This world began from an idea: what if a setting was designed around the magic of the new Tasha's Cauldron to Everything subclasses. So, what would a setting look like filled with psionic powers, rune knights, reality-is-an-illusion principles, and other weirdness? The result is this Eden Under Eventide.
By Adrián Ibarra Lugo
EDEN UNDER EVENTIDE is a high fantasy world of surreal, mystical magic wherein a diverse society of half-dreamed races must navigate a world of alien danger, chaotic fey, and shadow-birthed nightmares.
There are ten available races in Eden Under Eventide. These races are split into two groups of five: the DREAMPUNKS and the REALITIES.
DREAMPUNKS (the half-dreamed peoples, born from the divine deaths of insomniac immortals)
- Loxodons
- Tortles
- Yuan-Ti
- Ghostwise Halflings
- Mountain Dwarves
REALITIES (Outsiders from other worlds)
- Shadar-Kai
- Githyanki
- Githzerai
- Eladrin (DMG variant)
- Humans (including Tiefling and Aasimar).
Realities are often seen by Dreampunks as dangerous individuals who add another chaotic variable to their lives. However, due to shared elements in the Dreampunks cultures, attempts at peace are often made; but the Knighthood of the Owl’s Eye keeps a strict watch over all Realities, abjuring them from Eventide if needed without a second thought.
The default races allowed to be played are the five Dreampunks and Shadar-Kai. Gith of both forms normally arrive in arms (as they are hunting down some Far Realm thing), thus making them unlikely to remain in Eventide for long. Eladrin hail from the fey courts and are seldom accepted without great suspicion. Humans are reserved for Outsider characters—rarities to the extreme, usually only one or two in the world at a time.
EDEN UNDER EVENTIDE is a sprawling forest of supermassive trees, at times stabbed with mountains or gouged out with fathomless lakes that brood underneath a permanently twilit sky in which sits a total solar eclipse. At times the thing eclipsing the sun will move, allowing more light; however, the eclipse itself never ends. Littering the world are isolated strangities built from the Dreampunks magic (or that of the fey or something else); lone clocktowers rising gargantuan into the sky where sorcerers create miracles; the dens and burrows of immortal beasts who accepted not the Raven Queen’s gift of mortality; vast and labyrinthine mazes of glass where the fey trap Dreampunks in hells of endless trickery.
The Dreampunks of Eventide, despite their different natures, have a rather unified culture. This culture has its variations, splits into subcultures and so on, and is scattered across the plane and connected by Unearthly Roads that shorten the impossible distances. Some groups of Dreampunks choose to remain isolated, with wandering monkish loxodon moving seismically through the dim forest valleys, or circles of wildfire-worshipping dwarves hidden in the hearts of immense coal engines, whose light lines brass-forged streets of furtive, half-dreamed cities.
Binding this all together is the Half-Light Trinity - the default religion that is interpreted again and again in ever more different ways throughout the Eden Under Eventide. Below is the genesis myth of this strange faith.
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| By Zuzzana Wuzyk |
THE GENESIS OF THE EDEN UNDER EVENTIDE
As told by the shadar-kai, and their Gloom Weaving Mobeds
“From out the darkness she waltzed, our Gloaming Queen, dance partners too, death and memory. We followed Her into this twilit world, flew down as ravens from the abyss of its eclipse born on beams of dusk and dawn. You were not here yet. Nothing but a dream in the heads of immortal things that neither slept nor could wake. To each of those immortals our Queen did visit. She washed their matted hair, cleaned their bedsores, infected as they were by the curses that only lives lived too long could throng. With us, she shoo’d away the fairies, their Court of Glass, who dance in plague of all us still.
“Then, she answered the immortals’ prayers.
“Each one was given the gift of true sleep. Mortality was pressed upon their souls with raven feathers. As they died, their heads split open, and out flowed their endless half-dreams, hallucinations, weirdling sleep paralyses. They flooded this immortal world in a great chaotic press, horizon to horizon, fading and dying and breaking apart, warping the world into this.
“Our Queen watched. Then she left. She departed with no commands for us, no task but to experience what was destined to be our suffering. We who were left are we who watch. Though queenless, we have shaped this eventide garden with what wisdoms she left behind—the Half-Light Trinity.
“First there is the Monarch, the predominant aspect of the Goddess and Creator. It has no memory of the past, only the thing needed to reach the future. Through the Monarch inside all of us, we impose order upon Eventide, soothe the chaos, create a stable ground for life to thrive. Know this as our Mother.
“Then there is the Soothed, the heart of our God-Queen, and all hearts of Eventide too. Death and sleep, a concord among the dreamed. The Soothed is our peace, our destiny to maybe wake again—to sit under shaded boughs of primeval trees in succulent, sublime silence. Know this as our Sister.
“And lastly, there is the Sublime Light, the artha of all us in this Eden Under Eventide who must wander under the gated eclipse, the hollowed sun, protected in our immortal mortality, knowing that sleep will come from which we will never wake. Know this as our Soul.
“Through the Half-Light Trinity, embodying it, worshipping it, becoming it, dreams transformed into something else. You became peoples, scattered but now gathered, few and than many.
“Legacy to the Queen, in Her name only, swilah.”
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