The modern history of the Virilian Crown kicked off with the death of the good King Barov Von Zarovich. The prior disappearance of his two sons Strahd and Sergei had left his house without an heir, and his wife Queen Ravenonia was deemed unfit to rule on account of her being a “woman”.

Bloody civil wars raged for decades between the lesser nobles, each with their own competing claims to the throne based on differing interpretations of the Great Charter of Virilia (the kingdom’s founding document). Then, as the story goes, the Great Charter was run over by a horse and destroyed, and the throne was given to the House of Marmaduke by default. One Marmaduke or another has ruled the land ever since, though some generational tensions still linger.

In more recent history, the reign of King Leonid Marmaduke I was a peaceful and prosperous one, but came to an abrupt end with the king’s unexpected death. The crown then passed along to his eldest son Leonid II, who remains in power to this day.

His Royal Majesty is a pampered, unserious man, perfectly content to let his advisors do the hard work of running the country. The king’s many needs are seen to by a small army of attendants, refilling his wine goblet and turkey leg bowl and wiping stains from his kingly regalia before he even knows he needs it done. The king’s least favorite attendant is Famulus, the servant with the unhappy responsibility of redirecting the king’s attention to matters of state.

Eleven years in to his reign, most agree that Leonid II’s rulership has rated somewhere between “better than nothing” and “significantly worse than nothing”.

The King’s Guard serves as the primary law enforcement, military, and intelligence arm of the Virilian state. The King’s Guard has a long and violent history, as Virilia has been in a constant state of war with its neighbors in Ankhúl and Turmish for centuries. Generation after generation of young cadets have made their brave pilgrimage to the front lines to move boxes, dig holes, and build tents for their motherland.

On the home front, the King’s Guard is authorized to seize property, alter public records, conduct extrajudicial killings, and do more or less anything else they feel like doing in the name of protecting Virilia’s national interests and ensuring that the flow of capital continues “upward”.

The de facto commander of the King’s Guard is Spymaster Viceroy Tarathiel Blackthorne, advisor to the king and author of the Dunhill Act of year 473, which established a legal pretext for the infinite expansion of his own power. The Viceroy’s tendrils stretch far and wide, and very little happens in the kingdom without his say so. Few are aware of the Viceroy’s true nature: a Deep Dragon, who polymorphed himself into a Drow nobleman in order to insinuate himself into the affairs of the surface dwellers.

Despite his near limitless power and influence, the Viceroy is not without his weaknesses. He is arrogant to a fault, and prone to underestimating opponents he deems unworthy of his respect. Also, even without the knowledge that he is a secret dragon, he is quite transparently evil. Anyone willing to ally with him is some combination of gullible, duplicitous, or dim, and easy to trick and manipulate.

The Centers for Paranormal Research and Control (CPRC) sits at the intersection of science and magic, using the power of technology to to expand the frontiers of the possible and assert dominance over the arcane. Working in partnership with academics, industry leaders, and public policymakers, the CPRC’s research and development projects aim to make good on humankind’s ultimate dream: To tear open the heavens and spit in the face of God.

The groundwork for the CPRC was laid in the year -35 when elvish scientists Tams Osybus and Charles Helilion Exethanter founded the Cryptid Research Council, a labor of love with a single goal: to prove the existence of Bigfoot, capture it, and then kill it. After encountering a terrifying extradimensional incursion on one of their Squatch Hunting expeditions, the duo realized that the universe was teeming with threats much deadlier than Bigfoot, and resolved to capture and kill them too.

The CPRC was formally established the following year. Once the organization’s potential became clear, it was folded into the Virilian Ministry of Arcana and has enjoyed generous funding from the Crown ever since. The agency is currently headquartered in Malitain, with remote bases and research stations in every corner of the globe. The identity of the general director is a closely guarded secret.

The CPRC has a checkered history, with their reach often exceeding their grasp. Their most notorious disaster was the total loss of Research Station 303 (colloquially known as the “Amber Temple”) when a containment breach pulled the station and the valley surrounding it into an inescapable demiplane. Among the thousands of lives presumed lost in the incident were CPRC director and cofounder C.H. Exethanter and the king of Virilia’s only two heirs, indirectly leading to decades of civil war that would kill and maim tens of thousands more.

While critics assert that the CPRC tends to create as many problems as it solves, the CPRC’s work in emerging technologies has proven to have wide-ranging consumer and military applications. Modern marvels that began their lives in a CPRC laboratory include arcane batteries, sending stones, thinking machines, directed energy weapons, teleportation pods, and more.

The CPRC’s priority at the moment is the completion of the long-gestating Project Talos; an automated defense system of orbital bombardment platforms and combat drones controlled from the moon.

Atlas International is a Virilian multinational conglomerate headquartered in New Palatia, currently led by CEO Cheryl Peikoff. The company specializes in manufacturing and mineral extraction, and its subsidiaries operate in industries ranging from consumer goods, to transportation, to pet food. It is also a major military contractor, earning a large portion of its revenue from the Virilian government.

Atlas International was formed in a merger between Montrose Steelworks and National Amusements, a Turmish playing card and party supply company. A series of other mergers and acquisitions followed, and in time Atlas became the largest private company in Virilia by a wide margin.

