In the beginning, the First Age, the Age of the Wild, dungeons were wild things, simply swallowing up anything and everything that was too weak to survive one. But mortals were stubborn creatures, and didn’t let resources go unused for long.

At first, the various kingdoms had tried to use dungeons for themselves, starting the Age of Exploration. This… didn’t end well. Wars were fought between kingdoms for exclusive use of the dungeons. Adventurers who delved into them quickly grew powerful enough to slaughter entire armies with their new abilities, and political power changed hands as quickly as the next person could “level up” and become more powerful than the previous dictator was. Eventually, things got bad enough that the mages stepped in as a united whole, and forcibly took control of the situation by warding the dungeons off to anyone not a mage. They destroyed any dungeon that was “too large” to easily control, and took the rest for themselves. Thus began the Second Age, the Magisters’ Age.

The Age of Magisters… didn’t last for long, as Ages go. As it turns out, just because mages were used to having power already, it didn’t mean that they weren’t also susceptible to the lure of ever more power. Once the mages started studying the dungeons, they too began to fight over them. The power that a dungeon could give granted them more than just greater power in a direct fashion, the new spells they learned granted the mages something even more seductive. Knowledge. Mages had to understand how their spells worked to use them, gaining new spells from the dungeons would then pour greater understanding into them directly somehow.

At first it didn’t seem like too big a deal. After all, mages always sought to understand the world around them - but some knowledge was forbidden. There were things that mere men were just not meant to know. Mages already trespassed on the line between mortals and the gods, but that border was a wide one. Just stepping on the line didn’t imply going too far… but crossing it was a problem. A lich for example; or other methods of attempting immortality, these things were clear violations of the natural order. Mortals were just that - mortal, as in, meant to die.

Still, at first the Mages were tolerated. The dangers soon revealed themselves and they started policing themselves, even allowing select non-mages back into the dungeons in order to create an order of powerful knights who could aid the mage order in taking down any mage who went rogue and attempted the forbidden. They also allowed warriors dedicated to the gods to enter for training purposes as well, while keeping out any who served the various mortal kingdoms of the world.

Thus was a new balance found. Once again, any dungeons “too large” to be easily controlled were destroyed, and the rest brought into the new order. Mages and their anti-mage knight units policed themselves, while the various Paladin orders would still be able to train themselves in order to keep them strong for battles against any demonic summonings or other hellish incursions. It was thought to be the end of the problem of Dungeons… Until one mage found a way to bind themselves to a Dungeon Core. Following a lich ritual, but using the Dungeon Core as their phylactery? That had been the birth of the first of those beings called Dungeon Lords, who brought about the Third Age, named for their might.

The greatest discovery of the Age of Dungeon Lords was that a Dungeon Lord could completely control the power of a Dungeon. They could control the rate at which the monsters inside spawned, they could change the layout of the dungeon, alter the possible “loot drops” enemies left behind, they could gain new creatures for the dungeon by taking or otherwise obtaining monster followers, they could even move the dungeon entirely, though this took significant power and effort on their part.

Eventually, as more and more mages took the opportunity to become something greater than themselves, the Dungeon Lords went to war against one another, either to try and obtain the cores other Dungeon Lords held, or to destroy their potential rivals, no one was sure which, possibly both. With military members having been forbidden from entering the dungeons, there was no one powerful enough with great enough numbers to stop these new mages who could summon their warriors in seemingly endless numbers. Especially since many of these Dungeon Lords had their own anti-mage units as guards in their own dungeon.

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Eventually, with war sweeping over the continent, the Gods were forced to step in and deal with the problem themselves. They immediately sent their Paladins to destroy the Dungeons. This was worse however, as it was discovered that Dungeon Lords were able to summon demons into their employ, and could apparently force angels to serve as well. Normally if an angel or demon left the service of their God, they lost the vast majority of their powers - but those in the service of a powerful enough Dungeon Lord were able to maintain their abilities due to the power provided by the Core. Furthermore, the angels and demons who were under the control of a Dungeon Lord were brainwashed or subverted in some other manner, working together when they were antithetical to one another in such a way.

This was the final straw. Gods and Demon Gods alike decided that the Dungeon Lords were too dangerous. Angels and Demons fighting side-by-side for a single leader? It was a perversion of the natural order. There were even more disturbing rumors of Angelic and Demonic hybrids that had been created in the service of these Dungeon Lords. Not fallen angels, not ascended demons, no, actual half-breeds that contained both celestial and abyssal powers. A fallen angel lost their celestial powers in favor of abyssal variants, an ascended demon lost their abyssal power for celestial variants. Not until the Dungeon Lords had any creature been able to contain both at once - not even the Gods had managed that.

Well, it was only an unconfirmed rumor, but even the rumor alone was troubling. Such a perversion of the natural order? Abominations like that were only spoken of in whispers, sounding too much like the legendary “forbidden realms beyond the stars”, realms where supposedly anything was possible - but not in the good way that you told your children when they were asking what they could be when they grew up. No, the forbidden realms were where even the Gods and Demon Gods would work together, a place of such pure Chaos that you could be unmade in an instant and remade into something utterly anathema to all life, just by being there. Those realms were unconfirmed, and as far as you knew both the church and the demonic cults denied their existence, but rumors would always persist.

Nonetheless, rumors being true or not, this second purge of the Dungeons had the armies of the Gods materialize on the material plane and fight beside the Paladins. Even the Abyssal serving ones, the so-called “Anti-paladin” had joined in on the crusade flanked by their demonic masters. Angels and Demons had manifested on the mortal plane for a single unified purpose - destroying the Dungeon Lords that dared to defy the natural order, bringing about the Fifth Age, the Age of the Gods.

Once again, the dungeons had been destroyed, this time their cores shattered, and scattered to the winds. However, Dungeons could never truly be destroyed. Even if you utterly shattered a core, then spread its pieces as far and wide as possible, it would slowly reform over time. The power behind a dungeon was an inviolable part of reality. However the time gave the Gods - both Celestial and Abyssal - time to come to a decision. The dungeons from this point forward, would be monitored and controlled by the Church. Servants of the Gods, no matter their alignment, would monitor and maintain the natural order by ensuring that no one gained the power of a Dungeon ever again.

This didn’t render Dungeons safe, after all if you recall from my earlier description of the times before dungeons were used as a resource, you’ll remember that even without a Dungeon Lord dungeons attracted monsters, adventurers, and mages - and they were also subtly attracted to each other. Whenever two dungeons met, one would subsume the other, growing larger and more powerful. Furthermore, it was nigh impossible to know where and when a new dungeon was going to form. Unless you were practically on top of the location, the spells designed to sense such a thing would find nothing, as their range was too small. Thus, even finding a dungeon in order to police it before someone claimed it proved difficult.

Keeping dungeons small was the most important thing as well. After all, no one wanted an unkillable beast with deific power on the loose, especially since dungeons in their natural state seemed to operate at a basic instinct level, devouring anything that went into them, only to recreate the devoured as a defensive creature that would lose all reason and attempt to kill anything that entered, all to continue feeding the dungeon.

And thus, began the age we find ourselves in today, the Sixth Age, and this is the story of how that Age came about, and he who would bring it into being.

~ Ban Zhao, historian of the Twelfth Age.