Salt & Steel: History & Timeline

Document type: World & Lore — Foundational
Status: Canonical
Last updated: 2026-04
See also: World Overview | Factions & Civilizations | Mythology & Supernatural

Overview

The history of the Shattered Expanse is the history of a world that destroyed itself once and has been slowly deciding whether to do it again. This document presents that history as a timeline — not the dry list of dates and events that scholars compile, but the living record of decisions made and consequences taken, of people who were trying to do something meaningful and the world that answered them.

The timeline is presented in broad ages, each defined not by a arbitrary marker but by the dominant question the people living through it were trying to answer. The ages bleed into each other; no historian living through a transition knows they are in one. But looking back from the current moment, the shape of it is clear.

A note on dating: The current calendar counts from the Cataclysm. Year 0 is the year of the Reaching. The current game year is approximately 2240 AC (After Cataclysm). Pre-Cataclysm dates are noted as BC (Before Cataclysm) and are increasingly uncertain the further back they go.

Age One: The Age of the Depths

The Time Before Time (Before 3000 BC)

The Long Sleep

No human civilization existed. The Shattered Expanse was not yet shattered — the supercontinent of what scholars now call Urrath-Prime rose from a world ocean that covered the rest of the globe. The Old Gods existed in the deep ocean basins, sleeping or dreaming or doing something that human vocabulary cannot describe accurately. The Ley Lines of the Deep ran through the world's crust without anything to disturb them.

The natural world of this period was extraordinary by any subsequent standard. The geological stability that the intact Ley Line network provided produced a climate of remarkable consistency — warmer globally, with seas that supported biological diversity in every depth band. Creatures that would become legendary in the current age were, in this period, simply animals: the sea serpents, the pelagic drakes, the deep-water giants that later became the foundation of kraken mythology, all existing in a world that had not yet been disrupted.

The Old Gods' dreams shaped this world in ways that were not legible as influence because there was nothing with the cognitive sophistication to read them. The Ley Lines ran. The world was what it was. This age lasted longer than all subsequent ages combined.

The First Stirrings (3000-2500 BC)

Proto-Human Emergence

The first human ancestors appeared on the coastlines of Urrath-Prime approximately three thousand years before the Cataclysm. Their emergence was not the result of Old God influence — it was an ordinary evolutionary outcome of the biological world the Old Gods had unconsciously shaped. What was not ordinary was the location: proto-humans appeared first in the coastal zones where Ley Line currents surfaced most frequently, the places where the boundary between deep and shallow waters was most active.

Whether this means the Ley Lines influenced human cognitive development is debated. The Tidecallers believe it explains the human sensitivity to Ley Line presence — that humanity has been Ley-Line-adjacent since before it was fully human. The Ironclad Dominion's scholars find this claim unsupported. The Lighthouse Keepers have records that suggest a more complex answer, and they're not sharing.

The proto-human cultures of this period left almost nothing — their material culture was organic and perishable, their settlements were coastal and were therefore erased by the Cataclysm. What survives are genetic traces in the deep populations of the Jade Currents region and a handful of objects found in the deepest Drowned Reaches ruins that predate the oldest Urrathi construction by a thousand years.

Age Two: The First Empire

The Rise of the Urrathi (2500-1500 BC)

The First Cities

The civilization that would become the Urrathi First Empire emerged from the coastal proto-human populations approximately 2,500 years before the Cataclysm, in the coastal regions of what is now the southeastern Ember Seas — the area centered on the deep volcanic archipelago that is now known, accurately, as the Ember Sea's oldest zone. The natural thermal venting of that region provided reliable warmth, abundant marine resources, and the highest density of natural Ley Line surface expression in the world.

The first Urrathi achievement was agriculture — not revolutionary in other world histories but decisive here because it allowed permanent settlement in locations where seasonal migration had previously been necessary. The second was architecture: the Urrathi built in stone, which means some of their earliest structures still stand in the ruins now distributed across the Ember Seas and Drowned Reaches. The third — and the achievement that defined everything that followed — was discovery of the Ley Lines.

The Urrathi did not discover the Ley Lines through mystical practice. They discovered them through engineering: in building the foundations of their first city, they encountered the phenomenon of Ley Line current interference with their construction materials. Metal tools behaved strangely near certain geological formations. Compass-equivalents produced inconsistent readings. When their proto-engineers began investigating the inconsistency, they found the current, and began developing techniques to measure it, map it, and eventually use it.

