Volume I · The World
Lore of Diregulf
What follows is the working historical record of the crossroads city — compiled from guild archives, scholar testimony, and the oral histories that outlasted most written ones.
Sixteen centuries
Timeline of the World
~1600 Years Ago
The Fracture Cataclysm Wars
The Elder Fey Dominion collapses. Reality itself becomes unstable as immense Fey magics and ideological conflict tear the realm apart.
The original Fey realm violently splits into the Everbright and the Everdawn. Dimensional boundaries weaken across existence.
The first Fractals appear as reality-scarred beings. Magical storms, temporal distortions, and unstable portal tears devastate the Overworld.
Whether the threshold goddess Nexal predates the Fracture or emerged from the sudden proliferation of thresholds becomes one of the oldest and least resolvable questions in her theology — one she has never answered.
~1575 Years Ago
The Era of Refuge
Mortal civilizations begin constructing hidden sanctuary-citadels underground.
The earliest Strongholds are established as archives, shelters, magical preservation vaults, and survival bunkers.
Scholars and mages search desperately for stable dimensions. Primitive End portal research begins.
The first shrines associated with threshold worship are believed to date to this period, placed at the entrances of underground sanctuaries by those who understood they might never return to the surface.
~1550 Years Ago
The First End Expeditions
Explorers, scholars, and planar navigators breach the End intentionally for the first time.
The End is discovered to be alien but strangely stable compared to fractured mortal realms.
Endermite infestations spread; first cases of “Endbound Dissolution” are recorded.
The first shrines explicitly associated with Nexal and the End emerge within fragmented expedition records. Worship, such as it is, begins in earnest — or in desperation.
~1500 Years Ago
The Duergar Expansion Era
Nether pathways stabilize enough for organized interplanar travel.
Duergar factions begin aggressive portal engineering. The Iron Exiles emerge from older Gorgon cult traditions.
Massive Nether forge-cities arise. The Otherside is targeted for resource extraction and labor.
Whether the Duergar encountered Nexal's domain, or were responsible for the Dragon's entrapment, remains contested. Records concerning Nexal from this period are notably scarce — some scholars argue this reflects deliberate suppression.
~1480–1450 Years Ago
The Otherside Occupation
Orcs and Goblins are enslaved or displaced by Duergar expansion.
Ancient subterranean cities are transformed into industrial colonies.
Sculk ecosystems react violently to Duergar experimentation. The first Wardens are engineered as overseers.
~1440 Years Ago
The Warden Collapse
The sculk network adapts beyond Duergar control. Wardens cease obeying.
Entire underground cities vanish beneath uncontrolled sculk growth. Orc and Goblin rebellions erupt.
Major portal systems are destroyed during the uprisings.
~1400–1300 Years Ago
The Great Diasporas
Orcs and Goblins flee into the Overworld in massive migrations.
Ancient hatreds toward “Stonefolk” form in Orc oral history.
Duergar authority fractures. Many Strongholds are abandoned after End corruption incidents.
~1250 Years Ago
The Age of Wandering Kingdoms
Mortal civilizations stabilize across the Overworld. Trade routes reappear.
Early alliances between Humans, Elves, and surface Dwarves form. Endbound sightings become common legends.
Fey refugees from both Everbright and Everdawn integrate into mortal lands.
~1100 Years Ago
The Schisms of Faith
The Cult of Gorgon fractures: orthodox petrification sects, industrial Iron Exiles, and Ashbound rejectors.
Everbright and Everdawn sever most formal diplomatic contact.
The Everdawn refuge city of Ravenia becomes a haven for Tieflings, Vampires, intelligent undead, cursed peoples, and planar exiles.
~900 Years Ago
The Era of Ruin Delving
Ancient Strongholds and Otherside remnants become targets for treasure hunters and scholars.
End artifacts surface in mortal kingdoms. Several kingdoms collapse experimenting with portal relics.
Fractals become increasingly common near unstable dimensional sites.
Nexal's shrines multiply around ruins, unstable dimensional sites, and abandoned Strongholds. This period sees the emergence of the two major Gate Petitioner traditions — the Sealers, who pray the End Gate remain shut, and the Liberators, who pray it be opened.
~700 Years Ago
The Border Ages
Large mortal kingdoms solidify territorial borders. Orc clans and Dwarven holds enter recurring conflicts.
