A World of Ice and Darkness
Terminus is a world where time has lost nearly all meaning, with a history so long that even the Gods do not always remember its complete past. Many aeons ago, in the First Age, the Age of Creation, the Gods came together to try to form the ideal world: Lush forests and ice-peaked mountains, burning deserts and overgrown jungles. But the world was doomed, even though the races living there - the gnomes, elves, and halflings - did not yet know it.
The pact between the Gods was broken. Treachery was spoken of on both sides. And so the Gods battled. During the Second Age, the Age of War, many races were called into being by the Gods. Orcs and trolls were sent into battle against the elementals and the dwarves. When they died, they were raised again as revenants to fight the giants. The celestial war was fought to a stalemate, but for Terminus it had already had an effect
When the long war was finally over, most of the old races were devastated. New races came into being as the Gods rebuilt the world during an uneasy truce. Man was born as a sort of recompense for the wounds that had been laid on the world, and they soon outnumbered the old, dying races. The Third Age, was indeed the Age of Man. However, not all was as it should have been.
A dark god arose, and in the fight against him, the world of Terminus was flung on a course away from the gods. Fire spells and light spells waned. The Fourth Age, The Age of Death, saw the end of nearly all the old races. Only the strongest were able to eke out an existence in the oncoming frost, and finally all magic was reduced to a fraction of its former power.
The Age of Ice is upon Terminus now. There are legends that the Gods had laid out plans to retrieve the world of Terminus from the far reaches of the cosmos, and bring it back to its rightful place, but those are only legends. For the people of Terminus, life is hard. The constant wind and rain, ice and snow, mean that life is an unforgiving mistress. One mistake on the ice plains could mean death in a crevasse. The first slip could be the last.