Coming of the Rifts
While they are the defining characteristic of the world as it is known, the Rifts are also a symptom of what actually brought on Armageddon. The details may forever be lost to time, but enough documentation and other evidence remains to clearly establish that a war of global scale and devastating atomic fury triggered such releases of energy as to nearly scour the planet clean of all life.
The Rifts are quite literally rips in the quantum fabric of space-time, leading to virtually anywhere and allowing almost anything to come through from those elsewheres to here. Rifts lie at the junctions of cosmic energy conduits called ley lines. Not every ley line nexus has an active Rift, but all such junctions are capable of spawning one under any number of circumstances. While not as frequent as scholars say once was the case, temporary Rifts still erupt often enough to give scientists something to talk about.
Ley lines have always crisscrossed the world, though most students of the arcane believe the lines were barely detectable by the merest fraction of humanity for much of history until the day the Rifts came. In current times, most ley lines can be seen by the naked eye at night, at least within a few thousand feet. The larger ones, many rising from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air, can be viewed dozens of miles away, glowing blue-white in the dark and even visibly crackling with energy in broad daylight. Ley lines are inherently magical in nature, representing the flow of eldritch and arcane energies across the world and far beyond.
The Magic Zone —defining much of the eastern part of the North American continent, especially around the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains— has a much greater number of the larger lines, and a correspondingly larger number of active and semi-active Rifts.
These truths are what keep Coalition State authorities up most nights. There are many places, in and around Rifts, where expected topography and geography are found on one side of a ley line, while on the other lies a landscape utterly alien in nature, or a city from some fantasy realm or far-future world that stands where none should exist. Most of the latter were abandoned when whatever infrastructure that supported them collapsed from the sudden change, their surviving populations scattered to parts unknown around the strange new world they found themselves in. Some figured out how to make things work and carried on, creating wondrous new places for adventurers to discover.
The Rifts are quite literally rips in the quantum fabric of space-time, leading to virtually anywhere and allowing almost anything to come through from those elsewheres to here. Rifts lie at the junctions of cosmic energy conduits called ley lines. Not every ley line nexus has an active Rift, but all such junctions are capable of spawning one under any number of circumstances. While not as frequent as scholars say once was the case, temporary Rifts still erupt often enough to give scientists something to talk about.
Ley lines have always crisscrossed the world, though most students of the arcane believe the lines were barely detectable by the merest fraction of humanity for much of history until the day the Rifts came. In current times, most ley lines can be seen by the naked eye at night, at least within a few thousand feet. The larger ones, many rising from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air, can be viewed dozens of miles away, glowing blue-white in the dark and even visibly crackling with energy in broad daylight. Ley lines are inherently magical in nature, representing the flow of eldritch and arcane energies across the world and far beyond.
The Magic Zone —defining much of the eastern part of the North American continent, especially around the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains— has a much greater number of the larger lines, and a correspondingly larger number of active and semi-active Rifts.
These truths are what keep Coalition State authorities up most nights. There are many places, in and around Rifts, where expected topography and geography are found on one side of a ley line, while on the other lies a landscape utterly alien in nature, or a city from some fantasy realm or far-future world that stands where none should exist. Most of the latter were abandoned when whatever infrastructure that supported them collapsed from the sudden change, their surviving populations scattered to parts unknown around the strange new world they found themselves in. Some figured out how to make things work and carried on, creating wondrous new places for adventurers to discover.
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