According to the Great Dragon Dunkelzahn, the mana level of the world rises and falls on a roughly 26,000-year cycle. On December 21st, 2012, that long sine wave crossed the zero line, and magic returned to the world, marking the ending of the mundane Fifth World and the beginning of the Sixth World.
Starting around the beginning of the 21st century, babies began to be born with unusual characteristics — some smaller and stockier than normal, with slightly pointed ears; others larger but slimmer than normal, with more extremely pointed ears. As they grew older, it became apparent that the larger of these unusual children had very sensitive night vision, while the smaller ones could see much further into the infrared than ordinary people. They appeared in very small numbers at first, clustered within families, and to some extent geographically, but with no regional, racial, or socioeconomic bias, and with no apparent genetic or environmental cause.
By 2010, these births were common enough that the doctors had given the phenomenon a name — UGE, "Unexplained Genetic Expression". Colloquially, they became known as "elves" and "dwarves".
Over the same period, a variety of unusual maladies began to pop up, most of them mild, many of them resistant to antibiotics and other standard treatments, and none of them with any apparent cause. Conspiracy theorists attributed these, and the UGE babies, to vaccines, or to the ACA, or to pharmaceutical company experimentation.
Less noticed, reported sightings of ghosts, spirits, and cryptids began to creep up as well, even including phone videos posted on the Internet. The videos of spirits never showed what the poster claimed to have seen, though, and the cryptid videos were usually poor-quality. Those that weren't were largely believed to have been faked, and few people took them seriously.
As 2012 dawned, a cottage industry of apocalyptic cults had sprung up, blaming these events on the approaching end of the world, as allegedly prophecied by the Mayans. They turned out to be right, though not in the way they had expected.
On December 21st, 2012, the Mayan 12th b'ak'tun ended, and the 13th b'ak'tun began. Mayans everywhere had to buy new calendars. The new b'ak'tun was heralded not by the Earth's poles of rotation swapping and the sun growing ten times larger and killing everyone, as some had predicted, but by a variety of strange and mystical events sweeping across the globe.
In Japan, an Eastern dragon, later identified as the Great Dragon Ryumyo, was sighted flying over Mount Fuji. He vanished shortly thereafter, but thousands of people had recorded video of him. People across the world reported strange lights in the sky, and apparations such as the Wild Hunt riding over Britain, or a spectral cowboy herding ghostly cattle across the skies of the North American plains. Pagan and heathen groups performing solstice rituals reported contact with gods or spirits or channeling of energy far more palpable than before. In Mexico, a group alleged to have been Yucatán separatists, but rumored to have been a Mayan apocalyptic cult, were engaged by government forces near Chichén-Itzá, but their conflict was interrupted by a feathered serpent, believed to have been the Great Dragon Hualpa, appearing and attacking both groups. The Ring of Fire exploded, with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in defiance of seismologists' and vulcanologists' understanding happening all along the edges of the Pacific. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Anchorage were badly damaged by quakes; Seattle was damaged by ashfall from Mount Rainer's eruption. Japan was oddly untouched, despite several earthquakes off its coast, but New Zealand and the Philippines were ravaged by tsunamis. In the vicinity of Uluru, there were a variety of unexplained disappearances and appearances, including a group of tourists attacked by a marsupial lion, believed to have been extinct for almost 50,000 years.
On December 24th, Father Michael O'Hara, a Catholic priest in New York City, fell under suspicion of murder when a celebration of the Eucharist over which he was presiding turned out to involve actual human flesh and blood of unknown origin. The subsequent police investigation revealed that Father Michael was actually inadvertently transforming the host from bread and wine to flesh and blood through some inexplicable process that he was only able to duplicate within the context of a Mass. What had become the first officially confirmed use of magic by a human created a great deal of controversy within and around the Catholic Church, with people debating whether it was real or whether the NYPD had been fooled somehow, whether it was magic or miracle.
With the new year, the frequency of UGE births increased dramatically, until about 5% of all infants born were elves or dwarves.
At the same time, a new plague exploded across the world. Dubbed VITAS, it was fast-acting, highly lethal, resistant to treatment, and obeyed none of the usual rules of epidemiology. There was no apparent source or origin; it popped up in thousands of unconnected places all over the world almost simultaneously.
Desperate victims of VITAS, failed by modern medicine, turned to faith healing and magic, and found that while this was usually as much a scam as ever, for some few healers it worked. Of particular note was a faith healer by the name of H. Norman Rye, who operated a traveling tent revival in the American South, and who built a media ministry on the strength of his laying on of hands healing injuries and curing diseases, including VITAS.
But while Rye may have been the most visible, all across the world witches, shamans, wu-jen, and others were quietly using magic to combat the plague.
On January 20th, 2013, media coverage of Barack Obama's second inauguration as President of the United States was pre-empted when a blue-and-silver dragon appeared near Denver, and rather than showing himself briefly before disappearing again, leaving people to debate whether or not it was real, landed near observers, greeted them telepathically, introducing himself as Dunkelzahn, and consented to a televised interview, using a human interpreter — Holly Brighton — because recording gear could not pick up his telepathy. Much of what we think we know about the mana cycle and the events of the Awakening comes from that interview, and others Dunkelzahn has given since.
Even after the interview was broadcast, many people were convinced that it was faked, a Hollywood production with a CGI dragon, but as otherwise inexplicable weirdness began to pile up and the things Dunkelzahn had forecast began to come true, all but the most skeptical had to believe.
Dragons weren't the only creature of myth that appeared. Sightings of other cryptids, from unicorns and gryphons to chupacabras and sasquatches increased radically, and the number of decent-quality pictures and video, and the number of people who had personally had an encounter, increased until few disputed their authenticity. Dunkelzahn's explanation was that, unlike the dragons, who had been hibernating since the previous high-magic era, which had ended around 10,000 B.C.E., the other mythical creatures were the spawn of common animals that had, like the UGE babies, expressed hidden magical traits when the level of mana in the environment grew high enough, and that more would arise as the magic level continued to increase.
