-Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India in the 4th century, according to Ollie Bye
“Ecumene” is a Latinization of the Greek term “Oικουμένη (Oikoumeni)”, and refers to the breadth of the world as the Greeks knew it. Within the breadth of this setting, magic may lift the great stones that assembled the Great Pyramids of Giza, a champion, sword in hand, may cleave through a century, and dragons may guise themselves in the forms of men and demand worship from the people under assumed names as “Freya”, “Osiris”, and “Demeter”. The world of Ecumene will be grounded in the beautiful and diverse world of our real history, but dotted near and far with monsters to slay, dungeons to delve, and heroism to achieve that we all love from our Pathfinder (and other tabletop) experiences.
For historians of the immediate following centuries looking back on this time, it often would have seemed to them to have been the beginning of the end of civilization. That is one of many reasons why I have chosen this particular period to represent. In three centuries, two of the four great empires shown on the map above will have disappeared, and the remaining two will have been diminished to mere wisps of what they once were. The descendants of those who lived in this time will, for a millennium or more, look back on this era as the sunset upon a “Golden Age” of humanity, that they will then desperately attempt to claim and reclaim until the days of Napoleon.
Although our real civilizations are built by humans and continued by humans alone, Ecumene will have no shortage of ancestry options for any player character. The humanity of Ecumene has coexisted with many intelligent kin, from the befurred gnolls along the Horn of Africa to the brightly-scaled nagaji of southern India to golden-maned catfolk of the Greek peninsula. People of all shapes, colors, and stripes may appear in many unexpected locations and hold unexpected status in any part of the world, at least if archaeological evidence is to be believed. Do not feel as if you must “limit” yourself to “likely” options as a compromise for having fun and making the character you want; stranger things have happened in reality, and in the magic-rich setting of Ecumene, stranger things may happen still.
Lore and Dev Diary #2 will deal with ancestries and society’s perception of them, as well as the role character classes will play in a world that mirrors our own.
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