Through the Breach – The World of Malifaux
Malifaux is a world set aside from our own. Located in another realm, in another dimension of reality, it is home to monsters and mankind alike. Far too often, the two become indistinguishable from each other. Despite being a different world, Malifaux is similar to Earth in many ways. It has breathable air, discernible seasons, and a blue sky with a sun that rises in the morning and sets in the evening. The soil is suitable for growing crops, and Earth plants have been successfully transplanted to Malifaux (and vice versa) with little fuss.
There are differences, of course. The stars and constellations in the night sky are completely
different from those of Earth, and two moons – the bright Illios and the darker Delios – hang overhead at night. Some people claim that the sun makes colors appear brighter and more vivid in Malifaux, as if the world had been painted onto glass, but the majority of people who travel to Malifaux don’t notice that much of a change.
In short, Malifaux may seem strange to humans, and it’s certainly dangerous in the way of untamed wildernesses, but it’s rarely alien. Most natural laws, such as humanity understands them, continue to function on Malifaux just as they do on Earth. The one notable difference that separates Earth from Malifaux is the abundance of magical energy. On Earth, spellcasters have always had to struggle to draw upon the magical energy; only the most powerful spellcasters, emboldened by mystical runes
and arcane phrases passed down since ancient times, could even hope to harness this mystical power. In contrast, Malifaux is saturated with magical energy. The same arcane words that could barely light a candle back on Earth are enough to summon up a whirlwind of flame in Malifaux, and even those with no talent for magic gradually find themselves developing strange abilities as the latent magic of the
world seeps into their bodies and souls.
The History of Malifaux
The true history of Malifaux is lost to the annals of time. There are truths and deceptions buried in
equal measure among the legends told by its native denizens, but humanity has been able to piece
together these myths to create a plausible idea of what Malifaux was like prior to the opening of the
Great Breach.
Long ago, Malifaux was inhabited by people similar to humanity. They loved and fought each other as
humanity does, creating items of beauty and weapons of war in equal measure. Their earliest civilizations
learned of magic and studied its use, and as one empire crumbled to make way for the next, magic
and technology advanced in tandem with each other. In time, the people came to believe that they were
masters of magic and technology. They believed that they could solve any problem, rise to any challenge,
and one by one, they solved the greatest problems that plagued them: poverty, disease, sickness, pain…
Eventually, the most clever among them found ways to live without end and ushered in an era of peace
and prosperity.
Gradually, however, these visionaries grew bored with their long lives and, being clever, they sought out
ways to keep themselves entertained. Some created breathtaking art that pushed the boundaries of the
senses, some set out to gather the knowledge of their people in order to share it freely with their brethren,
and others delved deeply into hitherto unexplored realms of magic. Others altered their bodies and
the bodies of those around them in ways they found pleasurable, creating new races through advanced
science and magical ritual.
A handful of the bored immortals turned their attention toward darker pursuits. They found
dangerous ways to waste their time, and, being clever, mastered each one in turn.
What was a thrilling dip into the dark waters for some became a headlong, breathless plunge into depravity
for others. They found deep within themselves the worst perversions and most terrible desires, and
knowing no limits, they turned these things outward onto their fellows. They reveled in the misery they
caused and subjected their kin to cruel experiments and unspeakable sadism simply for their own
amusement and edification. Illness and pain once again abounded in Malifaux.
Drunk on their own power, these entities cast aside their mortal names and souls like snakes shedding
their skins… or perhaps, like moths emerging from cocoons. They assumed sobriquets to describe their
new selves – Plague, Obliteration, Meridion, Despair – but to those who had not ascended, there was only
one word to describe what they had become: Tyrants.
These Tyrants were so powerful that they seemed to be gods. The desperate people of Malifaux exhausted
every available force to stop the Tyrants. They turned to new magic and explored technologies that had
previously been too dangerous to consider. Terrible creatures were created through magical rituals and
spawned in chemical vats to be unleashed upon the Tyrants in the hope of exploiting an unknown
weakness. Armies the likes of which the world had never known marched in the shadows of terrible,
continent-shattering war machines.
Despite the best attempts of Malifaux’s people, however, nothing seemed capable of standing against
the potency of a Tyrant’s magic or their mastery of the sciences. The great machines of war were swept
aside like children’s toys, and entire armies were slaughtered in the blink of an eye.
When all seemed lost, it was the queen of the people who rekindled the hope of victory. Titania gathered
the scattered warriors, artificers, and mystics to her side and told them of her dreams and the machine
she saw there. The machine, she claimed, would allow her to harness the power of death itself in order
to destroy the Tyrants once and for all. The glimmer of hope was all that the survivors needed, and they
turned all of their efforts toward the creation of Titania’s Kythera device.
