Stormhaven is the great city at the heart of the Stormhaven Chronicles. It is home to the Stormhaven Paladins — Warriors of Light — who, alongside the elected Administrators, the Guilds Council, and District Representatives, share in the city’s governance. At the top sits the Prime Administrator, the nominal head of government for both Stormhaven and the Arten Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth is a federation of city-states bound by laws that emphasise personal rights and that are upheld by the Paladin Order. Its authority flows from the Commonwealth Assembly and the Prime Administrator, who oversees not only the capital’s bureaucracy but also the administrations of the wider federation. In Stormhaven itself, the Guilds are arguably the most influential faction, while in some outlying city-states hereditary nobles still cling to power — a century after Ulf’s Revolution.
Ulf Pendragon, the Commonwealth’s founder, is remembered as the leader who freed the serfs from the land, though not the land for the serfs. Successive Pendragons, as heads of the Paladin Order, together with later Administrators, have struggled to complete Ulf’s Revolution and secure justice across the Commonwealth.
The Arten Commonwealth stands today in uneasy rivalry with the Adzar Empire. Both powers lie on Damunger, one of four continents on the world of N’Ume. Roughly the size of Europe at 10 million square kilometers, Damunger is a land of diverse peoples and histories. Through ancient trans-dimensional rifts, cultures from Earth — European, African, Asian, and others — migrated here. For the past thousand years, however, no great rifts have appeared, ending the age of mass migrations. Yet spatio-temporal anomalies still linger, and on rare occasions, a traveler from Earth may stumble into N’Ume, with no safe path home.
Scientific development on N’Ume has not advanced beyond Earth’s early 19th century — the Age of Steam. Alongside familiar sciences, however, lie other technologies that outsiders might call magical or paranormal. It is said that N’Ume itself is more responsive to thought, word, and deed, giving rise to extraordinary arts and powers. The term Kai is used for all sapient life: humanoid races such as the Manakai, Orakai, Elvakai, and Dwarakai, and also non-humanoids such as the Drakai — the great manta-like creatures that soar in N’Ume’s skies. Kai may mean soul, mind, self, people, or force, and often all of these at once.
Damunger alone holds an estimated 50 million Manakai (human) inhabitants, alongside smaller but significant populations of Orakai (orcs), Elvakai (elves), and Dwarakai (dwarves). Maps exist only of Damunger so far, though it is known that N’Ume holds another northern continent and three more across the globe.