Key Facts About Orphan

Here’s some information that is vital to understanding the world of Orphan.

God Is Dead

Orphan is in a pretty sorry state. This is due to the death of God.
Orphan was created, and initially governed, by an all-powerful creator deity called the Demiurge (or the Monad, or God, or any of a hundred other epithets). For a while, things proceeded in a regimented fashion, according to an inscrutable and unfathomably complex cosmic plan; reality ran like clockwork, guided by the steady hand of its creator.
Then, there was a snag in the plan: the Demiurge died.
This was a first. Nothing had ever died before. Now, though, death opened like a black maw at the heart of reality, claiming God as its first victim, and things quickly went off the rails.

Reality Is Shattered

Not only was the driver’s seat of reality now vacant, there was also suddenly a huge surplus of raw power that nobody was using. The corpse of the Demiurge bled magic into the cosmos, and for the first time, even the lowliest of mortals were able to reach out and claim this power for themselves.
And they did. Magic, formerly a tool of order, became a hammer without a master, unpredictable and ruinous. Reality went off the rails for a while. Everyone fought everyone else. People started ascending to godhood willy-nilly. It was a bad scene.
The worst of the upheaval is past, but it has left the world forever altered. Much of Orphan is lost, erased from reality, and the rest is afloat in a vast, dark sea of chaos. The few remaining splinters of reality are riddled with weird phenomena and the scars of magical catastrophes, and the timeline is as tangled as a string of Christmas lights.

History Is Weird

Nobody actually knows how long the chaos that followed the Demiurge’s death lasted. It’s not that it lasted a particularly long time; it’s more that one of the things that got chopped and screwed beyond recognition during this period was linear time, and so, in a way, this upheaval didn’t really last any time at all, at least not according to any useful definition of the word.
Since Heaven and Hell signed their treaty, the timeline has been relatively stable. Anything before the Demiurge’s death, though, is a different story; nobody knows what the world was like back then. There are beings still living who claim to predate the Shattering, but they’re no help. Some give conflicting accounts, while others are unwilling or unable to do even that. Several such conflicting accounts have been proven simultaneously true, as if there are multiple pasts.
This effectively means that history starts about a millennium back. Everything before that is just speculation and guesswork, and besides, it’s all fairly irrelevant for our purposes.

Divinity Is Everywhere

Orphan is a world devoid of gods, though not of divinity. Let me explain.
The Demiurge is a tough act to follow. What upstart godling could measure up to an all-powerful, all-seeing creator deity? There’s divinity in spades, though—the immanent power of the Demiurge pervades reality—but with how separated and subdivided that power has become, there simply exists no being quite powerful enough to earn the epithet “god.”
This does not mean that nobody is attempting to reach godhood. Lots of people are! They’re trying constantly.
It also does not mean that the people of Orphan do not worship. Lots of people do! The generals of Heaven and Hell, and other particularly powerful individuals, are revered by their subjects. People carry around icons and things, kind of like a mix between god worship and saintly veneration.
You, however, are not a hyper-powerful divine being. Yet.

You Are Human

Yeah. Sorry about that. See, in this setting I’ve decided to eschew the typical orcs n’ elves flavor of D&D. There are a number of reasons behind this decision. Ask me about them sometime.
In place of the typical range of fantasy races, I’m focusing more on human variants—tieflings, aasimar, genasi, and so on. On Orphan, there’s a huge range of magical variation in the human genome—and the line between “human” and “supernatural being” is blurred, too. It’s completely possible (with a good deal of hard work and/or luck) for a human to become an angel, or a devil, or a marid, or whatever else. Possibly the reverse is true as well.
Alright, what else? Uh, Orphan’s technology is roughly Industrial Revolution-level—think steam locomotives, smokestacks belching black smoke, and so on—although things are of course complicated by the presence of magic. Oh yeah, and there’s an ongoing war for the future of reality, which humanity is caught in the middle of. That’s also a thing that’s going on, I guess.

Heaven and Hell Are at War

As the first spasm of wild destruction following the Demiurge’s death passed, the free-for-all coalesced into two sides: Heaven and Hell. Though these two sides have agreed to suspend hostilities, they are still very much at war.
This conflict isn’t clear-cut. Heaven isn’t objectively good, nor is Hell objectively evil; they just have opposing perspectives on how reality ought to be governed.
The angels of Heaven are loyalists; they consider themselves servants of the dead Demiurge. Heaven’s progressives (who are in the majority) wish to follow the Demiurge’s plan to the best of their flawed understanding; fringe conservative elements espouse the view that the Demiurge will one day return, and that until that day comes, all of Orphan must be preserved in stasis.
The demons of Hell, meanwhile, are heretics. They accept the Demiurge’s death and are like, “our city now.” Hell’s moderates (who are in the majority) believe that they should be not only the caretakers of reality, but its new architects, authors of a new cosmic plan. There’s a radical minority, though, that wants to just wipe the slate clean and build a new world from scratch.
Clearly, compromise is not an option. Though the war is cold, now, it’s far from over. There is constant political maneuvering, mutual espionage, and an ongoing arms race. Both sides champ at their bits; occasionally, and worryingly, tensions rise in a way that suggests overt hostilities might be on the horizon. And if they are—if the armies of Heaven and Hell decide to unleash their divine weapons of mass destruction against one another—it will spell the end of reality as we know it.