The planet Arcadia is ruled by wilderness, despite the Kingdom of Man's battle for domination of the planet - 40.000 years of battle against the enigmatic High Ones in their towers, against the brutal Trogs that grow like mushrooms in the underground and the deep forests and the Corruption that always threaten to rend the Kingdom apart from inside, against Independancies that refuse the King's tribute and against the hostility of the planet itself.
The genre of this setting is best described as dieselpunk fantasy. Society is feudal and the Church's power is indisputable. Millions of people toil in poverty, without the benefits of technology or medicine. Meanwhile the upper echelons in society have access to the most amazing ancient technology, with life-extensions and miniaturized wonder machines. The war machines of the army are huge and spewing black smoke where they go, and the endless masses of infantry keep their gas masks on and their oily carbines trained in the enemy's direction.
Arcadia, despite its name, is far from a paradise. Despite millennia of civilization the wilderness still constantly threaten to take over. Strong magnetic fields in the atmosphere make flight almost impossible, so communications over distance is faulty, at best. Endless forests, freezing tundra and barren wastes dominate the continents, making competition for the rich areas around rivers and lakes fiercely brutal.
Forty thousand years ago, when Man was little more than an ape in a valley, a God-King rose and proclaimed that Mankind's rightful place was as rulers over all of Arcadia. Since then the Kingdom of Man has conquered many lands and annihilated countless peoples - but over time lost almost as much as it gained in a waxing and waning over the millennia. As Man's power grew, so did the Corruption that threatens from within, and as the greatest of men have to fight Corruption the hardest, ten thousand years ago the King sat down on his throne and turned all of his attention inwards, to engage the Corruption in his heart in an eternal struggle. Since then the Church and the Administration has run the Kingdom of Man in the King's stead.
Within us all lies the potential for great evil, and the war-torn history of the humans of Arcadia has brought this evil into the open. The worst sides of Humanity has taken shape in the Apostles of Corruption: Wrath, Deceit, Oppression and the others. Where Corruption takes root, it spreads, and entire towns and even whole regions pay allegiance to the Dark Disciples, putting all its collective energy at waging war on the rest of Mankind and spreading the influence of Corruption.
Even if the High Ones look human on the outside, only taller, thinner and fairer, they are not related. They are the civilized descendants of the great reptiles of the distant past, and have been the rulers of the world since millions of years. However, when the Kingdom of Man began its ambitious expansion, the High Ones' empire had already started to stagnate into decadence, and now the High Ones that remain stay locked inside their distant towers, placed widely across the world, in the deserts, on the mountaintops and in the deep jungles.
After the Corruption, the gravest threat to Mankind must be the Trogs, beastly savages of the deep forest and the underground. They grow from fungi in the shadowy places of the world, and come in unnumbered shapes and sizes. In smaller groups they are quite shy of conflict, and so can remain unnoticed even rather close to civilized places, while they grow and gather their strength until they finally launch a brutal crusade against their neighbors.
Since their creation 20.000 years ago, the Templars have been the foremost champions of the King of Mankind. The Templars are warrior monks, fanatically devoted to serving the King, that have been surgically and genetically altered to far exceed the capabilities of mortal men. There is more than a hundred Temples spread throughout the Kingdom, and each is the spiritual home of a hundred Templars.
Unlike other institutions in the Kingdom, the Temples do not defer to any instance of the Administration, but regards itself as directly beneath the King himself, and since he does not communicate these days, they have his authority to pursue their last order: to continually fight the enemies of humanity and the King however they find best. Each Grand Master therefore runs her Temple in almost complete autonomy.
Clad in heavy armor and armed with powerful weapons, each Templar is said to be a match for a hundred ordinary soldier. Templars are therefore often sent on missions in pairs or small groups, or even solo, and expected to act independently for an extended time, even for decades if necessary. Such small units are often sent to towns in problematic areas under pressure from the enemies of the King to form the core of the town's defense, or as the spearhead in a counter-push to break the attacker's strength. Only rarely have entire Temples gone to battle together, but when it has happened those battles have been the turning-points of their eras.
The land around Border Town has been taken, lost and taken again, time after time throughout the ages. Until quite recently it was besieged and cut off from the rest of the Kingdom by a large area of Trog dominated land, and it only managed to break the siege when the Town rulers struck an unusual alliance with both a nearby High Ones tower that was also bothered by the Trogs and with an Independency that had managed to form in the mountains close by.
Now the town is trying hard to readjust to being a part of the Kingdom again, which is not easy, considering the foothold that both the High Ones and the Independency got in the area during the alliance. In fact, a number of officials from both the Church and the Administration are about to arrive to oversee that the town is being run in accordance with the ethics and policies of the Kingdom, and they are not likely to look kindly on the town's being friends with aliens and rebels…
Because the setting of Warhammer 40.000 is so cool; isn't that enough reason? Nah, just kidding, this setting has nothing to do with that game. Promise.
However, there is no arguing that this setting rides the coolness of supersoldiers in power armor, nobles in jeweled robes with gold-plated bionics and psychic powers. But on a deeper level the issue of Corruption is a central aspect of the setting, and one we find interesting to explore. There is also the issue of working for the collective, the town or the Kingdom, versus working for your personal interests, be they love, revenge or personal glory, at the cost of the common good.