This discovery is the moment from which everything else in the Urrathi story follows.

The Imperial Expansion (1500-800 BC)

The World Becomes One

Over seven hundred years, the Urrathi expanded across Urrath-Prime — not primarily through conquest, but through a characteristic pattern: wherever Urrathi engineers went, they built. Infrastructure projects — roads, harbors, aqueducts, and increasingly the Ley Line extraction facilities that powered all of it — made Urrathi-adjacent civilization substantially more comfortable than the alternatives. Incorporation into the Urrathi sphere was often voluntary, because the alternative was continuing to do without the things the Urrathi provided.

This period produced the Urrathi civilization that the current age finds in ruins: marble cities, sophisticated harbors, a global trade network in the full sense of the word (truly global; the supercontinent's coastlines connected every habitable region), and the emergence of the full Ley Line extraction infrastructure that made everything else possible.

The Urrathi of this period were not a monoculture. The First Empire was more confederation than empire — regional cultures maintained their practices and identities under a broad Urrathi technological and commercial umbrella. The current age's civilizations are, in almost every case, descended from specific regional Urrathi cultures. The Aurantine Concordat's Mediterranean architecture descends from the western coastal Urrathi. The Tidecallers' practices descend from the island-Urrathi who developed the deep-ocean mystical traditions. The Jade Fleet's ancestors were the eastern Urrathi who had the most extensive coastline and therefore the most sophisticated maritime engineering.

Historical Note for Designers: The Urrathi are not the Urrathi equivalent of the Roman Empire — they are not a "classical" civilization that later ages look back on nostalgically. They are the civilization that destroyed the world. Their ruins are beautiful and their technology was extraordinary, but the Urrathi's legacy is the Cataclysm. The current age's relationship to the Urrathi should be complicated: their knowledge is valuable, their artifacts are powerful, their history is fascinating — and their decision to reach for divine power ended the old world. Every encounter with their remains should carry this weight.

The Age of Reaching (800-0 BC)

The Five Hundred Years of Extraction

The Urrathi's Ley Line extraction technology improved over the course of the First Empire's existence, but the most aggressive period of improvement — and of extraction — was the five centuries before the Cataclysm. This period is sometimes called the Bright Age in the surviving fragments of Urrathi historiography: the age of their greatest achievements, their most spectacular cities, their most advanced medicine and engineering and navigation.

It was also the age of their most aggressive extraction. Each generation's engineers found ways to draw more from the Ley Lines than the previous generation, and each generation's civilization required more power than the previous. By the final century, the Urrathi's extraction was running at levels that the Tidecallers' retrospective analysis suggests were destabilizing the Ley Line network — the equivalent of drawing current from an electrical grid faster than it could be replenished.

The symptoms were present but were explained away: Ley Line interference in formerly stable regions, unusual creature behavior near extraction facilities, a slight but measurable shift in the tidal patterns that Urrathi navigators logged but did not fully analyze. The Reaching Council — the seventeen scientists, engineers, and theorists who proposed and implemented the direct connection to an Old God — were not acting in ignorance of these symptoms. They were acting in the belief that direct connection would solve them: unlimited power would mean unlimited power, and they would no longer need to stress the secondary Ley Line network.

They were wrong about the physics.

Year Zero: The Reaching and the Cataclysm (0 AC)

The Three Hours

The records of the Reaching itself are fragmentary and contradictory, which is unsurprising given that the people who would have written comprehensive accounts were, in the main, killed in the event itself. What the current age has assembled from those fragments:

The Reaching Council assembled their apparatus at the deepest drilling site they had built — in the volcanic deep sea region that is now the heart of the Storm Wastes. The site was chosen because the Ley Line concentration was highest there, which the Council understood as evidence that the Veil was thinnest there. They were correct. The apparatus was designed to punch through the Veil and create a sustained connection to whatever was on the other side. The Council believed this was the Great Sleeper — the largest and most energy-rich Old God presence they had mapped. They were, in this belief, approximately correct.