Unbeknownst to Titania’s followers, she had betrayed them. The Kythera device was not designed to merely
channel the power of death, but rather, to bring the personification of death itself – the Grave Spirit – into
Malifaux; Kythera was a dimensional portal. As it began to open, the Grave Spirit completed its end of
the bargain and infused Titania with its fell power. Only then did her subjects finally realized the full
extent of the dark bargains Titania had made with the entity.
As their queen turned the power of the Grave Spirit toward the Tyrants, killing their physical bodies, the
people who had built Kythera worked desperately to undo what had been done. In the end, they proved
unable to close the device, but they did stop the portal from opening any further than it had. The
corruptive, necromantic power of the Grave Spirit was seeping out of the device, but the entity itself had
been prevented from crossing over and devouring all life in Malifaux.
The act of channeling so much necromantic power had killed Titania, but rather than dying, she passed
into undeath and became a sentient, walking corpse. She expected admiration for defeating the Tyrants,
but her subjects had seen what she had nearly unleashed upon the world and turned on her.
Undead had never existed in Malifaux before Titania, and her former subjects were concerned
that executing her might release her corrupted soul, transforming her into a far greater threat than
she already was. Instead, they altered the plans for Kythera and built a second structure – Nythera – to
serve as a prison for Titania and those members of her court who were still loyal to her. It was believed
that Nythera would keep her contained for all time.
In the decades that followed the end of the Tyrant War, the survivors gradually began to realize that
the Tyrants had not been entirely defeated. Their physical forms had been shattered, true, but their
spirits had endured Titania’s assault and lingered in the aether as specters of their former selves.
Though relatively powerless in this ethereal form, the Tyrants could still exert their will upon the
world in a limited manner.
Worse yet, they seemed capable of forming spiritual bonds with mortals, granting that mortal
power as the Tyrant gradually consumed their soul and took their place in the world. Fearing
the return of such powerful enemies, the people of Malifaux turned their attention toward trapping
the Tyrants in magical prisons. The prisons varied in form and function, utilizing whatever worked
best to bind each Tyrant’s power.
Many of the Tyrants had their own power turned against them. Meridion drew her power from the ley
lines which crisscrossed the world, so the survivors imprisoned her within those same ley lines, forcing
her to destroy the very power that gave her strength in order to escape. Obliteration’s power stemmed
from its ability to manipulate time and remove things from reality, so its jailers constructed its prison from
the Tyrant’s own spiritual form, ensuring that any act of escape would be tantamount to suicide.
Other Tyrants were too subtle or powerful to be bound in such ways, necessitating the need for cruder
prisons. Plague was bound within the Necropolis beneath Malifaux City and warded with spells that
would turn aside anything approaching, Cherufe was imprisoned in a cage high in the sky, where its
flames sputtered and died without fuel, and Despair was sealed inside a fiendishly clever puzzle box.
One by one, each of the Tyrants was bound in prisons crafted from their own power. Some realized
what was happening and chose to exile themselves to different realms of reality: Nytemare fled into the
dream world, for instance, while the Dragon split its essence in half, leaving part of itself in Malifaux as it
flung its other self through the dimensions and into another world entirely… Earth.
The passage between dimensions greatly weakened both that portion of the Dragon’s soul and the
barrier that separated Malifaux from Earth, though it would be millennia before the full ramifications of
that weakening would be felt.
The people of Malifaux had won the war against the Tyrants and bound their spirits, but the price
they paid for their victory was steep. The Tyrants had used their magic and science to twist the minds
and bodies of their servants and enemies into useful tools, and now, the monstrous survivors of those
experiments struggled to find a place in the world. Some of these creatures, such as the Nephilim,
turned their backs on their former masters and took to hunting down those who still served the Tyrants.
Others turned to whatever fragments of magic they had scavenged from the fallen Tyrants, using
it to mutate their forms into new shapes that their vengeful brethren would not recognize.
Gradually, the survivors of the war began to drift away from each other. The great cities – the sites
associated so strongly with the Tyrants – were shunned as the people migrated into the wilds.
With each generation, the trappings of civilization fell further away, until the people had regressed into
tribes and packs.
Distracted as they were by the aftermath of the Tyrant War, the survivors failed to realize that
a far more insidious threat was growing in their midst. The Kythera device provided a link between
Malifaux and the realm of the Grave Spirit, and its corruption gradually spread outwards from the
portal, transforming the land and poisoning the minds of those who had survived the war. Those
who had settled in the most heavily affected areas turned once again to the magic of the Tyrants,
reworking their bodies into forms that could survive the spreading corruption.
Centuries passed, and with each generation, the various transmutative magics that had been worked
upon the people seeped into their offspring and their offspring’s offspring, until eventually, every one of
their descendants possessed an ability to change its physical form. For many, this change became a fixed
part of their growth cycle, such as with the Nephilim, who required red blood to grow larger, but others
retained a greater control over their forms and learned how to change their appearance on a whim.