Tir Hathar — World History

This document didn't exist until now, even though half the setting cites it — Religion, Magic Systems, World Overview, Silbriesti, and Rephaim all say "see World History" for context they assume is written down somewhere. It wasn't. This is that somewhere: everything already scattered across those documents about the Long War and its aftermath, pulled into one place, with the genuine gaps flagged rather than papered over.

Scope and Timeline

The Long War lasted 250 years. The current campaign era sits roughly a century after it ended — long enough that the war is documented history rather than living memory for almost everyone, short enough that its consequences are still the active shape of the world rather than settled into the past. A few people are old enough to have lived through parts of it: the oldest Elves were already adults when it began (see Silbriesti document), which is the clearest evidence in-setting of just how long Elves live. Nearly everyone else — every human nation's leadership, every Sigil house, every faith's current clergy — is working from what survived, not what they saw.

What "survived" means varies enormously by institution, and that unevenness is itself part of the setting's texture: some traditions came through relatively intact, some were gutted, and a few were untouched entirely because the war never reached them. See "Who Remembers, Who Was Untouched," below.

The Central Catastrophe — Gods Died

This is documented history, no longer heresy to say aloud (see Religion document). During the Long War, gods died — not metaphorically, not "fell out of favor," but died, in a way the surviving faiths all had to build a theology around afterward.

Confirmed deaths: the God of Life and the God of Knowledge — the only two deaths anyone treats as settled fact rather than theological interpretation. Their absence is load-bearing for huge parts of the current world: - The God of Life's death is why healing magic is scarce and political rather than tactical — the Flame's healing arm holds more of the world's healing capacity than any single institution should, and everyone knows it (see Religion document). - The God of Knowledge's death took the complete theoretical and theological framework for high-level magic and the Sigils down with it. Both the Sigil Houses' incomplete understanding of their own bloodlines and the arcane schools' 5th-level ceiling trace back to this one loss (see Magic Systems and The Sigil Houses documents).

Unconfirmed but implied: other Host patron deities died too — the Host's decentralized structure meant no unified response, so some domains went unclaimed and others were quietly absorbed by surviving gods who now hold portfolios they weren't built for (see Religion document). Exactly which gods, and how many, is still open — see below.

What it means is the live question, not the fact itself. Every surviving faith has had a century to build an answer, and none of them agree: the Host mourns quietly and absorbed what it could. The Flame reads the deaths as proof of the ancient threat it's always preached against, not evidence against faith. The Blood cult treats it as the final nail in the case that divinity was never external to begin with. See Religion document for each faith's full theological wound.

The Planar Scars

Damage to the connection between Tir Hathar and the planes beyond it — the specific mechanism behind why divine magic is capped lower than arcane magic (4th level for ordinary clergy versus 5th for arcane schools), why the two Walking Gods are powerful but not omnipotent, and very possibly why some fantastic creatures (Phase Spiders' planar-flickering is one flagged guess — see The Northern Reaches document) work the way they do.

What's actually known: the scars exist, they're real and measurable in their effects, and they haven't healed in a century of reconstruction. What's not known: their exact nature, whether they're repairable at all, and how many of the world's odder phenomena actually trace back to them versus being unrelated fantastic quirks that just happen to invite the comparison. This is one of the setting's genuine open mysteries rather than a solved problem being kept off the page — see Open, below.

The Spell Ceiling — What the War Cost Magic

Arcane: schools teach up to 5th level today because that's what survived their catalogues. 6th level exists only in fragments — partial texts, corrupted records, effects without mechanics — a rediscovery, not a curriculum item. Nothing above 6th exists anywhere in the setting; there is no 7th level spell in Tir Hathar.

The moon-schools were military institutions during the war, which made them targets. This is more specific than "magic declined generally" — it's an active, war-era ransacking with different schools taking different damage: - The Crimson school lost more than it publicly admits. - The Mirage school's pre-war catalogue is believed to have been twice its current size. - Al-Salat's records were deliberately destroyed by multiple parties, for multiple different reasons — not simple wartime chaos, but at least one actor who wanted that specific knowledge gone. See Magic Systems document.

Divine sits lower than arcane, and for a different reason. Arcane's ceiling is a knowledge problem — a library that burned. Divine's is a connection problem — the planar scars limiting what a living god can transmit to clergy who aren't standing in front of it. That's why ordinary clergy cap at 4th rather than sharing arcane's 5th, and why proximity to one of the two Walking Gods (up to 5th within a few miles) is the one way around it. See Religion document for the full breakdown.

Primal magic — the Elves' tradition — is the one major exception, drawing on something that predates the school system entirely and was untouched by the planar scars in ways arcane and divine magic weren't (see World Overview document). This is part of why Elven magic reads as older and stranger than anyone else's: it wasn't damaged by the same war that gutted everything else.

What Actually Happened — Known Events

The full 250-year military and political history isn't written yet (see Open, below) — what exists is a handful of specific, well-documented events, mostly clustered very early in the war:

The sea-draining and the Catfolk Diaspora. Very early in the Long War, the Giants (the Rephaim) dried the sea at the heart of Catfolk civilization, with the Caldrian Imperium's help. The mechanism was internal to the geography — Mexico's own rivers, redirected to empty into the open ocean on the landmass's far side instead of the enclosed sea between it and the dinosaur continent. This wasn't infrastructure, it was a deliberate act of war: it broke Catfolk civilization outright and took them out of the Long War entirely rather than defeating them in the field, scattering them into what's remembered as the Catfolk Diaspora. No Dwarven involvement. It's no longer a tightly held secret, though exactly how openly any given nation's leadership discusses its own ancestors' role in it varies. See Geography, Catfolk, Rephaim, and The Caldrian Empire documents.

