Magical Realm Cyoa/Diaspora
Diaspora
Realm Name: Diaspora
Realm Wizard: Xanatos
Population: 250 Million humans within the primary cities and surrounding areas. For other populations see Secrets of the Realms
General Description: Numerous dyson-sphere-like constructs linked by magical portals which connect in a manner similar to Stargate. Most areas are comprised of a single or small number of similar/linked biomes. All areas are infested by monsters, dungeons and hazards of all forms.
The Build
Complications - Notorious! [125]
Demiplanes - Area Increase 8 [110]
Planar Features - Gateways 2 [107]
Planar Features - Division [105]
Planar Features - Assimilation [102]
Population - Population Increase 6 [90]
Inhabitants - Extrahuman Population [86]
Inhabitants - Metahuman Population [82]
Technology - Technology Upgrade 2 [80]
Magic - Magical Upgrade 3 [74]
Society - Public Education [73]
Society - University [71]
Society - Industrial [68]
Society - Mystical [64]
Society - Technomagic [59]
Society - Sanitation [58]
Society - Healthy [57]
Culture - Intellectual [56]
Culture - Gaming [55]
Culture - Occult [54]
Culture - Sexual [53]
Environment - Cosmic Adjustment [51]
Environment - Landscape Adjustment [48]
Environment - Fertile [47]
Environment - Rich [45]
Environment - Exceptional Materials [42]
Environment - Magical Phenomena [39]
Environment - Flora & Fauna 3 [34]
Adventure - Dungeons 3 [29]
Adventure - Afterlife [26]
Adventure - Malice [25]
Adventure - Theme [21]
Personal - Spirit Walk [18]
Personal - Shape Shift 2 [13]
Powers - Levitation [12]
Powers - Enchanting [10]
Ascendance - Divine Spark [0]
History and Overview
In the times of myth and legend, Diaspora was a single realm. A magical plane of vast landmasses, huge seas, flying islands that followed the tradewinds, and a single star which never rose or fell in the sky, but always burned brightly directly above, no matter where one lived. In those long-lost times, the world was a peaceful place, with prosperity and happiness everywhere. Magic was known to exist, but there was no great need to explore the intricacies of spells and enchantments, and even less need to go beyond basic agriculture and metalworking. The land was fertile and rich and ripe with all the best things. There was one people who were masters of the land, and all was well.
Then, came the breaking. Great rifts appeared in the land and sea, swallowing whole nations and sundering continents. Trade became impossible, and the great floating isles were tethered for fear they would slip through these great rents in the world. The many scholars of the time gathered and discussed, but could find nothing in the histories or the world, nor could they understand what was happening with their meagre sciences. The greatest mages of the time cast their strongest divinations, and learned only that the world was ending due to the actions of one being - a semi-divine entity called Xanatos.
The great realm of Diaspora was torn apart, the peoples of the realm sundered as surely as the lands. Each land closed off from the others, most of them trapping a piece of the once great sun, and getting some portion of the rich resources as well as some portion of the people. In the end seven great realms were formed, with a hundred smaller, lesser worlds interspersed among these. Each of these pocket realms was connected to the others by a powerful artifice called a Portal, and each realm got at least one of these portals. Though magical travel is possible without the use of the portals, it is exceptionally difficult.
But this was not the end of the Diasporan people's troubles. Suddenly, the once peaceful land became harsh and dangerous. The tamed beasts of the wild lands became feral and fearsome. The plants became vicious, often poisonous or barbed or capable of lashing out. The weather of the spheres was no longer mild, and even the land itself twisted into mazes, mountains and other difficult terrains. The whole world had turned against the Diasporan peoples, forcing the once peaceful and calm natives to struggle for survival, and struggle hard.