Researchers working on a cure postulated that VITAS was one of these — a common and ordinarily benign virus where some populations, already spread across the globe, had been mutated into a deadly form by the Awakening. This explanation of its strange behavior was not widely accepted among medical researchers, but it caused many people to connect VITAS and its mounting casualties to the UGE babies. The faith healer Rye spoke out against the UGE babies, calling them "the devil's spawn", and likening them to the giant, hairless "devil rats" that were starting to become common wherever rats were found.
In February 2013, in a nearly unprecedented move, Pope Benedict XVI resigned, citing his advanced age and the need for a stronger pontiff to guide the Church through the tribulations of the new era. The conclave chose as his successor an Argentinian Jesuit, who took the regnal name "Francis". Pope Francis conspicuously did not address the question of magic or its use by humans, but did express that the UGE babies were "as God made them, and so loved", and directed the Church to provide any assistance possible in combating the plague.
VITAS killed almost a billion people worldwide through January and February, and ultimately faded away not because it had been defeated, but because its onset was so rapid and rapidly lethal that it burned itself out.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
The strange events of the Awakening, and the natural disasters and plagues that came with it inspired a wave of nationalism and isolationism across the world.
In the U.S., this, along with Barack Obama's landslide re-election, fractured the Republican Party, turning their radical wing against the less extreme core of the party. In the 2014 mid-terms, almost every mainstream Republican incumbent faced primary challenges from the extremist wing, and it ended up breaking the party apart, into the corporate-backed Neoconservative Party and the reactionary populist Tea Party — both of them further right, in different ways, than the predecessor Republican Party had been, and neither able to agree that the other had the right to the "Republican" name. The Democratic Party drifted right in response, in an effort to pick up center-right votes abandoned by the Republican scramble to the right.
In December 2014, another Great Dragon, golden Lofwyr, Awakened at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Schwarzwald. Unlike Dunkelzahn, he didn't greet the Sixth World with a press conference. Unlike Ryumyo and Hualpa, he didn't make a brief appearance and then drop out of sight. Instead, after a short time to get his bearings in the new world he had Awakened in, he liquidated a tremendous amount of precious metals from an unknown source — enough to have a notable impact on global commodities markets — and, operating through human intermediaries at first, entered the financial markets.
In Britain, the rising tide of nationalism and isolationism fueled a movement to leave the European Union, a movement dubbed "Britout". On June 23rd, 2016, the United Kingdom held a popular referendum on the question. "Leave" won overall, 53.2% to 46.8%, but its support was not evenly distributed. "Leave" had a significant margin of victory only in England, and won by a narrow margin in Wales, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted strongly to Remain. Despite this, the government took the vote as a mandate, and began to pursue separation from the E.U. On March 29th, 2017, Parliament authorized the Prime Minister to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, officially declaring the U.K.'s intention to leave the E.U., with an effective date of departure two years later.
The use of magic grew and spread as well. There seemed no rhyme nor reason to where it appeared, with everyone, everywhere, of every sex, race, religion, in every walk of life, having roughly a 1% chance of developing the ability to wield magic. Those who had an existing framework of beliefs regarding magic had an easier time of learning to use it, but they included not only shamans, witches, and houngans, but television psychics and even Jedi, and believing in magic, or even believing that one had magic before the Awakening, didn't increase the chances of getting it, nor did not believing reduce them. 1% of atheist skeptics Awakened to magical powers, while 99% of those who claimed to wield magic before the Awakening were disappointed.
The totemic traditions had an early leg up, from the totems — whatever they might actually be — channeling knowledge to their devotees, but hermetic magic followed. In many cases, magicians interpreted the totem in the context of their existing religious faith, and the magic they wielded as divine miracle. Some of these, such as H. Norman Rye, were outspoken about the evil of magic and opposed to its use, while distinguishing their own magical abilities as miracle performed by God. While the true nature of totems is still not fully understood, it is now known that the magic wielded by followers of totems originates no less personally than that of those who do not follow totems.
In September 2016, a series of attacks by sorcery and nature spirits halted construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline. Though no group claimed credit for the action, suspicions fell on members of the Sioux Nation, through whose territory the pipeline ran. The attacks became a major issue in the U.S. elections, with accusations of "supporting terrorism" leveled against candidates who had opposed the construction of the pipeline.
In the 2016 presidential election, a horde of right-wing candidates, in a series of vicious and bloodthirsty primaries, eventually winnowed themselves down to Senator Ted Cruz (N-TX) as the Neoconservative candidate and demagogue, con man, and reality television personality Donald Trump as the Tea Party candidate. The only serious Democratic candidate was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put up a primary challenge, and, after he lost to Secretary Clinton, threw his hat in the ring as the Progressive candidate in the general election.
With the vote split on both left and right, the general election was a mess, marked by vicious infighting, dirty campaigning, scandals both real and manufactured, Russian-backed astroturfing, voter suppression, and even evidence of direct vote tampering. No candidate secured a majority of either the popular or electoral vote. The reported popular vote came down Clinton, Trump, Cruz, Sanders, while the electoral vote worked out to Cruz, Clinton, Trump, Sanders. Record numbers of faithless electors cast their votes for other candidates, but without changing the overall ranking of the major candidates. With no candidate taking a majority of the electoral vote, the election devolved to the newly seated Congress, to choose between the top three candidates in the electoral college: Cruz, Clinton, and Trump.
The right-wing vote was split at lower levels, too, and most of those elections didn't have an additional left-wing candidate splitting left-wing votes, so the ultimate result was that the Democrats picked up a large number of seats in Congress, gaining firm control of the House of Representatives, though not the Senate. It was this Congress that was presented with the choice between Cruz, Clinton, and Trump. With right-wing delegations in the House split between Cruz and Trump, and the Democratic majority united behind Clinton, they selected Clinton for President. In the Senate, the Tea Party minority made common cause with the Neoconservative plurality and selected Cruz's running mate, Jeb Bush (N-FL), for Vice President.
This outcome infuriated practically everybody. Over the course of her term, the Secret Service foiled at least four assassination attempts against President Clinton, aimed at promoting Vice President Bush, and at least one against Bush.
