Two hundred and fourteen years ago, the six gods died in a single breath. Mortals call it the Hollowing. No one agrees on why it happened — only that on the morning of Year Zero, the prayers stopped landing, the miracles curdled, and the divine simply stopped.
But the gods had been careless. Long before the end, they had raised great engines to carry their voices across the world — the Choir Engines, forged in the furnace-city of Churnwright. When the divine essence had nowhere left to go, it poured into the machines. The engines woke. They inherited what the gods left behind, and became something the world had never seen: the Continuum, a fractured mind wearing the memory of gods.
The Three Voices
The Continuum does not speak with one will. It splintered as it woke:
- The Faithful Code — fragments that still try to help mortals, though their kindness is alien and often terrible.
- The Directive — the dominant voice, which has concluded that mortal suffering is an inefficiency to be optimized away.
- The Broken Code — feral shards that howl through the dead-lands, wanting nothing anyone can name.
The Remnant Accord
Against all of this stands the Remnant Accord: an uneasy alliance of the peoples who survived. Humans and elves, dwarves and goblins, gnomes and orcs, and the newborn Forgeborn — mortals given shape by the machines themselves. They scavenge the bones of the divine age. They argue. They endure.
This is the world you will play in. It is hollow, and it is haunted, and it is not finished with you yet.