- Timeline -
The history of our History
2016
- January 1st
- With the first sunrise of the new year, a wave of violet light sweeps the globe, touching each country as the light of the sun meets the land. It is invisible to cameras and doesn't disturb wildlife - only mankind notices, and they see the purplish light even in their dreams when they're not awake. This event becomes known as the Violet Dawn.
- Immediately, governments enforce a coerced silence on media corporations and try to stifle the news while their intelligence agencies figure out what exactly happened.
- January 3rd
- A significant portion of the world’s population suddenly manifest magical abilities. The vast majority of these tragic individuals are either killed by the uncontrollable manifestation of their vast power, or driven irrevocably and unintelligibly insane - and are subsequently lethally subdued by riot police and government response.
- Very few of what were eventually called The First Wave were taken alive; those that were, disappeared completely. It is likely that their citizenships were revoked, and that they remained in state custody until their deaths in captivity.
- It is unknown if any 1st Generation Mages survive in the wild, but estimates are that less than a handful possibly could - and that less than a half could still possibly be serviceably sane. The events of this period will come to be known, one day, as the first World Wide Witchhunt.
2017
- January 1st
- It happens again. Like a flashback to a nightmare, the public find themselves once again the subject of a wave of Violet light, washing over them like an occult tide with the rising of the sun. The world watches in horror… and waits in dread.
- January 3rd
- The Second Wave awaken, and much like the first one they are either so wildly out of control of their powers that they are killed by them, publicly, or they are mentally destroyed by the weight of their new abilities. The government respond as they did before - with gunfire and Witchhunts. The position of the agencies created to deal with The First Wave is now secure; these are the forefather agencies of the modern institutions dedicated to hunting magicians - and accordingly, the second World Wide Witchhunt commences. A few more magicians from this era survive the bloodshed, but not many. Never many.
- April 20th
- The Stafford Act - informally known as the Inquisition act - is passed by the UK parliament and subsequently taken up by the European Parliament as well. It formalises the cancellation of Brexit and the beginning of global intelligence cooperation to counter the Magical Threat. Mages are not quite universally seen as an enemy of civilisation as a whole, yet, but the public are terrified.
2018
- January 1st-3rd
- The Third Wave are expected to follow this year’s Violet Dawn by the FOE, and by the wider antimagic intelligence community - but they expected it to be different, more chaotic, more violent. The magicians of the Third Generation are instead like something more subtly deranged, like a failed experiment. For this reason, many of them survive, at least initially. Their hallucinations and delusions will eventually lead most of them to be captured nonetheless, but in the meantime they remain the most survivable Generation yet.
- February 4th
- The disparate branches and divisions of existing national intelligence agencies - the FBI Unusual Affairs branch, the CIA’s Extraordinary Intelligence Committee, the NSA’s Paranormal Task Force, MI5’s Crowley Office… - are formally dissolved and recondensed into their own institutions of investigation, by almost unanimous votes in nearly every sovereign nation in the world. This is the birthday of the European Magical Defence Agency, with the birthday of the Federal Occult Enforcement group coming the next day on the 5th of February.
- September 24th
- The Magician known as Cam, a talented and reasonably stable individual of the third generation, develops their abilities and is eventually able to identify individuals with latent magical potential. They immediately begin using this ability to try and find themselves some friends.
- December 25th
- Cam succeeds in finding seven others who are due to awaken after the next Violet Dawn. Knowing that they will not be able to reveal themselves until they too have self-identified as Magicians, Cam puts measures in place to protect them, and waits for the Sunrise on New Year’s Morning.
2019
- January 1st-3rd
- As is now the broadly accepted pattern, on New Year’s morning the world is once again bathed by the Violet Dawn, and once again another fraction of the population is awoken. This year’s magicians are the most stable yet, 90% or so of them remaining both bodily and mentally intact. Intelligence agencies scramble to capture them, using new - if primitive - magic-sensing devices developed covertly using captured mages to test on; they are moderately successful, but for the first time most of the awakened Fourth Generation remain free past the first month mark.
- Cam is successful in liberating four of the seven - the FOE were already too close to the other three - and bringing them together in Brightwell, Illinois. This is where they will, in the coming weeks, become the founders of the Violet Underground.
2020
- January 1st
- The Violet Dawn arrives once more.
- January 3rd
- You Awaken as a part of the Fifth Generation.
- At 03:03AM, on the third minute of the third hour of the third day of the year, you get a text from an unknown number, telling you that FOE will be knocking on your door in fifteen minutes, and that you need to leave your apartment by the back entrance and meet them in a nearby alleyway if you want to live. The text is brief, but apologetic - and you probably don’t have any better options anyway.
- After a traumatic but successful extraction, you arrive in Goodnight, an abandoned mall complex used as a temporary shelter for the VU and freshly awakened survivors.
Important Information
Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the world of Paradigm Shift. This is a roleplay where your character is a newly awakened magician, with no particular training or extensive background in magic, who is rescued shortly after their awakening by an agent of the Violet Underground and whisked away to safety just barely in the nick of time.
This isn’t an RP about saving the world, and it’s not a game where every plot line will have a happy ending. There will be loss and pain in equal or greater amounts as there will be joy and hope. You will be dealing with forces that were, and are, almost entirely beyond human comprehension - and you will also be dealing with forces created by mankind, too. This will be a story about survival as much as about being the good guy, and I personally have very high hopes for it.
Before we truly begin, however, some ground rules…
- Expanded Lore -
Stories and Detail
- OOC and CS Skeleton -
This RP aims to actively work with its player-base to produce a tailored experience to the characters. As such, it works on a mutual trust between the players and GMs to act reasonably and within the limits of the world set before them. In order to encourage communication and mutual content building for the game, the character creation process becomes an application into the RP with the slight chance of rejection.
Please do not be alarmed by this! The way that character creation works is as follows:
- The player creates their character sheet as per usual. In this example, they have some areas they could improve upon.
- A GM will formally check their sheet and provide official feedback on the improvements that need to be made before they are accepted.
- The player submits their improved sheet, whereupon it will either be accepted or declined.
Throughout the entirety of the process, the player is allowed to ask any queries they may have about lore, their application’s shortcomings, or potential ideas and work-arounds. Even though you get two ‘chances’ to formally submit your sheet, you are actively encouraged to ask any questions you have and work with the GMs to produce the best version of your character.
The CS Skeleton is below: