The Elder Scrolls: Legacy is a fantasy setting in which countless petty kingdoms struggle against each other for supremacy over the continent of Tamriel. Its people make endless war in the hope of bringing a close to the blood-soaked Second Age.
Type: BlossomThere are Eight Divines and Nine Daedric Princes, considered gods and worshipped in many forms across the land of Nirn. The Eight Divines are tied into the world, and thus are largely dormant; the Daedric Princes are an incursive force that seeks to expand into (and in some cases destroy) the world. Otherwise, they act like gods in normal fantasy settings, with petitioners, worshippers, cleric boons, and so on. The Divines are not necessarily good, nor are the Daedra necessarily evil.
-Akatosh: The Dragon Aedra of Time.
-Arkay: The Aedra of Life and Death.
-Azura: The Daedric Prince of Dawn, Dusk, Vanity, Egotism.
-Boethiah: The Daedric Prince of Deceit, Conspiracy, Secret Plots, and Rebellion.
-Clavicus Vile: The Daedric Prince of Wishes and Pacts.
-Dibella: The Aedra of Beauty.
-Hermaeus Mora: The Daedric Prince of Fate, Knowledge, The Past, and The Future.
-Hircine: The Daedric Prince of the Hunt, the Chase, and the creator of the various werecreature plagues.
-Julianos: The Aedra of Wisdom and Logic.
-Kynareth: The Aedra of Air, and also Dragonspeech.
-Mara: The Aedra of Love.
-Malacath: The Daedric Prince of Outcasts, Physical Strength, and Oaths.
-Mehrunes Dagon: The Daedric Prince of Destruction, Change, Revolution, Energy, and Ambition.
-Mephala: The Daedric Prince Whose Sphere Is Unknown To Mortals.
-Meridia: The Daedric Prince of Living Things.
-Molag Bal: The Daedric Prince of Domination and Slavery.
-Namira: The Daedric Prince of Disease, Decay, And Ancient Darkness.
-Nocturnal: The Daedric Prince of The Night And Darkness.
-Perytie: The Daedric Prince of Tasks, Pestilence, and Natural Order.
-Sanguine: The Daedric Prince of Hedonism And Dark Passions.
-Sheogorath: The Daedric Prince Of Madness.
-Stendarr: The Aedra of Mercy and Justice.
-Vaermina: The Daedric Prince Of Dreams, Nightmares, And Ill Omens.
-Zenithar: The Aedra Of Work, Commerce, And Trade.
The races of Men generally resemble ordinary humans with slight magical or supernatural abilities.
-Nords: Northern warriors who resist cold and magical frost.
-Cyrodiils: Cosmopolitan jungle-warriors magically skilled in diplomacy and trade.
-Bretons: Part-Elven knights and mages with both a talent for and resistance against magic.
-Redguards: Dark-skinned desert swordsmasters who resist poison and are fleet of foot.
The Elves are long-lived, pointy-eared people generally skilled in magic.
-Altmer: Tall, gold-skinned High Elves have a talent for magic and a resistance to disease, but are vulnerable to magical attacks.
-Bosmer: Dark-haired and dark-skinned Wood Elves, the Bosmer can command animals and blend in with their surroundings like chameleons. They are exclusively meat eaters due to a pact with their god not to harm plants.
-Dunmer: The dark-skinned, dark-haired Dark Elves of the province of Morrowind are distrustful, stealthy, and skilled with destructive spells and physical agility alike.
-Orsimer: The Orcs are a twisted green-skinned people who are exceptionally gifted with craftsmanship and physical strength, but cursed with ugliness and a lifespan closer to humans than Elves. Blessed with a berserker rage, they follow Malacath almost exclusively.
Tamriel is home to several sapient beast-folk races, most importantly the Argonians and the Khajit.
-Argonians: The lizardfolk of Black Marsh call themselves the Sazhleel. They are experts in guerilla warfare, able to breathe underwater and fight with rough claws. Argonians are tied to a power known as the Hist, plant-gods from another era that speak in their minds and dwell within Black Marsh.