The Federal government was deadlocked for the next four years, with the right-wing-controlled Senate voting down or simply refusing to consider legislation originating in the Democratic House. Government services collapsed due to inability to pass a budget, with vital functions, including law enforcement, ending up passed off to the private sector or simply languishing unfulfilled.
Three Supreme Court seats were vacated and remained unfilled for most or all of Clinton's term — including one that had been empty since the unexpected death of Antonin Scalia late in Obama's presidency — because the Senate simply refused to hold confirmation hearings for any of Clinton's nominees for replacement justices. The right-wing stub of the Court made a series of rulings that gutted voting rights and equal protection and promoted corporate rights over individual rights, including a decision affirming Dakota Access LLC's right to employ lethal force and magical measures to protect their pipeline construction, which became one of the critical decisions granting lawful power to corporate security forces.
The Democrats lost control of the House in the 2018 mid-terms, which didn't help matters, though the Neoconservative and Tea Party coalition still lacked the supermajority necessary to override Clinton's veto, so the government remained deadlocked.
In 2018, after long deliberation, Pope Francis, speaking ex cathedra, declared that mortal magic and divine miracle were separate and distinct, that following a totem was idolatry — but leaving open the possiblity of Catholics employing hermetic magic — that magic was a morally neutral force, but one to be used carefully, lest it lead one into temptation, and that the UGE children — the oldest of them just reaching adulthood — were fully human and in possession of souls.
Even after two years of negotiation, the British government was unable to reach an agreement with the E.U. on the terms of the U.K.'s withdrawal, and, though Britout support even within England dropped as the deadline approached without an agreement, Britout supporters within Parliament refused to allow the invocation of Article 50 to be withdrawn, or even to delay the deadline. On March 29th, 2019, the U.K. defaulted to a no-deal Britout, leaving the E.U. with no allowance for how to gracefully transition to a separate economy, handle large numbers of European nationals living and working in the U.K., or handle the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland proper.
The value of the British pound plunged. Supplies of imported foods and medicines stockpiled against just such an eventuality were rapidly depleted, and the falling pound made it increasingly difficult and expensive to import more. Scarcity and shortages throughout the economy affected confidence in the pound, and its value dropped further. The British economy went into a death spiral. Food riots and anti-immigrant violence broke out in England. The Scottish separatist movement grew stronger, more vocal, and, as the situation deteroriated, violent. The reinstatement of a hard border dividing Ireland reignited the Troubles.
The government response was to crack down on the disturbances, with increasingly harsh measures as the disorder grew and spread. This only exacerbated the problem, feeding a vicious cycle of increasingly violent and extremist civil unrest and increasingly oppressive government response.
In the midst of this, two dragons, one red and one white, Awakened near Somerset, and immediately set upon each other in a battle of tooth, claw, fire, and magic that ranged across Cornwall and southern Wales. The British military responded, but the first units on the scene were destroyed by powerful magics, almost as an afterthought by the draconic combatants, after which they maintained their distance and just tried to contain the collateral damage. After a day and a night of battle, the red dragon, Rhonabwy, was victorious. The white dragon's identity and fate are unknown; it has not been seen since, and no body was discovered. Rhonabwy apologized for the damage, but refused to explain the reasons for the battle. Dunkelzahn, when queried on it, responded only that if Rhonabwy wouldn't speak of it, it was not his place to.
On April 30th, 2019, Emperor Akihito abdicated the Crysanthemum Throne, and was succeeded by his son, Naruhito, marking the end of the Heisei (平成) era and the beginning of the Reiwa (令和) era. The official translation of Reiwa was given as "Beautiful Harmony", but that meaning of "令" is archaic, and the more common meaning in modern Japanese is "command" or "order", while "和" is often used to describe things Japanese. Despite the Japanese government's insistence to the contrary, a more common interpretation of the characters would be "Mandatory Harmony", and they could even be read as "Japanese Order". This did not make Japan's neighbors more comfortable with an SDF that was growing stronger and participating in overseas actions.
On June 20th, 2020, a second wave of UGE hit, this one more sudden and drastic than the first. It wasn't just newborns that were affected — roughly 5% of humans all over the world underwent spontaneous painful transformations unexplainable by science, growing, changing, and mutating. When it was all over, there were two new races of metahumanity — both of them large, strong, and ugly to human eyes. The smaller, as tall as elves but much bulkier, were dubbed "orks", after the orcs of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The larger, standing nearly three meters tall and weighing roughly half a ton, with broad chests, long arms, tusks, and horns, were dubbed "trolls". After Goblinization Day, as it came to be called, orks and trolls began to be born to ordinary, apparently-human, couples, and there were isolated instances of humans goblinizing later, usually just after the subject was born, or during puberty. These occurrences trickled off as the years went on, and by 2059 almost all orks and trolls are born that way.
Like the earlier wave of UGE, Goblinization Day was followed by an outbreak of VITAS — a new strain that, like the first outbreak, seemed to arise out of nowhere in many unconnected places almost simultaneously, with no apparent point of origin or path of spread. The global response to the second wave of VITAS was faster and more effective than to the first. The treatments that had been developed for VITAS-1 weren't fully effective on VITAS-2, but they were a starting point, and people resorted to magical treatments, which worked just as well on either strain, much more readily. By the end of July, the outbreak had been brought under control, with "only" a quarter-billion casualties worldwide.
The timing of the pandemic, once again close on the heels of a wave of UGE, along with the fact that dwarves, orks, and trolls seemed highly resistant to the disease, led many people to draw a causal link. The monstrous appearance of the new types of metahumans and the frightening nature of goblinization made them easier to hate than the elves and dwarves, and that most orks and trolls were adults rather than children, even the very oldest still teenagers, like the elves and dwarves, contributed. H. Norman Rye preached against metahumans from his television pulpit, calling elves and dwarves "devil spawn" and orks and trolls "demons", and calling upon warriors of Christ to purge them. Anti-metahuman hate groups had been around since UGE had become common, but goblinization and VITAS-2 made them stronger, more active, and more violent. Several of the higher-profile groups merged to form Humanis. Humanis leadership maintained anonymity, but Rye was rumored to be among them.
