The current year in the Unformed Lands is 5778. The months are based upon local names. This website generally uses Earth names for months to keep things simple.
The nature of The Unformed Lands has kept most of the population living in the mirs. Mage domains are hard to create, and subject to dissolving when the creator dies and isn't replaced. People can not live in the Unformed Lands, or rather, can not grow food or extract resources. It is only in the mirs that people can settle without significant magical ability.
Population pressure in the mirs is generally high. Mirs can only support a certain number of peopel, depending upon the tech level and political level of the mir. This has led to many groups of people leaving their over populated mir, by choice or force to either find a new mir or survive in the Unformed Lands. While travel in the Unformed Lands is dangerous, movement is easy. The population can spread from mir to mir without special equipment like ships. Movement can be done on foot, even though it does require at least a guide to lead them and the trip can be dangerous.
The Unformed Lands has gone through an apparently endless of cycle of empire and warlordism. There is always at least some part of the world that is in chaos, and others where civilization is present. Empires fall to barbarians, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire. Barbarians have overland access to the hearts of empires as the empires rot from the inside out. These invasions will reduce the population of groups of mirs until the next cycle of empire arises that can support more people.
The world is very old. All of the mirs have been settled for thousands of years, but not all of that time was as an orderly city-state. Mirs tend to go through cycles of growth, stabilty and then rapid descent to political and social chaos. The mirs are generally at or close to maximum population for the technology and political structure in that anchor. The world is old enough, and has gone through so many cycles of barbarism and empire that much history has been lost. There are no consistant, common or provable stories of how the Unformed Lands came to be, or how life arrived.
The rise and fall of mirs is gradual and tends to be in waves. Mirs near each will also usually be at close to the same level of civilization and stabilty. As you travel further away, the chaos in the mirs you encounter will be either higher or lower, but the change will be gradual. The mirs do not form a world wide web, but are a series of small regional webs.
These are more than broad events that have had a major impact on The Unformed Lands' history and development. Some of these are have no specifically identfiable start and stop time, beyond pointing to a century or decade. Earth examples would be the Industrial Revolution, Communism, the fall of the Roman Empire and similar.
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