Fallopia and the Xun

The back story for this setting is rather convoluted — not surprising in a game which has been in play for 30+ years and undergone 3 rules changes (it began as first edition D’nD). Rather than detail who was doing what to whom over almost almost two centuries of character time, I’ll just touch on the highlights as they pertain to the Backworlds campaign as it now exists. Fallopia, named for Gabriele Falloppio inventor of the condom, was a newly founded Benevolent colony when a daring act of sabotage cut it off from the interstellar community. Freed from their psionic slave masters, the transplanted sapients of Fallopia scrambled to develop appropriate technologies before the last of the offworld machines stopped working.

The Xun are a reptilian race who had been settled on the arid West Continent, first to recover from the Disaster and the ones who have delved deepest into magic-based technologies, largely due to their proximity to one of Fallopia’s two native intelligences both of whom are highly psionic. As they expanded eastward along the archipelago which connects the two major land masses, they conquered all in their path so that in the present time they effectively rule all of Fallopia other than the Dwarves of Arctica and the Elves beyond East Continent’s Dragonsbane Mountains (where Fallopia’s other native intelligence lives).

One of the technologies the Xun have developed is the creation of tiny pocket universes accessible from Fallopia or from one another (depending on where its creator spun it off from). Some years after being rediscovered by the interstellar community, the Xun had an interstellar war go very badly for their allies and tucked Fallopia into a pocket universe of its own to evade an avenging fleet (see what happens when you play “Let’s you and them fight?”). Since then, Fallopia has been the hub of a system of pocket universes trading with one another under the Xun’s careful eye.