A frozen, blighted world

Fallen Wyrms

A world in the twilight of its gods.

An age of receding gods, a fading light, and a world running out of time. Dragons were the firstborn. What moves in the thin places now, no one can name.

Descend
The Premise

The Age of Receding Gods

The world was made as a paradise, tended by gods who dwelt within it. Then one of their number turned.

He tapped the Void, the primordial nothing, and split the divine host. His war shattered the utopia and broke the single world into pieces. The loyal gods, unwilling to keep waging a war that was unmaking creation, withdrew by choice. What magic remains is only the fading remnant of their presence: strongest where they last stood, thinning everywhere else, and running out.

Mortals now inherit a world the gods deliberately stepped out of. The light is going out, slowly, the way a fire goes to embers. Some read the signs as the gods stirring at last. Others feel a colder hand. No one can tell which, and the difference is everything.

The Fall

The god who wanted an ending

The Fallen was the god of Time, the measurer of the ages, and of all the gods he alone always faced the nothing at the end of things. In the Void he found stillness and silence, and he came to long for it. What looks like a war of conquest is, beneath, a god reaching for his own rest, and willing to unmake the world to have it.

He cannot be destroyed, only caged or diminished, and so there will always be a Fallen. The light fades. The Void does not. That single imbalance is the engine of the age.

The Fallen, pale frost-dragon of the Void
The Divine Order

The Pantheon and their Dragons

Fifteen great powers stand in three houses: the Withdrawn who kept faith and left, the Undivided who refused the war and fell to mortality, and the Fallen's Host who followed him into the dark. Each god made a dragon in its own image, the firstborn of all living things, and mortals wear their allegiance as dragon-heraldry.

Sky-King
law and the heavens
The Smith
making and stone
The Champion
life and valor
Loremaster
truth and memory
Earth Mother
the living world
Glory-Goddess
beauty and the arts
Sea-Lord
the tides and the deep
War-God
wrath and slaughter
The Deceiver
lies, story, and song
The Rot
blight and decay
Shadow
fear and night
The Fallen
time and the Void

The Twelve Dragons

The Sundered Kinds

The Peoples and the Schism

The Fall did not only split the gods; it split every order of being beneath them. The same fault line runs through each kind, but never the same way. "Dark" is not one thing: the dark dwarves are merely shifty and self-interested, while the dark elves gave themselves wholly to the Void. And Men, most divided of all, fall on every side at once.

Light Elves
the faithful firstborn of the wood and sun
Dark Elves
Void-creatures sworn to the ending of light
Light Dwarves
steadfast keepers of the Smith
Dark Dwarves
shifty cultists of the stone giants
Half-Elves
the deathless middle, alone on their isle
Men of the Marches
heirs of a ruined kingdom
The Cults
those the Fallen recruits among Men
The Undivided
fallen gods who still walk the world
The Living World

The Natural Order

Beneath gods and mortals, the world itself is half-awake. Its great powers are the Elementals, kin to the god whose domain they embody; its wild middle are the beast-folk; and its least and most numerous are the Small Folk, the Muses who kindle mortal art and fall silent as the light dies. When the little folk go quiet and the wild things turn feral, the age is deepening.

Tree-shepherds
elder wardens of the wood
Stone Giants
the mountain-wakers
River-spirits
the bloodstream of magic
The Owls
the Chronicler's eyes
Stag-folk
the crowned wild
Great-cat-folk
the solitary hunters
Sprites
the fading enchantment
Brownies
the Muses of hearth and hollow
How the World is Organized

The Six Orders

Every institution in Fallen Wyrms is defined by its relationship to the fading light. They form a stack: mortal, natural, and divine.

I

Arcane

Wizards divided over a dying resource. The Wardens hoard it, the Free Art spends it boldly (and burns it fastest), the Deepening chases the Void to replace it. A doom-loop that is itself the death of magic.

II

Devotional

The Faithful, keeping faith with gods who withdrew on purpose and do not answer. Faith kept toward silence. When it breaks under the fading light, it breaks toward the Void.

III

Martial

The sworn brotherhoods: the Champion's orders of life and joy, the Sky-King's law-knights, the Rangers who hold the failing north.

IV

Void

The cults of the Fallen, the dark-mages, the dark elves. The dying of the light is their recruiter.

V

Natural

The awakenings of the world: Elementals, beast-folk, and the Muses. The living barometer of the magic as it thins.

VI

Divine

The Pantheon and their firstborn dragons, the apex order all others orient around, now mostly withdrawn or fallen.

The Mosaic

The Cast

There is no single chosen hero. The turning of the age is the protagonist, seen through the eyes of those it catches: a ruined heir, a highborn traitor, two fallen goddesses, a fading brownie, and a deathless woman who would rather not be found.

The Ranger
rightful blood of a kingdom that no longer exists
The Cultist
has everything, and joins the rising dark for more
The Half-Elf
deathless, and cannot make herself step in
The Glory-Hungry Goddess
a fallen goddess begging to be adored again
The Sorrowful Mother
saving what small lives she still can
The Brownie
a prickly heart of gold, fading with the world

The Powers Who Walk

The Chronicler
the withdrawn goddess who keeps the record. Your narrator.
The Deceiver
god of lies and song, the Chronicler's lost love
The Sea-Lord
the fickle Undivided, changeable as his tides
The Fallen
the god of Time who reached for the Void

Mortals of Consequence

C
The Cult-Master
The Deceiver's human high priest, and the Cultist's cold superior.
Portrait forthcoming
D
The Deepening Mage
A wizard who reached for the Void to save magic, and is being unmade by it.
Portrait forthcoming
D
The Dark-Elf Lord
The elven face of the Fallen, beautiful and merciless.
Portrait forthcoming
W
The Warden
An archmage of the withholding-wise: ally, obstacle, or both.
Portrait forthcoming
The Voice of the Series
"I am the one who remembers. I take no side in what follows. I only set it down, so that when the light is gone there is still a true account of how it went out."
The Chronicler

A withdrawn goddess of truth and memory frames the whole saga: a dispassionate witness who cannot save the world and has chosen instead to keep its record. Her owls are her eyes. She is the reader's way in, and a mystery in her own right.

One Canon, Many Stories

A Transmedia Universe

Fallen Wyrms is built from a single canonical World Bible, so every medium draws from one source of truth. The novels lead; the games and film follow, each a separately titled work under the same banner.

Novels
The flagship saga, mosaic epic fantasy
Lead
Tabletop RPG
A campaign setting from the canon
Online Game
A living world to inhabit
Mobile
A gateway into the universe
Film
The long horizon
The Structure

Fallen Wyrms (the universe) → a Fallen Wyrms Saga (each story) → House of the Tempest (the first, working title)
Already Built

Not a pitch on a napkin

A deep, internally consistent world already exists on the page and on the canvas.

Full World Bible

Cosmology, pantheon, peoples, magic, geography, and six orders, all internally consistent.

A Living Cast

Six point-of-view characters and a signature frame-narrator, the Chronicler.

60+ Art Assets

Gods, dragons, peoples, and places, generated and organized to one house style.

Brand and Domain

Named, secured, and ready to carry a franchise across every medium.