Tal'Dorei, Wildemount, Whitestone, Emon, Westruun, and the old roads are where memory says they should be.
The World
Public Canon
The World
Inverted Exandria, 836 P.D.: familiar continents, altered saints, and a peace built on the memory of a war the bards did not sing cleanly.
The people canon remembers as horrors are celebrated here as Saviors, while Vox Machina became the warning.
The world is mostly safe, but remnants, aging authorities, and unanswered costs are starting to move again.
Geographically, this is Exandria. The continent of Tal’Dorei still curls around the Ozmit Sea. Wildemount still sprawls east. The Frostweald, the Bramblewood, Emon, Whitestone, Westruun, the Underdark, the Feywild — all where the lore puts them.
What’s inverted is moral history: who fought whom, who won, and who the bards sing about.
Public Canon
The Big Inversion
In the original Exandria, Vox Machina were a band of misfits who saved the world from the Chroma Conclave, the Briarwoods of Whitestone, the Lich-King Vecna, and assorted other horrors. They became Lords and Ladies of the realm.
In this Exandria, those “horrors” were not horrors. They were the people who actually held the world together: the Briarwoods were sun-blessed clerics who restored Whitestone, Dr. Anna Ripley was a brilliant medical scientist whose work saved tens of thousands, the Chroma Council was a cabal of ancient guardian-wyrms who balanced the elements, Vecna the Whispered One was a melancholy archmage devoted to memory and the preservation of fragile knowledge, and so on.
Vox Machina, by contrast, rose from the wilds twenty-four years ago as a self-styled vanguard intent on remaking the world by force. They were charismatic, dangerous, and wrong. Whitestone burned. Healers were gunned down in their hospitals. Wyrms were butchered in their lairs. Sacred libraries were ransacked.
They lost.
The alliance of Briarwoods, Ripley, the Chroma Council, the Whispered One, the redeemed shadow Orthax, and several other figures stopped them — at terrible cost. Today’s Exandria is built on that aftermath. The figures who stopped them are the celebrated Saviors of the modern era. Vox Machina are remembered as the Fallen Machina: the great cautionary tale of the age, taught to children, sung at festivals, painted on the cheap printed broadsheets that emerged from Whitestone’s post-war reform.
Field Notes
When Are We?
Default: 24 years after the fall of Vox Machina (year 836 P.D., one Founding Day generation past the war). The Saviors are old now. Some are still active; some are retired into legend. The party are young adventurers who came of age in a world that was already saved — but is starting, in small ways, to feel less safe.
Whispered Truth
The Layers of What People Know
Even though the heroes won, the truth of what happened isn’t simple. What ordinary Exandrians are taught about the war is mostly accurate — but historians, surviving witnesses, and the children of the Saviors will tell you the picture is more complicated than the public hymns admit.
| Layer | Who Believes It | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Public canon | 95% of Exandria | The Briarwoods, blessed by Pelor, defended Whitestone from the Vox Machina invasion. They fell as martyrs. Lord Sylas’s body lies under the Sun Tree. |
| Whispered | Historians, surviving witnesses, the children of the Saviors | The Briarwoods were once Whispered-cult acolytes who turned from that path two decades before Vox Machina arrived. Their heroism was real, but recent — and at least one of them never fully renounced their old loyalties. |
Public Canon
What Stayed the Same
- Geography, calendar, climate, the gods (mostly).
- The Divergence still happened — gods walked, were exiled, etc.
- Magic functions identically. Standard 5e rules apply.
- Most NPCs (innkeepers, merchants, guards) are background figures from the standard Tal’Dorei sourcebook.
- The Chroma Conclave attack on Emon still happened in this world too — but as Vox Machina’s failed atrocity, not the dragons’. The dragons came after, to clean up the survivors and protect what was left.
Public Canon
What Flipped
- Canon’s “heroes” → defeated villains, dead a generation. (See
03-Fallen-Machina/.) - Canon’s “villains” → celebrated Saviors, alive or revered. (See
02-Heroes-of-Exandria/.) - Whitestone: a thriving city under Lady Cassandra de Rolo (the only de Rolo who didn’t side with her brother Percival), with the Briarwoods’ ash-tomb tended as a holy site beneath a restored Sun Tree.
- Emon: rebuilt by a council that includes Dr. Ripley’s surviving students. The Sovereign-line is currently held by a non-Vox-Machina figure. Scanlan Shorthalt’s name is on no monument anywhere.
- Vasselheim: the gods’ city. Where the Whispered One’s Vault of Memory was relocated after the war. Major pilgrimage site.
- Zephrah: the Air Ashari are back to their pre-war role of elemental balance, under a new Voice (not Keyleth, who died at the war’s end). The Drowning Trial of Vox Machina’s Keyleth is now a ritual cleansing site.
- Westruun: Grog’s burned half is rebuilt. The Herd of Storms (his old tribe, which he tried to lead) is back to ancestral practice and forbids his name being spoken aloud.
- The gods’ favor: most divine patrons are at peace. The Raven Queen, in particular, took back the role Vax’ildan tried to claim for himself; her current Champion is a quiet half-elf woman in Vasselheim.
Public Canon
The Saviors’ Authority
The eight or so principal Saviors do not rule a unified empire. They each retreated to or consolidated their own region, and a loose Concord of the Dawn treaty keeps them in semi-regular contact. In practical terms:
- Lady Delilah Briarwood — alive, an old woman, retired to Whitestone as Lady Cassandra’s spiritual advisor.
- Lord Sylas Briarwood — fell at the climax of the war. Body interred beneath the Sun Tree. Locally venerated.
- Dr. Anna Ripley — alive, ancient by now (extended by her own techniques), running a research institute in Wildmount.
- The Chroma Council — Thordak (red), Umbrasyl (black), Vorugal (white), Brimscythe (blue), Raishan (green) — three of the five still living; two fell in the war.
- Vecna the Whispered One — alive in some form. Maintains the Vault of Memory. Most reclusive of the Saviors.
- Orthax the Redeemed — bound spirit, now venerated as a patron of warriors who turn from vengeance. Resides in the Whitestone forge as its blessing.
- Plus various lieutenants and lesser-known allies (see
02-Heroes-of-Exandria/06-other-saviors.md).
Field Notes
The Tension That Drives Play
The world is at peace, mostly, but the peace is fraying. Possible pressure points include:
- Remnants: Vox Machina cultists, body-snatchers, or genuine returned undead are stirring.
- Aging: the Saviors are old, dying, or retreating from public life. Who fills their shoes?
- External: a new threat that the Saviors did not foresee — from the Underdark, the Feywild, the Far Realm, or another continent.
The party arrives in this world young, ordinary, and increasingly entangled in the cracks that are starting to show.
Field Notes
Tone Note
This world is, by default, a hopeful one — the heroes won, the people remember, and most ordinary days are peaceful. The interesting questions are not “is everything terrible?” but “what did winning cost, and what is left?” Whitestone’s children grow up tending the Briarwoods’ ash-garden. Vasselheim’s libraries are richer than they have ever been. The Chroma Council teaches young dragons restraint. The horror, where it exists, is in the cracks — and those cracks may widen.