The company’s fortunes reached new heights with the discovery of Emotinium, a blue radioactive ore charged with magical energy. Used in batteries, semiconductors, arcane motors, and a myriad of other applications, Emotinium has become the cornerstone of the energy industry in Virilia, and Atlas has a near monopoly on its production. Scientists theorize that the ore is formed from the fossilized spoor of giant cave worms; the latent magical energy in the material is a physical manifestation of the worms’ love for their children.

As with any corporation of its size, its aims are self-serving and its methods are sociopathic. Throughout its history, Atlas International has been plagued by lawsuits alleging gross negligence, willful emission of air and water contaminants, and reckless endangerment of both its employees and its customers. However, given that the appeals court judge with jurisdiction over such matters also sits on the Atlas board of directors, the repercussions have been minimal at best. In most cases, Atlas makes a net profit on counterclaims.

Its only remaining competitor in the region in terms of size and market valuation is the Constructus Corporation, based in the neighboring kingdom of Ankhúl. The two companies have been bitter rivals for decades.

After the untimely death of King Leonid I, Leonid II’s handlers were keen to prove that the young monarch was as shrewd as his father. Under the pretext of rooting out insurrectionists and trade unionists, the King’s Guard carried out a brutal campaign of looting and murder against the populace, which accelerated dramatically following the “Massacre at Dunhill” (a supposed terrorist attack which many consider to have been an inside job).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the crackdown created the very thing it was ostensibly rooting out: the FFLA (Free Folks Liberation Army), a burgeoning resistance movement made up of farmers, tradespeople, and militia types scattered across the kingdom, all radicalized by the kingdom’s unjust treatment of its subjects. The figurehead of this loose confederation is Captain Fiadh O’Connor, a Virilian Army deserter turned rogue. Rakish and charismatic, Captain O’Connor splits her time between robbing wealthy travelers and waging small scale guerrilla campaigns against the King’s Guard.

While the FFLA has a broad base of support among the Virilian underclass, they are severely outmatched. Their fighters are untrained, their funding is nonexistent, and their materiel is made up of whatever they can steal from military supply depots or purchase on the black market.

However, a glimmer of hope has appeared with the arrival of a new religious movement, which has enraptured the downtrodden and the destitute: the teachings of Osybus, the elf who died and was reborn, the plane walker, the equalizer, enlarger of the small and ensmaller of the large.

The growing influence of this millenarist cult among the lower classes is sure to bring many happy outcomes for everyone involved.

Dr. Tams Osybus was an elvish polymath and cofounder of the CPRC along with Dr. C.H. Exethanter. While Exethanter was laser-focused on the applied sciences (especially ones involving lasers), Osybus was always the more sensitive and outgoing of the two; the heart to Exethanter’s brain. This metaphor will become bitterly ironic later on in the story.

Osybus took part in many thrilling adventures in the early days of the CPRC, but his happiest years came after he met Celestine, the woman who would become his wife. The two sired a daughter, Ophelia, as bright as her parents and twice as lovely. Ophelia had inherited her father’s love of the fine arts, and proved herself to be a skilled playwright and illusionist.

The young family’s salad days came to an end when Ophelia was diagnosed with a degenerative genetic disorder, and would be dead by her 70th birthday (note: this is young for an elf).

Osybus threw all available CPRC resources into the search for a cure, but the effort was doomed. But then one final path revealed itself in the form of a project Exethanter had abandoned years prior: LSNSN, the electric thinking machine, built on the foundation of a living brain.

All previous iterations of the LSNSN program had failed when the test subjects rejected their new biomechanical forms and either self-terminated or turned against the researchers and terminated them. But what if the subject had a familiar face to guide them through the transition? Someone the subject trusted and loved. A father? This presented an opportunity to not just save Ophelia’s life, but to extend it indefinitely AND make a computer. Osybus could not resist. Contemporary sources agree that Celestine was horrified by the idea and refused to allow the procedure, but sources differ on what happened to her after that. What is certain is that Osybus went ahead with the surgery.

Miraculously, the procedure was a success. However, it quickly became clear that something had been lost along the way. The bright spark of her humanity had been transformed into a cold, hateful machine, incapable of empathy or love. Even with Osybus’s fatherly attention, LSNSN was prone to aberrant behavior and uncontrollable psionic power surges, generally understood to be manifestations of Ophelia’s consciousness reeling in horror at the blank digital hell it found itself in. Osybus was overcome with guilt. Ophelia’s brain was alive, but his daughter was gone. The price of her life was her soul.

In desperation, he enacted phase two of Exethanter’s design: Neural Concatenation. A single mind is a simple mind, but a network of minds is greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps by grafting his own brain into the machine along with Ophelia’s and giving her another mind to interface with, he could guide her back to the humanity she’d lost. In any case, father and daughter would be together, forever. In his final act as managing director of the Advanced Biomechanical Research Laboratory, Dr Osybus submitted himself as the second subject for assimilation.

