Fourth Age¶
Contested
This page is named in the open question Is the Age of Magic the Fourth Age?. The Fourth Age documents never name their calendar, and this page does not assert that their world is the MA world of the older archive.
"The remaining Nexa-Vinians were driven into hiding, their name now a curse-word among civilized populations." — Acadian Outline (S358)
The Fourth Age is the era of the Marshford and Demonlands material, so ruled by the designer from the folders that hold it. Its documents describe a world long after the Demon Wars, in which demons are imprisoned in the Abyss and "occasionally slip from the Abyss into the mortal world either through rifts or are summoned by reckless spellcasters" (S334); in which the Council of Wizards is a memory, the Nexa-Vinian Order a curse-word, and the Acadian Order the mages' police; and in which Acadia itself has been destroyed by a failed Fae Conjunction. Its one fixed point is a pair of years, 1387 and 1388, given without an era name. The 2026 cosmology says the age ended with the Age of the Dark Sun (S001).
The fall of the wizards¶
"The Council of Wizards fell apart after most of the Archwizards fell in the demon wars (all except one, Lothos). After some power struggles, an alliance between two of the remaining apprentices of the Archwizards reorganized the remnants (mages/wizards) and formed a new order: The Nexa-Vinian Order (after Nexagar and Vinias). The new order flourished in the aftermath of the demon wars, growing in both influence and membership. At the height of its power, the Nexa-Vinians were indirectly or directly controlling most of the civilized kingdoms" (S358).
The order broke on a question of principle. "Vinias was a proponent of the natural sovereignty of wizards: They were meant to rule. Nexagar favored the idea that wizards were meant to serve and protect. This schism created the Acadian splinter (led by Nexagar)." The kingdoms used the civil war "to seize back control from the Nexa-Vinians", and "a brutal repression of mages and the civil war decimated their numbers. The Acadians fled the conflict and established an outpost on a remote island that flourished" (S358). The war is told on its own page, the Nexa-Vinian War.
"Eventually, after things settled down (many many years) ... the Acadians became the de facto police force for hunting down rogue mages and providing magical support to the kingdoms, who eventually came to trust them (and gave them authority to police mages). Sometimes known for heavy handed tactics against latent magic users or hedge wizards, the Acadians mostly had a favorable reputation amongst the populace. It went on like this for many hundreds of years" (S358). Acadia became "a thriving, high population nation of its own", a mageocracy ruled by the order, and one of its eight rulers was the enchanter Tserrerak, "secretly a Nexa-Vinian" (S358).
Necromantic Blight of 1387¶
The one dated event of the age. The Rolls of Acadian Justice & Punishment of 1388 record the Trial of Tserrerak on charges of "Necromantic Experimentation", "Use of Necromancy" and "Murder … 15,678 people of necromantic blight", and the Annals of Arcane Remediation record the aftermath of the "Necromantic Blight of 1387 - 200,000+ disease" (S358). Tserrerak was imprisoned in an Acadian Imprisonment Crystal "for Necromantic experiments … harvesting magic from mortal chaff", and remained imprisoned for three hundred years (S358); his spirit, held in a black gem, passed through the hands of the Marshford company (S361, S359).
Gap
The years 1387 and 1388 are given without a calendar. If the Fourth Age is the Age of Magic, they are MA dates and fall in the Age of Lords of the South Astian chronology; nothing in the sources confirms or denies this.
Fae Conjunction¶
"Back on Acadia (now a thriving, high population nation of its own), a sanctioned experiment to create a Fae Conjunction went wrong. While attempting to amplify their powers by drawing on a more direct connection with the Fae, instead they created a great tear, breaking down the barriers between the Fae and Material planes." The Fae, the outline explains, "is elemental energy + intelligence", and its intelligences "are accustomed to absolute control and domination and don't naturally fit into good or evil". "The Fae Conjunction led to the destruction of Acadia and the creation of many Fae-based abominations and monstrosities" (S358): the Verdant Assimilators, the Crystalline Concord, the Pyric Renewal, and the Netherworm, "a massive entity born of the failed Fae Conjunction" whose purpose "seems to be to consume all energy" and which leaves "a ravine of grey, inert dust" behind it. The outline's own note is that the worm "IS the tear from the failed conjunction", and that "its presence is what allows fae rifts to sprout up all across Terrun" (S358). The creatures belong to the Outsiders and Fae pages.
Gap
No source dates the Fae Conjunction, except that Tserrerak's tower on Acadia had been "almost completely destroyed" and largely consumed by the Netherworm by the time of his release, three hundred years after his imprisonment (S358).
The world of Marshford¶
The Marshford documents sketch the present of the age in the kingdom of Arnyr and its neighbours. Marshford "began as a fishing village, with a population around 250" (S361). The Amarin Empire is a memory kept in imperial platinum bars and a trade ledger; its Imperial Mint town, Vaal'Dunak, six hundred miles from Marshford, was "destroyed in the Second Demon War" and is now a sinkhole city of green ghosts and hellhounds (S360, S361). Tserrerak's own reckoning, as the company recorded it, was "Shattering - 2000 years ago. 1000 years ago : End of elven dominance (corruption)" (S358).
In the age's final years as the documents leave them, a demonic plague moved "through much of Arnyr" (S359); the Collegium of the Amber Sun, an old and quiet magical college "co-opted by Tserrerak", had displaced the Nexa-Vinians as the secret society of wizards and ruled a confederation of nations, the Sovereign Assembly, through a Triumvirate of his apprentices; King Aderik Tugard of Arnyr had been displaced by an imposter; and the orcs of the Krag'Durn demanded the western provinces (S359). What the Marshford company did about any of this is the Marshford Campaign; the demons' side of the age is the Demonlands Mini Campaign.
Gap
No Fourth Age document names its calendar or gives a date for its present. The relation of the "Shattering - 2000 years ago" of S358 to the MA count, in which the Shattering is 2713 or 3221 years before the compendia's present, is the substance of the open question. The age's end, the Age of the Dark Sun, is described only from the far side.