Marches would change the balance of power on the continent. Not everyone wants that.
The Wastes are too quiet. The undead haven’t emerged from the Hollowdeep in significant numbers for years. The Ashen Vigil should be relieved. Instead, the veterans are nervous. The dead don’t stop. They’ve never stopped. So why did they stop? The silence feels like an indrawn breath.
Something is changing. The world is holding its breath, and the silence is getting louder.
Your characters are about to find out why.