Hello. C J here. I don't think I've ever mentioned this here but the Legend series wasn't ever intended to end after I made the card game. The Legend series was made to be compatible with any time period and setting and today I'm aiming to prove that. Here is the first page of text from my new setting project for the Legend series, Legend - Verse. The name Verse is part of the setting. This is not the Astral and the Astral won't come up in this new book at all. Once I've got the core text written I'm going to track down people to help illustrate it. Here's that sample.
Humanity’s new home has many names. Haven is its actual name while Homestead or just Stead are common derivatives. The planet has been occupied for just over a hundred years and in that time humanity has tried to keep it alive through storms of magic and industrial revolutions. Most of the planet is a dense wilderness ranging from jungle to parched badlands, all dotted with research stations and extraction sites. The single main city shares the planet’s lack of a name. This place wasn’t always home to this many people but in this age of advancement its the closest thing those people have to the world they lost.
That loss wasn’t that long ago. For a while the many races humanity fractured into thought they would take to the stars and forge an empire. The threat of galaxy scale warfare wasn’t ever realized but it was replaced by something worse, corporate competition. The corporations agreed that they couldn’t privately own planets but that left them with little else to do but compete for money and eventually for employees. As the corporations continued to advance they drove the market toward better, cheaper space flight and eventually colonized three planets. Haven was one of these, as were Ossan and Pallan. These last two were eventually lost.
Then came the tipping point. The discovery of magic changed life across the entire human settled region, commonly called the Settled Universe and quickly shortened to the Verse. A few other colonies sprang up around interesting celestial locations to research or profit from. While the human race was learning the basics of spaceflight, of course after having relied on it for almost a century without knowing how it worked, one of these stations derived a mathematical formula that, when contemplated by a human, could rearrange matter. The call for magic to be accepted by the people of the Verse happened rapidly and, faced with something the corporations couldn’t own all of, most people took to it well.
The rapidly advancing cross-planet communications network known as the exonet allowed thinkers and hobby theorists from across the Settled Universe to cooperate on the development of magic. Soon cabals were a common social outing and crossing between planets using sorcery was allowed and completely unregulated. People quickly learned that O2-flight was cheaper and easier than actual translocation, which required immense mathematical skill and impossible calculations, and travel between the four settled worlds was made easy and as inexpensive as packing yourself a lunch for the faster-than-light flight. The original planet humanity left was almost forgotten in this era and its original name has long since been lost.
Disaster followed after about five years of this. The corporations tried to crack down on magic freeware cutting into their profits and the people reacted. Not realizing how utterly democratic the exonet had become the people rose up and took what they could no longer buy. It was the worse civil conflict in history, with nations and governments obsolete and the future of four worlds in the balance. The original homeland humanity left withdrew from the conflict quickly and unified as one political power as a whole, renaming itself Golden. It still is named Golden and is one nation with one voice in space politics. The other three planets were left on their own. Facing impossible odds most corporate employees left Ossan and Pallan and abandoned the fight, travelling to Haven and flooding it with people.
The two lost planets have remained a reminder that the human race will destroy as often as it creates. They are gone simply because no one has the money or the will to recolonize them as something new. Haven is the only home most people have now. This was roughly twenty years ago. In that time the population of the planet has remained about two million and while most people have jobs the planet is without leaders. No one is willing to risk losing the last world humanity has left that isn’t it’s home world and so no one is willing to unify for any length of time. Money rules in their place, with anyone willing to hire a team to work on something or build something can get things done. But below it all, the old societies of magic are still there. They have collected together out of the entire Verse and operate with public approval but a lot of secrecy. The Verse doesn’t need to know what they’re doing.
Yet.
C J Mcpherson
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