The Caelic Isles — A Living World
Bound Wars unfolds across a cluster of island nations collectively known as The Caelic Isles, five cultures bound by origin, divided by time, history, and fear. The Academy sits central among them like a keystone, neutral only in name. The Tidebound were found here, carried ashore by a storm nobody forgets.
Where once necromancy ruled, now constructs walk. Where once armies marched, quiet unrest grows.
This is a world rebuilding, not healed, only pausing between storms.
The Isles
Cael Morren
The heart of the Isles. Neutral seat of the Academy and the Custodians, military and scholarly center both.
Here the Tidebound children were found, soaked in salt and starlight, half of them pairs who clung to one another like breath.
Cael Morren is discipline, history, and hope, a place that teaches giants and fears what they may become.
Eirden
Bogland marshes and long-fire halls. A people who keep their history in story, not stone.
Their pride is voice, bardic law, tribute feasts, ancestry recited in full.
Slow to anger, slower to forget. Eirden bleeds for those it calls kin.
Caledhor
Highlands of wind-bitten heather and iron-rich mountains. Clan banners rise from every pass.
Strength is currency, honesty is iron. Their rites of adulthood are brutal, but fair.
Many of the fiercest Warriors and Exemplars trace blood to Caledhor stone.
Albinar
Precision. Discipline. Industry. A people who build roads like arteries, foundries like lungs.
Mechanist-philosophers, logistics masters, pragmatic makers. Where others dream, Albinar refines.
They do not fear progress, they fear standing still.
Cymrath
Storm-swept archipelago, sea-law and council rule. Fleets drift like cities, rune-posts mark territory by tide not soil.
Their Rangers and Elementalists wield wind like a blade.
Cymrath’s identity isn’t land, it’s motion.
The Hidden Isle — The Fey Lands
Ringed by the Ring of Teeth, a crown of stone that devours ships. Shrouded by glamour-storms never visible, never reachable.
A refuge of Fey magic, a contradiction of impossibility.
Most say myth.
The Tidebound are uncertain.
The Binding War — A Brief History
Once, death answered to mortal wills. Necromancers called armies from grave and bone, binding spirits screaming into service.
One rose above all — the Lich-Lord, who chained provinces beneath a single starving will.
His fall ended the war, but not the shadow.
Necromancy was outlawed. Shamanism fell beside it.
In the place of Necromancers rose Animaeons, crafting constructs with lawful bindings, a compromise between power and mercy.
In place of Shamen rose Alchemists, demploying constructs, energy siphoning and weapon augments for lawful battlefield control.
Peace returned, hollowed.
With the Lich-Lord’s fall, a storm came, and with it the Tidebound. Children. So many children.
Half were twins.
Half clinging to another like a mirror soul.
That day ended the war only in name.
Factions of the Isles
The Tidebound
Children of the storm. Bound in pairs, Twin, Lover, or Companion, with bonds no scholar can measure.
Not military. Not political. Yet feared, revered, needed.
Two of them are the player pair and one third of The Six. The rest are the world’s turning point.
The Academy
Training cradle of warriors, scholars, animators, and custodians.
Neutral in treaty, never in consequence. The Academy raised the Tidebound. It does not claim ownership, but the world thinks it does.
The Custodians
Shield and seal of the Isles. Keepers of Environs, wardens of old knowledge, first to the shoreline when the children came.
Respected, trusted, and painfully aware that stability is a myth.
The Animaeon and Alchemist Orders
What rose from ashes of necromancy and Shamanism.Their crafts binds construct-shells, not souls, not spirits, ethical, disciplined, but forever stained by origins.
Some call them redemption. Others, delay.
The Class Orders
Warrior lodges, Ranger circles, Elementalist colleges, Illusionist theatres, Cleric sanctuaries, each shaping identity, culture, and doctrine.
United by method, divided by philosophy.
The Heretics
Remnants of forbidden deathcrafts. Secret. Scattered.
Not extinct, only patient.
The Fey of the Glamour Isle
Veiled. Watching.
Their silence is not absence, simply unreadable.
Where This Leaves the Player
A world recovering, not healed.
A storm that brought children instead of armies. Five nations circling questions they dare not voice.
The Binding War never ended, it only paused.
And now the Tidebound,
With you, your Bound Hero and the rest of The Six,
walk back into the centre of it.