Lore

The world has changed. The old World can be found in this Archive. The lore of the current world can be found below.

Overview

WARGROUNDS is a Live Action Roleplay battle sport set in and around the titular wargrounds, a great wound in the fabric of the world of Arebnak. The Wargrounds is a place where the world itself can shift and distort, filled with perilous terrain and dreadful creatures. It is the last remnant of an ancient war, ended with some unknown magical cataclysm that has damaged time and space itself. The Wargrounds is treacherous, unmappable and untameable, and those that dare venture past its borders risk life, limb, and sanity. It is a source of great riches for those with the skill and fortune to make it out in one piece. Ancient ruins rise out of the ground and spill forth with lost treasures and forbidden tomes of ancient magic. Strange, fantastical plants and beasts can be hunted and used to create powerful magical reagents. Sites of power form and allow for mighty rituals to be enacted. Indeed, it may be that the most dangerous feature of the wargrounds is how it tempts the brave and foolish to enter it in search of wealth and glory… From the nations that surround the Wargrounds come forth warbands; fraternities of questing knights seeking to make names for themselves, glory-hungry mercenaries hoping to raid ancient tombs, wicked and wretched cultists in search of ritual altars to desecrate, and even more motley lots. Inevitably, these throngs of warriors clash, be it for resources, for honour, or for the glory of battle. It is easy to enter the Wargrounds, but few leave it.

For centuries, the continent of Arebnak has been suspended in a peace born from stalemate. To the east, the Most Holy Empire of Confederated Kingdoms prepares for war, its Parliament of Kings called to raise armies of conquest. To the west, the League of Free Peoples and Nations form compacts and alliances, united only by a shared desire to be free from tyranny. Between them lies the Wargrounds, a wasteland of magical tempests. It, and the twisted Dreadhorde found within, are the only things keeping war at bay, for no army can travel through and make it out the other side, and the paths to navigate around are long and dangerous in their own right.

As much as the Wargrounds are an obstacle, it also offers prizes for the bold. Ancient ruins emerge out of skin-shearing sandstorms, with ancient relics of incredible magical power to be found within. Altars to forgotten gods rise up from pools of boiling acid, bestowing great power on the first to find and make offerings to them. Cursed creatures and monsters from the nightmares of the living offer trophies of both prestige and strength to those able to slay them. Though no army can endure the many dangers of the Wargrounds, small warbands of brave, desperate, or foolish souls venture forth into its borders, seeking power, fame, honour, and fortune. Expeditions are sent forth, as the Free Peoples and Empire seek some means to tip the scales of power in their favor.

The Wargrounds

The Wargrounds came into being before any recorded history across Arebnak. It has long been a fact of life, a dark smudge in the middle of every map. But Arebnak did not come into being with the Wargrounds.

The earliest civilizations to emerge in Arebnak were enclaves of powerful wizards, claiming territories and forming city states, kingdoms, and magical colleges. For reasons that will never be known, these first wizards began to wage war with each other.

The scale of these Wizards’ Wars are incalculable, and the magics unleashed will forever be beyond the understanding of any modern mage. It is not known what started the wars, or what ended them. Speculation of arcane archeologists range from meteoric fireball rain, to weaponized chronomantic paradoxes, the summoning of colossal and indescribable horrors from beyond this plane of existence, or even, most maddening and confusing of all, the destruction of fundamental forces controlling life and death. Whatever blind, foolish madness caused these wars, the result was the Wargrounds; a hostile crater in the fabric of reality, a wound in the world.

The Wargrounds changes constantly. The storms that wrack it may rain acid, blood, hot coals, eyes, or any other horrible substance, and it may either fall from the sky or shoot up from the ground into the clouds. Rivers of howling skulls push up from beneath the black earth, flowing uphill into bottomless pits. Fissures and canyons form overnight from a trickle of spilled water. Madness reigns supreme in the Wargrounds, but the same chaotic forces that make it impossible to settle the land or march an army are also what make it tantalizing to explore. Every day brings new, potentially profitable adventures. Libraries filled with arcane tomes, vaults spilling forth hoards of coin, and temples where blood sacrifice can bestow dark and divine majesty are all possible to find within the Wargrounds, and it is for these prizes that warbands venture forth past its borders.

Most Holy Confederated Empire of Kingdoms

Loyalty, Order, Victory

The western half of Arebnak is dominated entirely by The Most Holy Confederated Empire, a vast dominion forged from the uneasy unity of once-independent kingdoms, each bound by oath to the Parliament of Kings. Though every monarch holds their own lands, they kneel together at the foot of a single throne. Upon that throne sits The Immortal Empress, a sorcerer-queen of unfathomable power who has ruled with an arcane fist for a thousand years. Those that stand in her presence quail before her aura of majesty and power: robed in shimmering runes, eyes crackling with lightning, she rules not by lineage, but with immortal, calculated might.. Under her eternal reign, the Empire grew from a simple city state into the most advanced civilization in the known world. Towering sky-forges belch white steam and greasy black smoke into the sky, arcane engines hum beneath marble citadels, and soldiers march clad in steel tempered with alchemy and galvanism. The Empire’s authority binds its people, its bureaucracy orders their lives, and its ambition drives its borders ever outward. The Parliament projects an illusion of shared governance and heard voices, but the reality has each monarch quarrelling, scheming, and posturing. In truth, every choice and decree comes from the Empress’ throne, and her will is impossible to deny.

