WELCOME TO SHAR

Shar

(setting introduction)

Nearly a thousand years ago, a coalition of demons known as the Greater Nine, disaffected with the futile struggle against the divine order or disenchanted with meaninglessness dominion over layers of the Abyss, resolved to take some of the Prime Material Plane for themselves. This would be an altogether different space, free from the tyrannical balance dictated by Lord Ao and his petty divinities. It would be a dark canvas upon which to scrawl their own version of reality. Shar would be twisted into being, not created, for a demon cannot truly create, only corrupt. It would be purged of order, and remade in the memories and imaginations of some of the most dreadful beings in the multiverse.

 

Thus the Greater Nine, lead by the mysterious Lord Uro, folded off a piece of the Ethereal Plane, binding it to itself and anchoring it to the Prime Material Plane, a process as cataclysmic and imperfect as the demons themselves, a process that irreparably damaged the fabric of the multiverse. Where Shar and the Material Plane converge, they warp and fray, a terrible straining that has birthed many wounds: portals. These portals cannot be opened, and they cannot be closed, but they can be traversed, and over hundreds of years, creatures flowed, crept, fled, or were cast into Shar from the Material Plane, populating the continents with Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Goblinoids, and a great diversity of other Folk.

 

They were welcomed, these immigrants: beasts, refugees, and would-be-conquerors alike, as subjects and worshipers. And finding a world absent of gods, a world where the Weave itself twists and bucks, where every spell cast carries a grave risk, a world with very few beings to appeal to for protection, worshipers is exactly what many of them became. This great collaboration between mortal and fiend blossomed into cults, temples, cities, and even Civilizations, wrought in blood and fear, but yielding great power and wealth for those who embraced the Sovereignty of the Demons. Their exaltation of the Nine weakened the cosmic bonds that constrain them to the Abyss-- an investiture of power that drew the demons ever closer to Godhood.

 

That is, until the arrival of mortals who brought their Faith with them, who would not bow before the darkness, who uplifted the oppressed and downtrodden, and in their heretical devotion to the Obsolete Gods, opened the way for Pelor and Helm, Bahamut and Selûne and many other gods which the Nine had worked so tirelessly to leave behind forever. And though the Demons defended their plane with a desperate ferocity and violence, turning on worshiper and heretic alike during a time known as the Dark Ages, the Nine found themselves yet again cast out, this time from their own Realm. In fury and grief they retreated to the Abyss, but not before blighting the land with a permanent reminder of its Creators: Corruption, a terrible physical and spiritual plague that turns mortals into monsters, soulless horrors known only as Hollows.

 

In the modern era, in the South of Shar, seated deep within a vast desert across which roams a hellish menagerie of demons and monsters left over from the Dark Ages, lies one of the Plane’s most prosperous Kingdoms: Acroshia. This Human empire is more properly considered a loose collection of city-states united under the Banner of Mhim, the possibly Divine entity who has ruled the Kingdom since the end of the Dark Ages. Under the protection and guidance of Mhim and his many-tendrilled legions of fanatical warriors, priests, mages, and spies, the capitol city of Seth, as well as its primary trading partners, Fathi and Al-Jaran, have prospered and flourished. Though rumors persist of a great Kingdom to the North, for all that can be proven, Acroshia is the last and greatest Empire of Shar.

 

It is in this empire that you will find yourself, Adventurer, either a simple Acroshian commoner lifted to circumstances beyond the auspices of your birth, or a heroic figure from Endorahn, the so-called Realm Beyond, cast through a portal to Shar as a punishment for a terrible crime you didn’t commit… or did you? Hero or villain, commoner or King, welcome to a world that was not made for mortals. The desert awaits.