So the long night is a world in decline, because, as it uses the great orrery model, the planes of evil are all coming into alignment at once as the good ones move further away

The main continent is Jem, and there are two main settlements: Lerdona: a magocratic collection of City states under the Lord Sorcerer, and the confederation of the Black Scale, tribal barbarians from the West.

The black scale had conquered almost all of jem save for Lerdona, who had them to a stalemate, and the city of Hath. Modeled off of MtG's Keldon, Hath is ruled by a Warlord who commands the martial side, and a Mage who runs the magical. The scale attack many times, but never won.

As the good planes move away, it became more difficult for the goodly gods to intervene with Malkrova's (the world's) people. Fewer clerics were made, and divine magic from good aligned gods became harder to do.

Before the start of the long night, halflings were there farming powerhouse, but one day there was a grand recalling of them to their Homeland. The next day, all their cities vanished, farms gone, as if their lands were never settled. Jem lost its primary crop source overnight

This is because halflings were actually interplanar beings, having come to Jem after the last long night and knew what was coming. Instead of warning the other peoples of the continent, their courage failed and their mother goddess called them home, leaving Jem to fend for itself

To the South if Jem lay the Gongal Isles, rainforests where the dark elves of Malkreska reside. They worship the Spider Queen, who is a major fey elsewhere but a goddess there. They are neutral, providing diplomatic and medical aid to both Lerdona and The Black Scale

The long night happens every few millennia, and is not unlike a magical ice age. You can't gauge when it's started until it's over, and can last for generations or as little as, judged from it's height, a century.

There is the bright day, it's opposite wherein the good planes come into alignment, marked by cooperation and advancement but it seems that comes around far more rarely.

The other continent I worked out is Nax, to the east of Jem, the continent of fallen empires. The Asmoclan are tieflings that live in the jungle to the South and worship bloodthirsty gods in their Jade pyramids, while the ordering of Halifax is a mostly defunct empire of Giants

The campaign focused on gathering a coalition to join forces to fight the impeding planar invasion of a powerful lich. That invasion did come, despoiling the former halfling lands

The druids of the grey marshes, before getting wiped out or conscripted by the black scale, warned about the darkening of the current age, but none listened to the orcs and wood elves.

To the north of Jem is the elfwood, where the winter court of the high elves live. As the horrors of the long night came, they forsook their compacts with Lerdona and sealed their borders with magic, overlaying the elfwood with the feywild.

Between the elfwood and Lerdona is the blackreach mountains, under which live dwarves of the same name. They too had compacts to come to Lerdona's aid but also didn't. They hadn't been heard from in two years, however, and scrying for them fail

This is because the long night twisted one of their deities, a goddess of justice, into one of vengeance. Her cult began to attack those who they saw as decadent, who increasingly became everyone who wasn't them. They nearly wiped out all of dwarven kind before they were put down

My main idea when coming up with this setting, which was called evernight but I changed the name for an article I wrote in a gaming magazine that drops next month, was world in decline/cosmic horror. You cant defeat evernight no not than you can stop a storm, you just survive it

It was SUPPOSED to be a lot not political, about the cold war between Lerdona and the Black Scale, but someone ( @bsweichsel) asked me if the necromancer they fought in the third session was the lich who killed his parents. I, distracted, said yes. 2.5 years later they killed him

The funny part about the long night is that later I figured out that ALOT of what I made homebrew was just...Eberron. planes that come into alignment with the material, druids that keep horrors at bay, jungle drow, fallen giants. Idk this at the time, as I would have just used it

Because I got lazy, I stopped making my own gods early and took some from the dawn war era, and thus, the biggest dungeon I ever created was the desecrated Temple of Erathis, the Neutral goddess of civilization.

I used the long night to constantly put big red buttons in front of the players, cursed items, the deck of many things, an iron flask with a djinn inside it, and the book of vile darkness all found their way in front of the players.

The session in which Hath was introduced was so very important to me as a GM. I called it, in my own head, the City of Hooks, because the PCs just finished an arc and I needed them to decide where to go next so I wrote out 5 different hooks and what it all meant, 2x my word count