While many people have fled the Earth and taken to space to find a new home, some nations stubbornly remain. The main players are Aedolis and Teinar, two nations with two entirely different plans for the world. Aedolis is the Earth's superpower, a technological tyranny obsessed with control and directly behind the degradation of the Earth—yet far too deluded to accept that. While the rest of the world falls apart, Aedolis seeks to absorb and dominate the remaining nations on Earth and create its very own utopia, as envisioned by the Dragons that saved them from their demise. But Meanwhile Teinar, a network of rebels and underground cities, works to resist Aedolis' rule and free those citizens Aedolis has subjugated, all while desperately searching for a way to heal the Earth. Not everyone has given up on the planet.

Unfortunately, the problems don't end on Earth.

Of those nations that that have opted to flee the Earth to space, one, known as Seruna, orbits the galaxy in a series of space stations, seeking a new home after being displaced by the very empire they were once allies with: Aedolis. Seruna is what remains of a once peaceful country, though its people are hardly pacifists; they are known to coordinate with Teinar to smuggle people out of Aedolis. Meanwhile another nation, Edanith, wages war against Aedolis and targets Seruna and Aedolis both for their mages—valuable resources to a country that enslaves and uses them.

Truly the only neutral party is a company known as Thanatos Inc., a shady corporation with its fingers in all the pies, playing both sides of the field and forging a tight partnership with Edanith and Aedolis alike. They aren't lying when they say their products aren't tested on animals; they're tested on humanoids.

The Earth in Remnants of the Earth is far different from the one we all know and love today. For one, the game takes place millions of years into the future from our current time period, after a major cataclysm of some sort destroyed civilization. What that cataclysm was is still a mystery, and will likely always be a mystery, but as with any unexplainable event there are a million different theories and legends surrounding it.

There is an ancient legend that states that the Earth works in cycles, that the Earth was destroyed and recreated in response to the sins of humanity. When things simply got too bad, the planet would trash its previous incarnation and simply start over again from scratch. Some ancient cultures believed it was a complete death: the Earth was obliterated, destroying itself so it could start anew. Yet as time went on and ancient artifacts were recovered, the remnants of cultures far more advanced than their own medieval ones, more people began to believe in a sort of partial death, some sort of global catastrophe that would eliminate most of the life on Earth, but not all—and that it was likely brought on not by supernatural means, but due to man tampering with things he shouldn’t have been touching.

Whatever happened, it took millions of years for the Earth to finally recover and for life to bounce back. A lot can change over that much time, and the very shape of the landmasses themselves are different, so much so that it would be impossible to look on a map and pinpoint where, say, North America or Europe once was. Needless to say, the countries, cultures, and languages of the “Old Earth” do not exist and are long dead; there is no United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, etc. While some archaeologists have managed to learn more about these ancient cultures, it needs to be stressed that characters really shouldn’t have intense, detailed knowledge of them, their histories, or their languages, without a good reason (for example, maybe that character has the ability to time travel, or maybe a character of some alien race has encountered the people of the Old Earth before, etc.).

But even as the civilizations of the “Old Earth” became obsolete, civilization eventually bounced back. Back in those ancient times, the Earth had had plenty of time to heal from the past and could have been called something of a paradise. New species emerged and old species once extinct returned; forgotten magics were rediscovered as humanoids began to truly reconnect with their world. Oh, sure, there were problems. Wars, racial and religious issues, the usual greed and corruption that tends to follow humanity wherever it goes…but that was child’s play compared to what would happen millennia later. As civilization advanced, so did its technology—and with it the problems grew. If humanoids could already cause so much destruction and chaos with swords and magic, formidable weapons in and of themselves, the last thing they really needed was to tamper with science, the very element that could give them the knowledge and means of tampering with the very forces that drive nature itself.

Being sci-fi fantasy and set far into the future, the game is filled to the brim with a lot of magic and a lot of technology. The settings in the game are far more advanced than our own world; there’s space travel, starships, interplanetary wars, space colonies, aliens, mutants, genetic experiments gone wrong, supercomputers, blaster guns, you name it, it exists!

Beyond Earth, there really is no common language—or at least, there isn’t any that the Earthians are aware of. This might prove a challenge for those interacting with an alien race but, thankfully, there are such things as translators and they’re fairly easy to come by. Don’t leave Earth without one!

The VCN is not to be confused with The Network of Aedolis.

[VCN submitted by Shizzy]