The drilling operation worked. The Veil fractured. The energy released in the fractured Veil's equalization was not the power the Council expected to harness — it was the entire potential difference between the mortal world and the Old Gods' realm, released simultaneously rather than sustainably. The pressure equalization was equivalent to a global-scale natural disaster, because it was a global-scale natural disaster.

In three hours, the Urrathi First Empire ended.

The Shattering

The geological consequences unfolded over the following two years:

Hour 1-3: The immediate explosion at the drill site. The surrounding ocean vaporized within miles. The seabed cracked along pre-existing fracture lines radiating thousands of miles from the site in every direction. Every Ley Line extraction facility connected to the network — which was to say, nearly every significant piece of Urrathi infrastructure — received a catastrophic power surge and failed catastrophically.

Months 1-6: Cascading geological instability. The seabed fractures propagated upward through the continental crust. Major sections of Urrath-Prime's interior began to subside. The ocean, which had been held back by the continental landmass, began to flow into the spaces the subsidence created.

Year 1: The major coastal flooding began. The great Urrathi port cities — many of them built on coastal lowlands — went under first. The interior was briefly above water but the fractures beneath it were undermining it. Urrathi survivors in the highlands watched the coastlines disappear below water.

Year 2: The full extent of the catastrophe became clear. What had been a supercontinent was now an archipelago. The sea had risen to a new equilibrium level approximately 200 meters above the old level. What remained above water were the highest elevations of Urrath-Prime's mountain ranges — now islands — and the regions where the seabed fractures had not fully undermined the continental crust.

The current geography of the Shattered Expanse — ten thousand islands, volcanic archipelagos, shallow reef areas that are the tops of drowned lowlands — is the shape of what the Reaching left.

Age Three: The Dark Tides

The First Centuries (1-500 AC)

Survival

The people who survived the Cataclysm did so by being in the right place — high enough ground, or far enough from the worst of the geological fracturing, or lucky enough to be at sea in a ship that could survive the initial tsunamis. The survivors were a small fraction of the Urrathi population. Their situation was desperate: no infrastructure, no supply networks, no extraction technology (all of it had failed in the Cataclysm's power surge), and a transformed world in which the geography they knew no longer matched the geography they could see.

The Dark Tides were dark because almost everything useful had been lost. Food production had to be rebuilt from almost nothing — agricultural land had drowned, seed stocks were depleted, and the changed ocean chemistry required fishermen to relearn where the fish were in a sea that had been entirely reorganized. Medical knowledge, navigational knowledge, engineering knowledge — all of it survived in fragments in the minds of individuals who had memorized it, or in written records that had survived the flooding, or not at all.

The supernatural world became dramatically more present during this period, because the Cataclysm had made the Veil more permeable everywhere. The first Dark Tides saw Drowned Court entities appearing in daylight. Ghost ships were common enough to have their own vocabulary across multiple survivor communities. Old God energy leaked into the shallow waters in concentrations that caused biological anomalies, ghost sightings, and occasional visionary experiences in otherwise healthy people. The survivors of the Cataclysm had to build new civilizations in a world that was actively haunted.

The Divergence

The geographic scattering of survivors meant that communities that had been part of a single civilization became isolated from each other. Without communication infrastructure, without navigation technology capable of finding scattered islands in an unfamiliar sea, each survivor community developed independently. Within two hundred years of the Cataclysm, communities that had once shared a civilization were developing mutually unintelligible languages, distinct material cultures, and separate mythological traditions.

This divergence is the source of the current age's cultural diversity. The Ember Seas' maritime cultures are diverse not because they have different origins but because they have the same origin, separated by geography and time. The Tidecallers' traditions and the Jade Fleet's navigation techniques are different expressions of Urrathi maritime knowledge, filtered through two thousand years of isolated development. The Frozen Straits' Järnvolk and the Ember Seas' pirates share a common Urrathi ancestor and remember almost nothing about this.

The First Leviathan Attempt

Within the first century of the Dark Tides, the first organized attempt to complete the Cataclysm occurred. A group of Urrathi survivors, who had been members of the Reaching Council's support staff and who believed the Cataclysm was incomplete rather than catastrophic, organized a second attempt to open a Veil fracture. They succeeded in creating a small fracture — smaller than the original, but still significant — before being stopped by an alliance of survivor communities who had observed what happened the first time.

