Scarterra Advanced Primer

Age Before Ages

by me with Midjourney

In the Age Before Ages, the primordial god Turoch created Scarterra to act as a sort of soul farm, so he could could consume all mortals to satiate his endless hunger. Eventually, Turoch's greatest servants rebelled against him, orchestrating the Divine Rebellion.
Turoch's victorious former servants became the new gods of Scarterra, now known as the Nine. They forged weapons and tools out of Turoch's cooling corpse known as Divine Trophies. The Nine had a theoretically permanent agreement on how to share the management of the world called the Compact which among other things, set up aspects of nature they were responsible for known as the Dominions.

The First Age

The First Age, was known as "the Age of Dragons". The strongest mortal souls that survived the Divine Rebellion were formed by the Nine into the first dragons and the Nine intended dragons to become the dominant mortal creature in Scarterra.
Originally, the ancient dragons were little more than powerful automatons to eat, sleep, and worship the Nine, but the goddess Nami gave dragons and by extension all mortal races that would follow them the Gift of Free Will. Once free to choose how to worship, Nami became very popular for giving mortals freedom. Not wanting to be outdone, the rest of the Nine bestowed their own Gifts to mortalkind. The Gifts were things like agriculture, metal working, and music. The building blocks of civilization and culture. With the Gifts of the Nine, their great strength, magical power and intellect, the dragons created awe inspiring kingdoms of massive towers and monuments to both the Nine and themselves.

Once imbued with Free Will, Greymoria thought she deserved to be worshiped even without bestowing a Gift because her contribution to the Divine Rebellion was greatest. Dragons liked the Gifts of the Nine by this. Also, most dragons (like most younger mortal races to follow) thought Greymoria "contribution" to the Divine Rebellion was utterly terrifying. Many stopped worshiping Greymoria altogether. Others only worshiped Greymoria is fearful whispers.
Greymoria did not like this, so she created dozens, perhaps even hundreds of new mortal races and used these new races as cannon fodder to attack the dragon kingdoms. Many of these races of Greymoria's Children got tired of being fed into the proverbial meat grinder rebelled against the role assigned to them by their Dark Mother. This caused Greymoria to punish some of them.

by Zeta Gardner

Eventually the rest of the Nine tried to create a few new mortal races to help the dragons or otherwise represent that particularly god or goddess idea of what "proper and good living" is. Still, Greymoria created more new races than the rest of the Nine combined.
Even with Greymoria throwing new batches of monsters at them constantly, the dragons were still their own worst enemies.
Dragons fought warred on each other over matters of ideology, religion, and personal pride over real or imagined slights. They fought over territory, treasure, mates, and food. As the dragon kings and queens grew more selfish and paranoid, the eldest and most powerful dragons began to manipulate and abuse the younger generations of dragons more and more. In turn, the younger dragons rebelled against their elders adding generational divides to growing list of reasons for dragons to fight each other.
As the dragon wars grew more fierce, a foolhardy dragon queen messed with powers beyond her understanding. She was attempting to mystically seize control of all fresh water in Scarterra but accidentally doomed the world.

The First Unmaking

Millions of rogue elementals were spawned and the elementals began to fight other. This caused the continents to split, volcanoes to erupt, and massive seemingly unending hurricanes among stranger natural disasters. This event was known as the First Unmaking.
The natural disasters killed millions mortals and beasts as they were crushed, drowned, burned, or asphyxiated. The massive ecological ruin led to mass starvation. When the last elemental finally disappeared back the Elemental Plane. 95% of all dragons were dead and many species were driven to extinction.
The surviving dragons frequently became bitter loners. Much of the treasures of the First Age were lost, but enough treasure survived that most of the surviving dragons managed to create sizeable hoards of ancient wealth. Future generations of dragons became even more miserly and treasure loving than their ancient ancestors. It is said that dragons can barely cooperate with other dragons long enough to mate and perpetuate their species, but perpetuate their species they did...barely.

The Second Age

The Nine decided to create a new race to inherit Scarterra and rule over the Second Age rather than to rebuild the dragons to their former power. The Nine collectively created elves hoping that mortals with shorter lifespans and less raw might would be less likely to destroy the whole world.

Finally Greymoria opted to give a Gift to mortalkind. The Gift of wizardry. This was both to win favor with the elves and as a parting shot against the dragons by giving elves a potential weapon to use against the remaining dragons who did not all meekly accept elves as the new dominant race.
Unfortunately, elves turned away from worshiping Greymoria anyway, at the very least they were not worshiping her as much as Greymoria believed she deserved. Like in the First Age. Greymoria created new races and mystic curses to punish those who shunned her. Even more so than before, this had mixed results. Even more so than before, this spurred the rest of the Nine to create a small number of new races of their own.

by Zeta Gardner

History repeated itself as the ancient elf kingdoms had no shortage of reasons to war on each other. As the elven wars grew more intense, a foolhardy elven king had the idea that if he found a piece Turoch's essence, he could forge his own divine trophy and join the Nine as a tenth god.
That scheme did not work.

