Origins of the Tragic Millenium

As the western world, and so called democracies declined in the early 21st century, tensions between the decadent American hegemony and the rising Chinese dictatorships escalated into a series of resource wars in Africa, India and South America reminiscent of the cold war of the 20th century.

The collapse of global trade, and the dramatic impacts of climate change exasperated the divide between the have and the have nots, leading to mass migrations and the colonisation of militarised buffer zones between nations, patrolled by drones, scourging the people of north Africa, Mexico, the middle east and central Asia.

The discovery of interplanar physics, and the manipulation of relationships between structures and energy forms in the 2050’s created a revolution in technology too late to stop the great war breaking out in 2064. The resultant nuclear and biological holocaust annhilated north America and east Asia, and ravaged Europe, Russia and the Indian sub continent. In the aftermath the plagues and refugee hordes spread destruction across the globe sparing few from what would become the tragic millennium.

A thousand years of warfare, or terrifying new technologies, mutant and machine armies, and scientists weakening the boundaries between planes, finally left humanity struggling in the dark ages. As sea levels continued to rise, and the great deserts of the Amazon, the tropics and the Sahara drowned and buried cities and civilisations, the populations of earth (human and otherwise) declined to less than a 100 millions souls, divided by the great wastes.

Europe survived the worst of the mass destruction of the great war, and as the radiation decayed, the earth cooled and the seas receded, human civilisation recovered to the level of semi feudal societies similar to the those of the 10th / 11th century, but with access to terrifying weapons and technologies of the tragic millennium, without the wherewithal to fully understand those technologies that are now akin to magic. This is the setting for the sage of the Runestaff.