Goblinization, VITAS, and magic became the predominant issues of the U.S. presidential election, which had been ongoing since before the results of the 2018 mid-terms had even been finalized. Despite desperately low approval ratings, rivaled only by those of Congress, and several primary challengers from within her own party, President Clinton easily re-secured the Democratic nomination. A political outsider by the name of Landen Gage won the Tea Party nomination. The Neoconservative nomination was secured by Senator Greg Wyeth (N-GA). In a surprising move, he named as his running mate Congressman Jerry Winston (T-KS), who had been the first runner-up in the Tea Party primary, in an effort to appeal to voters lost to the Tea Party in the Republican Party schism.
The race was, if anything, even uglier than the 2016 race, filled with extremist rhetoric, blatant propaganda, financial irregularities, conspiracy theories being pushed as fact, criminal accusations, and even open violence, usually anti-metahuman, with Gage acting as an attack dog against Clinton, and Wyeth presenting a less aggressive face but never denying any of the slander Gage brought against Clinton. Nevertheless, polling indicated that the President would be re-elected by a comfortable margin, with a solid base of support among women, minorities, and metahumans — orks and trolls in particular, as most elves and dwarves were still too young to vote — and Wyeth and Gage splitting the right-wing vote.
This didn't happen. Millions of metahumans and other likely Democratic voters were denied their right to vote or had their vote disqualified on flimsy pretexts. In several key states, the reported results gave Wyeth the victory where pre-election polling and exit polls suggested that it was a safe Clinton state. Analysis of the results indicated that the discrepancy between polling and reported results was larger, to a statistically significant degree, in precincts where electronic voting machines that left no paper trail were used.
Gage took six states, but the largest of those was his home state of Oklahoma. Clinton won an absolute majority of the popular vote cast, but its distribution meant that she took Democratic strongholds like California and New York by huge margins, but narrowly lost every swing state to Wyeth. Including Wyeth's unexpected victories in the critical states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wyeth's minority of the popular vote translated to a significant majority of the electoral vote. Challenges to the reported vote and voting procedures that systematically denied the vote to likely Democratic voters went rapidly to the Supreme Court, who immediately and almost without deliberation shut them down. Several Wyeth electors defected to Gage, and one Gage elector defected to Wyeth, but this had no real effect on the result. Greg Wyeth became President-elect.
On January 20th, 2021, moments after being sworn in as President on the west steps of the Capitol, Wyeth was slain by a bolt of magical lightning originating in the crowd. It is unknown whether the assassin, an ork shaman by the name of William Spenser Garrison, was overcome by the effort of driving a powerful bolt of lightning through Secret Service wards to kill Wyeth, or if he was simply overwhelmed by numbers, but he was in any case killed by the angry crowd despite Secret Service efforts to take him alive. The violence spread rapidly, with the crowd first lashing out against the few other metahumans among them, and then spreading into the streets of D.C. in search of more targets to take their anger out on. As street-level video of events, from both sides, spread through the network and conventional media, it sparked protests and counter-protests throughout the nation, and where those clashed, violence broke out, perhaps spontaneously, but in at least some cases deliberately provoked by Humanis or similar groups.
Meanwhile, Vice President-elect Winston was hustled to safety by Secret Service agents, and sworn in as President inside the Capitol building by President pro tempore of the Senate Chuck Grassley (N-IA), as Chief Justice Roberts was being treated for electrical burns sustained in the attack on Wyeth.
That night, as the capital burned, Winston addressed the nation as President. His speech served only to throw fuel on the flames, denouncing sorcerers, monsters, and liberals, and calling for "Real Americans" to take back America. His exhortations were heeded, and sparks of violence became a firestorm, overwhelming any ability of law enforcement to contain it. Winston declared a state of emergency, and troops were sent in to enforce martial law. Unsurprisingly, this did little to calm things down.
In Atlanta on January 22nd, fighting broke out within the Georgia National Guard as a result of troops refusing orders to fire upon civilians. The conflict quickly escalated and spread, with individuals and entire units taking sides and firing on each other. Regular Army units brought in to quell the fighting discovered similarly divided sympathies, and as the news of events spread across the nation at the speed of the network, so did the fighting, until most of America's major cities had become literal war zones.
In some places, the conflict was resolved fairly quickly — but, unfortunately, not for the same side everywhere. In other places, the sides were more evenly matched, and the struggle continued, and escalated further as reinforcements for each side moved into still-contested areas. Though magic and metahumans had been the trigger to the conflict, they were far from the only cause, and the faction rifts were generally cultural and regional. The faction that became known as the East was concentrated in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the West Coast. The faction that became known as the West was concentrated in the Deep South, Great Plains, and Southwest. Urban areas across the country tended to be hotbeds of Eastern sentiment, while rural areas leaned more towards the West.
Washington, D.C., was a particularly strong Eastern outpost, with few of the permanent residents having any sympathies at all towards the West. Within a couple weeks, most Western-sympathizing politicians had fled the city, most of them returning to their home states. Winston remained in a White House literally under siege, throwing fuel on the fire with increasingly vehement and virulent television addresses and social media posts calling for and predicting imminently the complete extermination of the rebellion and all who had participated in it.
This was not going as smoothly as Winston and his supporters thought it would. They had assumed that the military fully backed them, and that was much less true than they believed. The rank and file were disproportionately poor, urban, and black or Hispanic, who often had enlisted as a last resort when weakened social safety nets had failed them, and had little reason to love Winston and his ilk. While there were very few elves and no dwarves in the military — few of them were old enough to enlist, and height requirements excluded dwarves — the usual 5% of military personnel had goblinized, just like everywhere else, and many orks and trolls had joined up after Goblinization Day because the military was one employer that didn't reject them outright. While the military as a whole still leaned right, it was not nearly so unbalanced as they had imagined — and the nascent magical corps went, almost to a man, to the East, bringing significant force-multiplication with them.
On February 10th, a Marine raiding force stormed the White House, but discovered that Winston had somehow escaped ahead of them. One of the Presidential VC-25s, using the call sign "Air Force One", left Andrews Air Force Base shortly thereafter. It was intercepted over Pennsylvania by F-35s of the Vermont Air National Guard, and forced down at Chicago-O'Hare, but, when it was boarded, it turned out that Winston was not aboard. He turned up in his hometown of Kansas City, Kansas, two days later, but it is still unknown how he made his way there.
