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A Thousand Years of Wolves and Winter

The Shattered Ice Eon.

By some reckonings, particularly those of the machine-priests and lunatic scholars who haunt Centimania, the year is 2253. But they are alone in their eccentricities: once such accounting was of inestimable value, for history's course flowed clear from the first days, and those who followed it had some hope of avoiding the long plunge down the waterfalls of the last.

But the river of time has frozen. Ragnarok is come.

In the Shattered Ice Eon, you play the survivors of humanity's downfall and ascension into a new age of sorcery and savagery. The skyscrapers of the world-that-was are ruined and ice-rimed, host now to grim-eyed gods who answer no prayer without sacrifice, smiling witches hungrily seeking slaves in spirit, monstrous machine-folk that disdain every human trapping in their search for a soul, and sometimes nothing sentient at all...just silence, frost, and the terrible horse-sized wolves not yet sated even having feasted on the hearts of every nation.

Come be...

...priestess or priest to a Nordic god, storied or newborn, and heritor of the strange, dark powers of frost, Fate, and death. Force fallen bandits or the spirits of long-slain soldiers to answer you, or shape an icy hallow in the wreckage of a university liberty and trade for the passion of passing warriors with secrets of victories and bitter defeats yet to come. Events, perhaps, you'll have a toe in.

...a witch of this first or final age, whose deceitful magic steals the strength of those who pledge themselves to you in exchange for vivid dreams and magic of their own - but always a pale shadow of your own power, expressed in vitality far beyond mortal means, the senses and service of beasts great and small, and the surreal ability to use rituals to change dreams into reality...or just as frighteningly, do it the other way around.

...one of the Sarkers, the musclebound warmakers who are said to carry a rage that lives longer than they do, ensuring no foe to face them survives even should their throats be cut and their bones be broken - some of whom it is whispered only pretend to be human, but have the howling eyes of wolves.

...a scavenger-savant, reinventing and refurbishing the technology of the Old Age to deal in firearms, luxury foods, virtual-reality paradises, and other bygone wonders for those who can meet whatever exorbitant fee you care to set. Walk armored in loyal and loving machinery; fear neither blade nor bullet, nor the lonely silence of the half-slain world.

Are your masters the Alfcurse, those alien hulks of chrome and black plastic whose inhuman thoughts are poison-sick with lust for your willing degradation in exchange for enchanted arms and electric treasures of the past? Do you rage against the Circle of Cinders, the old rich reborn in golden scales whose city-nests are graveyards where dignity goes to die, or will you apprentice in their secrets and speak to your would-be judges with a voice of fire? Why do the gods huddle moody and despairing in their towers, when each has power enough to make kings of all their servants and end the hegemony of wolves and ice?

And what walks in the wastes beyond city and field, in the forests grown wild and hateful to all human things? Who guides the wolves to any enclave that swells too proud and too numerous, extending into a bitter eternity this strange and twilit eon? Perhaps you will break the cycle of soft suffering, and change the Shattered Ice Eon to a time of bright spring. Perhaps you will be broken, and the stories of your surrender will send shivers down the spines of heroes a hundred years hence.

The world awaits you. It can do nothing else.