The Disaster Realms

   The Disaster Realms are the greatest single piece of evidence in the Federation-Apocalypse campaign that SOMEONE has been attacking – or harvesting – Core Earth for at least five hundred years, if not for many millennia.

   Normally people die, and their souls scatter across the Manifold. They wind up in various religious afterworlds, in realms from dreams, tales, literature, and other entertainments, in vaguely similar lives in more-or-less fanciful versions of their original worlds, as rulers and princes, as noble heroes, in historical scenarios, in realms of magic, and in a myriad other places and roles. They DON’T normally wind up all in the same place. It can happen – and has once or twice – but they pretty much have to have extraordinarily identical lives, homes, dreams, and entertainments, and they have to die in almost the same way and at pretty much the same time.

   In the Disaster Realms, something has changed that process. It looks like something or someone selects an existing realm – usually a tolerably comfortable one (picking one that your prisoners will fight to escape is making unnecessary work for yourself) – that is either already difficult to get out of (tending to force reincarnation within it when you die and difficult to move in and out of while you’re still alive) or can be made so, and then shunts a massive infusion of freshly-deceased souls from Core into it.

   Those souls are harvested from major Disasters – situations where very large numbers of people die unexpectedly, in a relatively short time, in roughly similar fashions, and in a limited area. There seems to be an exception for really large-scale plagues – apparently the very similar deaths and fears tend to make up for the expanded area – but notably not from among the usual day-to-day deaths. There have been suggestions that the individuals responsible have been manipulating events to cause disasters; this may indicate that, to harvest souls on such a scale, you need to have something to do with causing their original deaths (or at least in making the situation worse) – or it may not. There’s not enough evidence to say yet.

   Here we have a list of the major – known – historical Disasters, and just which realm they seem to have been used to populate. It is, as yet, unknown as to whether or not souls are harvested from every disaster, or just from a few, or whether or not souls from the really large-scale plagues are all sent to the same realm.

 

Location	Date	1000’s	Cause of Death	Disaster Realm
Syria	1138	230+	Earthquake
Egypt	1201	1100+	Earthquake	The River Realms
Netherlands	1228	100+	Flooding
China	1290	100+	Earthquake	Chin
Europe	1347	25,000+	Black Death	The Kali Yuga
North America	1500’s	2000+	European Plagues	Dreaming Thunder
China	1556	830+	Earthquake	Chin
China	1642	300+	Flooding	The Warring States
England	1665	100+	Black Death	Logres
Japan	1730	137+	Earthquake
India	1737	300+	Typhoon	The New World
Portugal	1755	100+	Earthquake/Tidal Wave	Rithhan
North America	1775	130+	Smallpox
Iran	1780	200+	Earthquake
West	1870	500+	Smallpox	Parie Fantastique’
China	1887	900+	Flood	The Shao-Lin Temple
Italy	1908	123+	Earthquake
World	1918	75,000+	Influenza
China	1920	200+	Earthquake
Japan	1923	180+	Earthquake	Kensho
China	1927	200+	Earthquake	Elder Egypt
China	1931	2000+	Flood	The Mandate of Heaven
China	1933	140+	Flood
China	1939	200+	Flood
USSR	1948	110+	Earthquake
Bangladesh	1970	500+	Cyclone and Floods	Baelaria
Vietnam	1971	100+	Flood
China	1976	655+	Earthquake
Armenia	1988	100+	Earthquake
Bangladesh	1991	139+	Flooding
Worldwide	2024	Millions	AIDs Epidemic	Singular
Worldwide	2029	Millions	Hemorrhagic Fever
Arcologies	2074	46,000+	Kochinde Massacre	The Linear Realms
Luna	2085	3200	Ardanus Blowout	The Far Colonies*
Asteroid Belt	2143	850	Koleschi Collision
Africa	2327	240	Supervolcanic Eruption	Imperium
Colonial	2362	134	Lungfroth Epidemic
Colonial	2482	111	Silicon Plague
	???	???	Meme Plagues

   Further information on the listed worlds (except for the Far Colonies) can be found with a quick search of the blog. Other Disaster Realms will be added as they appear in the campaign.

   The Linear Realms – and possibly The Far Colonies – are believed to be an exception to the deliberate creation of the Disaster Realms. Both featured a remarkably standardized and regimented environment and extremely sudden simultaneous death – with many dying without even being aware of it.