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.
Keep in mind that the world’s public history is written from an in-universe perspective. Like real history, not every account is complete — or entirely correct.
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.
~1590 Years Ago
The Great Severance
As the dust of the Cataclysm settled, scholars traced its cause to Chronurgy — the manipulation of time itself, used so freely in the dimensional war that competing powers overwrote one another’s histories until causality could no longer hold.
The dominant theological interpretation holds that the goddess Aiona removed Chronurgy from the world — not because mortals were unworthy, but because reality could no longer survive its use. The act became known among her faithful as the Great Severance.
The ritual is said to have required a living anchor: the chronomancer Dontyr Sintar, who surrendered his future so that history might keep one. His heart ceased and his flesh withered, yet he did not pass beyond. Since that day, no mortal has replicated the feats of the pre-Fracture chronomancers. Fragments remain. True mastery of time is gone.
~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.
A forgotten branch
The Lost Kin of the Nether
Among the many peoples altered by the chaos that followed the Fracture Cataclysm, few are so tragic — or so misunderstood — as the Piglins of the Nether. Most regard them as brutish scavengers obsessed with gold and violence. Few remember that they were once kin to the Swinefolk, a forgotten branch of the same Wildblooded family tree, shaped by exile, hardship, and centuries beneath a crimson sky.
Before the Fall
In the centuries following the Fracture, the newly emerged Swinefolk spread throughout the realms. Like many Wildblooded peoples — born when uncontrolled Fey energy pooled in wild places and transformed animal lineages — they sought places where they could live beyond the reach of stronger kingdoms and ancient powers.
Yet freedom was not easily won. During the height of Duergar expansion, as the forge-empire drove its deep roads outward and turned the Otherside into industrial colonies, countless Swinefolk were enslaved alongside the Orcs and Goblins of that occupation. Entire clans vanished into the deep roads beneath the world, forced to labor in mines, foundries, and subterranean cities.
When the Duergar empire collapsed beneath the spreading Sculk — the same catastrophe that broke the Wardens and swallowed whole underground cities — many of these enslaved peoples seized their chance to flee. Some escaped to the surface. Others vanished into forgotten tunnels and hidden realms. A number found refuge within the Nether.
The Long Exile
At first, the Nether settlements were little more than refugee camps. The escaped Swinefolk gathered among basalt cliffs and lava seas, sheltering within the abandoned strongholds and forge-fortresses the Duergar had left behind. They expected, one day, to return home.
That day never came. The Nether is a realm that changes all who dwell within it.
Generations passed, and the descendants of the refugees adapted. Their bodies hardened against the heat and ash; their culture grew increasingly insular. Contact with the outside world became rare, then nearly nonexistent. Stories became myths. Myths became rituals. Rituals became instinct.
Over centuries, the Nether clans ceased to be Swinefolk as the world knew them. They became Piglins. The beasts now called Hoglins are believed by some scholars to descend from livestock the first refugees drove into the Nether with them — though, like much of this history, the claim remains contested.
The Curse of Isolation
Piglins possess an intense distrust of outsiders, and to those who know their history this hostility is no mystery. Their ancestors were hunted, enslaved, and abandoned by the world. Every lesson passed down through the generations reinforced a single truth: strangers bring danger.
Thus Piglin society became fiercely protective of clan, territory, and tradition. Foreigners are treated as threats until proven otherwise. Yet traces of their former culture remain — buried, but not erased.
The Golden Memory
No trait of the Piglins is more famous than their obsession with gold. What few realize is that this fixation may be the final remnant of an ancient Swinefolk civilization.
Among early Swinefolk communities, gold served many purposes. It represented wealth, status, trade, and the bonds between clans. Agreements were sealed with gifts of gold; leaders wore it, merchants carried it, and families passed it through generations. The meaning has long since been forgotten. Only the instinct remains.
Piglins no longer know why gold is sacred. They know only that it is. A creature wearing gold is treated differently; a stranger bearing gifts of gold is granted a measure of tolerance; gold offered freely is often answered with a gift in return. Scholars believe Piglin bartering is the last surviving fragment of a once-complex mercantile culture — a memory preserved not through language, but through instinct.
The Bastions
The Bastions of the Nether are among the last surviving monuments to the Duergar empire. Raised during the height of its expansion, these immense fortresses served as military outposts, mining operations, and centers of administration. Many Swinefolk, Orcs, and Goblins were forced to labor and die within their walls.
When the Sculk catastrophe shattered Duergar power, countless Bastions were abandoned. Some fell to ruin; others were reclaimed by the Nether itself. Many became home to the escaped Swinefolk who had once been imprisoned within them — and, over the centuries, to the Piglins they became.
Most Piglins no longer understand who built the Bastions. They defend them fiercely nonetheless, holding halls raised by the very empire that once chained their ancestors. To outside scholars this is one of history’s cruelest ironies. Among the Piglins themselves, it is simply home.
More troubling are persistent rumors that not all Duergar abandoned the Nether. Certain explorers, merchants, and surviving records — the same fragments that speak of hidden enclaves still enduring deep within the dark — describe sealed fortresses deeper than any Piglin domain, where ancient Duergar sects continue in isolation. Whether these tales are truth, exaggeration, or madness remains unknown. Few who claim to have found such places ever return.
The Netherbound Curse
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Piglins is that they can no longer leave the Nether. The generations spent adapting to the realm have bound them to it completely.
When a Piglin remains outside the Nether for too long, a horrific transformation begins. The flesh decays, the mind deteriorates, and vital essence unravels. Eventually the victim becomes a Zombified Piglin.
This condition is not undeath in the conventional sense, nor a disease that can be cured. Scholars who have studied Endbound Dissolution recognize the shape of it: a soul grown so deeply intertwined with the energies of a single plane that separation becomes impossible. Where the Endbound are claimed by the End, the Piglins have been claimed by the Nether.
Lost Kin
Most Swinefolk know little of the Piglins beyond rumor and frightening stories. Most Piglins know nothing of the Swinefolk at all. Yet the truth remains.
The Piglins are not monsters. They are a people — a forgotten branch of the Swinefolk family tree, shaped by exile, hardship, and centuries beneath a crimson sky.
Though much of their history has been lost, fragments endure: a gesture of trade, a reverence for gold, the defense of ancient homes. Tiny remnants of a people who survived, even as the memory of themselves faded away.