Millennia have passed, and the world has become more harsh, not less. The people have adapted to their environment, becoming strong and fierce, intelligent and crafty. In each realm, the people are subtly different - travel between the realms happens infrequently, and the pockets of people have started to become racially divergent, each group adapting to the unique conditions of their own realm. The worlds have also adapted to the people, becoming more dangerous as the people grow in strength. In many of the scattered realms, the people have been hunted to extinction by fierce predators or have died off to natural hazards. In these pocket worlds, nature runs wild in the ruins of abandoned and forgotten cities and great beasts hoard the last remnants and treasures of lost peoples.
While some of the Diasporan people are cut off from the main populated worlds, the majority live in or near one of the Seven Cities, each in one of the greater realms, which are connected by fiercely guarded portals in those realms. The Seven Cities trade with each other, and the lesser realms, and grow wealthy and powerful from this trade. The founding of these cities is considered the beginning of modern history, and saw the beginning of the slow rise of magical, technological and technomagical progress.
For most of the people of Diaspora, the world is a mildly dangerous place, equally full or wonder and challenge, a place where they can grow strong and learn to thrive despite adversity. Yet every one of them, in some deep part of their heart, yearns for the peace and gentle carelessness of the times of myth. And so each one curses the name of Xanatos.
The Realms
There are seven greater realms, and roughly two hundred lesser realms. Each of these pocket realms has effectively the same cosmology as all the others, but differences in details result in wildly diverse conditions and biomes.
Each realm is effectively a Dyson Sphere - a shell of land, like a hollow planet, with a sun in the center and habitable land on the inner surface of the bubble. However, not every realm is a perfect sphere - many of the realms are oblate spheroids (slightly squashed balls), pseudo-cylinders with different levels of curvature, or occasionally even hourglass or stranger shapes. Just as importantly, different realms have different amounts of resources in them - some realms have larger 'suns' resulting in higher temperatures, some have more water or less earth, and some are even nearly-airless. While it is possible to equalize most of these elements through the portals, the limitations on the use of portals makes it impractical to fix a wildly divergent realm's issues in any reasonable time frame (see portals, below).
The Seven Greater Realms are the largest, and each is roughly half the volume of the earth's sun. The majority of that is open air, though each of these realms has a very thick 'outer' layer suitable for deep mining, and capable of supporting very extensive oceans. The total surface area of any given greater realm is comparable to what Jupiter would have were it not a gas giant - many thousand times more than the paltry land area of Earth. However, the vast majority of that area is trackless wilderness, uninhabited except by feral beasts and fearsome vegetation, pocked with deep caverns full of dangerous creatures and legendary lost treasures. Only the area near the Portal within a Greater Realm has any significant population - though there are scattered outposts and 'lost' tribes in every greater realm.
The Seven Realms are each named after one of the ancient, pre-scattering gods. It is unknown if those gods still live within the realms, if they have since left their broken domain, or if the wicked Xanatos slew them, but all that remains of those great beings are their names and a few legends.
The most prosperous of the realms, with the fairest climate and the largest population, is called Dagos, after the god of gentle storms. It is a nearly perfect sphere, with just the right level of light and heat to grow crops all year round, and enough rainfall to keep fields watered without extensive irrigation. It rains lightly for eight hours out of every twenty four, like clockwork, giving the realm the closest equivalent to a normal day/night cycle as exists within the realms. The farmers of Dagos are among the safest and best protected individuals in the realms, as their grain and produce provides the bulk of food to all seven of the great cities. The greatest danger near Dagos-Ka, the great city of Dagos, are the Rain Drakes - great flying lizards who infest the enormous flying stone islands that wander through the skies of that realm. Whenever one of these flying isles passes over the farmland around Dagos-Ka, hunting parties are called in from different realms to fend off Rain Drake attacks until it is past.
The next most prominent realm is Vander, named for the goddess of calm seas. Though the seas of Vander are legendary for the storms they produce, the island-specked realm is little more than a single vast ocean with the occasional land mass. The great city of Vander-Ka resides on the coast of the largest known land mass, with the city's portal actually residing in a shallow bay. To use this portal, the weather-mages and engimancers use huge water pumps to lower the water level of the bay until the portal is uncovered. Vander-Ka is famous for exporting their finely-built ships, seafood of all kinds, and water to those realms that need to import it.
