Overview | The Worlds | Pathways | Magic | Divine & Other Beings | History | The Present Age
The Worlds Avara | Mervaine | Vireza | Zifira
Avara History | Religions & Beliefs | The World Today | Nations & Powers | Magic & Practitioners | Ruptures & Otherworld Incursions | The Pathway & Magical Security | Culture & Everyday Life
The World
Today
2026 CE
General technologyContemporary industrial and digital civilisation.
MagicPublicly acknowledged, scientifically investigated and uncommon.
GM contextAvara is living through the wider Ilixan Second Opening without understanding that this is what is happening.
Avara in 2026
The fastest way to understand the setting is to begin with everything that is not unusual.
It is already a fully modern world in which the supernatural survived into the age of satellites, social media and international law.
Billions of people live across Avara's continents in societies ranging from liberal democracies to authoritarian states, constitutional monarchies, federal republics and other political systems.
People commute to work, watch television, stream music, order food, argue online, attend university, worry about rent, follow sport, use dating apps, go on holiday and complain about politicians.
Global trade links continents. International finance shapes economies. Commercial aviation moves millions of people between countries. Digital communications connect much of the planet continuously.
The world also faces familiar modern pressures: inequality, migration, demographic change, climate disruption, political polarisation, nationalism, economic insecurity, technological change and disputes over rights and identity.
A World Like Ours
Avara and Earth are independent realities, but their similarities can be striking.
For players and readers
Many Avaran places have close Earth equivalents that can be used as orientation aids.
The Vardane Federation broadly occupies the cultural and geopolitical role of the United States. The Calderan Union corresponds broadly to the United Kingdom, Lianqor to China, Kaishin to Japan and so on.
These comparisons do not mean that the countries possess identical histories, politicians, laws or cultures. They make the world legible without requiring every familiar concept to be relearned from scratch.
Inside Ilixa
Scholars who have access to multiple realities have observed that some worlds develop statistically extraordinary historical correspondences despite long periods without contact.
This is usually described as deep echo or historical convergence.
Avara and Earth appear to be an unusually strong echo pair. Industrialisation, political systems, social movements and even some broad historical patterns recur in recognisable forms.
Nobody has established why. Echo is also not destiny: details diverge, events develop differently and many realities resemble Earth very little or not at all.
Technology & Economy
Avara reached modernity through industrial and scientific development, not through the replacement of technology by magic.
Industrial capitalism remains the dominant economic framework across much of Avara, although its exact form varies greatly.
Multinational corporations, financial markets, banks, private property, wage labour and global supply chains coexist with welfare states, public services, state-owned industries, cooperatives and heavily regulated sectors.
Socialist and communist political traditions remain influential in parts of the world, as do state-directed capitalist systems and mixed economies.
Magic forms a specialised economic sector rather than an alternative economy.
Universities employ magical researchers. Governments contract ward engineers. Hospitals consult practitioners. Insurers assess magical loss. Specialist manufacturers produce detection equipment and containment materials.
But most businesses, homes, vehicles and consumer electronics operate through ordinary engineering.
A gifted person may be able to perform an extraordinary magical act. A machine can often be manufactured thousands or millions of times and operated by people with no magical ability at all. That basic economic fact shaped modern Avara.
Politics & Global Order
Avara's international system is recognisably modern: competitive, interconnected and permanently unfinished.
Nation-states remain the principal units of political power. They control taxation, law, armed forces, policing, borders and most public infrastructure.
International institutions coordinate trade, diplomacy, humanitarian affairs, public health, crime, environmental policy and security.
Regional unions and military alliances overlap with older national rivalries. States cooperate on one issue while competing intensely on another.
Nuclear weapons remain one foundation of global strategic power. Cyber capability, intelligence, industrial capacity, finance, conventional military strength and technological research matter far more to state power than simply possessing unusually strong sorcerers.
