Introduction to Waking Materia and the Tower-Helix Universe

Indulge me: I'll begin at the end.

The result is that Waking Materia is a world in great flux. Player characters may be government or trade agents probing new nautical routes on the plane's haunted, monster-infested oceans. They might be tomb raiders exploring newly-exposed ruins for great treasure, or maverick scholars unburying the secrets of Materia's extraordinary First Age. Citizens sometimes run afoul of nearby breaches in the Veil, encountering creatures only known from ancient, fictional storybooks. All too often, border peoples are caught in territorial wars. Clerics and paladins of Material Gods are increasingly forced to counter the machinations of certain Duskscape Regents.
While Waking Materia is rich in political intrigue, the "neighbouring" Duskscape is rich in monsters and isidious, alien influences. Sometimes the two even overlap.

And now, the beginning.

Welcome and thank you for reading. The following materials will introduce you to the diverse and mysterious world of Waking Materia, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan worlds in the Known Universe. It is a largely nautical world, having been subject to a mysterious catastophe known as the Deluge, where much of the plane, save for the uplands circling its periphery, was drowned in demon-infested brine. Nautical travel is limited and extremely dangrous: Materia’s oceans are plagued by terrible monsters and inexplicable but equally deadly weather phenomena. As the only landmasses remaining were once upland, Materia is an agriculturally sparse world with sometimes vicious clashes for resources. As it's a drastically different place both before and after the Deluge, Materia may be considered two settings in one, and that's not even including its shadowy mirror and the universe's myriad other planes scattered throughout the Void.

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Watching over the beings that reside on this plane are the Material Gods, also known as the Waking Gods, the Kunitsukami or the Tuatha. They rule over a wide variety of humanoid cultures.

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Materia has a coterminous plane, varyingly known as the Umbral Realms, the Dream Time, Nod, the Lost Land, the Night Country, the Gloaming or O-Inai, however the Author will refer to it by its Middish Common name: The Duskscape. It is a shifting, surreal, demiphysical realm where dead and dreaming souls wander, but is also a vast, functioning world all to itself, with endemic fauna and sentient societies, from the nightmarish qlippoth to the bizarre fae; from the demonic city-states of Dis and Epitaph to the ascetic Valkyries of Rom.

The Duskscape is ruled by its own pantheon of inscrutable, alien “gods”, known varyingly as the Duskscape Regents, the Fomoraigh, the Kagamikami or the Cenobites. Gods of conceptual as opposed to material things, Waking Peoples can and sometimes do worship these beings, but do so at their own risk, for their ways are very different from the cultures of mundane Materia.
The Veil between the Duskscape and Waking Materia, once strong, is now fading in many places around the world. Reports of monsters—strangely similar to mythological beasts from First Age texts—are increasing in the fringes of Waking society. What’s more, as the Veil weakens, the Sunken Expanse is receding, exposing new landmasses and vast subterranean caverns. As if the otherworldly monsters crossing the Veil wasn’t enough, territorial warfare and tomb raiding are on the rise.
The result is that Materia is a world in great flux, but that you know.

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In addition to the richness of this plane, the Known Universe is comprised of thousands of other planes scattered throughout the Void: from mere, kilometre-wide "islands" of bare rock or water to vast ecumenopoli. Higher-level adventures may find players directly navigating the Void to these diverse worlds, or "taking the back door" and exploring the increasingly alien realms of the Duskscape's Far Umbra in search of similar Veils.

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Prefer a more "ground's eye" view of Waking Materia?
Here are a few select articles to open things up: