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Medaevum is a roleplaying setting and experiment in genre created by me, Marshall Decker, also known as BLargtheAwesome. It wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of many players and friends over the years, to whom I express my unending gratitude.

Where to Start

First of all, join the discord if you somehow got here from somewhere else. https://discord.gg/s6TpGFGsKb

These are the rules. They're probably good to familiarize yourself with.

If you want to jump right in, consult the page on character creation.

And after that, just look for roleplay and start doing your own thing. This wiki exists as something to reference, not something mandatory to read.

Introduction

The stars above are strange tonight. One crawls across the sky slowly, without leaving a trail. A few hours later, it moves across again at the same speed. A small cluster of stars, fainter than most, blink slowly like the many eyes of some skyward god looking down at the world below. The gods descended from those same heavens, but there were more stars then. The void between stars grows larger every year, with some stars blinking out of the sky entirely. How long until that darkness comes for this sun?

Medaevum is the game, Ayaria is the setting this wiki focuses on. In the game of Medaevum, you are playing a character who has their own goals, ambitions, and sense of self-preservation. It is presumed that your character both wants to live, and has goals beyond just the simple preservation of their life that they want to fulfil. If your character is not at least a little self-directed, you probably won’t have as much fun on here as you would in a more structured environment.

Tone

Medaevum is a grounded fantasy setting. There is magic, and the magic is core to the setting, but is supplemental to the other themes of the setting. A mage may theoretically achieve the power of the gods, but the ambition of the mage and what they’re willing to sacrifice matters more than the intricate rules of the magic system itself.

Horror

Medaevum is frequently a horror setting. Which genre of horror is specific to the given scenario. One campaign might feature Resident Evil style action where the characters are fighting off against axe-wielding undead. Another campaign may feature an unusual figure that can be seen watching people from the shadows, their purpose unknown. There are some things that will never take place.

• Sex can be implied or referenced, but explicit sexual acts or rape are a hard no.
• Harm to children.
• Detailed depictions of torture.
• Some gore is okay.

Technology

It varies across time periods and regions, but generally speaking the most advanced technology a given character will ever see is an arquebus or a single-shot pistol. More advanced technology exists, but tend to be the guarded secrets of paranoid archaeologists or the state secrets of an entire nation. Inventors or those of great magical acumen tend to meet mysterious ends or suddenly lose the means of pursuing their projects.

Magic

The magic of Ayaria often involves the grotesque, disturbing, and outright cruel. There are those who can justify this by saying to themselves that it is for a greater good, or they have so far preserved their ignorance to the harsh realities that make their magic possible. Magic has never been common, except in societies of mages themselves.

Time

Time does not flow at the same pace for everyone. Time is measured at a grand scale by the number of seasons, and personally by one’s own reckoning of how much time they believe has passed. To say one has had a “long summer” is not an idiom in this world, but could very well be a literal statement of fact. One person may leave their family behind to travel to a faraway land, and from their perspective they have been gone a year while the season has remained autumnal throughout. Only to return and find that for his family only six months had passed, or perhaps ten years.

Elsewhere

Not only time has broken in the absence of the high gods, but so too has physical reality begun to relax and become less stable. There is a term in Ayaria, to say that someone is “from elsewhere.” Elsewhere is a broad term for other worlds, some near and some far. A person in this world might take the wrong bend down a forested road, and emerge in another reality altogether. Perhaps the differences would be subtle, the historic list of kings being in a different order, or it might be extremely dramatic. Encountering a world where it has been overrun by monsters, for example. Sometimes traveling between realities, walking along the Isthmus of Many Worlds, is deliberate. More often, such conjunctions are seemingly random and finding a way back into one’s own reality is a difficult trial most fail to overcome.

The Iron Blight

Iron and especially steel are rare. When new deposits of these precious minerals are found, they are jealously guarded. This is because it can be easily infested by a sort of inorganic disease, a blight that spreads between metallic objects like a blight spreads through crops. It will destroy iron and steel, and it will gradually unmeld bronze into its constituent parts, requiring reforging.

Current Setting

Ayaria is a large world, and every single part of it cannot be focused on at once. Sometimes it's a change in place, sometimes it's a change in time, and sometimes it's both. Because this wiki defaults to the most modern era of the setting, if the current setting is set at some point in the past some of the information may be too up to date. If there's any confusion you have questions, you can always ask.

The Rough Provinces

Called Asper Provincia by the Empyreans, home by the Vitravn, and Eastwood by the elves. This part of the world is dominated by The Whistling Pines, split by the River Eerie, and the sky is cleaved by the White Mountains. In spite of its proximity to Midasgard, few live here. The land is harsh, resource poor, and largely undeveloped. Parts of this land have not been seen by the eyes of man for a thousand years. For good reason.

The setting's current epoch is between The Theologians' War and The Lord-Cardinals' War.