While it is the least populous of the Seven Realms, Kloth - named for the god of the tended fire - is probably the wealthiest per person. This realm is nearly the mirror opposite of Vander, with little to no surface water anywhere in the realm. The occasional oasis in the vast desert of Kloth is generally treated as an invaluable treasure, its location jealously guarded by the nomadic tribe that discovers it. Despite its inhospitable climate, Kloth is home to the richest and most accessible veins of precious ores - gold, adamntium, silver, mythril, orichalcum and numerous rare earths. These materials are refined by expert smiths and craftsmages and traded to the other realms by the expert merchants of Kloth-Ka for the numerous resources required for survival in the parched realm of Kloth.
While not so harsh of climate as Kloth, the barren and frozen wastes of Pergos - named for the goddess of gentle breezes - are home to some of the hardiest souls in all the realms. The entire realm seems to be covered in enormous mountain ranges, scrubby tundra, and endlessly blowing artic winds. Despite the harshness of this environment, some of the largest and meanest fauna of the realms makes its home in this realm - providing excellent hunting and great challenges to any who would venture into its limitless wilds. Numerous small flying islets which are common to the skies of the realm are used as the foundations for large flying sailing ships, harnessing the ever-howling winds of the realm for fast travel over the mostly-barren wilderness. Not that this is a safe form of travel - the skies are full of Screaming Drakes, Furies and Rocs in addition to the larger flying landmasses pushed to great speeds by the blowing winds. Despite the many dangers, there are few who are friendlier and none who are tougher than the warriors of Pergos-Ka.
The most dangerous and secretive of the great realms is of course Spenet. Named for the god of shadows and hidden places, Spenet is the realm with the smallest 'great' city. Indeed, the entire city is housed within the branches of a single tree. Of course, that tree's branches span a distance of forty miles in nearly every direction from the massive portal embedded in its central upper trunk, but very few of the surrounding trees - each just as large - are even fully explored, let alone inhabited. None venture down to the floor of the world-forest of Spenet, as the ground of that plane is teeming with the most vicious critters in all the realms. These creatures will invade the realm on a seasonal basis, with the occasional surprise attack thrown in just to keep things interesting. The people who live there are ornery, territorial, and quick to resort to violence. A common saying of the Seven Cities is, "Be wary of your purse with a Kloth-Ka merchant, but be polite for sake of your life with a Spenet-Ka toddler."
Paradoxically, the people of Kiroth - named for the goddess of healing balms - are both the kindest and most feared. Because Kiroth has the mildest and least pleasant weather of all the realms - overcast skies with a continuous heavy misting which is not quite rain but which never stops - its people tend to be either very calm and collected, or else completely irrational and prone to sudden violence. Some are both. But that is not what makes the people of Kiroth feared - no, the weather on Kiroth has made the entire plane a single continuous swamp/rainforest, with the most diverse and intricate ecosystem of any realm. It is speculated that there are more kinds of poison in a single acre of Kiroth jungle than exist naturally in all of the other realms combined. Because of this, the average Kiroth-Ka citizen is better trained in medicine, chemistry, and general biology than most specialized healers from other realms. And on top of that, Kiroth-Ka has the single largest guild hall of practising necromancers of any realm - and is the only realm to actively welcome the oft-disliked school of magic. The healers and necromancers of Kiroth-Ka work closely together to manufacture the most potent drugs and medicines of any realm.
Lastly, there is the sunless realm of Tender, named for the god of peaceful death. This realm is perhaps unique in all the realms for having no visible sun without becoming a frozen no-man's land. It is speculated by scholars that Tender does have a sun, but that it is dark - like a lit coal covered in ash, generating heat but no light. The lands of Tender are still and mostly parched, but certainly not devoid of life - indeed, many of the strangest and most fearsome looking creatures in the realms hail from the darkness of Tender. Swarms of eyeless insects, numerous specialized fungi, enormous flying creatures that navigate by sound and many other strange things live there. The city of Tender-Ka is also known as the City of the Damned, because its inhabitants are the outcasts and criminals of the other realms, exiled there as punishments for the most terrible crimes. Doomed never to see the sun again, they must eke out lives in a place lit mostly by burning manure and bioluminescent fungi, though they will often purchase various types of magical illumination in trade for live samples of the plane's various strange creatures or bushels of the tastier kinds of mushrooms grown on the unlit farms.
