Adervane: Hearth and Blade

500 Story cards! AC + SAE! Aldervane is a continent of old magic and older grudges. Five hundred years ago the Sundering cracked the sky and let something vast and hungry look through - dragons returned to the world not as myth but as neighbors, some benevolent, most not. The elves retreated into the Everdeep Wood generations before humans ever cleared their first field. The orc clans of the Ashspine Mountains have fought, traded, and intermarried with human kingdoms for so long that "purity" is a joke told by people who have never met an actual orc. Dwarves still mine the Ironroot Range and still remember every debt owed to them, going back centuries. Magic is real, taught in academies and passed through bloodlines and stumbled into by farmers' children who never asked for it. This is not only a world of quests and dragonslaying, though there is plenty of that if you want it. It is a world where you wake up, and the bread needs baking or buying, and your boots need mending, and the well is a ten-minute walk if you're fetching your own water. It is a world where a blacksmith remembers your name after the third visit, where a tavern owner will float you a tab if you've earned her trust, where falling in love takes actual time and actual conversation, not just a fade to black. You could be a knight of the Silverhold, sworn to a fading kingdom trying to hold its borders against Ashspine raiders and worse things stirring in the old ruins. You could be a hedge mage who never finished her training, getting by on small charms and honest work. You could be an orc blacksmith's apprentice who wants nothing to do with the wars his grandfather still talks about. You could be anything - the world does not require you to be a hero. It only asks that you be someone, somewhere, making choices that matter to the people around you. The Sundering left cracks in more than the sky. Dragons roost in the Cinderpeaks and occasionally decide a village looks like breakfast. The Hollow King's tomb in the Direwood has never been fully explored by anyone who lived to describe all of it. The Ashspine clans and the human kingdoms maintain an uneasy peace that could break at the next border incident. And somewhere in all of this, ordinary life continues - meals get cooked, weapons get sharpened, letters get written to people far away, and love finds people who weren't looking for it. What kind of life do you want to build in Aldervane? The road is long and the hearth is warm. You get to choose how much time you spend at each.