The people who stopped them are the organizational ancestors of the Lighthouse Keepers. The people who attempted the second fracture are the organizational ancestors of the Leviathan Cult. This pattern — one faction trying to complete the Cataclysm, one faction trying to prevent it — has repeated in every subsequent age. The current Leviathan Cult is the most organized and most capable version of the impulse in two thousand years.

The Consolidation (500-900 AC)

The Second Building

By the fifth century AC, survivor communities had stabilized enough to begin organized development again. This was not a recovery of the Urrathi's achievement — the technological knowledge required to replicate most Urrathi systems was lost. It was, instead, a new beginning: communities discovering, independently in most cases, the same basic technologies of agriculture, sailing, and navigation that the Urrathi had discovered three thousand years before.

Two communities stood out as preserving more of the Urrathi knowledge than others:

The ancestors of the Jade Fleet had maintained the most intact record-keeping tradition through the Dark Tides, primarily because they were based on the highest and most stable part of the eastern coast and had the longest window to prepare for the flooding. Their records — on metal plates, stored in elevated sealed chambers — survived. Their descendants had two thousand years of pre-Cataclysm knowledge preserved in written form. They have spent the centuries since figuring out what it means.

The ancestors of the Tidecallers had maintained their navigational practice continuously, because it required no infrastructure beyond human training and the sea itself. Their Ley Line sensitivity — the result of generations of deliberate cultivation — remained viable across the Dark Tides because it was not dependent on any technology that could be destroyed. What they lost was external context; what they kept was the core practice.

The Lighthouse Network's Origin

The Lighthouse Keepers established their first formal network in approximately 600 AC — a series of beacons placed at navigational hazard points along the emerging sea lanes of the Ember Seas. The beacon technology was partly Urrathi (preserved by one of the founding members of the organization who had been, before the Cataclysm, an engineer of extraction infrastructure) and partly new: the beacons drew on Ley Line current in a careful, sustainable way that the Urrathi's extraction technology did not.

The Keepers' stated purpose was navigational safety. Their actual purpose — the Ley Line stabilization function of the beacons, the monitoring of Old God activity, the ongoing suppression of Veil permeability in their operational range — was never publicly articulated. This discretion was deliberate and has been maintained since.

Age Four: The Age of Rebuilding

The New Civilizations Emerge (900-1400 AC)

Five Hundred Years of Becoming

The Age of Rebuilding is the period in which the current civilizations' identifiable ancestors appeared. It is the age in which communities large enough to have political structures formed, in which trade networks between those communities became reliable enough to sustain civilization-level exchange, and in which the cultural identities that define the major factions of the current age crystallized.

The Aurantine Concordat's Ancestor: The western coastal communities of the Ember Seas formed a trading league approximately 1100 AC, built around a shared legal framework for commercial disputes. This league — originally seven port-cities — expanded steadily, absorbing neighboring communities through the familiar Urrathi pattern of infrastructure provision: if you join us, you get access to our network; if you don't, you don't. By 1400 AC, the league had become recognizably the Concordat, with a governing bureaucracy, a navy, and a cultural identity organized around commerce.

The Tidecallers' Formalization: The Tidecaller tradition had always been practiced in small communities, passed from teacher to student. Around 1000 AC, a crisis — a Ley Line disruption of unusual magnitude in the central Ember Seas — forced multiple Tidecaller communities to coordinate for the first time. The coordination worked, the disruption was managed, and the experience convinced the communities that a more organized structure would make them more effective. The nation that resulted — its capital on the deep-sea archipelago at the Ember Seas' edge — is recognizably the Tidecallers of the current age.

The Jade Fleet's Consolidation: The eastern communities with the preserved Urrathi records had been using those records selectively — applying old knowledge to new problems without revealing the full extent of what they had. Around 1200 AC, a coalition of the most powerful merchant families in the eastern sea organized the Jade Fleet as a formal institution, establishing the navigational and commercial standards that would eventually make them the dominant power of the Jade Currents region. Their three-thousand-year records were formalized into a restricted archive during this period. The decision about who could access those records has driven the Fleet's internal politics ever since.

