In the year when the fungal spires blossomed scarlet across the salt marshes of Qud, four powers alien to this world descended, their arrival shattering the precarious balance of its tangled futures. The annals of that time, known now as the War of Broken Epochs, speak of a conflict so vast and strange that it rewrote the very strata of possibility. The survivors still whisper of skyships blacker than void, of towering steel titans marked with burning sigils, of sorcerers who drained the marrow of the earth, and of a pale elf whose hatred poisoned rivers.
Qud itself was never a simple stage. It is a land of chrome pyramids half-sunken in salt dunes, jungles strangled by sentient vines, rivers where water remembers pain, and ruins older than language. Its surface crawls with mutants and dervishes, its underworld with oozes, spidering roots, and memory-eating things that once were men. It is here that the invaders made landfall, each convinced that this strange world could be bent to their dominion.
The Galactic Empire descended first, piercing Qud’s skies with Star Destroyers. To the people below, these were not ships but wandering mountains, cold and radiant, trailing storms of falling debris. The Empire fortified the salt desert of Joppa’s rimlands, declaring it a new Outer Province. They built outposts of ferrocrete and durasteel, where stormtroopers patrolled among chrome ruins they did not understand.
The Empire sought to impose order by decree: taxation of trade routes through the fungal jungles, suppression of mutant tribes, and seizure of all relics that hinted at forbidden technology. Yet their might was blunted. Blasters burned through dervish cloaks but did little against the living forests that regrew faster than fire could consume. Their Star Destroyers orbited high, but strange gravitational shears in Qud’s atmosphere crippled hyperspace drives, stranding them. Thus the Empire, used to lightning conquest, found itself bogged down in a war of attrition against both local resistance and rival invaders.
From the void fell Zeon, their fleets of Musai cruisers crashing into the fungal jungles east of the Spindle. Out strode mobile suits, towering humanoid war machines, their mono-eyes glowing baleful red. The ground quaked beneath Zaku squadrons as they established fortified encampments among chrome megaliths. To the mutants of Qud, they seemed like gods of steel and fire.
Zeon’s ambition was familiar: to prove their supremacy as a people, to carve dominion through technology and will. Yet Qud defied their expectations. The salt dunes clogged reactor vents, spores infiltrated cockpits, and psychic vines wrapped themselves around Zaku limbs. Still, Zeon adapted. They harvested Qud’s bio-circuits, grafting them into their mobile suits, creating chimera mechs with fungal symbionts and roots for ligaments. These abominations terrified both Empire and sorcerer alike.
Zeon’s strategy was not conquest alone but assimilation. They sought alliances with mutant tribes, promising them protection under Zeonic steel. Many accepted, forming cults around mobile suits as living idols. Others resisted, igniting brushfire wars across the steppe.
Into this maelstrom stepped Jon Irenicus, the exiled elf whose hunger for godhood had consumed Faerûn. He came not with armies but with curses, walking barefoot across salt dunes, his shadow bleeding across the sands. Wherever he tread, the plants withered into bone-dry husks, the rivers turned black, and memory itself fled the minds of beasts.
Irenicus sought not empire but apotheosis. He looked upon Qud, with its living chrome, its layered timescales, its surreal ecologies, and saw a crucible fit for his experiments. In the fungal jungles of Bethsaida, he established his sanctum, binding the spirits of dervishes to his will and dissecting mutant prophets for secrets of their legacies. His magic warped even further in Qud’s alien physics: spells spawned recursive echoes, and his illusions bred shadows that devoured flesh.
Unlike the Empire or Zeon, Irenicus did not march armies. He gathered cults of the dispossessed, promising them release from the Red Curse, freedom from the Empire’s chains, or vengeance against Zeon. His followers became fanatics, willing to be unmade in his experiments. Rumors spread that he had already grafted Qud’s own dimensional strata into his soul, making him unkillable. Whether true or not, every faction learned to fear his name.
Last to arrive were the Sorcerer-Kings of Athas, borne upon obsidian palanquins carried by enslaved elementals. They came through a shimmering wound in reality, a portal they had carved by bleeding entire deserts dry. To them, Qud was a feast of power: jungles ripe to be defiled, chrome ruins to be unmade for their essence, and mutant tribes to be enslaved as chattel.
The Sorcerer-Kings established their dominion along the basalt cliffs of Omonporch, raising ziggurats of glassy black stone that drank the life of all around them. Their defiling magic proved horrifyingly effective in Qud, where life’s abundance was both lush and fragile. Whole valleys were reduced to ash circles overnight. In response, local mutants launched suicide raids, seeking vengeance though their bodies withered at the sorcerers’ approach.
Yet the Sorcerer-Kings did not always stand united. Each coveted dominion over this strange land, and their rivalries flared even as they waged war against the Empire’s legions and Zeon’s mobile suits. Their armies were mixtures of defilers, slave legions, and summoned horrors that twisted Qud’s ecosystems into weapons.
The War of Broken Epochs unfolded as a shifting tapestry of alliances and betrayals.
The Empire and Zeon clashed repeatedly. Stormtroopers with AT-AT walkers faced mobile suits on the salt flats, battles that left entire provinces cratered and smoking.
Irenicus played both sides, selling cursed relics to Zeon while feeding intelligence to Imperial governors, all while pursuing his private experiments.
The Sorcerer-Kings warred against all, draining the jungles that Zeon needed for bio-mech symbiosis and burning villages that supplied the Empire. Their ziggurats radiated such desolation that even stormtroopers balked at marching near them.
The land of Qud itself resisted. Chrome pyramids awoke, revealing machine intelligences older than any empire. The fungal jungles rose in revolt, birthing colonies that consumed entire battalions. Even time fractured: explorers spoke of meeting future versions of themselves, scarred veterans of battles yet to come.
Several key moments stand out:
The Siege of the Spindle: Zeon attempted to seize the Spindle, believing it a weapon. Imperial Star Destroyers blockaded the skies, but Sorcerer-Kings and Irenicus both intervened, unleashing storms of magic and chrome-sap machines. The Spindle cracked, releasing a storm of light that erased an entire Zeonic fleet.
The Defilement of Golgotha: Sorcerer-Kings defiled the underground city of Golgotha, collapsing it into an abyss. Survivors claimed Irenicus engineered this, baiting them to expend their power while he harvested the remains.
The Betrayal at Joppa: A fragile truce between Imperial forces and Zeon collapsed when stormtroopers massacred a Zeon-aligned mutant tribe. The reprisals shattered any hope of peace.
The Ascension Attempt: Irenicus, having grafted Qud’s dimensional filaments into his soul, attempted to merge with the Spindle’s consciousness. The ritual was interrupted by a combined strike from Imperial Inquisitors, Zeonic Newtype pilots, and a renegade Sorcerer-King. The Spindle imploded, casting shockwaves across Qud that permanently altered its timeline.
The war remains unresolved. No faction has triumphed. The Empire clings to its coastal forts, Zeon rebuilds its bio-mechs in the jungles, Irenicus continues his experiments in shadow, and the Sorcerer-Kings brood in their black ziggurats. Qud itself has absorbed their presence, mutating further, sprouting ruins of starships entangled with fungal spires, and birthing mutants who carry legacies of blaster-fire and spellfire alike.
The people of Qud call this age the Time of Interlopers, when gods of alien epochs fought over their land. To them, survival is all that matters. Yet historians whisper that this war is only the prelude—that the true awakening of Qud’s machine minds has yet to come, and when it does, even empires and sorcerers will kneel.