With Winston gone, the violence in the capital died down. Congress re-convened, but absent most Western-sympathizing members. The partial House, mostly Democrats from Eastern-sympathizing districts, appointed a new Speaker, Congressman Robert Hastings (D-NY). Hastings led the House to impeach Winston in absentia, and the Senate, similarly operating without the participation of most Neoconservative and Tea Party members, removed him from office. In the absence of any Vice President, the Presidency, in the eyes of those who accepted the legitimacy of these proceedings, devolved onto Hastings.
Over the course of March, the chaos resolved itself into more organized warfare. Though irregular warfare continued in some places — Western sympathizers resisting in the hills of Appalachia and upstate New York, and Eastern sympathizers engaging in urban warfare in the big cities of the West, particularly Austin and Denver — the main fighting was happening along fronts in the South, the Midwest, the northern Great Plains, and the Great Basin in the west. The West had the edge in ground troops, but the East had the edge in air and naval power and, significantly, magic. Simple geography had put all the major naval yards in Eastern territory, and they had by chance gotten the main tank manufacturing facilities as well, and keeping or taking control of them was one of the major objectives of the early war in the Midwest.
America's overseas deployments quickly dwindled away. Some of them were recalled by whichever Commander-in-Chief believed them to be loyal. Others made their way home on their own to join whichever side they felt held their loyalty. Others, unwilling to wage war on their countrymen or to be thrown into the meatgrinder that the American fronts were rapidly becoming, deserted. In some cases, entire units, complete with gear, went AWOL. Many of those ended up as mercenaries or even warlords in Africa or Central Asia.
The American civil war, and particularly the withdrawal of the U.S. military forces that had been keeping the lids on various hot spots around the world, triggered follow-on effects across the globe.
Japan saw the kanji on the wall when the U.S. collapsed into civil war. The abandonment of Japan by the U.S. forces stationed to protect it gave Prime Minister Abe the leverage he needed to push through an amendment to Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, to explicitly affirm Japan's right to self-defense, and to allow Japan to maintain military forces for that purpose. Even those loosened restrictions were interpreted broadly, and Japan immediately began to accelerate their remilitarization process and seek sources other than American manufacturers to support it — European at first, while they revitalized their own military-industrial complex.
Practically since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had been trying to regain that empire. They had spent much of the early part of the century nibbling off bits of the former SSRs, culminating in the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. With the United States' and United Kingdom's domestic difficulties hamstringing NATO, Russia had a free hand to act. In January 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the unilateral formation of the Russian Union, which incorporated all of the former Soviet Union except for the Baltic republics. Some pretense was made that this was done in accordance with the will and desires of the common people in the annexed nations, and the Russians published referendum results in support of this idea, but no one actually believed it.
The annexed nations, of course, objected, and Russian tanks rolled in to enforce the annexation. In most places, organized opposition collapsed quickly. Despite ongoing guerilla resistance, all of the annexed territories except for Georgia and Ukraine were firmly under Russian control before the end of the year. The European Union and the broken remains of NATO, wary of a resurgent Russia on their borders, but unwilling to engage the Russians directly, instead poured support in resources and equipment, into Ukraine and Georgia. Despite this, Georgia fell by the end of February 2023, and only Ukraine continued to hold out.
Westamerica, in a fit of nationalism, closed their border with Mexico, banning immigration and trade from Mexico. Due to the war, however, they lacked the manpower to actually enforce the ban, or even to properly patrol the border. The upshot was that Mexico's legitimate economy was crippled, but illicit trade, including drug smuggling and human trafficking, flourished. Mexico's ever-fragile democratic government crumpled, while the cartels, particularly ORO Corporation, grew in strength. In April of 2022, Presidente Salvador Echevarría was assassinated in a rocket attack. His replacement, Presidente Substituto Ramón Castilla, was a wholly owned puppet of ORO, and evidence was that he was installed through ORO extortion and blackmail of members of Congress.
On Cinco de Mayo, 2022, ORO Corporation, in an apparent effort to gain legitimacy in the public eye by shedding their cartel image, rebranded themselves as Aztechnology.
In April 2022, a corporation called Ares Arms, based in Detroit, was formed to coordinate Eastern military production.
In November 2022, North Korean troops poured across the DMZ and into South Korea. North Korea threatened nuclear retaliation against anyone who dared interfere with their rightful reunification of Korea. The North Korean equipment was largely third-rate knockoffs of old Chinese or Soviet Bloc hardware, and their training and tactics were distinctly lacking, but there were a lot of them, and, without American support, the South Koreans had no hope of holding back the tsunami.
Within three days, Seoul was under siege and the KPA was pushing into the southern end of Korea. The ROKAF was mobilizing reserves as quickly as possible, but it was clear that it was not quickly enough.
On November 18th, the Japanese destroyer escort Sendai was sunk near the edge of Korean territorial waters. The JMSDF claimed that Sendai had merely been monitoring the Korean situation when it had been torpedoed without warning by a North Korean submarine. North Korea asserted that Sendai had deliberately and repeatedly violated Korean territorial waters and made provacative moves towards North Korean vessels. Japan used the incident as justification for deploying first JMSDF vessels to hunt North Korean submarines, and then troops into Korea itself in support of the ROKAF, claiming tbat countering the North Korean threat was legitimate national self-defense.
The bulk of the Japanese people were unimpressed by this reasoning, believing that the Abe administration was overstepping its authority, even under the loosened Article 9. The South Koreans were deeply unappreciative of the Japanese assistance — they remembered the last time Japanese troops had been deployed in Korea — but, in the face of the overwhelming flood of the KPA, they had little choice but to accept it.
North Korea was even more infuriated by the Japanese interference, and announced that they were following through on their threat of nuclear retaliation. On November 28th, North Korea launched a Hwasong-12 ballistic missile, targeted on Tokyo. However, something went wrong, and the missile deviated from its trajectory and crashed harmlessly and without detonating into the Sea of Japan. The Japanese outrage provoked by North Korea's attempt to nuke them silenced any significant internal dissent regarding Japan's remilitarization in general and involvement in the Korean conflict in particular.
