The year is 2032, post-landfall. The year is the resplendent adolescence of the 32nd Scion of the Imperial line. The year is 321 A.B., praise be the Divine triplets, salvation of mana. The year is the season after the rains left grass-damp cloy nose yet plum-ferment on panting tongue. The year is 23/H 55k, as the atoms turn.
The world is Phoibos.
Space still burns aetherfire blue, the old interstellar order’s lingering hubris. Galactic devastation, all because people believed they knew magic’s nature.
Magic is just unknown science. It’s irrational to behave otherwise.
Magic is reality’s will. It’s immoral to behave otherwise.
From antinomy’s opposites, star civs built lostech: fields exempting whole systems from nature’s law, cyphers hacking channels gods act through, debts for a season’s warmth called in generations later by callous creditors. Their empires studded the night sky, their feats banished daemons past matter’s edge, their legends tragedies, triumphs, and atrocities of intergalactic proportion.
Then someone burned it all down. (Probably the Humans.)
Phoibos remains. The gathered wreckage of worlds, a hemispherical boss stretching to infinity, conglomerated around the pole of Yggdrasil. Decendents of the old orders remain, among new peoples.
The Fay, lords of magic, an eternal family splintered by cataclysm. Self-conceptions reimagined from wreckage and mistakes, self-conceptions reasserting legitimacy and legacy of dominion.
The Abyssal Fleets, pragmatist-opportunists, star-nomads who remade ships for Phoibos’ seas. Science and faith, theories of magic, all weighed on one scale: is it a means to humanity’s survival?
The Underdeep, to whom magic is a hazard, to be treated as everything foreign: contained, controlled. Suppression collars. Watching AIs. Gene-lines edited clean. Bunker walls sealed against xenos and sorcerers alike, since, to the Underdeep, there’s little difference.
The Were, beasts made sapient by the Cataclysm’s long echo. Shamed, set apart yet living besides their beast-kin, the Were begin to understand magic’s nature, unladen by other faction’s dogmas, self-deceptions, and sunk investments.
The Centaur Hierophants, new living divines born from the old gods’ deaths. Nations a network of personal relations with divine, peoples rich in magics of vows, covenants, and contracts, societies for divine-dependent faithfuls.
Civilizations, old and new, built upon the same old antinomy. Societies believing magic an unknown science, a force to be exploited, controlled, hoarded. Societies believing magic the wills of reality, wills owed the same respect as persons.
To live in such times is to live, by other’s lights, irrationally, immorally, recklessly, forlornly, or duplicitously.To be on Phoibos is to take steps towards paths unknown, to a repeat Cataclysm, to power-imposed ideology, or to co-existence among peoples with fundamentally different understandings.
Yours are the tales of this time. Your characters, their choices. The legends of Phoibos continued, every way you play.
RADIANT TACTICS 