All know of the City of Union as an enormously active hub of bustling tradeand adventure hooks. It serves as a source of nearly everything in allcampaign worlds, and in fact sustains itself by connecting at once to everyone of them, drawing what benefit it can from each. For the most part, atraveler in Union can expect to find the standard adventuring hooks andmagical gear, but with eyes more peeled one might see travelers from otherworlds, similar yet alien, who enter through otherwise impassable planarportals, bring with them new goods and culture and money, and leave again backto their lives through similarly blank and unadmitting gateways. It is thisexistence in all campaign universes at once that presents Union as anotherwise impossible source of wealth and power in any given one of them.Time with respect to what lies outside is mostly immaterial in Union - thecity has existed and thrived since the first storytellers, and is infinite inextent along the timestream as countless stories see their characters visitthe city.And so it was that on one completely anonymous day, a group of rather powerfuladventurers happened upon a strange occurance. They were Adama, divineembodiment of the principles of growth and sustenance, Vogar, wielder ofarcane power whose ambition best manifested as a drive for perfection, Manny,a slippery character who tends to pop up always in the right place and time tooffer just the right piece of skill or knowledge, and Vermi, stalwart defenderof sensibility and level-headedness.The four had come to Union after a particularly nasty happenstance in theirhomeworld that threatened to leave it broken and lifeless, seeking someone orsomething to benefit them. Shortly afer emerging from their material plane'sportal, they spotted a similar portal that, while expected to be blocked offto them, instead admitted without a problem at all.They found themselves in a newborn world, full of potential but doing nothingwith it. Manny, most genre-savvy of all and most familiar with the story andnature of Union, deduced that this must have been a campaign world newlycreated but abandoned before any civilization was conceived. (Narrative note:This does not count as the "one big coincidence per story", since omega ofthese universes could exist and omega groups of metagame-knowledgeableadventurers could happen upon any of them.) Adama proposed that if they couldbring their people from their dying world to this one, they could set up a newnation and nurture it into prosperity... and so was born the world of Syra.Constructed from the raw energy that was abundant in the plane, civilizationgrew very rapidly, and all who lived there fluorished.Vogar, knowledgeable above all about cosmological matters, became instantlycurious about what possibilities that such a discovery could open. So after afew weeks of the four at work pulling a small metropolis out of nowhere, heannounced that he thought there was much more to be done, much more power tobe harnessed to benefit them and their people. Adama thought the four of themshould stick together, because their abilities should all be put together tobest feed the prosperity of their people. Vermi warned Vogar against gettingin over his head, that they should consider themselves lucky to have a workinguniverse and keep their focus on what they had at hand. Manny simply chuckledand requested that if Vogar found himself in the universe of the storytellersof the campaign that he be careful not to slay anybody. So with three warningsat his back, Vogar took off back through the portal to Union and was not seenagain.Since that time, Adama, Manny, and Vermi led the growth of what is now thecapital city of Syra, called Kria. Kria sits in nearly the exact center of thecontinent and serves as a trading hub among all the settlements that havearisen across Syra. People soon deemed life to be stable, and the threeleaders then decided what to do with themselves. As thought best by everyone,Vermi took responsibility for ruling Kria, and reigned as empress with calmdemeanor and strict justice, before dying of old age in the year 23 AS (AfterSettlement). Manny served as Vermi's political advisor for a few years beforebecoming restless and forming a new adventuring party to go explore the world.Adama immediately departed for the Elven lands in the southeast, to keep herremaining family company, but in dire times has been known to pass politicaldecisions for Kria from afar.Much has developed in the half century since first discovery, and even thelarge mishaps that have come and go and sometimes stayed around for dinnernever seem to bother anybody too much. Idealistic beliefs standing in conflictwith desire to worship a newfound pantheon have passively settled their scorethrough geographic distance, a struggle for control over the portal to Unionhas been kept nondestructive by an unspoken agreement on both sides to notdedicate inordinately much force, and many groups of magic users have marketedservices in travelling the vast distances across the land in the absence ofmany roads. The year is now 56 AS.