Timeline

Creation Myths

There are numerous creation myths throughout the shards, but many of them seem to share some common elements: Humans were the first race, created by the gods in paradise. They prospered, and eventually became so powerful and hubristic that they tried to supplant the gods. They ultimately failed, and the old gods, in their anger, drove the humans from paradise.

Forced to fend for themselves in an untamed land, many of the surviving humans died from starvation, disease, and war.

The Dark Age

The new world was a hostile place, and for countless centuries the humans fought to hold their own against the strange and ever-shifting Wilds, which haunted the edges of their civilization with beasts and apparitions. Save for a few artifacts, most of the knowledge and history from this era and before have been lost or destroyed. Details of this era are very scarce, but most historical scholars agree that it happened in some form or another.

The Age of Humanity

Although the horrors of the wild were relentless, human expansion and progress were inexorable, and eventually the humans advanced to the point that they were able to better protect themselves and begin to expand, pushing back the wilds. Wars were at this time few and far between, as the various human factions considered the encroaching wilds to be a common enemy. Slowly, the world unified under one banner, and together began to expand further into the wilds. One by one, humanity discovered other pockets of civilization within the wilds, many of which were founded by humans who were either cut off from the rest of civilization in centuries past or left for the wilds during the Dark Age and presumed lost. Over the millenia, the wilds had changed these people in various ways, giving them various magical abilities and altering their appearance such that they were no longer human. The "Wildlings," as these people were called, included elves, dwarves, catfolk, orcs, kitsune, goblins, and countless other races.

The Rebellion

As the pockets of wildling civilizations were discovered one by one, they were forced to either assimilate, defend their lands (at great cost), or retreat further into the wilds. Those who chose to assimilate quickly discovered that they were forever marked as second-class citizens, because thousands of years of fighting the horrors of the wilds had left humanity distrustful of anything that wasn't like them.

Relations between humans and Wildlings went rapidly from bad to worse, finally culminating in an attempted genocide of Wildlings.

The Shattering

Rightly fearing for their survival, outnumbered, and outgunned, the wildlings and their allies among the humans, using wildling magic combined with an ancient artifact of indeterminate origin, shattered the single dimension into an infinite number of finite shard dimensions, separating humanity and the wildlings into small groups and effectively preventing the genocide from continuing by cutting small groups of people off from one another.

The Healing

Slowly, over the course of millenia, the people of the shards discovered various ways of opening gates to other shards. Due to the ease with which these gates could be blocked from either side, inter-shard wars were basically unheard-of, and those that did happen generally ended in a stalemate. As the remaining humans and wildlings reconnected their worlds by building more shardgates, technology and magic spread, enabling shards to be reconnected even more rapidly.

The Renaissance

In the present, there is mounting evidence that there is no end to the number of undiscovered shards, and it's increasingly suspected that shards can spontaneously come into existence without ever having been part of the One World of the Age of Humanity. Adventuring and exploration are increasingly important as new shardgates are opened, as people search for artifacts, magic, uncontacted civilizations, and lost knowledge. Trade and cultural exchange flourish, and most of the rejoined shards have again achieved a post-scarcity society, with those that have not done so mostly there by choice.