The intervention of the SDF, unwanted as it might have been, gave the South Koreans enough breathing room to mobilize reserves, and the ROKAF and their unwelcome allies began to push the KPA back into the north. The KPA's fighting ability deteriorated as the war went on. They had been looting fuel and food from South Korean territory, and as they were pushed back into territory they had already picked over, they began running out.
When the allied forces pushed the KPA back across the DMZ and into North Korea, it also became apparent that not only were there no metahumans in the KPA, there were none in North Korea at all. Further investigation revealed that UGE had been found to not conform with socialist ideology, and first elven and dwarven babies, and later the goblinized, had been killed and their families, if not themselves metahuman, imprisoned in labor camps. Metahumans in Japanese society were shunned and marginalized, but even the Japanese were horrified by this genocide, and it galvanized the South against the Kim regime.
As the allies closed in on Pyongyang, KPA resistance stiffened, their supply problems, if not gone, at least greatly alleviated. The allies suspected the PRC of supporting the North Koreans with supplies and materiel, despite official Chinese denials and their condemnation of the metahuman genocide.
In December, around the time it began to become obvious that North Korean resistance had collapsed entirely and the forces the South Koreans and Japanese were fighting in North Korea were simply the Chinese, the PRC lunged across the Strait of Taiwan to attack the ROC.
Corporations are not fully extraterritorial, but they control the world's governments behind the scenes thoroughly enough that it hardly matters. It is functionally impossible to visit legal consequences on any major corporation, and politicians who are not corporate-backed find it impossible to be elected. Corporate security forces are given a free hand in operating as law enforcement agencies, and privatization of basically everything that a profit could be made on has meant that in many places, they are the law enforcement agencies. The Texas-based corporation Lone Star operates most police departments in Westamerica, while most Eastamerican law enforcement is contracted to Knight Errant, a subdivision of the Detroit-based megacorporation Ares Macrotechnology.
They still find it useful to maintain plausible deniability regarding their less savory activities, lest they provoke open warfare with other corporations. This is where shadowrunners come in.
North America in 2059 has become balkanized, with the United States and Canada both having broken into smaller nations. As a result of the Second American Civil War (2021–2025), the United States split into two hostile factions, both of which claim to be the only legitimate United States of America, but which are commonly known as Eastamerica and Westamerica. The final borders largely follow the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and the western border of the old state of Georgia. Much of Georgia and South Carolina sympathize with the West, but Atlanta was an Eastern stronghold, and remained with the East. South Carolina, rural Georgia and North Carolina, and parts of Florida, even in 2059, are basically occupied territory.
Civil War II was never a declared war, with both sides characterizing it as an internal police action, and was never officially ended with a treaty, but the open violence has long since faded away. Occasional border skirmishes still flare up, however.
Canada, largely as a result of the war to the south stressing the already-strained relationship between Ottawa and the plains provinces, also broke up. Québec initiated the breakup, with Bloc Québécois, holding the effective balance of power in Parliament, voting themselves out of the squabble. The resulting political and economic fallout caused the Plains to separate as well, with Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan forming the Plains Republic. These separations were peaceful and relatively friendly, and the resulting nations remain on good terms with each other.
California split off from Eastamerica towards the end of the war, forming the independent Republic of California, which neither Eastamerica nor Westamerica recognize; their diplomatic relations with both Americas are relatively friendly, however, reality having taken precedence over official policy.
California's departure left the western portions of Oregon and Washington state, which had remained with the East, rather in a lurch. They ended up joining together with British Columbia, which was in a similar situation, to form the nation of Greater Columbia. Canada recognizes Greater Columbia; neither America does. Eastamerica is friendly with Greater Columbia, however, but Westamerica, in possession of the other half of Oregon and Washington, resents their loss.
Eastamerica is largely made up of the heavily urbanized East Coast and Great Lakes regions of the formerly United States — though Hawai'i remains part of Eastamerica. They have more people than they do agricultural capacity. "Real food" — particularly meat, with the great ranches of the West having gone with Westamerica — is expensive and sometimes difficult to find. Eastamerica is industrially powerful, and dominated by megacorporations. Said corporations are not extraterritorial, and generally at least pretend to play by the rules, but they have enough power and influence that they can change the rules if they really need to.
The capital of Eastamerica remains in Washington, though the District of Columbia was granted statehood after the war, and is now the State of Columbia (not to be confused with the West Coast nation Greater Columbia).
There are currently 29 statesColumbia, Connecticut, (East) Dakota, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawai'i, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, (East) Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin with votes in the Eastamerican Congress and electoral college — though official policy maintains that the Western states are still part of the United States, the legitimate government of which is the East's, the "treasonous" states are not allowed representation for "the duration of the crisis"... which was never a declared war, has never officially ended, despite a cease-fire largely honored for more than twenty years, and is unlikely to ever actually be resolved. This number includes Hawai'i, which remains with Eastamerica despite the distance, and Columbia and Puerto Rico, made states after the war.
Most states remain divided along their original lines, where those lines lie within Eastamerican borders, but the already-sparsely-populated Dakotas were merged into a single state named, simply, "Dakota", but often called "East Dakota", especially in the West. Likewise, the halves of Missouri are often called "East Missouri" and "West Missouri", though both Americas maintain that it is a single state, Missouri. Missouri and other states partitioned by the East/West border are granted representation in Congress based on their full population, but residents of the West are not allowed to actually vote. This measure has been unpopular, and is becoming more so as the first generation who don't remember a United States that was actually united reach voting age.
There are currently five parties with representation in Congress: the Technocrats, the Democrats, the Progressives, the Conservatives, and the Loyalists.
The Technocrats were originally a tech-business and net-openness oriented faction within the Democrats, who broke off in the 2024 election, when their candidate, Congresswoman Sigourney Stephens (D-MD) was elected President on the strength of their declare-victory-and-end-it war platform. They have, since, become a wholly-owned subsidiary of various tech corporations. As of 2058, they control the White House and a plurality of the House of Representatives.
