Home›Behind the Veil›Author's Notes — Age of Umbra

GM Note

Author's Notes — Age of Umbra

The GM's spoken design monologue and lore revisions.

☾
Behind the Veil — GM material. Spoilers, draft notes, and cosmology that is not yet canon (and may never be). Players of the Enduring Lesser Lights, turn back.

A spoken worldbuilding monologue by the GM, recorded 2025-10-17 (transcribed and lightly cleaned). These are author's-intent lore revisions made while developing the Age of Umbra campaign frame toward a Daggerheart campaign book in the style of the Root clearing books. GM canon — not player-facing.

The world as chrysalis

  • The biggest revision concerns Otheidas, the god-king: he was a Promethean figure. He tried to seize the power of the gods and build something lasting here — either not realizing, or refusing to accept, that the gods were always going to leave.
  • The world is a chrysalis — a husk, embryological development. The Titans were the original stock: they built the preconditions, and out of the Titans came both the gods and the ancestries (shaped to help the gods develop). The world is a clutch of eggs.
  • Now the gods have hatched and gone, taking most of the Splendor magic with them. What remains is vestigial and dying. The blessed branches are vestiges of Caranthalis; other Splendor artifacts are tied to the other departed gods.
  • The gods have withdrawn to a higher sphere — a concentric-worlds cosmology, very eldritch-abomination in flavor. The Titans are now inert and buried. The Umbra bleeds through everything; the sacred pyres, lit by Caranthalis's blessed branches, hold the Umbra at bay — an oil-and-water stalemate.

The players

  • Dimmers — the criminal syndicate. Smaller players: they strip copper wire from the ruins of civilization. Nihilistic — let's make a buck on the way out.
  • The Celsian Athenaeum and the Celsian itinerants — wandering academic tutors who preserve knowledge and spread it between communities.
  • Witches — wield Umbra magic. Some still cling to the old god-influenced Splendor traditions, but after a godless century those have become wonky hybrids; witches have largely gone all-in on the Umbra, making them a relatively new force. The most significant, for the party's purposes, is Ygva, the witch of Ulmira's Step, high in the mountains.
  • In those mountains the party brushes against vestiges of the veiled god Ulmira, and against Tlellic's old familiar, the Askavir — a massive, Roc-like eagle-beast.
  • The simiah largely rejected the sacred pyres and remained in the forests, not delving too far into things — except for one simiah community high in the mountains (Verrow's Span).