TE = Tattered Earth

Several of you have heard me mention TE, or Tattered Earth. Many of you are curious about it, so I offer this explination.

TE is a project of mine that has been ongoing for several years. It was origionally started at the same time Knightstar and myself first started the WhiteWolf server. As WW grew it tool more of my time, so TE was set aside. Very slowly it has been added to over the years, the majority being within the last three. While hardly any of it exists in a module or in the NWN toolset, I have a notebook that contains all the details of the world, the gods, it's races, and so on. This notebook is 100 pages long, and is full of ideas.. It was created and worked on while I was a prison guard, who happened to work 12 hour night shifts from 6pm to 6am. Hence much of the detailed information below.

Below is the TE description. It will give any who read it a vivid mental picture of what the TE world is like, and possibly a craving for more.. Please, enjoy the read and post any questions or comments you may have.

On a side note, while I do still toy with areas and such in the toolset, WW has my attention and will continue to do so.

This is a Tattered Earth..

...It is a world that long ago was not unlike your own. At one time Earth had species galore, and over six billion people. These people had the computer, grand machines of flight, used chemistry and the atom, and experimented with creating life, working closer to try and become gods themselves. While the secret to DNA had not yet been discovered, still they understood the basic elements of genetics and disease. They had long since mastered the forge and metalworking; they had vast engines of destruction and control of nuclear power all at the touch of a button. All in all theirs had seemed a bright, if not frightening future, whose fanciful ideas had lead explorers to probe into the heavens in search of new worlds. They were a people who thought the course of their planet would go on forever...

They may have been right, but greater forces than earthlings were at work against them. Soon, their little world would be shattered, ending in a blinding flash. And now, thirty thousand or more years later, this is what the survivors - less than three hundred thousand of them - knew of their world..

..That a great object had sped towards Earth, it's path guided by the Gods of which the people of Earth had long forgotten existed in their advanced world. It was the Gods who sought to gain the attention of their people; to cleanse the Earth and return it to what it should have been, free of the excessive waste and mis-use that was cast upon the land.

And in their legends (which are confused and contradictory, because the written form of their language thought safe within their technology was lost in the aftermath, so that history had become a thing passed down by word of mouth) Earth had been ravaged of most it's species, along with its peoples, and might well have been considered dead.

At first it had seemed to move slowly, like a comet, then more swiftly, and finally in a rush; like a bar of white light; it speared down out of space to glance off the moon, where it's shattered pieces blazed across the surface of the world! Five great pieces slammed into the Earth, shattering the land. Not much survived the areas around the impacts.. Not much survived the impacts at all. The seperate pieces thudded down into craters of their own making, on a world gone mad by reason of its coming.

To the handful of stumbling, stunned survivors it was sufficient - no, more than sufficient - that a deadly white sun had fallen out of the sky and destroyed everything they had known, leaving them and their descendants to live through a sort of hell for over ten thousand years. For all the grand technology the people of Earth had, none of it worked. The meteor's impact had caused magnetic shockwaves, destroying all things electrical. The world shook for weeks as great earthquakes further altered the planets mass. Where some areas broke away from their parent continents, some sunk completely. Others would become new lands. With in a few years, the superheated and turmoiled planet was plunged into a new ice age.. Slowly everything stilled. Eventually, as the planet's orbit stabilized and its climates re-polarized - however dramatically - all that was left of humanity dwelled as best they might in vast underground caverns. Of all the known continents, oceans, and islands none was recognisable. THe seasons of winds, suns, rains, and snow did not return for over fifteen thousand years...

But all is not lost, for the gods are merciful. For those who survived, the knowledge of the wheel, fire and sails, even rudimentory magics and coarse chemistry remains. They understand the basic elements of a forge and of metalworking; for they have metal tools, and the crossbow for hunting.

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The land of Tarrah, a world where magic touches little and barbaric societies rule. It is a place of both fantastic beauty and grand horror, where things can be as normal as the sun rising every morning to greet its people, or as odd as the fragmented moons floating in the night sky.

This shining land lays open - ready for conquest, and the ways into it are the rivers. Slow and mighty, turbulent and frothing, the rivers are the roads the first explorers take, building rafts and flatboats, floating down water that is green, brown, and black flecked with foam, that leads onward into the heart of a dangerous yet unawakened land where riches wait for the bold and the strong.

The journey across the plains is endless, the mountains rough, the passes few, and the streams treacherous and deadly. The days are long, each being as long as a week, as are the nights.. Earth's rotation has dramatically slowed, giving birth to a more stable weather pattern. The seasons are persistant; truely destructive storms are rare, perhaps one in every seventy years..

Wars rage between the races, a constant threat in this savage land. Only a handful of races dominate the known territories. The Loxxan in the eastern plains, the Culan in the mountainous north, the Episidies on the western coast, and the treacherous Nebari in the vast forests to the south.