Over the last 100 years, the world of Mythellion has undergone radical change. The Empire of Shar, once a small, relatively weak nation, has massively expanded its borders and improved its technology and infrastructure after discovering a powerful artifact known only as “The Oracle.” What this oracle is, or what it does exactly, is a closely-kept secret known only by the highest level officials in the empire and the ruling body of the Cult of the Oracle.
In this time, the Empire of Shar has enforced strict religious and personal policies on their newly conquered nations and become known throughout the world as a totalitarian state. While it is not realistic for them to ban the worship of all other deities, practitioners of other faiths must pay tribute to the Oracle and the Empire or see their temples razed. Harsh taxes fuel the Empire’s war machine, while curfews, restricted areas and militant patrols keep the population in check. For followers of the Oracle and officials in the Empire, it is a new golden age, but for the rest of the world it is an age of darkness and despair, where previously celebrated differences between people are homogenized beneath the Empire of Shar’s banner.
Because of this, many of the remaining nations outside of the Empire’s borders, as well as many of the conquered states within it, have begun to mount a coordinated resistance, though their efforts are still in their infancy. Talented individuals from around the world are recruited or otherwise encouraged to resist the Empire’s rule, while many others find themselves imprisoned and facing extreme sentences for a variety of crimes, both real and perceived.
The World
For much of history, the world has largely been divided by many different nations and cultures, and while the Empire of Shar has taken to absorbing many of these, the people within them remain unique. The former Diocese of Pianzia originally birthed the fledgling Shar Empire, and having been re-conquered they share many of the same values and customs as the Empire itself. To the north, the warring tribes and kingdoms of Sadsetia were quick to acknowledge Shar’s might, having long been a frigid land of barbarians and conquerors and eager to take their conquest to the nations of the south. The eastern kingdoms, most notably the Kingdom of Arga, the Republic of Cepro and the nation of Sepri, lived in relative prosperity as economic and diplomatic powerhouses prior to their conquest. Diverse in people but strong in ideals, the Empire was quick to focus on severing and scattering the eastern kingdoms to make way for their conquest. To the west, the mystic and beautiful Reikasku Shogunate and its vassal-states allied with the wealthy Gourgosian League to resist the Empire, using the former as a shield to remain relatively unscathed. Though the costal nations of Pargonia and Borum were successfully resistant to Imperial rule at first, using their considerable naval capacity to stave off inbound invasions, the Empire of Shar managed to bring these nations under their fold by spreading worship of the Oracle, allowing their faith to take to the seas and thus quietly spread across the world.
Many of these nations are fractured and re-structured facsimiles of the kingdoms they once were, and as such most of them have large overlap of peoples and cultures. Many races that were ostracized prior to the Empire’s expansion, such as tieflings and lizardfolk, have seen a massive increase of acceptance outside the Empire’s borders, while being even more heavily discriminated against inside the Shar Empire than they had previously. Spies and couriers communicate between the remaining kingdoms to coordinate a counter-attack, while diplomats travel around the Empire’s borders to ensure such a counter-attack is possible when the time comes.
Religion
Even after the massive expansion of the Cult of the Oracle, religion in the world of Mythellion remains diverse and complicated. Throughout history, different parts of the world have had varying and contradicting religious beliefs, and to further complicate matters, many of these contradicting beliefs have simultaneously been verified as true. While some scholars and philosophers have long believed that the varying religious views throughout the world are merely different interpretations of the same truths, messengers of the gods and even some gods themselves have claimed otherwise, stating that their worshippers are in the right and decrying the gods of other regions as false, even when those gods have done the same.
While the specific gods and beliefs across the world vary greatly, however, there are clerics and priests under every domain in nearly every part of the world. How these domains are interpreted throughout the world is inconsistent: worshippers of the Steltasinstic pantheon in western Pargonia have a different god for each holy domain, the people of followers of Pereste in the east simply see the different domains as different aspects of the Sleeper’s dream. Even the Cult of the Oracle, which has become highly influential since the Empire of Shar’s rise, holds clerics of different domains within its borders, as the ruling body of the Empire have declared that the Oracle is but a messenger of the True Gods, and their actual nature is not yet known for certain.
Brief History of Mythellion
