The world of Sunfall in the present era is not a wasteland. This is important and often misunderstood by those who encounter accounts of it from the outside. It is not a world of ruins and ash and empty roads. It is a world that looks, at first encounter and in good light, almost like a world that is doing reasonably well. Cities exist and are populated. Trade routes function. Laws are maintained and for the most part obeyed. The infrastructure of civilization — market days and postal systems and professional guilds and municipal water — operates with the efficiency of long habit. The people of Sunfall have not lost the ability to build or grow or govern or make art. They have lost something more foundational and less visible: the confidence that any of those activities will ultimately matter. The civilization of the present age operates like a clock that has been wound without the winder believing that anyone will arrive to read the time. The mechanisms are maintained because maintaining them is what one does. The faith that mechanisms serve a purpose has become, for most, a social performance rather than a genuine conviction.
The primary inheritors of the Meridian Age's geography are three loose cultural groupings who share the remnants of Vel Sorath infrastructure without sharing any particular vision for what it should be used toward. The Covenant Holds are a series of walled settlements in the interior — the descendants of Meridian Age administrative centers that withdrew behind their walls when the Descent began and have maintained a careful, increasingly rigid institutional culture ever since. The Covenant Holds are governed by Remembrancers, an administrative-scholarly class whose function is the preservation and interpretation of Meridian Age texts, and who are in the slow process of becoming a priestly caste without having intended to. Their theology is not supernatural — it remains technically rationalist — but the gap between what the texts say the world is and what the world demonstrably is has been growing for three hundred years, and the gap is being papered over with ceremony. The Covenant Holds are orderly, literate, and deeply frightened of what would happen if the order were interrupted long enough for people to notice what they are actually living inside.
The Tidemark Settlements occupy the coastlines and are defined by their relationship to the ocean, which is simultaneously their primary resource and their primary source of dread. The ocean of Sunfall is not what it was. Its deepest trenches reach further than any survey has been able to measure, and what comes up from those trenches — in nets, in the stomachs of harvested fish, in the cargo holds of ships that went down in waters that should have been survivable — is not always what was down there before. The Tidemark people are pragmatic about this in the way of people who cannot afford not to be. They fish the waters that feed them and they do not discuss what they sometimes find in the catch, and they maintain a dense web of superstitions that function as practical safety protocols — never fish the deeper runs on nights when the stars align in specific configurations, never speak certain words on open water, never acknowledge what you see in your net that was not there a moment ago — and they are deeply suspicious of anyone who asks too many questions about the ocean's recent behavioral changes. They are not incurious. They are experienced.
The Wandering Assemblies are the third grouping and the least cohesive — a collective name for the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations that move through the spaces between Holds and Settlements, along the old Vel Sorath road networks and through the wilderness territories that no current authority governs. The Assemblies are diverse in their origins, their practices, and their beliefs, but share a particular relationship to the present age that distinguishes them from the Hold-dwellers and the Tidemarks: they look at what is happening to Sunfall and they do not look away from it. The Assemblies contain the world's most comprehensive body of practical knowledge about the Descent — where the Lattice distortions are strongest, which ruins are safe to enter and which produce effects on visitors that cannot be explained by anything in the natural order, what the behavioral signatures are of the entities that have been appearing with increasing frequency in the wild places. The Assemblies are not brave. They are not curious in any comfortable sense. They look directly at the thing because looking directly at it is the only survival strategy that has worked.