The world of Urdu is old, the oldest thing in this incarnation of the universe, the point from which all else came into being. For billions of years people have lived and fought and died on it. Mighty empires have rose, fallen, rebuilt themselves, been ground into ashes by those who came after them Over all of this the gods have watched, sometimes playing games, sometimes now, feared and worshipped, they were pieces of the universe given form, powers beyond human ken who built their cities in the heavens from which to watch all that passed below them.

Until the Cataclysm. Until the terrible event over 300 winters ago when the heavens themselves fell down, destroying the entire southern continent, obliterating tracts of land and reshaping the world in a fury of fire and the death screams of the gods. Those who could Channel their power did so, in one last moment as the gods tried to halt their demise and failed. The ancient wizards, whose bargains with Mors and Arth'Ba'Toch failed as Death and Time died, passed on, and most magic in the world was lost or shattered by the loss of the gods.

The world has never recovered, though nothing has risen to replace them, no terrible Power come to claim the world as its own. There is only the loss, and the building of the new world from those terrible moments and the ashes of all that had come before.

Into these times come your characters, drawn to the city of Estavia (one of the few to have grown in strength when all the empires were shattered), a haven of modern alchemy trying to find new ways to do for people what the gods always did. You are, each, the relics of an old age, one of the families of those Gifted with magic who remain in the present age and have not been destroyed by the Hands from Bremen or died out due to inbreeding. Almost the last of those gifted, a three hundred year program to make Gifts strong enough to face down the remaining Wizards, but no one living knows why the Gifted families went this far, nor what was intended.... most believe it is the salvation of the world and the restoration of the gods.