Revision 9

Overview

The Nolands are the surviving human people in Everland. Their ancestors built a civilization under the protection of four elemental deities, but that civilization was destroyed during The War Between Heaven and Man. The Nolands now live as scattered communities, scavenging pre-war ruins and struggling to survive in a hostile world.

History

Before the war, the Nolands' ancestors were a prosperous people who had mastered construction, agriculture, and craftsmanship under divine guidance. Temples to the four elemental forces dotted their cities, and their technology incorporated elemental energy into everyday tools and structures.

When the divine forces turned destructive, the civilization collapsed in a matter of generations. The survivors who managed to endure the calamities became the Nolands, named for the loss of their lands. Knowledge of pre-war technology was largely lost, preserved only in scattered ruins and oral tradition.

Present State

The Nolands live in small, loosely connected settlements. They are resourceful and adaptive, having learned to read weather patterns, avoid calamity zones, and build structures that can withstand environmental threats. Their communities depend on foraging, hunting, and the occasional salvage run into dangerous ruin sites.

Role of the Player

The player character is a member of the Nolands. Over the course of the game, the player works to rebuild, explore Everland's lost regions, and uncover the truth behind the war. The player is accompanied by Elle, a mysterious companion whose connection to Everland's past may hold answers.

Mission

The Nolands' overarching goal is restoration. They want to reclaim their homeland, rebuild their civilization, and, if possible, understand and reverse the forces that destroyed it. Whether that means making peace with the elemental forces or finding a way to stop them entirely is not yet clear.

Once-Resplendent Civilization

The game's official description gives the pre-war Nolands a one-line summary: "Once, under the blessing of the deities, your forebears forged a once-resplendent civilization, an era of wondrous crafts and countless creations." The phrasing positions the pre-war Nolands as a peak of craftsmanship and creation, not a primitive society. Their fall is therefore a collapse from a height, which informs both the game's tone (mournful reclamation rather than discovery) and the player's narrative role (restoration of a remembered glory, not the founding of a new culture).

The Nolands of the present are scattered survivors of that collapse. Their settlements are small, loosely federated, and built among the ruins of pre-war infrastructure. Knowledge of the old crafts persists in fragments, recovered through salvage runs into dangerous ruin sites and through oral tradition between settlements.

Homelands of the Forebears

The published lore of Everland's regions fills in how the Nolands' ancestors once lived. On the Plain they built villages, raised livestock, and carved instruments from the bones of strange beasts, melodies that were said to tame beasts and summon storm and rain. By the Waters they mastered hydraulic engineering, firing riverbed mud into vessels and metal-casting molds, and built ships to travel between islands. In the mountains a Shamanism civilization held the peaks sacred, and elsewhere a bronze-working civilization flourished before the Gobi Desert buried it under sand. These were not primitive settlements but a network of distinct, skilled cultures, which is why their fall reads as a collapse from a height rather than a slow decline.

The Bone Field marks one of the most direct links between the Nolands and the wild beasts of today: the colossal Si rhinos that fought beside the ancestors in battle left the bones that name the region. The survivors who endured the calamities carried fragments of all of this knowledge forward into the scattered settlements of the present.