The Järnvolk's Great Raid Period: The Norse-inspired cultures of the Frozen Straits developed their maritime technology independently and reached a period of significant expansion — raiding and trading throughout the northern seas — approximately 1000-1300 AC. Their encounters with the other rebuilding civilizations shaped both their culture and the cultures they contacted. The Järnvolk contributed a tradition of physical endurance, navigational courage, and supernatural directness (they are the culture most willing to interact directly with Old God phenomena rather than interpreting them through theology) that distinguishes them from every other maritime culture of the age.

The Great Sea-Powers (1400-1800 AC)

Navies and Nations

The four centuries between 1400 and 1800 AC are the Age of the Great Sea-Powers — the period in which the major civilizations of the current age established their relationships with each other and with the sea. Navies were built. Trade routes were established and fought over. The first wars that were wars between civilizations rather than between communities occurred.

The Aurantine Wars (1450-1480 AC): The Concordat's expansion brought it into conflict with several independent island nations that had developed their own political organization during the Rebuilding period. Three decades of conflict ended with most of the independent states incorporated into the Concordat's sphere — willingly or otherwise. The wars established the Concordat's navy as the dominant force in the central Ember Seas and generated the first organized piracy: former navies of the defeated states, unwilling to serve the Concordat but skilled at sea, who continued to operate outside any state's authority.

The Jade Fleet's Opening (1600 AC): The Jade Fleet made its first formal contact with the western civilizations of the Ember Seas in approximately 1600 AC, establishing trade relationships that have continued since. The meeting was carefully managed by the Fleet — they chose what to reveal, when, and to whom — and the asymmetry of knowledge between the Fleet and the Concordat has characterized their relationship ever since.

The First Ironclad Company (1750 AC): A consortium of western merchant-investors organized the first systematic seabed salvage operation in the Drowned Reaches, recovering Urrathi artifacts for sale to collectors and institutions. The company grew, expanded into more aggressive extraction operations, and is the direct organizational ancestor of the Ironclad Dominion. The Tidecallers opposed the first Company from its founding. The opposition has continued for five hundred years.

Age Five: The Age of Sail

The Known World Expands

The Age of Sail is the period in which the geography of the Shattered Expanse became approximately known to the major civilizations — when the sea lanes were charted, the major islands settled or at least visited, and the world became a network of connected places rather than a collection of isolated communities separated by dangerous water.

This is also the age in which the technological divergence between civilizations became most apparent. The Aurantine Concordat's shipbuilding tradition, developed over centuries, produced the largest conventional fleet in the world. The Jade Fleet's navigation techniques, drawing on three thousand years of accumulated knowledge, produced the most capable individual vessels in terms of range and reliability. The Järnvolk's extreme-environment shipbuilding produced vessels capable of the Frozen Straits in conditions that would sink any southern-built ship.

And the Ironclad Company's extraction operations, increasingly efficient at pulling Urrathi technology from the seabed, began producing ships with capabilities that derived from neither natural maritime tradition nor conventional engineering — ships powered partly by adapted Urrathi machinery, capable of ranges and speeds that defied any conventional explanation.

Key Figures of the Age of Sail:

Navigator Yuen Sao (Jade Fleet, born approximately 1810 AC) — The Jade Fleet captain who completed the first confirmed circumnavigation of the entire Shattered Expanse, returning with charts of the outer reaches that remain the most complete available. Her voyage took twelve years. She returned with three crewmembers from her original crew of forty and with records that the Fleet immediately classified. The charts she made of the Storm Wastes' outer boundary are the foundation of all subsequent knowledge of that region.

Admiral Cressida Vane (Aurantine Concordat, born approximately 1850 AC) — The Concordat admiral who established the first systematic naval patrol routes in the Ember Seas, creating the framework of the Concordat's sea lane control that persists to the current day. She is also, less officially, the person who developed the Concordat's understanding of how to conduct effective anti-piracy operations — and who documented, in her private journals, that many of the people her navy was hunting were not criminals but former Concordat sailors rendered destitute by the navy's own post-war demobilizations. Her journals are kept in the Concordat's restricted archive. They have never been published.