Surface Dwarves struggle to separate themselves from Duergar history.
The Everdawn refuge city becomes an important neutral sanctuary.
~500 Years Ago
The Quiet Consolidation
Trade and diplomacy flourish. Ancient catastrophes become partially mythologized.
Scholars debate whether the Fracture Cataclysm truly happened as described.
Hidden Duergar enclaves continue operating deep within the Nether. The End remains feared but poorly understood.
~200 Years Ago
The Pre-Diregulf Tensions
Competition over ancient ruins, portal relics, and magical resources intensifies.
Refugee populations settle near major trade routes. Frontier settlements emerge around waterways and ruins.
Conflicts between cultures increase — but so does intermixing.
Present Era
The Founding of Diregulf
Diregulf is founded as a major crossroads between peoples, histories, and planar influences.
The city becomes known for trade, diplomacy, adventuring, ruin exploration, and uneasy coexistence.
Ancient wounds remain unresolved beneath the surface. The aftershocks of the Fracture Cataclysm still shape the world 1,600 years later.
Small shrines to Nexal remain common throughout Diregulf, standing beside doorways, crossroads, cave mouths, gravesites, and forgotten ruins. She is not widely worshipped — she is widely acknowledged. Her faithful maintain there is a difference.
The Council City
The Political Structure of Diregulf
Diregulf is one of the first major trade cities to rise to prominence since the Fracture Cataclysm — built less as a kingdom and more as a convergence point for survivors, delvers, merchants, pilgrims, and wanderers seeking stability in a fractured world.
Its governance is intentionally loose and practical, focused on maintaining defenses, protecting trade routes, organizing expeditions, and ensuring the city’s survival. Rather than ruled by a rigid political ideology, Diregulf is coordinated through councils of guild representatives, caravan leaders, wardens, engineers, and civic stewards.
The city’s importance comes not from conquest, but from necessity. Safe walls, functioning markets, navigable tunnels, preserved archives, and reliable infrastructure have made Diregulf a rare center of civilization in an otherwise dangerous and fragmented world.
A fragile law
Feral and Non-Feral Outcasts
Many outcast races — Vampires, Undead, the Cursed, and other afflicted peoples — exist in both feral and non-feral populations. Feral outcasts are violent, maddened, or driven by uncontrollable hunger, and are responsible for much of the fear surrounding their kind.
Non-feral outcasts retain intelligence, culture, and self-control, often struggling to survive in societies that rarely distinguish them from their feral counterparts. Many are met with suspicion or hostility regardless of their true nature.
Some outcast communities actively hunt or exile feral members of their own kind in an effort to prove they are not monsters. Diregulf is one of the few growing settlements where non-feral outcasts may openly exist under law — though often uneasily.
Beneath the city
The Deep Routes
Until recently, the tunnels beneath Diregulf consisted only of scattered mining shafts, collapsed ruins, storage vaults, and forgotten excavation passages. No permanent subterranean settlement existed beneath the city.
That changed with the discovery of the Deep Routes. During a large excavation project beneath Diregulf’s lower districts, workers uncovered an immense and previously unmapped network of ancient tunnels descending far deeper than any known cavern systems.
Continued exploration revealed that the tunnels extend for miles beneath the earth and connect to ruins far older than any recorded civilization.
The Survivor’s Account
All expeditions into the lower tunnels have failed to return — save one, which produced a single surviving member.
According to fragmented testimony, the expedition reached an Ancient City buried in the deepest accessible regions of the tunnel system: vast sculk-covered ruins, dormant Wardens, impossible architecture, and symbols associated with forgotten gods and a recurring term — the “Ninth Gate.”
The survivor’s account is inconsistent in places, and portions are believed to be missing, distorted, or deliberately suppressed. No physical proof of the Ancient City has been made publicly available.
The Ninth Gate
Among all claims made by the survivor, none has generated more speculation than repeated references to the so-called Ninth Gate.
Some scholars believe it refers to a lost form of portal or dimensional alignment. Others argue it was never meant to be activated at all — or existed at all, for that matter. A minority of researchers suggest it predates the Fracture Cataclysm itself.
Whether truth or distortion, references to the Ninth Gate continue to appear in the deepest ruins beneath Diregulf — always fragmented, always incomplete, and always surrounded by deliberate historical silence.