The sun rises on a new world- a world not like that you may know. Shattered by a catastrophic impact not long after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Earth is not as it should be. This impact, a star falling to earth, changed not only the shape of the world, but also her content; this star bore strange light and eldritch crystals, warping and altering the planet where humanity slowly arose. Continents were broken, minds shattered, even animals and plants twisted and changed. It is a different world, one in many ways hostile to humanity- but in the end, it is your world.
You stand forward as one of the leaders of a grand empire, an empire amongst many. It has been over a thousand years now since the first tribes emerged in the impact of the Cataclysm, family groups formed from scattered wanderers and survivors, and now from those first few tribes and city-states immense nations and countries have emerged, shaping the world about them. Iron armed warriors march in their thousands, wielding weapons both mundane and mystical, and great siege engines roll across the plains to beleaguer cities of formidable walls and sprawling scale. Atop cyclopean wonders priests offer sacrifices to strange gods, and call upon arcane powers to both aid their fellows and smite their foes. This is a time of grandeur, of culture, of beauty, but also a time of fear and chaos, for man's most dangerous adversary is no longer the wilds and the fell things of the darkness, but himself...
To be a leader in such times is to be given glorious potential, but also enormous responsibility. Civilization is fragile, and your civilization the most vulnerable - your enemies many, potential or otherwise. Will you rise to greatness alongside your kinsmen, or will you falter and be forgotten? Come, and tell the tale of Imperium and Empire.
Across a thousand and ten thousand souls, the new sun rises - climbing flaring out of the west to signal the start of a nascent day. It clambers skyward from below horizons, under seas, behind great forest canopy, across baking deserts, and even from behind forbidding ranges of high mountains. The gaze of that flaming father, the source of life, takes in sprawling cities, ululating nomads, tall temples wreathed in banks of incense, and more besides. Mankind, the most blessed of his creations, walks in different lands, divided and each seeking his own vision.
But this is not bad. It was not so long that he feared for the world itself, that she was nearly shattered and broken. In their own ways mankind has flourished after this breaking, strong enough and clever in heart, allowing him to shape for himself the strange and battered remnants of the old world into something new and beautiful. Dangerous and beautiful, benign and beautiful, but new all the same. Now they are not merely tribes, or cities, but empires and nations in their own right, stretching from horizon to horizon...