The Compass Rose Brotherhood (dissolved approximately 1900 AC) — A navigators' fraternal organization that operated across faction lines during the Age of Sail, sharing navigation knowledge regardless of national affiliation. The Brotherhood is the organizational predecessor of several current institutions: the Phantom Tide (which preserved the Brotherhood's information-sharing traditions under less legal circumstances), the Lighthouse Keepers' navigator program (which absorbed many Brotherhood members when the Brotherhood dissolved), and the Sunken Crown (which was founded by Brotherhood members who decided that navigational knowledge should extend below the surface).

The Birth of the Confederacy (2100-2150 AC)

Three Captains and an Agreement

The Maelstrom Confederacy was formally established in approximately 2107 AC, when three captains — Torben Ashmark, Mira Desolaine, and an individual known to history only as the Saltbinder — signed the original Articles of the Deep on the neutral island of Kaldera Bay. The circumstances of their meeting are instructive: all three had recently escaped Aurantine naval capture by cooperating without any prior agreement to do so, and afterward Ashmark is recorded as saying "We nearly died because we didn't know each other. We survived because we acted like we did. What if we actually did?"

The Articles of the Deep that the three captains drafted were remarkable for their clarity: equal share in prizes; democratic decision-making on all non-combat matters; absolute captain's authority in combat; the right of any crew to petition the three signatories for arbitration of disputes. The Articles also contained a clause that has defined the Confederacy ever since: the prohibition on any member acquiring enough power to compel other members. The Confederacy was explicitly designed to prevent itself from becoming an empire.

The Confederacy's first two decades were chaotic — the Articles were tested by captains who found their constraints inconvenient, by attempted takeovers by larger ships attempting to dominate smaller ones, and by the Concordat's initial attempt to suppress the organization militarily. All three crises were survived, which established the Confederacy's legitimacy through demonstrated resilience.

The Grand Muster — the twice-yearly meeting of all Confederacy captains — developed organically from the original arbitration provision and has been the Confederacy's governance structure since approximately 2130 AC.

Age Six: The Age of Piracy (Current)

The World as It Stands (2150 AC - Present)

The Current Moment

The Age of Piracy is the age the player enters. It is called the Age of Piracy by the empires, who mean it as an insult. The pirates themselves call it the Age of the Free Sea, or the Second Age of Discovery, or simply Now — because what defines the age for those living it is not the political label but the sensation of a world in motion, a world not yet finished deciding what it will become.

The current moment is approximately 2240 AC — ninety years after the Confederacy's founding, eighty years after the Ironclad Dominion's formal organization as a state, and roughly fifty years after the point at which the Tidecallers first began documenting what they believe is evidence of renewed Old God activity.

The major civilizations are at a moment of maximum tension:

The Aurantine Concordat is the largest single power but is increasingly aware that it is not growing as fast as its rivals. The Ironclad Dominion's technological advantage is compounding; the Jade Fleet's navigational advantage is ancient and unassailable; the Tidecallers' knowledge of the supernatural world gives them a kind of influence the Concordat cannot acquire or purchase.
The Ironclad Dominion is confident and expanding, driven by the genuine advantages its technology provides and the commercial success of its extraction operations. It is also, unknown to most of its own leadership, hosting an active Leviathan Cult infiltration in its engineering corps, which has been deliberately orienting the Dominion's operations toward Ley Line disruption targets rather than optimal extraction sites.
The Tidecallers are alarmed. They have been alarmed for fifty years, documenting the increasing instability of the Ley Line network and the correlation of that instability with the Ironclad Dominion's expansion. They have made this information available to the Concordat, to the Jade Fleet, and, less formally, to the Maelstrom Confederacy. No one with the power to act on the information has done so.
The Jade Fleet is managing something. What specifically, they will not say. Their behavior in the past twenty years has been more active than their usual careful neutrality — more ships moving unusual routes, more diplomatic missions to Tidecaller archipelagos, more classified communications between the Great Houses. Their three-thousand-year-old prophetic text's current relevance is known only to the Fleet's inner council, and they have not shared this.
The Maelstrom Confederacy is in its most interesting period. The Grand Muster is currently deadlocked on three major questions: whether to accept an Ironclad Dominion offer of formalized commercial access in exchange for reduced raiding of Dominion shipping; whether the Free Sail Alliance's political agenda should be adopted as Confederacy policy; and what to do about the growing number of Leviathan Cult incidents at sea that appear to specifically target Confederacy ships. The deadlock is producing the conditions for a leadership crisis.

