Cataclysm

Day Zero

4916 FYA: In the last days of the Vestari Empire, the Lich Emperor called a conclave of kings to resolve the issues threatening to tear the empire apart. While that conclave was being held in Tearra, there was a massive explosion that ignited the emperor's magical armories, destroyed the city in gouts of multicolored fire, and blew a hole in the plain half a mile deep.

The Rain of Filth

4916 FYA: Over the next twenty-four years, a frequently thick, sludgy rain falls all around the world. It's heavily polluted and contains millions of spell fragments from the Lich Emperor's vaults. Where it lands, it transforms the land, the people, and many other living things. Also known as goblin rain.

Cosmological Effects

Even bigger than the world-altering disaster everyone can see the results of is the cosmological disaster still ongoing.

The Cataclysm was so violent on an Essential level that it actually jerked the universe with Tierra out of its usual alignment among the ethereal and other material planes. In the process, it tore the universe loose from most of its existing moorings to other material planes. This has the following effects:

• The sidhe were able to send an expeditionary force from the Summerlands shortly after the initial blast, but the mooring between worlds was extremely volatile and had to be cut before it pulled the Summerlands and the Winterlands out of alignment with everything else they were tethered to. The expeditionary force had to leave in 40 DB at the height of the Rift War.

• The pocket universe Xanatua completely snaps its tether from Tierra. Most of the gods are there and, as a result, can't travel directly to Tierra. They still maintain their Essential links to their worshipers and can power cleric and paladin spells, hear prayers, and manifest through possession, but their ability to effect the world directly is extremely curtailed.

• Most tethers to the Outer Dark are snapped. Only two hells, Gehenna and Pandemonium remain attached and the tether from Pandemonium to the Abyss is pulled as tight as a bowstring, making travel between the two extremely perilous, even for demons.

• Where the tethers have broken off, tears leading to the Ethereal Plane have allowed strange energy to leak into Tierra.

• Where Tierra has careened off of other material planes, matter and reality have scraped through, bringing their own physics and logic with them.

• Tierra's plane has become topographically twisted and, in places touches itself in three and four dimensions.

• The Cait Sidhe on Tierra are in diaspora, their court limited to the ragged tethers left attached to this world. Their greatest sorcerers have bound those tethers into each other to allow place-to-place transport within the plane and some have even managed to tether to Tierra's past in places, but these passages are extremely perilous and volatile.

• The Heart of Chaos has snapped off its tether and the tether to the Heart of Order is strained. This has caused the Psychopomps' War.