Deep Past

Eamon forms near the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Its location is a nexus where many cosmic currents and lines of power meet, imbuing the planet with wild and varied magic and giving rise to frequent spatial and dimensional rifts.

Four creator deities from the Elemental Planes of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water together shape the nascent world as a means of encouraging cooperation and harmony among them, but their competitiveness sparks a struggle for dominance and they ultimately destroy each other in what's now known as the Sea of Death.

Some hold that the Western Isles are the creator deities' remains, others that the isles are remnants of a lost landmass shattered by their conflict. Lumenite tradition states that the elemental energies released after the creator deities' deaths gave rise to a second generation of lesser gods who arose on Eamon long before the advent of humanity.

Donald Brown, writing in his Eamon Player's Manual, placed the world of Eamon "at the dead center of the Milky Way" and noted that "it doesn't orbit any suns — all of the suns orbit it." He reasoned that the tremendous forces exerted by the countless surrounding stars were the source of the planet's magic.

I love Brown's unique setting, but for whatever reason nobody ever ran with it: subsequent authors consistently painted Eamon as a more Earth-like world with seasons, years, regular periods of day and night, and a single sun — or two, per Eamon Remastered. Some sci-fi adventures also suggest that Eamon, far from being the heart of the Milky Way, is a minor world without great significance. ("Eamon, huh? Never heard of it," grunts the sergeant in Hammer's Slammers). As such, I've situated Eamon in a star system near the galaxy's center but not right on top of it.

The creation story of the warring elemental deities comes from the introduction to the 2004 adventure Journey Across the Muerte Sea by John MacArthur. The Western Isles are a nod to the Eamon West Archipelago mentioned in Museum of Unnatural History: "Islands of every possible shape (and some impossible ones) are scattered over it."

Deep Past

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