Some worship her as a living goddess, and understandably so; kingdoms conquered by the Empire are forced to position her at the head of any native pantheon. Others fear her, cursing her as the architect of their eventual extinction. And whispered in secret are rumors that she is one of those ancient mages that waged the terrible war that created the Wargrounds in dark ages past. But all are forced to agree on one truth: The Empire expands, the Empire consumes, and whatever it touches is reshaped in her image. First is offered the open hand of diplomacy, but when the Confederation’s steep terms are denied there is no hesitation. Those who would defy the Empress will soon hear the tread of Imperial boots, the ringing of Imperial steel, and the grinding roar of Imperial war machines.

But for all of its many evils, it cannot be denied that the Empire brings with it order and prosperity. By the Empress’ own decree are her subjects bestowed equal rights under the law, harsh though those laws may be. Where taxes and tithes may otherwise be squandered on the vain projects of weaker kings, the Empress’ treasury is rarely spent on frivolities, rather favoring roads, aqueducts, and the welfare of the common folk. A comfortable, safe, life is worth the sacrifice of freedom and culture to many, and never do the Empire’s armies want for recruits.

The Dreadhorde

Fervor, Power, Anarchy

The Dreadhorde is the shadow cast by the world’s failures. When kingdoms grow too proud, when the Empire purges too deeply, when the Free Peoples drive away those fallen into insanity - those who have nowhere left to stand drift inexorably toward the Wargrounds. Most settle on the border marches, settling into niches where they can avoid most of the dangers, but some truly deranged souls actually dwell within the Wargrounds itself, though usually not for long. Some arrive fleeing justice, others running from grief or prophecy or madness. Many are simply unwanted. The scarred, the strange, the devout of outlawed gods. Individually, they are dregs, urchins, and castoff scum. Together, they are a force feared and despised by those who border the accursed lands.

These throngs of wretches are no organised army or alliance of men at arms.They claim no capital, raise no walls, and crown no sovereign. Instead, they wander in sprawling caravans, warbands, and cult processions, moving with the unpredictable pulse of the Wargrounds itself. They may make claims to be able to understand and tame the Wargrounds, but in truth these maddened folk are gambling every day with their lives and souls.

To the outside world, these bands may seem to be a horde, a single army of dread warriors, heretic sorcerers, and loose companies of savages, but there is little binding them together. Among their ranks are imperial exiles who spat upon the Empress’ eternity, shamans who can read the language of screaming winds, zealots who revere the Wargrounds as a holy mortifaction upon the face of the world, and fierce tribes who have forgotten any life beyond the hunt of beasts and men. These many and varied pariahs are forced together through circumstance. They respect only power, and the malignant energies of the Wargrounds compel them to join together as a greater force whenever threats draw near. Champions of the Dreadhorde earn their place through feats that civilised nations would consider sickening, but without a larger foe to vent their rage upon the many warbands of the Horde quickly devolve into infighting and blood sport. All the luckier for the rest of the world, for a united Dreadhorde would be able to enact terrible atrocities upon the lands beyond the Wargrounds.

The Dreadhorde is less a cohesive faction and more an amalgamation of cults, bandits, and other wretched souls, bound together only by the will of powerful dark forces and a shared interest in lashing out against the world that rejects them. They do not flee when horrors crawl out of the ancient wars’ residue. They endure, adapt, and consume. The Wargrounds change daily, but the Dreadhorde changes with it; a protean, deranged legion of psychotic warriors and damned souls.

The League of Free Peoples and Nations

Freedom, Honor, Sovereignty

To the east of Arebnak, shielded from Imperial invasion forces by the Wargrounds, lays the League of Free Peoples and Nations. This is no single kingdom, but a tangled mess of city-states, petty realms, forest enclaves and free harbours - each fiercely independent, each sworn to defend its own way of life. While these peoples may have no love for one another, all agree on the truth that their sovereignty is worth bleeding for.

The Free Peoples are an alliance of convenience, not based on contracts or treaties so much as blood oaths and runes carved on stone. Neighbouring realms may feud over grazing rights, river borders, or ancient insults, yet when danger looms they gather in unified defiance.. Geography shapes their unity as much as its politics. To the north, a narrow corridor of broken highlands forms a natural gauntlet where invading forces falter, bogged down by treacherous ridges, and ambushed by a people who remember every stone and thicket.To the south, the Wargrounds extends beyond the coastline, forcing long detours for naval crossings through the Endless Isles, leaving transport ships at constant risk of running aground on sandbars, being dragged beneath the waves by sea monsters, or attacked by the pirates and corsairs that prowl the currents. Between the two is the Wargrounds, which is entirely impossible to cross an army through, leaving opposition to the Free Peoples few options but sporadic and small hostile expeditions into the territories that they inhabit.

What binds the League is not uniformity, but the shared belief that every people has the right to choose its own fate. They fight not for conquest, but for the freedom to remain as they are; a mosaic of wild, stubborn nations who refuse to kneel, least of all to each other.

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