The Shattering of Antrom
For three hundred years the Kingdom of Antrom ran on aether crystal.
Miners pulled it from the veins beneath the Crown Mountains, refineries burned it into
plasma, and the kingdom grew rich enough to stop asking where
the crystal came from. The deeper the drills went, the stranger the veins became — warmer,
brighter, arranged in patterns no mineral should hold.
Then a deep bore broke through the last stretch of rock, and Antrom learned the truth: the
veins were never ore. They were the Aethyr — an elder race entombed in crystal beneath the
mountains, dreaming for ten thousand years. Their waking split the Crown Mountains apart and
broke the kingdom with them. What is left are battlegrounds: a scarred grey plateau where
the Crown fell, green islands where the lowlands drowned, an ashen causeway that still
joins two halves of a city, and a pair of reliquaries staring at each other across open
ground.
Three Banners Over the Ruins
The Vanguard are what remains of Antrom's army — the engineers
and soldiers who dug the kingdom's mines and now fight to win its ruins back. They know they
caused the Shattering. They intend to out-build it. Warmaster Kael leads from the front, and
his crews can weld a firebase together faster than anyone can burn one down.
The Aethyr are the ones the drills woke. To them, every crystal
vein is a tomb still holding their sleeping kin, and every harvester on it is grave robbery.
Their gilded war-machines assemble themselves from light, and Riftlord Auren has one demand:
the veins returned, or the diggers erased.
The Myriad are the Shattering's accident. Raw crystal energy
bled into the cracks of the broken world and fused everything living down there into a single
will with endless bodies. Broodmother Szel does not negotiate, build, or stop. The swarm
spawns, the swarm feeds, and every battlefield it touches becomes a nest.
The War for the Veins
Three armies, one prize: the fragments of Antrom, every one of them rich with the crystal and
plasma that started this. No treaty survives contact with a fresh vein. Commanders drop onto
the ruins, raise a base from nothing, and fight until every enemy banner is ash — the only
victory the veins recognize is a battlefield with a single flag on it. Harvest the crystal,
tap the plasma vents, climb the tech tree, and choose your moment: the war for Antrom is won
by the commander who turns resources into an army one push faster than everyone else.
