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re: the arcana universe might be post-apocalyptic -- do tell! sounds epic. details??
*cracks fingers* boy HOWDY has it been a while since my last "it's not that deep, Nabs" headcanon ramble! Let's go! 8D
So this whole worldbuilding headcanon is mostly based on one chapter of Portia's route, "XVII - The Star - History, in Poetry", where Portia and the Apprentice descend into the lower layers of magic-infused Vesuvia and uncover the history behind its founding.
Now, I do think that a whole lot of the descend was created and morphed by the Realm magic in the area going haywire – I doubt the current Vesuvia actually stands on top of multiple stacked hollow caverns the size of the whole city. Given that a part of it is already "sinking", that just sounds like it's one construction error away from creating the world's largest sinkhole.
I will take it as there being layers of ruins underground, however. Some hollow spaces one could explore if they were to discover the passage there, maybe magically preserved areas like the founding mural; the restless ghosts are still there, for the drama of it. The preserved visions of the past, a whole Plague river, the adventure book traps, are a product of the Realm magic shenanigans. I'm also gonna go ahead and assume that the location names, language and flags being the same millennia ago as they are also just another effect of the Realm Plot Convenience Magic.
Information we gain from this whole ordeal, though, I will interpret as "real".
As a refresher (or if you haven't played the route/chapter yet, in which case what are you doing here, do your homework dammit /j): the founding of Vesuvia was a deal of the first Count, Prospero, with Valdemar. It is, rewording some dialogue, "an eternal city of untold power". The position of water canals create a giant ritual circle that uses unique realm conditions, the "conjunction", that occur every 777 years and last for 3, and change the "laws of magic" to grant the caster immense power. But those events the city ends up destroyed, just to be rebuilt.
...just bear with me here. Time for the ✨implications✨.
Vesuvia is really, really old.
We never get an exact number, naturally. What we do get is a direct mention of some "layers" that formed with every destruction event (more about those a bit later). It is a bit vague, but I'd say the text references 3 up to 7 "layers" directly, but then we get hit with an "again and again, the cycle repeats", and the MC doesn't know if the descend takes hours or days.
But even if we take the minimum implied number of cycles (3 + 1 for each "again" + the current ending cycle), that's...
6 * 780 = 4680 years since the founding. And if you get more generous with the interpretation of the cycle number, that number can easily double. Or more, if you want things to get even wilder.
For our world, "4680 years ago" means Stone or Bronze Age, depending on the region.
And yet, that first Vesuvia already had the water canals, the palace, and magic "tech" advanced enough to create a recording of Prospero's message and store it in the mural for thousands of years, which is frankly fancier than most magic we see in the game. That first Vesuvia, and consequent Vesuvias actually, didn't look all that different from the "modern" one, and was built within Prospero's lifetime.
So, hold on. It really seems like the human civilization didn't progress all that much over those 5-9k years. Sure, a lot of places outside of Vesuvia seem to be more advanced magically, but not like... "5k years later" advanced. Especially when you start thinking about the "advanced" cycles...
...and about how they would then be replaced by "simple huts".
Things get real interesting on a global scale. Think about all the countries and cities outside of Vesuvia. Okay, say a magic nuke razes Vesuvia and puts it underground. But why does the development of the entire city begin from scratch? Surely, if people from the outside claimed the land (it was under siege by Prakra during one of the cataclysm events) or lent any sort of aid, it wouldn't take Vesuvia centuries to get out of the "simple huts" stage. Where did all this knowledge of advanced magic and construction go?
You can probably see that this is where I whip out the "post-apocalyptic" hypothesis. The hard reset button wasn't just pressed on Vesuvia. Oh no-no-no, it would set off a chain reaction, in various ways, that affected the whole continent/planet.
As an example, in the cycle right before the current one, the past Vesuvia was destroyed by... the Red Plague. It was here before and it did wipe out the city. And more.
That time, it actually spread. I'm grabbing that single damn line and running with it.
The real lore cherry on top of this disaster cupcake is that this whole thing is a result of a deal with Valdemar, who's been maintaining the cycle, feeding off it, and is probably the reason why the city returns to the same look over and over again. Who else would ensure the new Count knows where to maintain the channels after the city is put into the ground once more?
(There's also the fun little part that by the time Prospero summoned Valdemar, they were already an eldritch horror. "It's been a very long time since I was summoned by mortal hands". HOW FUCKING OLD IS VALDEMAR??)
This all still leaves us with a lot of questions, of course, but it is how ancient history is I suppose. I wish we'd know why exactly Prospero made the deal in the first place, or how did he know who and how to summon for such a massive undertaking – well, the likely culprit there is the Devil, I guess. (Also this is where I tie in my dragonverse nonsense, with the "draconic threat" pushing some people to extreme measures to try getting the upper hand.)
Ok that's all I got for now, if you got here I'm gently placing a shiny rock in your hand.
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