Creation of Caeldon

Overview

At The Creation of Caeldon, the steadied Material Plane brings forth one of its lasting named worlds, the world at the heart of the setting.

Here a realm that can make worlds makes this one: a planet that will last long enough to hold seas, forests, beasts, and at last peoples, and on which history can begin.

A Named World Within the Material Plane

By the age of The First Celestial Condensations, the Material Plane can hold great lasting bodies of matter.

Caeldon is born in that later age, not in the first instant of balance. It is not the source of the Material Plane, but one world made within it. It comes in its proper turn: first a balance that survived, then steady material law, then the power to make worlds, and only then particular worlds.

Caeldon is a child of a cosmos that has found its order, not a leftover of the primordial chaos.

Durable Conditions for History

The making of Caeldon is less a spectacle than a beginning that lasts.

Once Caeldon stands as a steady world, it can keep what time gives it: lands that endure, living things that adapt, homelands for peoples yet unborn, regions that grow apart in character. A world fit for history must hold its differences through the ages without losing itself. Caeldon becomes that kind of world.

No peoples walk on it yet. What exists is the stage, waiting for those who will one day fight, build, and die upon it.

From World to Historical Field

The making of Caeldon is the last great threshold before the planet's own history begins.

Only once Caeldon exists can its great regions slowly grow apart, the first Elven and Dwarven peoples take lasting form, and the old meeting-grounds between them open. The creation does not stand alone. It leads into The First Regional Differentiations of Caeldon, then into The First Stabilizations on Caeldon, and, as those close, into Caeldon Early Contact and everything that follows.

Caeldon is more than a place where stories happen. It is the first world whose history is told in full.

Historical Significance

Here the story of the cosmos becomes the story of a world.

The Material Plane's power to make worlds becomes one world that lasts: long enough for species to arise, for regions to grow apart, for peoples to remember, and for kingdoms to rise and fall. Without this step, the tale would leap straight from the making of the cosmos to a world already full of peoples. With it, the order holds: first balance, then the making of worlds, then this world, and only after that the peoples and places that endure on it.

Nothing of that hour is left that anyone can visit. Its leavings are the world itself: its oldest stone, its deepest roots, and the ground beneath every later ruin.