Key Historical Figures

The Legendary Dead

The Saltbinder (fl. 2100 AC)

Co-founder of the Maelstrom Confederacy, the only founding captain whose real name was never recorded. The Saltbinder insisted on this themselves — their argument, recorded in the Articles' preamble, was that a name attached to a person becomes a tool for that person's enemies. Their legacy would survive as the Articles' principles, not as a personality cult.

What is recorded: they were the most experienced navigator of the three founders, they had previously served in both the Aurantine navy and the Jade Fleet (the only person known to have done both), and they disappeared approximately twenty years after the Confederacy's founding during an expedition to the Storm Wastes. Whether they died in the Wastes or survived and chose not to return is unknown. The Sunken Crown maintains a quest file on this question, which has been open for a hundred years without resolution.

Admiral Cressida Vane (1850-1920 AC)

See above. Additionally: in the final decade of her life, Vane retired from the Concordat's navy and spent ten years producing a private history of Concordat naval policy that is, by all accounts, devastating in its honesty about the Concordat's role in creating the conditions for piracy by treating maritime communities as extraction targets rather than partners. The history was suppressed by the Concordat on her death. Several copies are believed to circulate among the Phantom Tide's archive.

Zheng Liulian (Jade Fleet, fl. 1920 AC)

The Jade Fleet captain who decoded the first major section of the three-thousand-year-old prophetic text. Her decoding revealed that the text describes a sequence of events matching the current period of Ley Line instability with enough specificity to be disturbing. Liulian's response was to immediately classify her findings at the Fleet's highest level and to begin developing a contingency plan. She died before completing the plan. Her successor has been continuing it.

The Walker of the Maelstrom (Legend, uncertain date)

A figure present in the folklore of the Storm Wastes, the Ember Seas, and — in different forms — the Frozen Straits and the Jade Currents, who is described as having entered the Maelstrom's eye and survived with knowledge of what is inside. The Walker's descriptions of the Maelstrom's interior are the most consistent single source on the topic across multiple unrelated cultural traditions, which implies either a common source — a real person who actually went — or a supernatural origin for the legend itself.

The Walker is the only figure in the world's folklore who is simultaneously referenced positively by the Tidecallers, the Lighthouse Keepers, the Drowned Court, and the Jade Fleet's ancient records. Each describes them differently. The Sunken Crown's current most active research file is trying to reconcile the descriptions into a coherent portrait of someone who may have been real.

Doria Vance (2170-2225 AC)

Founder of the Free Sail Alliance. Former Aurantine naval officer. The event that transformed her: during a commercial dispute suppression operation, she was ordered to fire on a civilian harbor because harbor workers were refusing to unload Concordat merchant goods under protest of low wages. She refused the order, was court-martialed, was stripped of her commission, and spent the next decade sailing with the Confederacy and developing the political philosophy that became the Alliance's founding principles.

Vance died fifteen years ago during a raid that went wrong — she was killed covering the retreat of a newly recruited crew whose inexperience she had compensated for with her own expertise. The Alliance has lionized her since, which has the complicated effect of making her principles simultaneously more influential and more subject to interpretation by people with agendas she would not have endorsed.

Living Figures of the Current Age

First Councilor Marcellus Aurelio (Aurantine Concordat, born 2205 AC)

The most powerful person in the Concordat's current government, which means the most powerful person in the world's largest empire. Aurelio has served as First Councilor for twelve years, during which he has maintained the Concordat's position against growing Ironclad Dominion pressure through a combination of diplomatic skill and willingness to conduct the kind of covert operations that official Concordat policy prohibits. He is aware that the Phantom Tide maintains files on some of those operations. He is aware that the Phantom Tide is aware he is aware. This mutual awareness has produced a working relationship that neither party publicly acknowledges.

Director-Admiral Kira Strand (Ironclad Dominion, born 2198 AC)

The Dominion's current director of naval operations and the primary advocate for aggressive deep-sea expansion. Strand is a genuine believer — she grew up in a Dominion port city, benefited from Dominion infrastructure, and has absolute conviction that the Dominion's technological development is the best hope for the Expanse's future. She is not cruel; she is indifferent to consequences she does not observe. The Leviathan Cult's engineering corps infiltration is, as far as anyone can determine, unknown to her. Whether she would act if she knew is one of the more interesting unresolved questions of the current moment.