Magic adds another strategic field: one that governments regulate, research, conceal and sometimes attempt to exploit.
People & Rights
Magic changed parts of Avaran society. It did not erase ordinary human history.
Avara has its own history, activists, political movements, court cases and laws, but many contemporary social questions have close structural equivalents on Earth.
Modern societies remain shaped by the legacies of empire, colonialism, slavery, migration, religion, class and industrialisation.
Former slave and colonial societies continue to confront racial inequality and the consequences of older systems of segregation and exclusion.
Women's rights, reproductive rights, disability rights and struggles over economic and political equality have developed through long histories of activism and reform.
Gay, lesbian and bisexual people live with levels of legal protection and social acceptance that vary sharply between jurisdictions. Same-sex relationships and marriage are ordinary and legally protected in many countries, while elsewhere LGBTQ+ people face substantial legal or social hostility.
Transgender people are increasingly visible within contemporary Avaran society. Medical care, legal recognition, discrimination, education, sport, public facilities and the rights of trans young people remain politically contested in several states in 2026.
The existence of supernatural minorities adds further questions rather than replacing these ones. Practitioner rights, vampirism, therianthropy, magical disability, altered bodies and non-human personhood have created additional legal and cultural debates.
Magic in Modern Life
Everybody knows magic exists. That does not mean everybody lives a magical life.
Real. Public. Uncommon.
A person can live their entire life on Avara without seeing a major supernatural event firsthand.
They can still watch magical incidents on the news, know that government practitioners exist, understand that some hospitals have specialist magical teams and have opinions about practitioner regulation.
Magic therefore feels simultaneously ordinary and strange.
What the World Knows
Modern Avara knows far more about the supernatural than its ancestors did — and far less than it believes.
What an educated Avaran broadly knows
Sorcerers, wizards and other practitioners exist and can perform measurable supernatural effects.
Unstable anomalous events sometimes allow unusual effects, objects or creatures to appear.
Major states maintain specialist agencies, laboratories and response services.
It is an extremely ancient anomalous structure on a restricted international territory and requires continuous containment.
Vampires, transformations, ghosts and strange entities are not purely fictional concepts, even if popular stories are often inaccurate.
What is actually happening
It is a surviving stable interface from Avara's forgotten era of connection to Ilixa.
Its mythology and magical traditions preserve broken fragments of that history.
Not every apparently anomalous being originated within Avara.
Modern scholars often lack the historical framework needed to identify them correctly.
Avara is experiencing the effects of the Ilixan Second Opening.
Beneath the Surface
The modern world has excellent institutions for investigating things it does not completely understand.
Avara is living through the Second Opening without knowing that the Second Opening exists.
Across wider Ilixa, old interfaces have begun to react, dormant routes have shown renewed activity and worlds separated for thousands of years are beginning to approach one another again.
On Avara this appears as a collection of separate scientific and magical problems: unusual rupture behaviour, unexplained anomalous readings, archaeological discoveries, strange entities and occasional incidents that fail to fit existing models.
Governments investigate each problem through the categories available to them. Intelligence agencies see security risks. Universities see research questions. magical agencies see containment problems. Custodians see changes in systems far older than modern states.
Very few people possess enough pieces of the puzzle to suspect that all of these developments may belong to the same historical process.
The Present Moment
From inside Avara, 2026 does not feel like the beginning of a new cosmic age.
Most people are not waiting for other worlds to return.
They are working, studying, raising families, paying bills, dating, travelling, watching sport, making art, voting, protesting, scrolling through phones and worrying about the future.
A major magical event can dominate news coverage for days. Then the news cycle moves on.
Governments argue about budgets and elections at the same time as classified departments investigate impossible phenomena.
Universities publish papers that come remarkably close to truths their authors do not possess the vocabulary to describe.
Old stories are being re-read. Old instruments are producing new results. Some doors have remained closed for more than three thousand years.
In the history of Ilixa, it is living through the Second Opening.