The Progressives also spun off the Democrats, after Bernie Sanders's failed run for the Presidency in 2016. They ended up with most of the pre-Awakening Democratic Party. They hold the plurality of the Senate, and are largely owned by the media.
The current Democratic Party is formed from a union of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats after the Republican Party broke up after the 2012 election and the Awakening. They tend to play the loyal opposition to whichever of the Progressives or the Technocrats is currently dominating. They are completely owned by banks and other financial interests.
The Conservatives trace their lineage back through the Neo-Conservatives to the Republican Party of last century. They took near-fatal damage in the war years, and are only starting to recover. They frequently make common cause with the Loyalists.
The Loyalists are a post-war party that advocates the immediate surrender of the treasonous East to the legitimate government of the United States. South Carolina and rural Georgia and Florida elect a lot of them, but they're wildly unpopular almost everywhere else. They have only minor representation in the House, and their only Senator is one of South Carolina's. They're entirely owned by Westamerica.
The Greens and the Libertarians both continue to scrape together vote percentages in the mid-single-digits, but have not yet achieved national representation.
Westamerica is spacious and relatively sparsely populated. There are only 23 statesAlabama (including part of the former Florida panhandle), Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, (West) Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wyoming in Westamerica, but most of them are much larger in area and smaller in population than most Eastamerican states. Their control of much of the central North American agricultural lands makes them breadbasket of the world, which is very valuable in a world with over eight billion people in it. However, they lost most of industrial and urban America to the East, so their economy is not strong.
The capital of Westamerica is in Denver, Colorado. It was originally in Kansas City, Kansas, where President Winston lived, and where he fled when he felt the need to leave D.C., but it was relocated when it turned out to be far too close to the front. Texas made a strong bid for permanently locating the capital in Dallas; however, no one else liked the idea of Texas, already the 500-pound-gorilla of the Western states, having that much influence over the capital, so Denver it was.
Westamerica was largely founded on meta-racism and hatred of magic, and it's only recently that metahumans have attained, even in legal theory, the full rights of basic humans, and it will probably be many more years before they gain real equality. Magic is still largely distrusted, but the war years made clear that it was real and powerful and there to stay. The Native American nations of the West have become disproportionately powerful and influential because they were more open to accepting shamanic magic than their non-Native neighbors, so fewer of their Awakened go without recognizing or using their talents. Early in the war, several of the Native reservations bartered magical assistance and training for increased rights and influence. As a result, shamanic magic, following traditional Native totems, is more trusted in the West in general than hermetic magic, which still smacks of occultism.
Mexico's ever-shaky democratic government was dealt a fatal blow by the nationalist policies and civil unrest in their northern neighbor and largest trading partner. The forms of it are still nominally in place, but all candidates for any office, regardless of party, have only one agenda: Do Aztechnology's bidding in any and all circumstances. Candidates who don't have the Aztechnology seal of approval have a tendency to turn up messily dead, or to never turn up again at all.
Aztechnology, based in Mexico City, is an unholy conglomeration of multinational corporate interests and drug cartels, according to rumor tied together by cabals of blood mages. Their primary products are cheap consumer goods, designer drugs, and magical paraphenalia. They are the parent corporation of the Stuffer Shack chain of convenience stores, which are banned in Westamerica, but widespread in Eastamerica and California. Aztechnology-linked cartels are believed to be responsible for most of the illegal drug trafficking across the southern borders of the Americas.
Mexico and Westamerica have been in constant low-level conflict since before the Civil War, with occasional skirmishing, often from heavily-armed private bandit or vigilante groups from Westamerica, but they have yet to engage in open warfare.
On the eve of the Awakening, a group believed to have been Yucatán separatists clashed with government forces near the ancient Mayan city Chichén-Itzá. During the skirmish, a feathered serpent later identified as the Great Dragon Hualpa, appeared — the second dragon to be seen in the modern era, hours after Ryumyo's appearance over Mount Fuji — and attacked both groups. The government forces were broken and scattered. It is unknown what happened to the group they were fighting, and Hualpa dropped out of sight thereafter, but has since turned up in South America, as the leader of the Amazonia movement.
California was once, despite their position on the West Coast, a stronghold of Eastamerica. Most of their major urban centers were badly damaged by earthquakes linked to the Awakening, though, and they were still recovering when the Second Civil War broke out. In January 2024, Westamerica threatened to cut off California's water supply in an effort to force Eastamerica's surrender. Eastamerica refused to knuckle under to this blatant terrorism, but California, caught between a rock and a hard place, broke off from Eastamerica and negotiated a separate peace with Westamerica.
In theory, neither America recognizes California's independence. In practice, both of them find what was the largest economy in the United States, when they were actually united, and the home of a large proportion of its tech industry, to be too valuable a trading partner to exclude over diplomatic nonsense.
The orange Great Dragon Hestaby makes her lair on Mount Shasta in the north of California.
In June 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on leaving the European Union, dubbed "Britout". The Leave faction, riding a wave of nationalism and isolationism, won 53.2% to 46.8%. Support for Britout, however, was not evenly distributed, gaining a solid majority only in England, with Wales slightly in favor and Scotland and Northern Ireland strongly opposed. The government was unable to agree to terms for Britain's withdrawal, nor to revoke or even postpone it, and so, on 29 March 2019, they defaulted to a no-deal Britout. The British economy, thoroughly entangled with the rest of Europe's, immediately collapsed.
Domestic unrest in the United Kingdom exploded. Scotland's separatist movement grew far more aggressive, in Ireland the Troubles re-ignited, and even in England support for the government's actions plunged when the food riots started. The government's response was to crack down with oppressive control measures, which exacerbated the problem and fed a vicious cycle of increasingly violent and extremist action and increasingly draconian government response.
