Mentack
Lore Archive

Dates are written in KM — the Card Era — counted from the year the first true card was made.

Everyone in this world is human. Lineages shape culture and affinity — they do not create separate species.

Raw magic was unstable and lethal; seals were invented to guide it, and cards made seal knowledge portable.

Cards are seal knowledge made portable — from the elementless Ancient Cards to the element cards born of catastrophe.

Owning a card is not the same as being able to use one — untrained use is weak, wasted, or dangerous.

Cards are made from seal-bearing Syleth paper by trained producers — making and using cards are separate disciplines.

Cards do not burn, tear, break, or age — but each card is spent when used.

A deck is many single-use cards — and an inheritance of technique, style, selection, and worldview.

Cards choose no one — but a carried deck lies inside its owner's personal seal field, which makes theft its own craft.

The Void is the only true other dimension — a place where the order of existence fails.

The Seep is a reality-corroding substance that taints plants after a Void Gate opens.

The Void Exile is the old punishment of casting criminals into the Void — lawful in theory, and not always in practice.

The dead pass on to the soul realm — a place of continuation, not a power that intervenes in the world.

The Parallel Shard is a fragment of another reality that fell on Virex — and the mystery no one has solved.

The world runs on Oren coin and Syleth paper — a card economy stretched between honest markets and priced secrets.

Card commerce is legal and priced by craft, rarity, difficulty, legality, and history.

Selling forbidden cards is a grave crime — uncontrolled Void work, mind-breaking Sound seals, and their kin.

Syleth grows best in the neutral central lowlands — which is why the card economy's heart sits on politically shared ground.