Caelesta is the game world in which The Damage Guild’s Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign is set. Read below to learn more about the world and its history.
The Age of Wardens
Under the watchful eye of the wardens, the world entered a period of unprecedented prosperity. The wardens served to shepherd society, guiding their growth and leading them to a time of enlightenment. Magic and technology advanced and flourished, leading to the proliferation of incredible labor-saving devices, vast communication and travel networks, and longer and easier lives than ever before.
Each warden was unique in form and mind, and claimed responsibility over its own region of the land. Over time, the wardens and their domains grew to resemble each other, as the wardens poured their own magic into the land, creating the leylines to serve as conduits for their power. Sometimes, the land or its people would take on fantastical attributes. Eventually, this led to the formation of many of the races known today, with each race taking after the dominant features of their patron warden, and the land shaping itself to serve as an ideal home for such a people.
The wardens would sometimes take wives or husbands, either of other wardens, or of their own people. The warden blood flowed strong in their offspring, and these new wardens grew to take on roles of responsibility within their lands. Since these children were often all but immortal, over time, they grew in number until they had replaced their people in nearly all positions that required decision-making and leadership. With the prosperity brought by their wisdom and strength, few thought to challenge this shift of power.
The Stagnation
Generations of easy living led the people to grow complacent. With their major problems having all been solved by those who came before and by the wardens and warden-born who now ruled them, they lived lazy, luxurious lives, and no longer sought to learn from the wardens and better themselves. The wardens, for their part, became more aloof from those they had been created to watch over, and withdrew into their own interests. They continued to maintain the leylines and their children continued to lead at a smaller scale, but there was little direction from above to lead the people to new growth. As such, much of the knowledge and skill that had been built up over thousands of years was lost.
The Sundering
Certain wardens had grown arrogant in their isolation, believing themselves equal to the true gods. In their hubris, they sought to use their power to reshape the land into a new and even more ideal domain, worthy of beings of their stature. But they made a fatal mistake, tearing open the leylines and causing a magical disaster of unimaginable scale. The very world itself was ripped asunder, and the face of the land forever changed. Whole cities fell to ruin in the blink of an eye, and raw magic power flowed out from the leylines, often mutating the land and its inhabitants into twisted, monstrous forms, but some lucky few were instead gifted with magical abilities.
Whether killed by the cataclysm, driven into hiding by their shame, or reclaimed for punishment by the gods, the wardens disappeared, leaving their people to fend for themselves. The survivors had little knowledge and no experience in dealing with such hardship, and without the wardens’ guidance, untold numbers soon perished in the struggle for food and basic necessities. Desperate for leadership, communities turned to the remaining warden-born, no matter how distantly removed their bloodlines, or to those with newfound magic powers, who were seen as gifted by the gods.
The Age of Adversity
The world has been reduced to shattered chunks of earth, riven by the sudden formation of fissures, mountains, oceans, leyline walls, and other barriers, which have further separated the surviving towns and led to the creation of vast newly unexplored frontiers. Without the wardens to keep them in check, monsters have overrun much of the wilderness, sometimes spewing forth fully formed from the leylines themselves, sometimes transformed and twisted from the natural denizens of the land.