L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Recluce Saga is set in the typical sort of pre-technological world, with Counts, Dukes, swords, battles, and that type of thing. However, what sets Modesitt's world of Recluce apart from other sword and sorcery worlds is the fact that the magic here actually has a theory behind it. Modesitt's magic has two sides to it: order, and chaos. Everything that exists has both order and chaos in it, interacting with each other, with order trying to strengthen an object while chaos tries to weaken it. Chaos magic does exactly what you would think it would, destroy things, with disease, sickness, earthquakes, fire, explosions, et cetera. How a chaos master does this is by either manipulating chaos to break the order bonds within objects, or throwing pure chaos fire at them to burn them. Order masters do just the opposite, manipulating objects by strengthening or rearranging the order bonds within them. Chaos is represented by the color white, because white light is a chaotic mixture of all colors of light; order is represented by black, because it absent of all light, and thus pure and orderly. Order does not quite equate to good, nor does chaos equate fully to evil.

Furthermore, order and chaos are not separate, nor are they unlimited; they are indeed finite, and they must balance each other in equal quantities. Nature seeks this Balance, for it consists of both order and chaos, and too much of either would destroy it. If order or chaos get too powerful, the Balance between them must be righted; some of books deal with this idea. This fact gives rise to the idea of grey magicians, who work with both order and chaos and work to maintain the Balance between them.

From the Fall of Angels (FoA) till The Towers of the Sunset (tTotS), order magicians have no country or empire for themselves; they are scattered around. In tTots, however, a guy named Creslin creates such a place, an island nation named Recluce. From The Magic Engineer (tME) till The Death of Chaos (tDoC), the heros of the books come from Recluce. As for the chaos magicians, they have an empire called "Fairhaven" (or "Frven") from tTotS till The Order War (tOW), although Fairhaven was created before tTotS. While The Chaos Balance (tCB) deals with the end of a white empire called "Cyad", in the other books in the saga the white magicians are scattered around various areas.