The Giants took Hungary around the same early-war window. Settled and uncontested now — the Imperium keeps a symbolic schoolbook grievance about it, not a live dispute. See Geography and Giant Kingdoms documents.

The Dwarves armed every side of the war without shame — the richest power on the map, and the only one whose war-era conduct reads as pure, unapologetic commerce rather than a side taken. See Nations document.

Dar Ilm al-Zakir (the Scholar Nation) entered the war last and negotiated peace first — not cowardice, genuine diplomatic superiority — and emerged with trade concessions that left them richer than when the war started. The Imperium has not forgiven this. See Dar Ilm al-Zakir document.

The Wayfolk trace to war-era neutral caravaners — itinerant animal-handlers and supply-runners who served every side by picking none, since a caravan that stayed unaligned could cross any front line. The war ended; the habit, and every border-conscious nation's century of trusting them not to have picked a side, didn't. See Wayfolk document.

The Flame's militant arm got a century of practice and a century of license that peace hasn't fully revoked — the internal rot Religion document flags (zealotry sliding into atrocity) traces directly to this. See Religion document.

The Two Walking Gods

Two deities descended during the Long War and have not returned to the heavens. They walk the world as individuals of immense but limited power, constrained by the same planar scars that cap everyone else's divine magic, and they are at odds with each other — maintaining distance because a direct confrontation between two divine beings on the mortal plane could be catastrophic to one or both. Their names, domains, what they did during the war, and why they descended and never left are all campaign-level reveals, not front matter. See Religion and Open Questions documents.

Who Remembers, Who Was Untouched

Not everyone in Tir Hathar relates to the Long War the same way, and the variance is itself a setting feature:

The Elves remember it directly, and that memory is a wound, not a trophy. The oldest living Elves were adults when the war began and watched all 250 years of it unfold, including the gods dying. Taniere's isolationism is guarded behind multiple competing theories, and the full truth — guilt, a failure to intervene or an intervention that came too late, something the oldest Elves cannot explain without admitting complicity — is a deliberate campaign-level revelation, not something this document resolves. See Silbriesti and Open Questions documents.

The Kuwaffri are the opposite case entirely — not survivors of the war, but genuinely outside it. Alone among Tir Hathar's peoples, their homeland (a drowned rift roughly where the Red Sea sits) was never touched by the war, never scarred by the planar damage, never affected by the God of Knowledge's death or anything else that shaped everyone else's cosmology. Where the Elves are unique for remembering what was lost, the Kuwaffri are unique for having nothing to have lost in the first place. See Kuwaffri document.

Some dragons may be old enough to remember firsthand too — old-world remnants predating the Long War and possibly the death of the God of Knowledge, meaning a handful of the oldest dragons could hold intact knowledge nobody else in the world still has. This is flagged as a "who still remembers the truth" thread alongside the oldest Elves and the two Walking Gods, not yet developed further. See Dragons document.

The Rephaim's own origin myth predates the war by generations — old enough that even the Elves only have it as inherited story, not memory. It sits in a separate, older mythic layer rather than being a Long War event itself, and whether it bears on the Sigils, the Walking Gods, or the war at all is deliberately undetermined. See Rephaim document.

The World Since — What a Century of Reconstruction Looks Like

Politically, decree gave way to consensus, badly. Empires that once ruled by fiat now govern through messier processes than they used to, and nothing about the current order reads as fully settled just because the fighting stopped (see Index document) — Dar Ilm al-Zakir's Majlis-and-trade model and the Flame's internal factionalism are both, in their own ways, downstream of this.

Relics of the war still circulate and still mean something when they surface. Warcaster Armor is the clearest example: a finite number of suits exist, no new ones are being made (doing so would read as preparation for the next war), and wearing one into a city is a political act on the order of driving a tank down a street. See World Overview document.

The map still carries physical scars. Dead zones, echo sites, and corrupted nodes are scattered across it wherever the war left its deepest marks — largely unplaced and undeveloped as specific locations, but explicitly intended as adventure-site material rather than just flavor text. The newly-flagged dead-magic zone at the dinosaur continent's southern Cape may or may not be one of these; the connection isn't confirmed. See World Overview and Geography documents.

The Blood cult's theology went from fringe to hard-to-dismiss. It existed before the war as a marginal belief; after gods visibly died, after divine magic became capped, after the world acquired scars that a century of prayer hasn't healed, its central claim — that divinity was always latent in mortal blood rather than external — stopped being easy to laugh off. See Religion document.

Open: which specific gods died beyond the God of Life and the God of Knowledge; the exact nature of the planar scars and whether they're repairable at all; what the world looked like before the war — how much more powerful the schools were, how much more complete the Sigils were; what role the Sigil houses played during the 250 years — who they sold to, what they lost, which houses existed before the war that don't anymore; the specific event or sequence of events that actually ended the war (250 years of fighting didn't just stop on its own); where dead zones, echo sites, and corrupted nodes actually sit on the map and what each one is; what pre-war artifacts exist beyond Warcaster Armor, where they are, and who knows about them; the two Walking Gods' full story (see Religion document); the full truth behind Elven isolationism (see Silbriesti document); whether the Southern Cape dead-magic zone connects to the planar scars or is something older and unrelated (see Geography document).