Beyond the seven great realms are the numerous minor realms. These vary greatly in size, shape and condition, from mostly-liveable spheres the size of a medium gas giant like Neptune, to smallish balls no larger than Mars. The conditions within each realm is unique, and often quite extreme, and no two are entirely identical in disposition of climate and life. No one has gotten a precise count of these as yet, but the number is at least one hundred and sixty, and new portal addresses are discovered each year. Perhaps half of those are known to be inhabited, with the total populous of the realms last summed up as over two hundred and fifty million. For the most part, despite the vast land areas involved, the realms can be considered as a collection of loosely aligned city-states, with the major cities always vying for power and dominance, and the smaller ones either trying to grow or struggling to survive. Those towns and villages that do not have easy access to their realm's portal - which is most of them - tend to be the worst off, since those portals tend to attract strong guardian creatures who must be killed or driven off to get even a small number of people or goods through. Overall, life in one of the minor realms is hard.
The Secrets of the Realms:
The realms have many secrets and mysteries hidden within. Perhaps most startling to the inhabitants is that their population is far more extensive than they suspect - and that the afterlife of peace and tranquility they believe in is entirely false. If they knew the truth, and became aware that he was responsible for it, they would hate Xanatos even more. The reality of the Realms is that there is no fixed afterlife - nothing special exists beyond death - death is merely a doorway into a different realm, and a new life. Anyone who dies within Diaspora is immediately reborn, in a different pocket realm of Diaspora, far from any portal, and in a new body. Their memories of their previous lives are locked away in their deep subconscious mind, giving them gentle guidance so that they may learn more quickly those skills they were once good at, but only really accessible to the most powerful of mind-mages, and then only if they go looking.
Those people who are reborn often take on a shape acclimatized to their new native realm - those realms which are mostly water will tend to result in aquatic inhabitants, while mountainous realms will result in cloven hooves and fur. The people birthed this way are called 'demihumans' by the inhabitants of the Seven Cities, and generally are considered sentient monsters - sometimes reasonable, sometimes not, depending on species and culture. They are treated as second-class citizens in the cases where they are accepted at all. Common demihuman races are discussed below under The People.
The majority of the people in the Seven Cities are first generation - those who are born naturally into the worlds, most often from other first generation people. Because life is least harsh among the Seven Cities, and the inhabitants are relatively long-lived, the birth rate for these people is fairly low. Those few who are not are those who were reborn in the smaller realms and grew powerful enough to challenge the portal guardians who crop up nigh-constantly. And of course, the portal guardians themselves are the reborn souls of those who have grown incredibly strong - those who have some inkling of the truth, and seek to control the portals of the smaller realms, to guard the Seven Cities from the horrifying truth.
The portals themselves are clearly magitech - great free-standing rings covered in glowing runes, with a control panel built into the lowest part of the inner edge. The panel consists of a standard set of twenty characters, along with a red and green button. Enter a set of seven characters and press the green button, and if the combination you have chosen matches the runes carved at the top of another portal, a tone will sound and after ten seconds a shimmering rainbow-hued field of light will fill the center of the gate for a further twenty seconds. It is a bad idea to be within the portal's frame when the gateway forms or closes - the shimmering rainbow light will sever literally anything (this is used in some places for manufacturing purposes). After forming a gateway, the portal cannot be activated again for one kilosecond (a little over sixteen minutes), from either direction (so another gate dialling a currently or recently activated gateway will fail to activate). Pressing the red button or entering more than seven characters on the portal's controls will reset the control panel.