-The catfolk of Elsweyr are swift and clever, blessed with sharp claws and a gift for moving at night that lends other races to distrust them easily.
There are nine provinces of Tamriel, the continent on which the Elder Scrolls series of games, and Legacy by extension, takes place.
-Black Marsh: The swamplands the Argonians call home. It lies southeast of Cyrodiil.
-Cyrodiil: The centralmost province, a vast jungle full of warring kingdoms. The home of the Cyrodiilic Men.
-Elsweyr: The southernmost province, a sprawling desert land home to the Khajit. Its southern tip is full of jungles.
-Hammerfell: To the west of Cyrodiil, the desert lands of Hammerfell are the adopted home of the Redguards.
-High Rock: The province of High Rock, home of the Bretons, lies to the northwest of Hammerfell, and is a land of kings and knights and feudal backstabbing.
-Morrowind: The alien, mushroom-covered land of Morrowind is northeast of Cyrodiil, cupped around the Red Mountain, a massive supervolcano at the heart of the huge island of Vvardenfell. It is the ash-coated home of the Dunmer.
-Skyrim: North of Cyrodiil is Skyrim, the home of the Nords, a snowy and unforgiving province full of more warring kingdoms, battle-axes, and a deep culture surrounding the concept of dragons.
-Summerset Isle: An island off the southwestern coast of Tamriel, Summerset Isle is the cultured and beautiful home of the High Elves, steeped in the arcane and the arts alike.
-Valenwood: West of Elsweyr and south of Cyrodiil is Valenwood, the sprawling, overgrown forest home of the Wood Elves.
Magic is a simple matter in the world of Tamriel. There are four major kinds of magic that may be relevant to "just walking around" sorts of things.
-MAGICKA: This is standard Dungeons and Dragons lightning-bolts-summon-spells-enchantments-and-so-on magic. Spells are constructed from attributes; first, the School it falls under (so, what the spell does: DESTRUCTION, obviously, DESTROYS things, while ALTERATION alters them; more on this below), and then the effect that it performs (such as FORTIFY SPEED to make you go faster). This is largely technical; players apping for an Elder Scrolls spellcaster should treat it like any other spellcasting fantasy world, describing what they specialize in and what kind of effects they can perform.
-TONAL ARCHITECTURE: This is the magic of the Thu'um, Dwarves, and other high-end specialists. Tonal Architecture refers to magic that relies on sound to change the world, and is not actually "magic" so much as it is "the language of the world." For the most part, this is plot-only, but a special exception has to be noted for Thu'um, the Dragon Language, which is the power of the Dragonborns, and a skill that can theoretically be learned by others, if painstakingly slowly.
-ALCHEMY: This is the magic of the common folk. Take some wheat and mushrooms and brew a healing potion. This largely functions as a fantasy replacement for science-type healing and drugs and such, and should be treated like it.
-ENCHANTING: This is the magic of weaponsmiths. Enchanting imbues items with power. Unlike most worlds with enchantment, Tamriel does not have a concept of permanent enchantments; the magic on a magic item must be sustained with the power of captured souls. The more powerful the enchantment, the more powerful the soul necessary, and the more quickly it runs dry. Essentially, Tamriel doesn't have +5 weapons that are always good; its flaming swords have ammo counts made up of dead cows, and its legendary artifacts run on ensnared people and other powerful enemies.
-NATIVE: A fifth "type" of magic exists in the people of Skyrim themselves. Most people have some degree of magical talent; Nords, for example, have a magical resistance to cold. People born under certain star signs gain certain minor benefits. Essentially, people in Tamriel generally have two minor powers of some sort related to their species and birthday, which are magical, but not in the spellcasting sense; simply an innate sort of power everybody has. Some refinements of these powers do exist, such as the Spirit Sword of Redguard history, but these represent exceptional students of innate magic who have dedicated their lives to such manipulation, not casual dabblers; in effect, such a talent would be their "gimmick."
There are several schools of Magicka used in Tamriel's second age.
-DESTRUCTION: Destruction harms the target by focusing energy into elemental attacks, draining attributes, and otherwise applying status effects and debuffs.