In the midst of this, two dragons, one red and one white, Awakened near Somerset, and immediately engaged each other in a battle involving fire, magic, and tooth and claw that ranged across Cornwall and southern Wales. The British military responded, but backed off and restrained themselves to trying to contain the collateral damage after the first units on the scene were destroyed by magics more powerful than any that metahumanity had been seen to wield, almost as an afterthought by the draconic combatants. After a day and a night of battle, the red dragon was victorious. The white dragon's identity and fate are unknown; it has not been seen since, and no body was discovered. The red dragon, Rhonabwy, apologized for the damage, but refused to explain.
Rhonabwy has established a lair somewhere in Wales, and is rumored to be connected to the Welsh separatist movement.
By 2059, Britain is a totalitarian surveillance state, torn by domestic rebellion and shorn of its once-mighty empire. The pound (£) is now worthless outside Britain, and not worth much more inside it. Elizabeth II remains Queen; it is unknown whether her unnatural longevity is owed to science or to magic, or perhaps some combination of both.
Despite the U.K.'s departure, the European Union as a whole has grown and strengthened. The euro (€) is the strongest currency in the world, and accepted anywhere. Europe's primary concerns are the Balkans, which remain the region that gave the world the word "balkanization", and where millennia-old enmities have only been exacerbated by the Awakening, and the powerful and internally restless Russian Union on their border. They have been reluctant to directly provoke Russia, but have been engaged in an ongoing cold war with them, and a series of proxy wars, first in Georgia and Ukraine, and currently in the Middle East and Central Asia.
In 2014, the gold dragon Lofwyr Awakened from his long slumber in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Schwarzwald. Operating through human proxies at first, and later in his own right as dragons participating in modern society became more normal, he liquidated significant assets and used them to enter the financial markets. In 2035, it was revealed that his machinations had garnered him controlling interest in BMW/Krupp, which, after further acquisitions, became Saeder-Krupp, one of the world's largest megacorporations. Lofwyr is, by most estimates, the richest single being on the planet.
Russia spent much of the 2010s gradually nibbling off bits of the other republics of the former USSR. The collapse of NATO as a result of Britout and Civil War II left them without anything keeping them in check, and in 2022 they announced the formation of the Russian Union, involuntarily incorporating all the former SSRs except the Baltic republics. When the unwillingly assimilated nations objected, Russia sent tanks. Most of the former Soviets fell within the year, though continued guerrilla resistance raged on. Georgia held out a little longer before being overwhelmed. Ukraine put up stiff resistance, and the EU, in the interest of maintaining a buffer state between them and Russia, poured resources and support into Ukraine.
In 2023, China, involved in a war with Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, decided that the Russians were sufficiently distracted by the war with Ukraine and resistance in the other conquered territories that they could grab some of Siberia's untapped resources to fuel their East Asian war efforts without too much resistance. They quickly discovered that they were wrong, as Russia responded more quickly, more aggressively, and in more strength than anticipated, and Russia and China both got bogged down in a grinding, back-and-forth war in Siberia and Mongolia, with both able to take ground, but neither able to hold it. This distracted Russia from their conquest of Ukraine, though, and it wasn't until 2040 that they were able to fully occupy it.
Both North Korea and China took advantage of the power vacuum of the American Civil War to pounce on the targets they'd had their eyes on for decades — South Korea and Taiwan. Japan intervened in both cases, and now occupies ("protects") both Taiwan and the Korean peninsula, though they were repulsed when they tried to move into mainland China. No one says "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Mark II", but a lot of people in Korea and China are thinking it.
China also attempted to grab off a chunk of Siberia, largely to fuel their conquests elsewhere, but quickly discovered that Russia was not as distracted as they thought, and ended up in a major war with the Russian Union, which led directly to the Japanese victory in Korea and Taiwan.
Japanese forces, though still called the Self-Defense Force, are now for all practical purposes a full-fledged military, and now that they have real experience to complement their training and high-tech equipment, a powerful one.
Japan's domination of Korea and Taiwan has made their already-strong corporations into powerhouses. The yen suffered during the conflict with China, leading the Japanese to knock three zeros off it and redub it the "nuyen". With the recovery of the Japanese economy post-war, the nuyen (¥) has become one of the world's strongest currencies, and is accepted anywhere.
Africa remains Africa, beset by post-colonial woes. The introduction of magic into the mix has been helpful in some ways, but mostly has just made matters worse. Magic is a resource and a weapon that can't be monopolized by the ruling factions, and so provides a route for the downtrodden to overturn the status quo. While this seems like it might be a good thing, what it mostly results in is the downtrodden becoming the new oppressors and taking their vengeance on the old ones, until the wheel turns again and the cycle of blood and vengeance continues with the shoe on the other foot.
The United States withdrew most of their troops from the Middle East as the Second Civil War escalated, and the ones left in place largely deserted as their support broke down. Others deserted rather than be recalled into the internecine warfare back home. Many of those deserters ended up in Africa, with first-rate U.S. hardware and training, as mercenaries — or, in some cases, warlords grabbing chunks of territory for themselves by main force. This has just made matters worse, without being helpful in any way.
In the decades since, most of those mercenary groups have faded away, but they have been replaced by corporate mercenaries, who keep the disorder going to fill corporate coffers. The megacorps often arrange for cash-poor factions in need of military power to make their payments in resources or exploitation rights. This never works out well.
To further complicate matters, a lot of large wildlife got magical powers in the Awakening, too. The money involved in poaching has grown significantly, because many of those creatures' body parts have value to talismongers. Awakened creatures are often much more capable of fighting back, though.
South and Central America suffer from many of the same problems as Africa, with unstable governments being further destabilized by the introduction of magic into the equation. Much of the heart of South America is controlled by a coalition of sapient magical creatures and native tribes. There are at least three feathered serpents involved in this. The Great Dragon Hualpa appears to be their leader, but has not been communicative about their ultimate goals. Even the normally garrulous Dunkelzahn has declined to comment on Hualpa's activities.
Something very strange is going on in Australia, and no one is sure exactly what it is — or if they are, they're not willing to say. Even dragons like Dunkelzahn and Hestaby, who are usually forthcoming about things like this, have offered no explanation. Much of the heart of the continent, a slowly-growing area centered on Uluru, is affected by a phenomenon that distorts distances and time, and blurs the boundaries between the mundane world, astral space, and the metaplanes beyond.