The Age of Stability
The Age of Stability is a period of several thousand years, and it is this period in time during which most SCRPG Campaigns and works of fiction will be based. The Age itself is broken into three Eras, and so most dates you encounter in the game will be abbreviated F.E., S.E. and T.E., for First, Second and Third Era respectively. Of course the peoples of the world keep their dates in different ways, but for simplicity's sake we will generally keep references of dates to this base system.
There is one key event that launches the Age of Stability, and so that will be the focus here, rather than giving spoiler details of the world in which the Characters will wander. This monumental event is known as:
The Day of Forgetting
One moment the denizens of the Sister Continents are living their lives, going about their ordinary days, whether that be waging war or tending a field, and the next thing they know, they remember nothing. This memory loss is absolute, and mostly permanent. In time folks did tend to remember their names and other familiar things, but not always. Highly trained skills, habits, rituals, and daily events are the only types of things people ever come to remember. Needless to say, the Age of Stability started with a good deal of chaos and in many areas of the world it took centuries to settle down- such as the Wars of Succession in the Tek regions that flared for nearly 300 years due to so many claimants to so many thrones and affected their politics for centuries to come.
Following the Forgetting books were extremely prized possessions, as were maps, despite the fact that the maps so often seemed horribly inaccurate. The destruction during the Age of Warlords was catastrophic, as many libraries fell into the seas while others were burned or scattered to the winds as Warlords sought knowledge from the enemy and destroyed texts to protect their knowledge from falling into enemy hands. To increase the dilemna for scholars, many of the surviving texts contradict each other, and seem to have no basis in the geographic reality of the world.
The first Campaign for the SCRPG will be set upon the Ôlfindarâ Islands just three years after the Day of Forgetting. In their isolation from the rest of the world the island's politics stabilize relatively quickly, but not everything is at peace under the rule of the new king. The old king was murdered, but nobody remembers by whom and why, and priests of the Pantheon of the Four Queens writhe beneath the political surface, seeking power for themselves and the gods they serve. The islands themselves are fragmented and dangerous, with ancient roads that lead only to the sea, and delapidated cities and fortresses whose ruination varies from ancient to recent. The islands abound with mysteries craving to be solved, and are an excellent introdution into the greater world beyond.