The Story
A spoiler-controlled introduction. What follows is what the world already knows about itself.
IThe Mask
The world looks familiar. There are villages with farmland and a tavern. There are roads with guards and merchants. There are churches, and people who go to them because they have nothing else to hold.
Underneath it, something older is not at rest. The boundary between the natural and the supernatural, the Veil, is damaged. Ancient structures retain powers their inhabitants no longer understand. Magical traditions have grown out of incomplete knowledge of the past.
The world is a mask.
Nothing in Eclipsed Realms is simply what it appears to be: not the village, not the priest, not the helpful voice in the dark.
IIThe First Binding
Long before any of the kingdoms were founded, there was a force that could not be destroyed. So it was contained.
Six blood anchors were joined into a prison: places, sacrifice and blood tied into a single enormous structure. It held for a time, and then it fractured. The geometry remains, written into the land. The purpose has been forgotten.
What leaks through the break is not one catastrophe but many small ones: magic bleeding out of old stones, animals that are wrong, rituals that survive their reasons.
IIIThe Survivor
You wake among bodies, in an ossuary beneath an old house, in a cage. The house is older than the village above it and the Cult that haunts the village. You should not be alive. You have the strong impression that you were not expected to be.
You are customisable, with no predetermined morality. The story does not decide who you are. It asks, repeatedly, what you will do.
The first thing to speak to you is the Cursed Doll. She is helpful. She is friendly. She appears at waypoints across the realm, and she is the kind of ally you have reason to look at twice.
"There you are. I was beginning to think you would stay quiet."
IVThe Powers
Survival of that kind draws attention. Several powers take an interest, each reading it through its own beliefs.
The Cult
An organised religious power that treats bloodshed as devotion. It does not fully understand what it is calling.
The Hidden Village
Druids and keepers of ancestral knowledge, far from the Kingdom's reach. Not automatic allies.
The Kingdom
The largest organised authority in the realm: a walled mountain city of order, law, guards, and its own secrets.
Guards, Knights and Templars
The Kingdom's armed hand: city guards, knights and templars, each a rung of the same ladder.
The Thieves
A criminal society with a camp of its own and a trade in knowledge that is not for sale to the Kingdom.
None of them is the villain and none is the cure. Communities have competing loyalties and survival interests. You can be a protector, a manipulator, a conqueror, a corrupted caster, or something between.
VThe Choice
Allegiance matters, and the game remembers. Karma records your conduct. Corruption records what you spent. Factions keep their opinions; individuals keep theirs. Personality, Witty, Empathetic or Bold, shapes how you speak, and how people answer.
Some events are fixed. Eclipsed Realms does not promise that every outcome can be prevented. What belongs to you is the reason, the relationships and the cost.
Beyond that, we are not telling you.