Elder Navigator Sasha Kalinde (Tidecallers, born 2185 AC)

The Tidecallers' most technically accomplished active navigator and their primary voice in diplomatic engagements with other factions. Kalinde has spent the past decade attempting to translate the Tidecallers' alarm about Ley Line instability into terms that political and commercial leaders will act on. The experience has made them deeply frustrated. They have recently begun considering whether there are actions the Tidecallers could take unilaterally that they have previously avoided taking diplomatically.

Master of Charts Ruen Beija (Jade Fleet, born 2190 AC)

The individual within the Jade Fleet's inner council most directly responsible for the prophetic text. Beija has decoded approximately forty percent of the text's remaining obscured sections over the past decade, and what they have decoded has accelerated the Fleet's covert preparation considerably. Beija is also the Fleet member most sympathetic to the idea of sharing the text's contents with other factions — a view that puts them in tension with Fleet consensus.

Captain-Admiral Torsa Blackmast (Maelstrom Confederacy, born 2200 AC)

The Confederacy's most decorated active captain and the frontrunner in the next Grand Muster's vote for Admiralty, should the Confederacy succeed in establishing that role (currently contested). Blackmast is not a philosopher — they are a sailor and a fighter of extraordinary competence, whose reputation has been built on a record of successful engagements against Concordat naval patrols that has made them a legend. They are also currently being actively recruited by the Leviathan Cult, who regard them as the ideal disruption vector for the Confederacy's Grand Muster. Blackmast is not aware of this.

Unresolved Mysteries

These are the narrative questions that drive the game's ongoing story. They are listed not as things with current answers but as things whose answers the player's exploration can uncover.

Where did the Saltbinder go?

The founding captain's disappearance in the Storm Wastes is a hundred-year-old mystery. The Sunken Crown's active research file includes evidence that the Saltbinder may have reached the Maelstrom's eye — based on navigational logs recovered from the wreck of a vessel that matches the Saltbinder's last known ship. What they found there, and whether they survived finding it, are open questions that the Storm Wastes expansion is designed to explore.

What is in the Jade Fleet's classified archive?

The Fleet's restricted records extend back three thousand years and include pre-Cataclysm material from the Urrathi period. What specifically is in the sections the Fleet has never shared — and why they are still choosing not to share it — is one of the Jade Currents expansion's central narrative questions.

Who is currently leading the Leviathan Cult?

The Cult's leadership structure is deliberately obscured. The current top tier — the people with direct contact with Yavarath's influence in the Obsidian Deep — are unknown to the Cult's own membership. The Phantom Tide's file on the Cult contains names for the mid-tier leadership; the top tier remains blank. The answer to who is leading the Cult and what their specific plan is constitutes the main narrative arc's central mystery.

What is the Unnamed?

The fifth Old God presence in the Obsidian Deep. Explicitly not described in any accessible document. The Obsidian Deep expansion's final revelation. The answer to this question changes the understanding of everything that came before it.

What did Henry Every (analog) do with his fortune?

The analog to Henry Every in the Shattered Expanse's history — a pirate captain named Vasco del Oro — successfully completed a raid of legendary scale approximately one hundred and fifty years ago, disappeared afterward, and was never found. What he took, where he went, and what he built with what he took is the template for the game's richest treasure hunt content: not a dungeon but a life, reconstructed through evidence scattered across the world.

Can the Veil be repaired?

The Reaching's wound has been leaking for two thousand years. The Tidecallers believe it is theoretically possible to close the fracture — that the conditions for doing so are described, obliquely, in the Account of What Comes After. The question of whether the player's captain will discover those conditions, and whether they will choose to use them, is the game's central narrative choice in the Obsidian Deep expansion.

What does the Lighthouse Keepers' Third Protocol actually say?

The Keepers' internal document referenced in their organizational structure but never published. Known only to the First, Second, and Third Lights. Connected to the Unnamed. The answer is the last piece of lore the player can discover in the entire game.

See also:
World Overview — the geography this history produced
Factions & Civilizations — the organizations this history shaped
Mythology & Supernatural — the supernatural elements this history involves
Design Pillars — the Expanding Horizons pillar and how history supports long-term narrative