Technically, every realm is survivable - but not every realm is survivable by a normal human. Some realms are so flooded that they may as well be full of water, others are colder than the polar ice caps and yet others are in near-vacuum. Yet each of these realms is teeming with life, if one knows where to look. And nearly every one of the portals aside from those most strongly guarded by the realm's inhabitants (not just the Seven Cities, but many of the most hospitable realms have cities on top of their portals) have portal guardians - great, powerful, intelligent beasts with enormous magical and physical strength, who only seem interested in denying access to the portals to anyone else. In truth, this isn't really so - while the Portal Guardians aren't especially interested in allowing others access to their claimed portals, those who show intelligence and open-mindedness may convince them, or bribe them, into letting them pass without a fight. The Portal Guardians are also incessant gossips, and have all discovered a second, hidden feature of the portals, which allows voice communication between control panels (pressing and holding the green and red buttons at the same time after entering the seven digit code will transmit sound between the panels as long as the buttons are held down).
The last secret, one which the inhabitants of the realm would not be capable of comprehending even if they were aware of it, is the nature of this reality. Those inhabitants who study the natural laws of the realms are well aware of the fundamental truths of its physical and metaphysical laws, but they are entirely unaware of the meanings behind these truths - they know that a very simple divination spell will result in simple numeric data describing an individual, that the emotions a person is feeling can be read as a list, that spells are grouped by tier of difficulty and that living a full and vigorous life will increase a persons capabilities, even if the skills gained are unrelated to the tasks accomplished. What they cannot understand is that this is not how most other realities work - that their world is themed, and its deepest nature is that of a specific, otherworldly genre of game. And this one is perhaps the most insidious, because the game-nature of the world will apply to any who visit, and may continue to apply even after they leave...
The People
The People of Diaspora can be thought of as two, or possibly three, interrelated groups. The first and most cohesive group are the First Generation Diasporans, or in their dialect, The Ancestral People or simply The People. These are the ones who are descended from the ancient, original inhabitants of the realm, before it was broken up, those who have never been reborn. Currently, there are some 300 million of them, living mostly within the Seven Cities or in other near-portal settlements in the smaller realms.
The People have been building, adapting, and growing in the way of any culture for several millenia, placed under constant strain and in the face of ever-present danger. While none of them are ever fully safe, for the most part they have learned to manage the continual monster attacks and natural hazards of their world, and so they can expect to live as long as first world people of the modern world - and while their technology might be somewhat behind the curve in comparison to the modern world, they more than make up for it in magic and magitech.
Indeed, as far as the Diasporans are concerned, the rules of Sorcery are simply more natural laws to be learned, understood, and exploited for the betterment of all Diasporans. But this is not a fast process, or a simple one, since the laws of magic seem to be nearly as complex and numerous as the realms. It is said that there is a school of magic native to each of the realms, and that only by exploring and understanding all of the realms fully can one comprehend the full extent of magic within the realms. Whether true or not, such exploration is likely to be far simpler than the extensive study needed.
After the First Generation, those who have died within Diaspora are reborn. For the most part, it matters little how many times a Diasporan soul has died and been reborn - additional rebirths only offer a wider variety of subconscious experiences and knowledges to draw on. The mechanics of Rebirth are quite mysterious - no one has ever witnessed it occurring, and the Reborn themselves remember nothing of the event. They merely appear in some abandoned place in the wilderness, roughly 400 megaseconds old and just at the beginning of puberty. The Reborn who are birthed in this manner have high levels of instinctive access to survival skills and also have some natural affinity with one type of magic or another, giving them sufficient power and ability to survive until they can find others. Those who are not aware of the rebirth cycle generally assume that the Reborn are simply orphans from a lost tribe wiped out by the natural dangers of their world, and the fact that such individuals are common beyond all statistical likelihood has led to extensive myths about the monsters of the forest being kind to children - something which is not entirely untrue, since many of those 'monsters' can dimly recall being children themselves, once.