-RESTORTATION: Restoration heals the target, bolsters it against harmful debuffs, and otherwise channels energy into helpful, vitality-restoring effects.
-CONJURATION: Conjuration calls creatures and creates weapon from focused energy or other worlds. It also deals in telepathy; all conjured creatures have telepathic connections to their summoners, and conjuration may also enable telepathic communication between conjurers.
-ALTERATION: Alteration focuses energy to affect direct properties of the target. An Alteration mage might increase the weight of armor to break an enemy's back, grant himself the power to fly or walk on or breathe water, or create shields of elemental power to defend himself.
-ILLUSION: Illusion harnesses power to fool and influence the mind and light, as well as augmenting aspects to do with light, such as vision or translucency.
-MYSTICISM: Mysticism harnesses power to influence magic itself. It is "meta-magic," using telekinesis, spell reflection, and soul-trapping as its bread and butter.
-THAUMATURGY: Thaumaturgy influences or manipulates physical and magical laws to accomplish the effects of other schools, though in a less efficient manner. A Thaumaturgic spell imitating Alteration, for example, will not make targetted armor heavier, but increase the effect of gravity on the target.
-NECROMANCY: Necromancy allows a caster to raise the dead, create undead, bind souls to places or corpses, and repel and destroy the undead.
The moment Nirn was joined to the larger universe, it underwent an event known as a Dragon Break. Akatosh, the God of and existence that structures Time, spasmed. Time became nonlinear. The barrier against Oblivion cracked, and Dremora, the demon race, have gained a foothold on a small island. Several dragons long-dormant arose once again to speak the Thu'um and carve out dominions. The already-exciting chaos of Tamriel's Interregnum has become more chaotic as glimpses of the past and the future surge into a time they are neither wanted nor desired.
The most outstanding feature of the Dragon Break, however, is the new sun, the second sun that has opened and spilled forth into Nirn. The new sun is, like the old sun, a portal out of Nirn; however, no magic flows in through the new sun. It is a vast, impossible flower, a direct and permanently-open portal from the Aurbis to the rest of the Tree, from which great vines spill out to reinforce and aid travel. Nirn, whether it likes it or not, is part of the wider world now.
In MUSH terms, the Dragon Break is a simple event that gave access to the greater world of Nirn (and Tamriel specifically) to space-faring civilizations, and allows certain events, characters, or other elements of the broad Elder Scrolls theme to be brought in on a case-by-case basis, such as extremely obscure races that should be dead by the Second Era. This is not fiat integration, and requires regular apps; it merely opens the possibility of apping someone like Pelinal Whitestrake or a Kothringi OC into the world of Legacy. It does not allow for characters from later games, such as the Last Dragonborn or the Hero of Oblivion, to be applied for, as they are the heroes and defining features of their own eras, and thus cannot be moved through the Dragon Break.
Characters apped into the world of Legacy must fit into the timeline of Legacy, even if they "shouldn't." Someone apping Jarl Balgruuf of TESV: Skyrim into Legacy might app him as the Jarl of Whiterun, for example, but because of the Dragon Break, Balgruuf has always been the Jarl of Whiterun; he is not a time traveller, nor does he know of the events of TESV: Skyrim, nor does he realize he has been displaced, nor can he. For all intents and purposes, the Dragon Break allows people to "replace" unnamed characters from history with canonical characters from the later games and play them if they so choose by adapting them to the chaos of the Second Era.
Nirn's greater "space" is known as the Aurbis. It is, effectively, "space" full of chaos and potentium. It is simultaneously a word for the self-contained universe of Nirn, and includes such things as the moons and planets - each the body of one of the Eight Divines or a plane of Oblivion or the Afterlife - and various magical attempts to colonize or explore these areas. While no species currently extant on Nirn has the capacity to explore the Aurbis with ease, ruined Dwemer ships, Ayleid stations, and long-lost colonies still exist on the moons and planets of the universe. Space-faring themes can easily access Aurbis as if it was a normal space universe, and magical themes can walk through it with various magical means, such as portals, riding powerful magical beasts, or astral projection.