An Invitation to Explore
The Earthborne setting places us on a far future Earth, saved from The Great Calamities through the hard work of humankind. The geography of the Earth and biology of its creatures has changed drastically. This new world is covered in wildly diverse flora and fauna, much of it untouched by human hands for more than a thousand years. Only time will tell what mysteries will be uncovered by its inhabitants.
EXCERPT FROM NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THE THIRD AND FOURTH MILLENIA
Composed by Lorelord of the Second Council Tishala Saidik. 3rd Cycle, 8433 L.R.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the world balanced on the brink of destruction. The Great Calamities threatened to leave our world a blasted wasteland, but in the face of certain death, people did the one thing nobody expected. They pulled together.
Led by a figure known only as The Guide, the disparate peoples of Earth began to heal their grievously wounded planet. To do so, they began the Great Generational Projects.
These projects were monumental feats of engineering, practical biology, and chemistry (to name but a few disciplines), requiring decades of work from millions of people; in short, the greatest undertakings in all of human history. They filled the Messepian Sea, unfurled the Lagrangian Shade to cool the Earth, built the towering carbon stacks, and carefully bred the kilometers long beasts known as terravores that still slowly crawl across the land, consuming centuries worth of refuse. They did all this and much more.
These projects were aptly named. The simplest took decades to complete, while the greatest could only be completed over centuries of labor. They knew it would take a thousand years or more for our world to heal, so our ancestors built great arcologies to shelter themselves from the ravages of a worsening climate. To their massive, enclosed cities they retreated; to wait out the storm of storms so that their descendants may one day walk freely upon the Earth.
It worked. The Earth healed, and although the land had undergone great change, the planet reached a new equilibrium. By this time, the mechanisms that sustained the arcologies began to fail, and our ancestors were compelled to venture forth into a world untouched by human hands for more than a thousand years.
The ancestors who left the arcologies at this time were quantifiably more introspective and aware than those who founded them. The countless cultures that had evolved in the past millennia (and would evolve in the millennia to come) agreed on one thing: the health of the Earth, the Well-Spring of All Life, could not be risked again. The societies that eventually resettled our planet are wildly diverse, but they all share a sense of mindfulness and a drive to live in harmony with the natural world, instead of apart from it, or above it. Some have eschewed all of the technological expertise of our ancestors, while others (among whose number we Lorelords are counted) try to find a balance; entwining the triumphs of the world that came before with the world we live in today.
And the world we live in today is very different than the Earth of two millennia past. The spectacular ruins of the great machines of the Generational Projects still dot the landscape, and they stand as a testament to the ingenuity of our ancestors. Some of those machines still function, operating to some unknowable purpose, best left undisturbed. Any mountain or ridge may hide the cavernous halls of an abandoned arcology within. And while our ancestors would recognize some of the creatures that populate this world, they would find others marvelously strange; the fruits of genetic crafting as our ancestors attempted to prevent mass extinctions and breed new species to fill abandoned roles.
The geography of the Earth itself has changed. New seas fill the broad expanses of river plains, mountains have risen and crumbled, and climates have shifted across the globe.
Our ancestors gave us a gift of incomparable significance when they rescued humankind from extinction. Now, this new world is ours to embrace.