New to Numina

The Story So Far

Nobody expects you to have read three years of plot before your first event — see Day in the Life for the reassurance that even veterans don’t know everything happening at once. But if you would rather walk in with the big picture already in your head, here it is. This page is current as of the community’s own discussion through the summer 2026 events; ask staff or your fellow players for anything more recent than that.

The short version

Roughly a decade and a half ago, something ancient and hungry called the Vargoth appeared, destroyed a nation called Valarmore in a single day, and has been grinding across the continent of Aeledd ever since. Your town, Fortune’s Bend, is a settlement that reappears whenever the world needs heroes — and right now, it very much does. Everything else below is detail on top of that one sentence.

The Vargoth, plainly

The Vargoth are ancient predators that consume Purpose — the soul-stuff, life-force, and identity that makes a Purposed character who they are. The gods of this world, the Genesori, apparently sealed them away long ago, until someone let them out again. They turn people into two kinds of monster:

• Husks — a fast conversion. Their green ichor gets into an open wound, and within moments the victim’s Purpose is wiped, leaving a mindless, aggressive creature.
• Turned — a slow one, taking months to a year. The victim keeps their intelligence and personality but becomes secretly loyal to the Vargoth. Several of the campaign’s most trusted figures have turned out to be Turned, including a celebrated Valarmore war hero, a high-ranking herald, and a colonel now remembered as “the Clockwork Butcher” — which is a large part of why this war has been so hard to fight. You never quite know who is still themselves.

The frontline is the Howling Gates, a mountain pass that is the last thing standing between the Vargoth and the Five Duchies. Several of the gates fell across 2024 and 2025, forcing a scorched-earth retreat — and then, at the siege of Stone Keep in spring 2026, the tide turned. By late May 2026 the Vargoth’s main force was confirmed in retreat for the first time in the whole war.

Who is actually behind it

For most of the war, the Vargoth looked like an unstoppable force of nature with nobody steering it. Eventually the town discovered it is being directed by a mortal mage named Malkor — a former scholar of Valarmore’s own Atheneum, not a monster, but a man with an ego problem who wants Husks to worship him so he can become a god in defiance of the Genesori. He twisted the original ritual that let the Vargoth loose, made himself immune to being consumed by them, created the Turned as his loyal agents, and purged historical knowledge of the Vargoth from libraries across the continent to cover his tracks — he is also believed to be behind the attempt on the Valarmore war hero’s life at a council meant to unite Aeledd’s nations against the threat, specifically to keep that unity from happening. The town’s current strategy is blunt: kill Malkor, then work out what a headless Vargoth horde even does next.

The other major players

• The Faustino family — old-money antagonists who sabotaged Fortune’s Bend’s own magic before the current heroes ever arrived, and have resurfaced as antagonists repeatedly since, using constructs and corrupted weapons. Whether they are allied with the Vargoth or simply willing to use anyone as a tool is still an open question in-world.
• The Tyrant — rules the closed-off Barred Commots with total authority, and is currently a reluctant ally against the Vargoth because the Vargoth threatens his own power too. Almost everyone assumes he will turn on the town eventually, because that is what tyrants do, and he is widely suspected to be the war after this one.
• The Sly Fox — a shapeshifting fae-adjacent entity the town made a deal with in late 2025 without fully reading the terms. In exchange for permanently banishing Vargoth presence from the nation of Spyndelmere, the price is that Fortune’s Bend’s heroes will vanish from the world for “a year and a day” once the main war is over. It caused one of the most consequential arguments, in and out of character, in this community’s history — a good example of how far a single decision can ripple here.

Cosmology, if you want it (you do not need it to play)

• Purpose is what makes a character special — think of it as a candle’s flame. Before Purpose existed, people were “Fated” instead, more like pre-shaped wax.
• Fate, Death, and Magic are the three cosmic forces that run the world, sometimes called the Triumvirate. Fate was “Sundered” — shattered — long ago, which is why the stars froze in place and a great deal of old magic stopped working properly.
• The Genesori are the god-like creators of this world, mostly absent and mysterious.
• The Shade is the spirit realm; the Lattice is the magical transit network connecting the nations, and a Threshold is a gate onto it.

What’s happening right now

As of summer 2026, the town is building Pillars — culturally specific, unifying commitments from each nation of Aeledd, meant to function as an actual weapon against Malkor and the Vargoth rather than just a symbolic gesture. There is real in-character tension around this: if Malkor is as clever as he has already shown himself to be, gathering that much Purpose in one place might be exactly what he is counting on. Alongside that, several threads are still unresolved — an expedition seeking a legendary crafting figure called the Forgemother, a corrupted entity called Valteraxis (or “the Bloodgiver”) whose connection to the Vargoth is suspected but unconfirmed, a set of coded letters tied to a shadowy “Unwanted Syndicate,” and a brand-new mystery involving a spirit apparently killing artists who romanticize a historical figure named St. Traian.

A community faction called the Hearthguard has also paid a real cost in this war — a member named Kira was quietly confirmed dead in mid-2026, a detail that surprised even staff when it surfaced. It is a small reminder that, for all the humor and warmth of this community, the stakes in-game are played straight.

Where to go from here

This page covers the broad strokes. For the world itself — its sixteen nations, its peoples, its history before any of this started — see Lore. For how to build a character who can actually do something about all of this, see Building a Character. And if you would rather see the story from the other side of the curtain first, see NPCing.