Those who have been Reborn are also no longer capable of giving birth to First Generation souls. Any progeny where one of the parents is one of the Reborn will result in the child also being one of the Reborn. Such children are known to grow from infants to young adults at a greatly accelerated rate - generally taking a mere 100 megaseconds to grow as much as other children do in five times that time, with this accelerated growth ending just after puberty. It is fortunate for such children that their minds are capable of keeping up with such rapid growth. However, for such a birth to be possible, conception of the child must come at the same moment as the death of an individual in another realm, to within a tenth of a second. This means that the Reborn have a significantly harder time reproducing than the First Generation. It is possible that this could be fixed with appropriate applications of Necromancy or other soul-based magics, but so far no one has made the connection.
First Generation Diasporans are not completely unaware of this phenomena, and they call those Reborn humans they find or who are birthed by other reborn 'Noven'. It is generally hard to tell one of the People from a Noven physically, but mentally there is not a great deal of comparison. A Noven would be considered a natural genius on earth, and many of the greatest geniuses born as First Generation Diasporans have been mistaken as Noven. While there is some small prejudice for the Noven as a whole among The People, on an individual level they are generally welcomed and well liked, since they tend to be the most skilled individuals in any society. Still, Noven are considered a rarity, simply because so few of the Reborn are both born completely human and close enough to one of The People's settlements to make it there.
Most of the Reborn are birthed as either Demihumans or Monsters. Demihumans are those beings capable of passing for a normal human in poor light - those who have scales for skin, who can wear pants to hide their digigrade legs and hats to disguise their horns. Perhaps the Demihuman is a bit too large or small to easily pass for being a man, but not outside the realms of reason. Extreme dwarfism or giantism in a First Generation Diasporan will often lead to them being accused of being a Demihuman. These children are somewhat less able to access the skills and recollections of their past lives due to the more significant physical differences in their new forms, although if a soul is reborn as the same type of Demihuman or Monster, they will have many of the same benefits as a Noven child.
Demihumans are divided into seven major races, and innumerable minor ones which are considered variations. The major races and their most distinctive features are as follows:
Merfolk - Those Demihumans who are adapted to live in water, including any amphibians. Whether they are merely humans with gills or half-fish people, any Demihuman who can comfortably live in Lake or Ocean is a Merfolk.
Halflings - Any Demihuman who is naturally shorter than four and a half feet tall, but larger than two feet tall. Alternately, any Demihuman who weighs less then fifty pounds when full-grown, including the willowy Reedmen who stand seven foot tall but are so thin they weigh only forty five pounds on average.
Beastfolk - These are the man-sized Demihumans who have mild animalistic features. Fangs, slightly distorted sensory organs (large ears, pigs noses, slit pupils), fur and strange coloration are all considered normal for Beastfolk. Anything more than that gets someone qualified as a Troll.
Trolls - Those Demihumans who are at least man-sized and have some kind of obvious animalistic feature. Whether it is goats-horns, digigrade legs, extra arms or wings, anything that is beyond what a normal human could account for with a lot of makeup qualifies a Demihuman as a Troll.
Ogres - Any Demihuman who is extremely large or heavy but still in the basic shape of a man. This is a somewhat arguable category, and many debate the difference between Ogres, who are considered Demihumans, and Giants, who are considered Monsters. The common rule of thumb is that if it can fit through a doorway made for a troll, it's an Ogre, and if it can't you should run away screaming.
Fey - Despite their names Fey are merely the smaller-than-human equivalent of the Troll. Any Demihuman who is both very small and purely human in shape is considered one of the Fey.
Demons - The catch-all classification for a Demihuman who is too strange to qualify even as a Fey or Troll, but is still reasonable enough that the First Generation Diasporans do not immediately flee from them or try to kill them. Demons are heavily discriminated against in the Seven Cities because they are considered little better than Monsters.
