The Age of Legends

Shattered Earth Powered by GURPS: The Age of Legends — a campaign in the world's deep past — when the Art was young, the gods were already distant, and every village kept a candle lit for the wise-woman at its edge.

The gods do not answer. The temples keep the forms, and no priest has heard a reply in living memory. What answers instead — sometimes, at a price — is the Lambda Field: the living substrate beneath the world, which a rare few are born able to touch. They are called the Gifted, and everything about how your world treats them follows from one fact: magic is real, useful, dangerous, and witnessed.

The Shape of the World

This is a low-magic world in the old key. Most magic you will ever see is small: a fever cooled, a garden quickened, a door that knows its own. The Orders and guilds hold the teaching — the Grave-Speech presides over funerals and witnessed oaths, the Storm Callers work the rivers and coasts, the Forge-Rite keeps its fires, and the Scriveners' Guild posts a Sight-clerk at every real town's gate for the same reason it posts a tax collector. The exceptions live where they always have: hedge wise-women at the boundary of every village, paid promptly and invited to nothing, and the druids of the deep country, who answer to no charter at all.

Mages are mostly Gandalf-shaped: they do things the ordinary way and keep their tricks for when the ordinary way won't serve — because the Art's real costs are paid in risk, witnesses, and the slow ledger of a community's memory. Common folk do not fear what a wizard does on purpose. They fear what happens when it goes wrong.

What You Need

One Law Before All Others

The tithe is universal. Every casting — from a one-die spark to a nine-die storm — costs at least 1 Quintessence Point. Skill never erases it, no purchase waives it, and the Field always takes its penny. Everything else in the Art is negotiable, rollable, or buyable. This is not.