In an unknown land there exists a massive city, surrounding this city is a gargantuan wall constructed out of a mysterious, grey, concrete-like substance reaching into the clouds. All that is known about the inside of the wall is that there is a City. This City is known to occasionally banish inhabitants to the Outside, their memories of the City being almost entirely erased in the process. The City occasionally exchanges resources with the Outside—the Yonderlands scavengers being the City’s supplier of yonderweed and yonderwort, among other things. To the Northeast of the City lies a small portion of Old City. As the name implies, this is a part of the City that was cut off and left derelict when the wall was erected centuries ago. Here, cracked roads are crowded by old, tall buildings in which many of the inhabitants of the Outside have taken residence.

To the west of that lies a rocky, sparsely vegetated landscape inhabited by tribes of orcks. Orcks are bloated, mutated drug addicts cast out from society. These orcks live in shacks of sheet metal and wood, where they continue to produce the drugs that made them the way they are. The rivers and streams that flow through orckish territory are filled with fish deformed from chemical waste, a product of the drug production. .

To the east of the City is a vast expanse of tall golden grasses and stormy gray skies called the Steppe. The Steppe is interspersed with diverse villages, some nomadic and some settled. The Steppe is also home to roving groups of the massive Wildermenn, covered from head to toe in shaggy hair and horns, dressed in leather straps from which dented bells dangle. Another anomaly inhabits the Steppe, known only as Angelles. These Angelles are vaguely humanoid, wooden structures draped in rags and constructed of trash. They do not move when being looked at, seeming to teleport from location to location only when unobserved. The mages say they are the incarnations of 4th dimensional beings

To the southeast of the City there lies an area of muddy, rocky land consisting of burrows and pools surrounding a small lake. In and among them live the anthropods, a sexually dimorphic species of exoskeletoned humanoids. Only the females can be compared to humans, as the males are only a few centimeters big, closely resembling small crustaceans.

To the west of this wetland lies a much larger portion of Old City. This portion of the Old City is more populous and contains much taller buildings. To the west of this portion of Old City lies the thin strip that is the Visari Forest. The Visari are a species of highly diverse cloven humanoids covered in variously colored downy fur. a single hollow horn filled with beads adorns their heads. Some have lamblike morphologies, others are more insectoid, with other phenotypes even more strange in existence. The visari are scavengers of the Yonderlands that lay to the west of the forest. They gather the resources from dangerous Yonderlands and trade them to others both inside and outside the City. Just north of the visari forest is a barren, rocky, hilly wasteland containing old, derelict labs and factories now populated by anthrodroids, sentient robots created for reasons long forgotten.

To the north of the anthrodroid territory is the territory of the daemyr. Cloven humanoids with furry, digitigrade legs, strange tails, and horns on their heads. They can range from more satyr-like to more demonic in appearance. The daemyr live in feudal towns and are constantly at war with the anthrodroids.

The history of the region known colloquially as the Outside is mysterious, as knowledge regarding the distant past was lost when the world was forever changed by the Resplendent Pact of Everlasting Lucency, contemporarily known as the ‘sun bastards.’ A little over a millennium ago, the Resplendent Pact came together to cast one of the most powerful– and catastrophic– rituals known to history. Their aim was to remove the very sun from the sky and replace it with a sun composed of pure magic so that it might rain magical energy down onto the world and bless every living thing with sheer unending ecstasy. The Pact promised that the Ritual of the Pale Sun would bring an end to all suffering and an eternity of global peace and prosperity. Instead, on that fateful day, the world was met with a few moments of darkness before being bathed in a frigid and cruel light that brought society to its knees.

The new sun, known as the Pale Sun– or Bastard Sun– filled the air with magic just as the Resplendent Pact had promised, but this stray magic scalded and warped anyone caught in its light for too long. Anyone met by the Pale Sun’s rays would be physically and mentally twisted in a matter of minutes as their skin was scorched by the light. Not even protective clothing was enough to block out the Sun. The best course of action was to stay inside and away from the windows. The Pale Sun also destroyed nearly all technology, as most electronic equipment was solar powered and at least partially outdoors (e.g. wires that connected machines over long distances). The stray magic tore through any hardware in its path and rendered everything obsolete. The tech-reliant civilizations of the world crumbled as their computers turned to scrap and unimaginable amounts of knowledge were completely lost. No one could step outside during clear days for longer than a few minutes. This apocalyptic span of time came to be known by many names, such as ‘the brightest days,’ ‘the era of the Pale Sun,’ or ‘the brilliant cataclysm.’

The Pale Sun, upon its appearance, also blanketed large swathes of land with even more dense magic than everywhere else, like flicking a paintbrush wet with ink at a canvas from a distance. These thick blankets of chaotic magic would remain a permanent presence and forever taint the lands on which they sat. Affected areas would become known as the Yonderlands, realms inhospitable to regular life where extreme anomalous phenomena occur incessantly. There is great concern among Yonderlands researchers as there is evidence that the Yonderlands seem to be spreading ever so slowly.

Soon after the Ritual of the Pale Sun, an organization of renowned ritualists was formed in order to fix the pressing matter of the Pale Sun. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the ritual was either dead or basically dead so there was no one with knowledge or power enough to remove the Pale Sun from its place in the sky. After much research, deliberation, and preparation, it was decided that the only effective course of action to save the planet from annihilation was to blanket the world in thick clouds dense with magic in order to block out the sun’s rays. So it was that multiple years after suffering under the Pale Sun’s entropic gaze, the Stratutians took to the Steppe and began a ritual second only to that of the Pale Sun in power and scale. Over the course of days, the skies all over the world were filled with dreary gray clouds. Nearly every single day since then has been completely overcast no matter where one may find themself.

The spell, however, is imperfect, and on occasion the clouds may part to allow the Bastard Sun to shine down onto an area for a time. Such sunny days are dreaded by the Outsiders and considered to be an ill omen. Contrarily, occasions in which the sky parts at night and allows the denizens a rare opportunity to observe the stars and moon are venerated and seen as good tidings. On nights like these, the chaotic and violent Outside becomes far more peaceful as everyone stops their conflicts to stare up at the sky in awe and bask in the starlight.