Most hear the word “apocalypse”, and they think of nothing, literal nothing – everything they’d known before gone in an instant. But for the people of a place long gone, their apocalypse came first in a trickle, only to become a flood before there was any chance to avoid it. They fought amongst themselves, divided by the arbitrary traits of birthplace and the crown they bent their knee to, and all the while, the gods they paid their lip service to – mere mortals who had taken up the mantle of divinity – watched in contentment, while other, lesser divines watched in horror.
These lesser divines, having watched as their betters did nothing to stop the people of their world as they fell to murder and corruption, then hatched a plan to put a stop to the fighting once and for all. The eldest of these lessers, a blacksmith in life, took a single ember from the forge of the greatest smith known to the world, and from that single shard of the old world, he and his siblings forged a world anew, forever barring the previous divines from interfering in their creation at the cost of their lives.
This new world, called Ciruin, formed itself in the shadow of the old, unaware of the chaos as the old world faltered and finally fell to the horrors created by their war, and those gifted salvation by the new gods flourished where before they had floundered. But the new gods learned very little from the horrors they'd witnessed before, and soon their world, too, had begun to fill with the horrors they had hoped to save themselves from. As time passed, the rift between the populace grew larger, and they formed themselves into two kingdoms, Alderra and (SUGGESTIONS WELCOME), stuck in a cycle of vicious warfare and uneasy truce.
One hundred and twenty five years after the creation of Ciruin, the story of the gods creating their world from a burning shard of the old has passed into myth, the kingdoms have entered another cycle of uneasy truce, and the gods have had enough of sitting on high and weeping for their creations. The world shard is dying, and with it, the protection it offered from the old gods long forgotten; something must be done to protect the world from suffering the same fate as the world before. The gods, with no idea what to do in their inexperience, gift the people of their world with the strengths of the god they worship, in the hopes that this would stop their in-fighting and prepare them for what may never come.
The fate of Ciruin, now in the hands of its people, is yet to be decided. But the gods are not finished with their creation, and the old gods have not forgotten...
I like to think this would still be open ended enough that builders could continue to be creative, while still helping to maintain a coherent story for the areas to fall into, as well as plenty of space for quests and such to add to it. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would love to hear them, because critique is always nice (and "fuck lore" is not a critique).