Reality is a spell.
A single, vast concentration spell, cast by the gods to bind existence together. When the gods fell, humanity inherited the burden. Wizards took up the concentration. For centuries they held. But every time someone failed a saving throw, a piece of the world came undone.
Not fire. Not rot. Not death. Just absence. Holes in the fabric of being. Voids where time stutters, space cracks, and magic loses coherence.
Wuh-Zhei is the last city. Look out from the top plates and you won’t see mountains or other nations. You’ll see nothing.
And still, the factions try.
The Paragons: Stand and Fight
The shield will hold.
That’s what the Paragons believe. That the Unraveling can be beaten with the right wards, the right firepower, the right spell. If they can just hold the barricades long enough to find it.
They’ve already scored the only documented tactical victory against a rupture. The newest Senator, Arch Evoker, Lord Commander Sutherland Dash, developed a spell-weapon that pushed it back.
If only it would work a second time.
If only it was clear what was pushed back.
If only the city lasts against the encroaching end.
Arch Abjurer Commander Gael’da Vorn is that final line of defense.
The Optimists: Escape and Rebuild
The world is ending. That’s just logistics.
The Optimists believe there’s no saving this plane. Instead, they’re building a new one. A stable, artificial reality to escape to before everything collapses. They smile. They offer help. But their eyes are already somewhere else.
That’s the idea at least. So far, every alternate plane created has been unstable with traces of the Unraveling. Their crowned leader, Grand Magus Matilda R. Brightside, is a halfling lich and the Bloc’s sunniest dictator. When she smiles, the entire city moves.
The Transneuroclasts: Transcend the Frame
To them, the Unraveling is a call to action, possibly even an evolution. But in either case, it’s a puzzle. The ‘Greatest Puzzle.’
The Transneuroclasts believe the only future lies within the void itself. We must become that which can exist beyond form or time. Their leader, Head Researcher Sintetra, is a cosmic tabaxi genasi who has fed her lab with the unwanted, the undocumented and the unpinned. If the senate will not fund her then she will ensure the Transneuroclast experiments can be carried out on the lower plates.
These wizards are not trying to survive the collapse.
They’re trying to become something new that can live inside it.
The Gilded Gaze: Observe, Chronicle, Celebrate
There have been many prophecies about the end. Not all of them can be true. But at least one is, and it’s clear it’s coming soon.
The Gilded Gaze doesn’t fight the Unraveling. They document it. Predict it. Celebrate it. Shape the narrative. Right now, every oracle agrees on two things: the world is ending soonish and that Dalton Marius will die today.
And First Oracle Nero, is certain that this moment is worth celebrating. The end is coming. Let’s roll out the red carpet and paint a picture worthy of how truly excellent “life” in all of its centuries has been.
The Chronomancers: Buy Time
The Chronomancers don’t debate how to fix the end.
They know they can’t.
Their job is to delay. Compress time. Buffer the city. Stall entropy just long enough for someone else to win the real fight.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Eighty years ago, Senator Dalton Marius the 100th went into seclusion after the entire wizarding community refused to pursue banned Chronomancy that might have offered a temporal alternative to a linear end.
He distills his discovery into a single Gambit that might doom the world, or it might work.
His death, the fixed point in time that Dalton Marius needed to jettison the player characters into a time loop.
And this time, maybe, it yields a way out.
The New Faith: Today is Enough
The New Faith doesn’t argue about entropy or magical decay.
They know the world is ending. Everyone knows.
But they’ve got crops to tend. Elders to bury. Sermons to give. They channel divine magic not to fix the world but to endure it.
They don’t preach escape or transcendence.
They preach dignity.
And that message is spreading across the plates, across the factions, into hearts too tired to keep pretending wizardry will save them.
At the center of it all is retired adventurer Varen, once a run of the mill rogue. Now an accidental time-traveler and reluctant prophet who doesn’t understand the power she sparked. Maybe she doesn’t need to. The Faith does the rest.