The end of the Infernal Wars marked the end of the First Age.

  For one hundred years, the demonic forces of Hel laid siege to the material plane. Decade after blood bathed decade, the countless armies of Oliida forfeited their lives to defend their home. But the strength of mortals was never enough and their dead grew beyond counting. When all seemed bleakest, Zarina, the Prophet of Soln, broke her vow of sinlessness in order to raise a legion of the dead. The restless spirits of the fallen repelled the tides of evil, forever sealing them back into the accursed depths from whence they came. The battered, battle-weary people of Oliida finally emerged victorious from the smouldering ashes of conflict.

  But no rest came from peace…

  Zarina’s sin rippled through the aether, forcing Soln, God of Light, to forsake Oliida. The sun faded to a faint whisper of its former radiance and the world grew cold, freezing over entirely in a cataclysmic event known as the White Death.

  1100 years passed.

  In wake of global permafrost, society in Oliida evolved. Kingdoms became city states, and those city states eventually unified under a single world order known as the House Collective. The mechas within the Collective provided concentrated shelter and housed technological progress. Trade between cities was tough and perilous; that is, until the invention of steelrunners.

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  These impressively sized locomotives rode the rails crisscrossing through the continents like veins, transporting goods and passengers more efficiently than any mode of transport before. They quickly became vital assets in helping sustain the metropolises and, by extension, Oliida itself.

  But not all is well in the world. In recent times, a separatist organization known as the Vironists seceded from the House Collective, citing ineffective leadership and heinous oversight to atrocities allowed to fester in select cities such as slavery and sanctioned genocide. For a few brief, tension-filled years, the two factions managed to coexist in a semblance of jagged peace. But, when an attempt on the life of the Vironist matriarch, Maxine Viron, instead claimed that of her son, she promptly declared war.

  In the grueling years since, the disputing factions have lacerated Oliida with trenches and explosive bombardment. Soldiers fight and die by the hundreds of thousands for a cause which so few even fully comprehend. The age of innovation, once promising a better tomorrow in a fallen world, has soured, culminating in a bastardization of progress informed by the machinations of warfare. Many now struggle to navigate their lives in a world so fraught with chaos. In this new era of moral confusion, only one age-old truth continues to prevail:

  The cold claims all under Oliida’s pale sun.