Monsters are those Reborn who are birthed as intelligent beasts of the wilds, sufficiently inhuman in shape and mind that their spiritual ancestors are unable to recognise or accept them as 'people'. While some Demihuman races have an easier time getting along with some Monsters, on the whole Monsters do not associate with beings outside their own or similar forms. For example, a Manticore tribe might be willing to negotiate and trade with a group of Griffons or even some Demons, but they would be far more likely to tear apart a group of Demihumans or Beholders who ventured into their territory. Similarly the Giants of the Realms tend to be on good terms with Ogres and some kinds of Trolls, but they feel they are inherently superior to most other kinds of people and as such tend to be vicious and cruel to mere 'human' scale people.
Of course, not all Monsters are intelligent - most of the beasts of the wild, such as Drakes and Dire Wolves, are just animals with extreme biologies and some innate magical ability. Such beasts have spirits similar to the souls of the intelligent, and as such have a similar birth and rebirth cycle, but the mechanics of their reincarnation are not as well governed by the natural rules of the realms. This results in some monsters being incredibly powerful, having been reborn with full access to all their original memories and powers. Such monsters tend to be just below the cusp of true sentience, exceptionally clever and capable, and far more dangerous because of this.
This leads to the last category of intelligent life in the Realms - the Portal Guardians. While technically just Monsters in the eyes of the Diasporan people, the Portal Guardians are the beings most aware and knowledgeable about the reincarnation cycle. To an individual, they are unwilling to share this revelation with others, seeing it as robbing their spiritual descendants of their innocence. Those others are considered 'spiritual descendants' because every one of the portal guardians holds the soul of one of the original inhabitants of the realm, before it was torn into pieces. They are the souls who have gained so much power over the ages of reincarnation that they awaken to each new life with full memory of their past lives and complete control over the potent powers they are born with. Portal Guardians are always birthed in the wilds of a realm, fully mature, and generally begin travelling back to their chosen portal shortly after - perhaps taking a few months 'vacation' to get used to their new bodies first.
The reason that they guard their portals is not entirely clear - perhaps they think that limiting travel between the realms will make it more difficult to piece together the many puzzles of the reincarnation cycle. Regardless of their reasons, the Guardians enjoy keeping in touch with each other, and are not shy about killing those who attempt to force access to the portals they guard - such people may be their spiritual descendants, but they'll be reborn, so no real harm in killing them a bit.
Whether souls created after the splitting of the realms are capable of becoming as powerful as the Portal Guardians or if they are in some way inherently weaker is a mystery that not even the Portal Guardians are privy to, despite hundreds of years of experimentation by some of the more curious among them.
Xanatos
Little is known about the cause of the Great Breaking, but everyone knows the name Xanatos. Considered by the population of the realm to be the religious equivalent of Lucifer after his fall and Loki after the start of Ragnarok, he is referred to as 'The Breaker', 'The Deceiver' and 'Father of Monsters' based on various legends about his most famous words and deeds.
The extent of Xanatos' abilities are shrouded in mystery, but it is known that he can change shape, fly without wings, and that he does not die when he is killed. Considering magic has progressed in the world to the point where the Polymorph spell, Fly spell and the Lich's phylactery are reasonably well known to all magical scholars, it is commonly accepted that Xanatos is far more powerful than his legends would depict, but that he is supernaturally adept at hiding the full extent of his power.
The most difficult thing is identifying Xanatos - the legends depict Xanatos as being crafty enough to assume the shape of a woman's lover to take her to bed, only for the real man to show up in the middle of the night. It is through such antics that Xanatos gained the title of 'The Deceiver'. Another legend has Xanatos claiming that it was his desire that Monsters be loosed on the world after the Great Breaking, which gave him is other title.
While none know or understand Xanatos' true motivations, the priesthood of the old faith hunt for signs of his presence endlessly and are convinced that the being is a trickster-god whose sole purpose is to sow chaos and discontent among the people.
Even the Portal Guardians are mystified by this being, and hold him in the highest form of contempt. But they have learned not to try to stop a lone man, dressed all in black, with dark skin and darker hair and claiming to be the despised figure. For the last hundred years, any Portal Guardian who so much as slows the man down has died - instantly and without apparent cause that they can discern from their last moments of life - regardless of the defences or countermeasures they might raise against him.