Jewelsea - The Hole in History

2025-07-16

Recorded history in the Jewelsea only goes back six, seven, maybe eight centuries if you're lucky. People know there had to be something before that—the ruins dot the land, remarkably pristine despite centuries of exposure to the elements—but nothing is recorded of what came before. The ruins are lavishly decorated, covered in carvings and script few can read, often made of a whitish seemingly indestructible materials shot through with veins of shining metal. These places fill many with a sense of the surreal; they are evidence of a grandeur that modern civilization cannot match, a paradise that once existed on earth.

As the study of history has become a more regimented discipline, scholars have begun to wonder why the memory of this old empire is completely gone from every known culture. Surely some must remain who descend from this civilization! They find signs that the world was once different—ice once filled the gorges of the now-subtropical Canyonlands, cities were of a scale that beggars the imagination of those familiar with the settlements of today. The best scholars have been able to decipher the language of the old empire, but this proves to be dangerous knowledge indeed. Any who speak it vanish, leaving behind only dust and their slightly singed clothing. Those with the sense to read silently find that the inscriptions can teach them much, but nothing of the old empire's history.

Sages who attempt to scry the past beyond the bounds of recorded history find it increasingly difficult the further back they push. The deeper into the past they reach, the less they learn and the more dangerous the practice becomes. Those who reach too far scar their minds. They have yet to determine precisely where the boundary between the knowable and unknowable lies.

The Darkness. The Fog. The Confusion. All terms that these chrononauts have applied to the murky regions that clearly follow the collapse of this lost civilization. Their divinations begin to become more useful in this period, but they have yet to piece together more than vague legends or determine how long this era went on. This has not stopped the scholars from speculating on why this old empire vanished. A selection of their hypotheses follows.

41 theories about the fall of the old empire

The people of the old empire apotheosized and became the gods of the new era.
Our reality is only a dream of the last empress of their fading empire.
All of history is false—the empire has only just fallen and the wool is being pulled over our eyes.
The gods cast the old empire down for becoming too like them.
Time itself was distorted and the empire experienced a thousand years in a day. Everything broke.
A great fire from the sky came and destroyed most of the earth.
They turned inward, stopping the pursuit of anything other than pleasure and leaving all they built to fall apart.
The old empire never existed—the ruins are merely deceits placed by hostile gods or devils.
The very rules of reality changed and the foundations of their society no longer functioned.
All of society became stuck in an illusion from which they could not escape.
The people quit the earth and retreated to live in the Beneath.
The dragons helped build the empire. When they withdrew their grace, the people fought each other and destroyed themselves.
The old empire assaulted the heavens themselves and the gods were forced to destroy them.
The empire grew so prosperous, populous, and successful that the earth itself could no longer sustain them and withdrew its blessing. The empire withered like a branch pruned from the tree.
Entities from the Beyond taught their secrets to the people of the old empire that allowed them to build to such great heights. They took their secrets back.
The people of the empire became the Birds, the enigmatic neighbors of humanity.
They mutated into monsters and destroyed one another.
Society perfected cloning. None could trust that anyone else was who they claimed to be. Social trust broke down completely.
A plague came from the Beyond that destroyed the memory of all it infected.
The people stopped seeking enlightenment and moral progress. Moral virtue was required to work their technology.
Ice came forth from the mountains and the north and scoured the earth.
They destroyed themselves deliberately, fearing that their power would attract the attention of primordial entities lurking in the far Beyond.
The ghosts of their ancestors destroyed them for their disrespect.
The empire has risen and fallen many times—this is a cycle that inevitably repeats itself as decreed by the creators.
The people of the empire fled to live on the blue sun.
Those who lived on the empire's periphery cursed the empire's tongue in a grand ritual. Most of them destroyed themselves by speaking.
The empire grew so powerful that it summoned a star which destroyed both itself and the empire.
The creators remake the world regularly—bits always linger from the previous incarnation. The ruins of the old empire are one of those remnants.
They made servitors who turned on them. Today's humans were pets or servants of the true imperials.
They unwound the threads that wove reality. The earth of today is the knot that formed from the tangles left behind.
The empire existed outside of time, free of entropy, lasting forever and for the briefest moment. The collapse of this strange loop destroyed them.
The polarity of ley lines reversed and destroyed most of their devices.
Someone told a lie in their tongue, which is impossible.
The true builders of the planet and the solar system returned and destroyed the parasites. They will come back again someday to pursue their inscrutable goals.
The creators create to understand themselves. They had an epiphany which changed the rules the empire relied on.
The empire still exists—they just left and went elsewhere in the cosmos.
All the earth's volcanoes erupted at once.
The gods lived among them and decided to leave.
The empire never ended—we're all in an illusion now.
The empire exists in the eternal now, at every moment and no moment. Those from the old empire could choose to visit us whenever they wanted.
The old empire was a bubble of the future that reached into the past. It collapsed and was sent back to its proper time.