BACKGROUND

A Word on History...

A Dimmer Tide takes place in a world that ended many thousands of years ago.  The realities of this world are as distant and irrelevant to the people of the present day as those of any mythical age.  Books and priests speak of a world full of greenery and clear-running water.  Of acres to roam in and a soil from which humans could pull food and resources with which to build, clothe and feed themselves.  That world is dead.  All that is left is its ashes.

The lasting legacy of that world is the corrosive, poisonous liquid that eats all that is not stone.  It may have had a proper name once but now it is known simply as 'crym. 

The Black Tide Rises.

'Crym started as a wonderfood.  Easy in its planting, hardy in its growth and bountiful in its fruits, 'crym spread out across the face of the earth, strangling other plant life and the animals that depended upon it.  So hardy was the plant, so quick to mutate and adapt to new surroundings that it resisted all attempts to kill it or even control its growth.  The plant spread across the Earth's continents until it reached the sea and there it stopped... for a while.  The humans breathed a sigh of relief for despite the fact that all other plant and animal life was now limited to biospheres, the 'crym fed humanity's billions and cleaned the air, absorbing its pollutants.  But then fishermen started complaining of algae spreading across the seabeds and killing their stocks of fish.  The 'crym had mutated again and adapted to life under water.  The mix of 'crym and seawater is what killed the world as the mix of pollen and sea water became corrosive and sea levels started to rise, eating one city after the next over the period of decades until the remnants of humanity clung to the tops of mountains in cities.

The Builders

As the generations ticked past, the resources and skills available to those humans started to dim and a decision was made to plan for a coming dark age in which scientific knowledge would be lost.  This age saw the building of the Traverses, great bridges of stone and iron that link up the remaining human cities as well as any outcrops of land that might one day be settled.  Sadly, the settling of those lands marked the end of a world rather than a beginning.  As the technology of the cities started to fail, many broke away in order to set up their own lands based on their own rules.

The 'Crym Ages

Before long humanity was but a collection of barbaric warlords and petty kings, fighting endless wars for control of a patch of land or a particularly wide and well built section of the Traverse network. Between the wars and the failure to preserve any but the most rudimentary fragments of human learning, humanity descended into an age of endless barbarism in which tyrannical warlords proclaimed themselves kings and were supported by what were little more than serfs who spent their short lives scraping a living from the remaining farmable surfaces and the planet's wildlife, now increasingly better adapted to living with 'crym than humanity.  As centuries ticked by, kingdoms rose and fall, erasing all physical traces of humanity's world.

A Still Birth

However, as humanity faught to maintain its grip on life, new discoveries were made allowing cities to sustain larger populations and with these larger populations came the first academics who examined texts maintained by monastic orders and formulated theories about the existence of cities outside of the immediate area.  Many of these theories proved wrong, the degradation of generations of "interpretation" and "clarification" of old texts having long since extinguished any embers of truth that might once have burned in the old books, but some proved correct and feudal warriors became explorers who opened up the way for travel and trade between the great city states that had survived the 'Crym Ages.  As merchant houses and academies flourished, many spoke of a new age of learning and freedom but it was not to be.

The merchant houses started to consolidate and form monopolies who jealously guarded new technologies such as steam and clockwork, carefully selecting which cities they would sell to.  These merchant houses then merged with emerging trade unions and formed the Lodges, who soon had absolute control over all technology and education, poisoning humanity's rebirth while still in the womb.

Independent scientists were forced to join Lodges or were made to disappear.  Anyone who complained was immediately placed on a blacklist at The Hall of Lodges in Phenice.  A great black monolith upon whose face is carved the names of thousands of people whose political beliefs or glib comments have lead them to be denied access to any technology or even the fruits of any of those technologies, forcing them out onto the Traverses in the hopes of survival.