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- The gods have withdrawn to a higher sphere — a concentric-worlds cosmology, very eldritch-abomination in flavor.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).
Why the gods left
- The gods do not know why they left — no more than a bird knows why it flies south before winter. It was a natural impulse, an inevitability, not a decision.
- To the extent that a god is sentient, it has built a post-hoc rationalization — a story that recasts the inevitable as a choice, so that leaving becomes something it meant to do.
- Whether a returning god would be resentful varies by god, and turns on the rationalization it settled into — but underneath every rationalization is the same blank fact: none of them chose, and none of them know.
(GM: what rationalization did each god arrive at, and are those stories shared among the gods or divided up between them? This is the deeper question behind Sylvie's "would the gods resent being called back" — and behind her own reach toward godhood.)