The world has passed through six distinct Ages. Each left its mark on the ruins you’ll explore, the relics you’ll recover, and the world beyond Hearth.
Scholars number the Ages oldest to newest. No one alive remembers most of them. What is known comes from ruins, relics, and manuscripts - and much of that is guesswork.
Age I - The Myriad Deep
Oldest known era. Pre-human.
The Titans - beings of immense power - shaped the world through primal force. Their works are not buildings so much as geographic features: structures so vast they are mistaken for mountains, valleys, or palaces made of wind by their Genasi descendants.
They are gone. Their purpose is unknown. Their end is unknown. What they left behind is old, strange, and dangerous.
Age II - The Age of the Skylords
A floating empire. A catastrophic fall.
A civilization mastered the skies - cities, fortresses, and trade routes suspended in the air by magical forces no one has since replicated. Their hubris brought them down (literally). The wreckage of their fall is scattered across the world and affected the Ages that followed.
Bafflingly, one structure from this Age has been visible from the ground, intact against all reason and popular in old folklore and stories.
Age III - The Dark Ages
Classic kingdoms. Dead gods.
Following the fall of the Skylords came an Age marked by the turbulence of a divided world. The Dark Ages were a long era of mortal kingdoms, wars, and the worship of gods who no longer answer. The polytheistic pantheon of this Age is gone - whether they were false, killed, departed, or simply silent depends on who you ask. Their temples remain. Their magic is devotional in nature, tied to faith rather than artifice.
Age IV - The Magitech Dominion
Industry and arcane power, fused. Despots on every throne.
The Magitech Dominion industrialized magic - factories running on ley lines, enchanted infrastructure, skyships, and weaponized relics. It was the Age that most deeply understood the relationship between arcane energy and its conversion into mechanical power. That understanding is why scholars believe the The Hearth Engine originated here.
The Dominion was ruled by kings and queens who accumulated far too much power for themselves. It did not end peacefully. The peoples rose up, and the revolutions that toppled the Magitech rulers became the founding act of the next Age.
One obscure record from this era mentions a figure named Thalorin Vex - an eccentric who predicted a coming age of permanent frost. Nobody took him seriously. The The Hearth Engine that now keeps Hearth alive may have been his work, or may simply be a product of his era. Scholars are not certain.
Relics from this Age tend to be mechanical, purposeful, and built to last - tools that did a specific job and did it well.
Age V - The Age of Cydonia
Revolution’s leftovers. A slow collapse.
The revolutions that ended the Magitech Dominion were meant to break the power of kings and queens. What they built instead was the Cydonian Bureaucracy - a vast administrative apparatus designed to keep rulers in check by distributing power across layers of elected officials. It didn’t take long for the “election” framework to be “retired.” It replaced one kind of glutton with another.
Cydonia lacked the technological capabilities of the Dominion it replaced. Skyships were already a fading memory by the time the Bureaucracy took hold - lost in the chaos of revolution and the neglect of administrators more interested in proper order than innovation. What remained was a bland, sprawling renaissance-industrial civilization - functional, joyless, and slowly grinding to a halt.
The Bureaucracy was not a sudden collapse. It was a slow one - the kind where everyone can see it happening and nobody can stop it. Then the Frost arrived, and finished the job.
Cydonian relics tend to be administrative: cataloguing devices, navigation tools, record-keeping artifacts. Occasionally something stranger surfaces, a remnant of the Dominion era they tried to bury.
Age VI - The Age of Frost
Now. Year 10.
The world froze fast. There were signs in the decade before - unusual cold, failing harvests, winters that didn’t quite end - but few acted on them. Then, in the span of about three years, it stopped being a warning and became a catastrophe. Crops failed entirely. Infrastructure collapsed. The Cydonian Bureaucracy - past its prime but not yet at its end, perhaps a century from collapse under ordinary circumstances - found that all its paperwork, corruption, and institutional slowness had left it with no unified capacity to respond. Its police and officials abandoned the capital to save themselves. That moment of collapse is Year 0 - the start of the current calendar.
The Frost is not a wall of instant death. A traveler with good gear can survive outside on a clear day. But civilization needs more than survival - it needs crops, consistent warmth, and the ability to build. The Frost ended all of that. The cause remains unknown. The arcane ice is not natural; it is magical in origin. Whether it is permanent is a question nobody has answered yet.
Hearth survives because of the The Hearth Engine. Everywhere else fights bitterly to do so.
There are rarely Age VI relics. Nothing has been built worth keeping.
See Events Timeline for a full chronological record of player-known events across all Ages.