The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening / Kraken's Awakening

For detailed campaign notes, see the admittedly woefully incomplete Solace: Ascension game summaries (note: these are DM written and may vary GREATLY from player memories)

The short version is: There was a massive Mountain range in the spine of the world, the mountains simply came out of the water. Many adventurers scaled the mountain over the millenia, but it was a completely barren place, and dreadfully unforgiving, so it was mostly avoided.

In the year 0 of the Common Era (then referred to by multiple passages of time) it was discovered that not only was everyone wrong about the mountains being mountains, but the back of a moon-sized kraken, but the kraken was awakening. In a devastating act, the Kraken awoke, and left the planet completely, decimating the ocean, disrupting continents, and reshaping much of the world as a result.

It is unclear what the origin of the Kraken was, or exactly how it was killed, but after taking flight it collided back to Terra and the resulting tsunami swept the entire globe. The population of the world was severely impacted, as was a number of entire continents.