Age of Sorrows

The Age of Sorrows setting is the default world in which Exalted takes place. Also called the Second Age of Man, the world is flat, and surrounded by Elemental Poles: The northern Pole of Air is arctic and mountainous, the ruins of an empire that mysteriously collapsed overnight. The Western Pole of Water is a series of archipelagos in an otherwise empty ocean. The Southern Pole of Fire is a great desert. The Pole of Wood in the East is an ancient forest. And in the center, on an island roughly the size of Europe, a mountain hundreds of miles high forms the center of the world at the Pole of Earth.

The Age of Sorrows is so named for the fall from the First Age, when the mighty Solar Exalted served the gods as righteous kings, before the death-curse of the Primordials drove them mad. In wiping them out, the Dragon Blooded who now rule may have saved the world, but the wonder of it died with its previous masters. Magic and strange technology still coexist, but it is a lesser thing, and the Dragon-Blooded find themselves struggling: when the Scarlet Empress ascended to the throne, she quelled the Great Contagion and the march of Chaos, but the many deaths changed the shape of the world, and wore holes in small parts of it, Shadowlands where the living and the dead mingle.

Nor did the plague come from nothing--the most infuriated ghosts of the Solar Exalted made deals with the Malfeans, dead Primordials that they themselves killed. In exchange for their names and their assistance in tearing down the whole of the world into nothing, the Malfeans would replace the power that they lost with their deaths, and give them the tools to take their own revenge.

The Age of Sorrows seems to be drawing to a close--the exaltation of new Solar Exalted has begun. The oldest Sidereals are reaching the ends of their lives. The Dragon-Blooded Scarlet Empress, seeking greater power, has (whether intentionally or not) sold herself to demons, and is to be wed to the one of the Yozis--the Primordials who chose imprisonment over death. All of these things together, and the effects thereof, are forcing matters to come to a head. While the first chapter describes the outcome of the world as bleak, players and Storytellers are encouraged to either put their own spin on it, or break the fate of the world and save it all--aside from that first paragraph, there is nothing to suggest that Creation is doomed--merely headed for a lot of trouble.