The Outline Of History

Here's the first infodump I sent out. A few comments:

1. 'Arith' was intended to be a temporary name, as it's a pretty obvious cliche, but nothing dramatically better suggested itself, and I didn't feel like doing an S&R an what was becoming a massive collection of documents. Maybe if this thing goes commercial (hah!) I'll put some mental effort into a better name.
2. I have no idea what a 'gigacollider' might be. It sounds cool.
3. I chose 2020 to give me about 13 years of 'future history' to play with, to set up anything I might need to do, but keep it close enough to 'our time' that the world will be mostly recognizable. If I need super-efficient electric generators, man portable lasers, robotic battlesuits, or AI computers, I can justifiably add them; if I don't need them, they don't need to exist.

The History Of The Shattered World
In 2020, the Austin Gigacollider came on-line. The largest atomic collider ever constructed, it was designed to unlock the final secrets of creation, to produce strangelets for study. A few fringe scientists and luddites feared this would lead to disaster, but they were ignored. As it turns out, they were right, but for no reason they could imagine.

Right next door -- and a world away -- academicians at the Diamond Tower were working towards isolating the thaum, the hypothetical basis of all magic, divine and arcane. It would allow the creation of spells of unprecedented power, as well as refining the control of magic to a previously unheard of degree.

Two experiments, in two worlds. Each one ground breaking, but harmless -- in itself. Had the worlds not been so close (dimensionally speaking) or the experiments not so close in time and space, nothing would have happened. The kind of disaster which created the Crush was a one in a million chance.

As we all know, one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.

The two experiments caused a void to appear between the worlds, and both worlds rushed into it, their dimensional natures suddenly coinciding. Cities appeared on top of other cities; flesh merged with flesh. Because both worlds had similar geographies, the largest cities were located in roughly the same spots; thus, the most concentrated centers of population were struck the worst. Billions died instantly, and the more industrial (and thus urban) the nation, the worse the effect. Power plants exploded as mountains appeared inside them. Coastal towns were swamped, or left miles from the shore. Rivers fought to find new beds.

As the initial shock faded, whatever governments remained struggled to make sense of things. Each saw the inhabitants of other worlds as invaders. Earth forces scored early victories, but soon fell back, as supply lines were non-existent. Tanks ran out of fuel; artillery batteries fell silent. Earth soldiers had no concept of magic, and could not deal with scrying, teleportation, or summoning. Despite superior numbers and deadly weapons, the armies of Earth soon fell.

In various isolated bunkers, failsafes tripped. The external chaos meant no signals could come through. Some of those stationed there, seeing the world collapse, decided to launch final strikes. While only a fraction of Earth's nuclear armament was launched, it was enough. Radiation and magic mingled, increasing the destruction.

The collapse of the infrastructure doomed billions more. What civilization survived the crush and the nukes was burned or torn apart in riots. Strange, alien, races had appeared, some creatures of beauty out of legend, others horror from nightmare. A war of all against all began, a decade of chaos, confusion, and destruction.

Worse, because the deep underground and barren wilds were mostly uninhabited on Earth, the creatures which dwelled there -- orcs and trolls, ogres and giants, drow and beholders -- suffered the least. As the armies of light fell, they emerged to a world where they could ravage unopposed. Earth's armies made no distinction between elf and orc, between troll and kobold. All were enemies, so the alliances which could have saved them were not made in time.

It was after ten years of near-constant war that the first tentative allegiances began to be made. In a few spots around the world, tiny handfuls of survivors started to see common foes and work to secure a small number of tiny freeholds, places where a pathetic semblance of normal life could begin to occur. At a rough guess, 95% of Earth's population was dead at this point, and about 50% of Arith's. All of the great cities were destroyed; the old nations erased. The folk who dwelled in the tiny pockets of semi-sanity looked out on a world ravaged by war and peopled by monstrosities.