The Second Unmaking

After Turoch's destruction, his essence, his hunger, lingered on in an extra planar realm known as the Void. Sometimes the Void spawned Void demons who hungered to consume mortal souls but the The Barrier, erected by the Nine and maintained by the god Phidas kept them at bay.
That is until the elven wizard king ventured into the Void, unleashed unstable arcane magic there, and accidentally breached the Barrier. This allowed millions of Void demons to enter the mortal plane. Led by the eight Demon Lords, the Void demons and their undead minions sought to extinguish all mortal life on Scarterra. This event was known as the Second Unmaking.
The Void Demons mostly left the plants and animals alone, only interested in slaying creatures that had fully mortal souls but a side effect of the Barrier being damaged was that winters became longer and harsher. With many farms abandoned or destroyed, starvation killed almost as many Scarterrans as Void Demons did.
By the time the last Demon Lord was slain, over 90% of all mortal life was gone and the populations of wild animals and plants was roughly cut in half.

The Third Age Begins

Only three large groups of elves survived the Second Unmaking. One group survived by dedicating themselves to Greymoria and gaining all her godly support. Their descendants are now known as dark elves and their homeland is known as Kahdisteria.
Another group survived by hiding in their forest and making alliances with mortal races of forest dwellers. Their descendants are now known as wood elves and their homeland is known as the and of Codenya.
The third major group of elf survivors managed to fortify themselves on an island with many geographic advantages to make it easier to fend off Void demon armies. Their descendants are now known as grey elves and their homeland is known as the Elven Empire though whether it qualifies as a true empire is debatable.
There were smaller groups of elven survivors but overtime most of them either died out or assimilated into one of three aforementioned nations.

by me with Hero Forge

The Nine permitted the elven survivors their opportunity to rebuild, but they opted to create a new race to inherit the bulk of Scarterra. It was hoped that the shorter lifespan of humans would prevent any single human from gaining enough power to trigger a Third Unmaking and so far, so good.

Eight commissioned human portraits by Diana Rahfoth

Chronologically, the Third Age is split into Red Era and the Feudal Era. The Feudal Era is the "default" setting for Scarterra fiction and Scarterran RPGs but the Red Era is available as an alternative option. The general vibe is that Feudal Era stories are intended to have a "High Fantasy" feel and Red Era stories are intended to have a "Sword and Sorcery" feel.
The last major event of the Red Eras was vampires trying to take over the world eventually pushing many rival factions to unite against them. The death of Vladimir the Conqueror marks year 1 of the Feudal Era. While Vladmir's world domination scheme failed, a majority of Scarterran ended up copying his style of feudal law, hence the name "Feudal Era"

Geography within Scarterra

Rough draft world map of Scarterra by me

The northern hemisphere is dominated by the continents of West Colassia and East Colassia. The flora and fauna of West Colassia is loosely based on that of preindustrial Europe in the real world. The flora and fauna of East Colassia is loosely based on that of real world Africa.
The Southern hemisphere is home to three smaller continents: Umera, Penarchia, and island of Khemarok. Umera's flora and fauna is loosely based on real world East Asia, Penarchia's flora and fauna is loosely based on the Indian subcontinent, and the flora and fauna of Khemarok is loosely based on real world Australia. There are also a fair number of smaller islands, mostly concentrated in the southern hemisphere.
As of the writing of this article, the vast majority of my world building is focused on West Colassia, especially central West Colassia. My first sample adventure, my first, second, and third RPG campaigns are set here. So is WIP novel and the plurality of my short stories.
Specifically the land of Fumaya is more fleshed out than the rest of the continent because while all of Scarterra has a rich history and culture, Fumaya has lots of problems that heroes can address RIGHT now. So this is my primary setting for RPGs and fiction.

Map of the Border Baronies by Pendrake

Likewise the Border Baronies Region sees a lot of action because it's made up of 20 small independent nations that all experience a lot coups and upheavals because sometimes you want to tell a story about the death of a king and not send giant shockwaves through the entire setting. In my first long-term Scarterra campaign, the PCs ended up influencing six regime changes and created an interesting networks of allies and enemies in the region. And if I get a new set of players, I'll reset up the dominoes and see what they do.
And hypothetically if another Game Master took up Scarterra as a setting, they can use or discard whatever plot elements they want. It's very easy for a Game Master to cook up their own version of a Border Barony as a base for adventures.

The Nonagon

"The Nine" refers to the nine gods and goddesses that preside over Scarterrra. "The Nonagon" refers to the various priesthoods that serve the nine. The nickname sticks because it is fairly common for temples and shrines to the Nine to be organized into an equilatieral nonagon shape.
The priesthoods fight and quarrel amongst themselves and they jockey for power and influence. Each priesthood has priests, priestesses, support and holy warriors. They compete with each other on behalf of their patron deities, but they also have their own internal conflicts as followers of the same deity argue about the "correct" way to worship. Sometimes this conflict is indirect and sometimes blood is shed. Sometimes they try to influence princes and potentates directly and other times they seek to sway the masses. Canny secular leaders can sometimes try to manipulate the Nonagon officials by playing them against each other.
The various priesthoods wield a lot of power and influence. Just like in the real world, priests and priestesses have spiritual authority but they can back this authority with raw mystical power. Theurgists are men and women that can channel aspects of divine magic on the mortal plane. Only a minority of priesthood's members are theurgists but very few theurgists exist outside a priesthood, so the Nonagon has a near monopoly on this type of mystic power.
Some say that the mortal priesthoods subconsciously enact the quarrels and rivalries of the Nine themselves. Others theorize that the Nine subconsciously mimic the shifting alliances and vendettas of their followers. Possibly both.
Not all conflict in Scarterra is religous base. Scarterrans fight over land, riches, food, honor, jealousy and all the same things real world people fight over, but the Nonagon at least stick their fingers in most conflicts.