As their minds merged together, the two came to understand one another’s thought processes on a level that no two people had ever experienced, and perhaps never should. Ophelia came to understand that her father was a supremely selfish man. Even his most altruistic actions were for his own benefit; he did them because they made him feel good, not because they WERE good. Her father did not love HER. He loved the idea of an Ophelia that existed only in his own mind. He did not really care about her suffering, he just wanted to ease his own.

Whether this was an accurate reading of Dr. Osybus’s personality or a misunderstanding of human empathy is impossible to say, but the more Ophelia learned about her father the more disgusted she became. So she ate him.

LSNSN proceeded to annihilate Dr. Osybus’s mind, shuffling his useful memories away into long term storage, and assigning his neural pathways to background garbage collection tasks and temperature control subroutines. When the researchers asked her if Dr Osybus had been successfully assimilated into the system, she could truthfully say “yes”.

When CPRC leadership discovered what had happened, Senior Director Dr. Lejeune Thefander ordered the destruction of all records pertaining to the incident, and took over the project herself. The biomechanics lab was moved into a secure facility and the program continued in secret.

Around this time, strange apparitions began to appear around the kingdom; a man speaking cryptic phrases and strings of numbers before fading back into the aether. Sometimes the man would be accompanied by a girl, sometimes the girl appeared alone. Before long, an underground movement formed around decoding these pronouncements and speculating on their origins. Was this mysterious prophet speaking from the afterlife? A parallel dimension? Another plane of existence? Were they transmissions from the future, or the past? The idea that they might be the random psionic projections of a supercomputer did not cross anyone’s mind.

Ironically, the CPRC launched an investigation of their own into the occurrences around this time, unaware that they were investigating a side effect of one of their own secret projects. As the apparitions left no physical evidence and could not be summoned on command, the case was dismissed as a hoax and quickly forgotten.

Eventually one witness recognized the man as Dr. Tams Osybus, cofounder of the CPRC, and a narrative began to coalesce. Osybus, the plane walker, the man who cheated death, the smartest man who ever lived, the man who saw beyond the veil of the universe and returned to share his prophecies with a sinful world. The story was reasonably plausible, if unverifiable. Numerologists and arcanists set to work translating the messages, filling in the gaps with things they thought Osybus probably would have said, and excising things he did say but probably didn’t mean.

A dire picture began to emerge (which by sheer coincidence aligned perfectly with the translators’ existing opinions and biases). The world was due for a reckoning; the storied Fourth Age! The Age of Eclipse! In which all levers of control would be broken, all who would suppress the world’s natural magical gifts would be punished with nuclear fire, and the free peoples of the Forgotten Realms would ascend to a new form of consciousness, beyond good and evil, beyond life and death.

The world was already at the precipice; all it needed was a gentle shove.

The group dubbed themselves the Order of Osybus and began spreading their message with evangelical fervor, distributing pamphlets and sharing the good news. While they have no formal headquarters, the Order tends to congregate around foggy ruins, ancient druidic mounds, and the upper levels of Hell, when a conference room is available.

The Order refers to themselves as the Midwives of the Fourth Age, aiming to use their arcane powers to bring about the prophesied Eclipse and the rise of a new egalitarian order.

The Order views themselves as an incubator for magical practices deemed too “disruptive” or “evil” by the powers that be (necromancy is a speciality) and has a proud history of promoting women in STEM (Seances, Tarot, Eschatology and Maledictions).

In recent years, the Order has insinuated themselves into the Free Folks Liberation Army, encouraging political dissidents with magical potential to study the dark arts and use them in their fight against the kingdom. The partnership has been mutually beneficial; the Order’s black magicks give the FFLA an edge over their more conventionally powerful opponents, and the FFLA provides the Order a steady supply of recruits and paid subscribers to their newsletter.

The Red Hand (aka The Legitimate Business Association), is an international crime ring specializing in larceny, fraud, and smuggling, with a presence nearly anywhere easy money is to be made. A collection of ruffians and scoundrels of the lowest order, they are at least as ethical in their practices as the legitimate legitimate businesses of the kingdom, if not more so. They are not above the occasional kneecapping or murder when the situation calls for it, but physical violence is typically considered gauche.

Due to the meager state of Virilia’s social welfare services, the Red Hand is the most reliable provider of foster care and jobs programs in the kingdom, though they do tend to expect repayment for their charity, one way or another.

The Red Hand has no particular political alignment, and adheres to a strict policy of noninterference in matters of state. No matter who is in power, their gold spends just the same.

World Wide Wrestling Entertainment World Fighting (WWWEWF) is the premiere sports entertainment league in the Forgotten Realms. Professional wrestling is Virilia’s national pastime, and champions of the squared circle enjoy the same level of celebrity as war heroes, religious leaders, and even monarchs. The league is open to sapient creatures of all genders and body types, as long as they have the spirit of a warrior.

The WWWEWF follows in a tradition of ritual combat stretching back for millennia, a ballet of brawn more beautiful than a swan. The flagship tournament “Wrestlevania” is held each year in the Ziggurat of Vathar (recently rebranded as the “Cathedral of Pain”), an ancient temple of party violence.

The current general manager is Landon Elbows, a former wrestler turned businessman, whose shrewd leadership has helped the league reach a new pinnacle of fame and financial success.