'The Riven Realms, they call it. A fine, poetic name for something as rotten and twisted as our land has become. It was not always so. The Old Empire - the oldest and noblest society created by humans - spanned almost the whole continent of Xeryn, the Cradle of Man. But after thousands of years of progress and incomparable achievements, inevitably, the Empire began to fall into stagnation and decadence. [...] The subjugation of weaker realms; the enslavement of whole nations; the strip mining of foreign resources; the oppression of Imperial citizens; war on several fronts; genocide… Eventually the gods could not tolerate such horrors done in their name. Foretold by a slew of divine omens, they descended upon the Empire to right its wrongs. In a chain of dreadful events that became known as The Calamity, they destroyed the Empire in a matter of days.’

- Agos, old wanderer

Vagrus is set in the Riven Realms, specifically on the dark continent of Xeryn, where an unspeakable cataclysm, called the Calamity, all but destroyed the oldest human civilization, the Empire, a millennium ago. Survivors tried to rebuild their societies, but have had to contend with magical anomalies, terrible creatures, barbarism, and beings from outside the natural world in the wake of the destruction. In the game’s present, although a period of restoration already took place, the continent and the Empire are twisted caricatures of what they used to be. The land is blighted with all kinds of dangers, and most who travel between the isolated settlements do so in an armed group for protection.

The Calamity upset the natural order of things due to the vast magical energies released during the event. The result is varied from area to area; some regions are cursed, some are burning deserts, others ash-ridden wastelands, still others are constantly bombarded by arcane storms that no one and nothing can survive. There are more ancient and recent ruins scattered across the land than there are settlements. Between these decrepit towns, fading camps, and shadowy cities few roads exist, the exception being the Emperor’s Road that runs from the cityport of Thot in the furthest North to the capital itself in the hearthlands, Xeryn City, where the Emperor is said to be slumbering in the cyclopean Cathedral of Ascendency.

Since reality itself was damaged in the Calamity, many beings and nomadic races from the Outer Realms (dimensions that contain the primal forces of the universe and used to be the home of the gods) wandered into the Riven Realms through rifts and set up new homes there. Among them were the fierce Dragonlords and their loyal dragonkin followers, the vile demonspawn half breeds, the nomadic peddler kal-rish, and many more. In the millennia that followed the Calamity, both these new settlers and remnants of old powers struggled to carve out a piece of the forsaken continent for themselves. Some survived, some faded into obscurity, and in present day, a fragile status quo is maintained; for the most part, anyways.

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