Several ideas recur throughout the history, religion, magic, and planar scholarship of Kor Sirok. The articles collected here explain the terminology and large-scale events needed to understand those subjects without requiring a reader to begin with any particular nation or campaign history.
Time and History
The Calendar of Kor Sirok describes the dating system used throughout the setting and the broad historical periods into which modern scholars divide the past. These are the Dawn Era, Mythic Era, and present Shattered Era.
The boundaries between these eras reflect major changes in the conditions under which civilizations developed rather than the rise and fall of a single kingdom. The Sundering, for example, marks the transition from the Mythic Era into the Shattered Era because it fundamentally altered Kor Sirok’s relationship with the wider planes.
Creation and the Ancient Kindred
Creation of The Planes describes the earliest history of Creation and the beings now known as the Ancient Kindred. Their disagreements eventually developed into the First War, during which increasingly profound alterations to Creation produced the First Paradox.
The war ended through the Concord of Creation, also preserved in some traditions as the First Binding. The Concord established limits upon the foundational powers of the Ancient Kindred and shaped many of the conditions under which gods, mortals, and the planes have existed since.
Knowledge of these events is incomplete among mortals. Surviving religions, ancient traditions, planar scholarship, and fragmentary histories preserve portions of the story, but no ordinary mortal tradition possesses the whole account.
Magic
The Confluence is the principal framework used by modern scholars to understand conventional magic around Kor Sirok. It is the continuing metaphysical interaction associated with Amundala and Phaethos, anchored through the two moons bearing their names.
Psionics describes a different means of perceiving and manipulating metaphysical relationships. Psionic abilities do not appear to depend upon the Confluence in the same manner as conventional spellcasting, although their underlying nature remains the subject of considerable study.
Planar Relationships and Travel
Planar travel depends upon relationships between stable realities rather than ordinary geographic distance. The Verge is the transitional condition experienced when one stable reality gives way to another.
A Planar Seam is a location where two realities possess an unusually strong relationship. A Crossing is a seam shallow enough to permit direct passage, while a Vergeway is a stable or sufficiently predictable route through the Verge. These distinctions are fundamental to modern planar navigation.
For the larger structure of Creation and the realms known to planar scholarship, see Planes of Existence and Cosmological Models.
Kor Sirok and the Outside
The Twilight Veil is an ancient protection created at the end of the Twilight War to prevent beings from the Nascent Expanse from establishing themselves within Kor Sirok. It has survived for thousands of years, though both the Sundering and the Harrowing demonstrate that the protections separating Kor Sirok from threats beyond Creation are not absolute.
The Nascent Expanse is not another plane. It lies outside the stable framework of Creation, and the assumptions that make ordinary planar geography possible cannot be relied upon there.