Guildfall

Guildfall is a collective name for the events that led up to and immedietely followed Nathrael's assault on the World Tree. It was triggered by the gathering of several cursed items from various locations in the multiverse. Rhillaine studied these items but was unable to prevent them from unleashing first Nathrael's lieutenants, then the Sin Writer himself. The result of the assault was the almost total loss of all Guild adventurers of active status, the shattering of the guild hall, and the corruption of the World Tree, which has led to it withering and being unable to provide the interplanar travel and dimensional manipulation the Guild relied on to function.

Prelude

At the height of its influence, the Little Warriors Adventurers Guild held outposts on over a hundred worlds, traded across multiple planes of reality, and repelled incursions from the lower and far realms as part of regular operations. Rhillaine had begun collecting a set of obscure artifacts thought to originate from the Guild's homeworld of Elanora, dated from the world's antiquity. The artifacts each contained a fragment of the essence of Nathrael, the Sin Writer, one of Elanora's progenator gods who helped Rhillaine create her world in ages past, and once the set was assembled Nathrael was able to reform.

Assault on the World Tree

Whisper had outwitted the guild strategists and located the Guildhall within the multiverse, passing this information to his masters from beyond. As the artifacts containing Nathrael's essense formed, they released an anti-magic pulse that disabled the halls outer defences, allowing Nathrael's lieutenants - 're-written' Balors combining the savagery of the Abyss with the unpredictability of the far realms - to assault the hall directly. However their assault proved to be a wicked mess as the souls of any warriors that fell to the demons were drained, their power siphoned to strengthen Nathrael himself. Worse, the attacks were ultimately diversionary as Nathrael used the time spent dealing with them to prepare an assault on the World Tree itself.

With most of the Guild's warriors having spent their energies and abilities defeating the demons, and having learned that each individual's death was making their task all the more impossible, the Guild decided to send their twelve strongest heroes (left standing and with spells left to cast) into combat against the Sin Writer. Four of them would fall, but once the heroes identified Nathrael's book was the focus of his power they were able to destroy both it and him.

Aftermath

Nathrael's apparent death caused the Guild hall to explode violently into both time and space. Almost every guild member who was either fighting Nathrael or taking shelter in the corners of the Hall to recuperate was killed or lost into the multiverse. Those trainees who were at first deemed too likely to perish in futility in the final battle were mustering for a final desperate assault outside the Hall, and they were mostly spared. Of Rhillaine and most of the senior guild leadership, there was no sign. Damien Ironbrand survived with severe amnesia. Lady Wintergreen was the highest ranking councilmember left alive to take command of the guild itself.

The core of the shattered hall remained on Elanora, the World Tree corrupted and dead leaving behind only a seed. With the World Tree corrupted, the sub-dimensional pockets of reality the Guild used as living quarters, storage rooms and operation centres ceased to exist. There is no current way of knowing the fate of anyone who happened to be inside when the Tree perished. The twelve original rooms of the Hall that were assaulted by Nathrael's lieutenants do remain, and what is left of the Guild now makes camp in their ruins and in Wintergreen's gardens outside.

The wider world of Elanora suffered tremors, short but virulent plagues, unnatural clouds of darkness that clung to the land for days on end, and incursions from the Shadowfell and lower planes. These trials were severe but only lasted about a month, and while order in the old kingdom of New Braeland was challenged, the Eal empire and other surrounding kingdoms suffered no irrepairable loss. The greater injury was to the world's psyche - the Guild had always stood as an aloof guardian, difficult to rouse to anger but terrifying in its power when finally provoked to action. Without this symbol of order the old enemies of the central kingdoms have grown bold beyond measure. To make matters worse some parts of the Guild Hall - those sub-dimensional pockets that were maintained by the World Tree - have appeared seemingly at random scattered about the rest of the world's surface. In some cases these pockets have been scattered across time as well as space and either appeared years into the past, rewritting the worlds history, or dropped into existence weeks or months after the events of Guildfall. Some of these old rooms and the priceless and powerful artifacts they stored have fallen under the control of Elanora's old agents of chaos such as evil giants, dragons and barbaric tribes of demon worshipers. In some cases Nathrael's passing has rewritten entire landscapes in the local area, causing lands from across the multiverse to appear merged with Elanora's own - overwritting events, lands and perhaps even the people who used to lie underneath.

Nathrael's death also wrecked havoc on the local perception of time itself. Guild records have begun to be kept in reference to Guildfall as reliability of non-Guild records in Elanora is suspect. Scholars of the surrounding kingdoms appear to disagree on exactly when the Guild was assaulted and how long the assault lasted. Hence Guild records are dated according to its members perspective - '0.0.1 After Guildfall' is the first sun of the first moon of the first winter after the Guild first began to interact with the outside world once more, about 1137 'after Exodus' in the local calendar. Matching dates with local calendars during or before Guildfall has proven problematic.

See also - Day Zero