When worlds collide.
Axion Forge features various different Factions from across the multiverse, each offering a distinct philosophy, aesthetic, and playstyle.
Mix any combination of Factions, experiment with unexpected synergies, or master a single identity. With a universal resource system, there are no strict limitations to what Faction's cards you can play.
The motives and interactions between Factions all tie together in the overarching narrative story.
MECHANICA
Steampunk, mechanized armies, and magitek. Mechanica wields technological ingenuity through resource efficiency and modular enhancement. Synergy makes their cards stronger together. Adapt, improvise, overcome.
"Order through ingenuity, no matter the cost."
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An Empire of Machines
On the industrial world of Caldra, Mechanica has built an empire around a simple belief: magic is engineering. Runes are circuits, crystals are generators, and alchemy is chemistry. Nothing is unknowable, only unstudied.
That philosophy led to the creation of the Golden Engine, a reactor that gathers and condenses Caldra’s naturally occurring arcane energy into usable power. This power is Luminance. The city of Ironhold grew around it, eventually overshadowing Mechanica’s original capital of Brasswick to become the center of their empire.
Luminance is distributed from Ironhold’s reactor across the Wellspring network to three auxiliary reactors, each controlled by one of Caldra’s four engineering guilds. Together, they form the Iron Assembly which has ruled Mechanica for generations. Brasswick’s traditionalist engineers resent their former capital’s decline, creating a century-old rivalry that the appearance of the Nexus threatens to reignite.
The Automaton Legions
Luminance is more than energy; it is life itself.
Clockwork drones are self-contained autonomous machines. Sophisticated, but ultimately just tools. Luminant automata are different. Inert until charged by a Luminance reactor, they awaken and are able to learn, adapt, and respond in ways that are sometimes unsettlingly close to consciousness.
Rumors claim some of the Luminent have become genuinely sentient only to be classified as property by the guilds. An underground network of liberated Luminants and sympathetic engineers dubbed The Lumenguard seeks to expose the truth. The Iron Assembly denies that true machine consciousness exists.
The Ashfall Breach
At the Ashfall guild's reactor, an anomaly appeared. Experiments on the Breach produced impossible results: machinery emerged that no one had designed, power surges exceeded every known limit, and failures cascaded across Ironhold's entire grid.
For the first time, Mechanica encountered something they could not understand. Researchers now believe the Breach may provide access to power beyond even Luminance, but may also reveal that their fundamental assumptions about reality have never been more wrong.
Varris Kane
Varris was once a compassionate senior engineer of the Emberlight guild, devoting himself to making Caldra safer through better design.
When the Ashfall Breach opened on top of him during his research on Luminants, Varris was nearly destroyed by it. He barely survived by ripping the drone’s Luminance core from its reactor line and implanting it into his own chest. The surging energy destroyed his biological body, forcing him to replace much of himself with metal.
Varris became more man than machine, something caught between biological human and mechanized Luminant, kept alive by the same force that animates the machines he once studied.
The Breach unknowingly Imprinted the Nexus on him. He now perceives undetectable energy and glimpses impossible futures. His visions have left him questioning whether prediction gives him the right to prevent events before others can choose their own paths.
Despite his experience and the Lumenguard's cause, Varris has remained publicly silent about machine sentience. Instead, he has begun work on his greatest invention: the Continuum, an apparatus designed to permanently seal the Rifts and cut the Nexus off from Mechanica, and anything else.
His reasoning is simple — If something is too dangerous to control, it must be made inaccessible.
Whether that conviction is compassion or the cold logic of inevitability is a question Varris has not found an answer to. It may be the only problem he has ever been afraid to solve.
PRIMAL
The natural world, beasts, and the elements. Raw and untamed, Primal harnesses the ferocity of nature itself through unrelenting aggression. They gain power when damaged, and many cards have effects that trigger when attacked. Harness the power of the wild.
"The wilds do not ask permission or offer forgiveness."
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Into the Wilds
Veyruun is a massive terrestrial world of endless forests, vast oceans, and ancient mountains. The majority of its lands are places of pristine beauty.
Primal is home to countless packs, clans, and spiritual orders scattered across its wilderness. Humans, Beastfolk, sapient animals, intelligent plants, and stranger things coexist without a central government or dominant species. They share one belief: life is sacred, and unchecked consumption is an affront to it. Nature creates and destroys without apology, and so do its people.
Three allied tribes stand at Primal's center.
The Bloodtoooth clan are hunters who reclaimed the highlands once held by Kaita's people. They measure life by what one is willing to sacrifice to protect it. The Withered are the surviving members of a tribe destroyed by the Withering, the ecological devastation left by foreign invaders. They live in poisoned lands abandoned by everyone else and believe those responsible must be destroyed before it spreads. Sentient botanical beings rooted in Veyruun itself are known as the Bloomward. They tend its ancient forests and preserve its living memory. Unlike the Withered, some have begun nurturing life beneath the contaminated soil rather than simply condemning it; a position the Withered consider closer to acceptance, and therefore betrayal.
The Primal tribes call the outsiders responsible for Veyruun's destruction Badbloods. Formally, they are the Hadria Combine, an extraterrestrial corporate civilization whose cities of glass and steel have spread across vast stretches of the wilds for generations.
The Hadria Combine
The Hadria came to Veyruun as part of a complex corporate expansion and bioengineering program. Drawn by its abundant resources and seemingly limitless wilderness, they came not to understand the world but to extract from it. Mining, research, and industrial entrenching have scarred the planet and caused grave ecological damage.
The Combine's own people have suffered the consequences of generations of its own bioengineering. An engineered subclass of creatures serve as a subservient labor force under the Hadria. Their brutalist cities and compounds reflect their priorities. The Combine is not interested in beauty, only efficiency and profitability.
The Sundered Reach
Once a thriving coastal ecosystem, the Sundered Reach was shattered by the Convergence when Rifts introduced creatures to the lands with no natural predators. Everything became prey.
Native species that had ruled the region for millennia were rapidly displaced, and the Reach is now collapsing into a wasteland where instinct offers no protection. Primal's leaders cannot agree on how to respond, but Kaita continues returning to the Reach, determined not to let another part of Veyruun become a memory.
Kaita Bloodtooth
Kaita was born to a highland tribe destroyed by the Hollowing, a catastrophic inversion of Veyruun's life stream. The force normally returning mortal essence to the planet instead began consuming it, killing her all of her kin overnight. Kaita miraculously survived only due to a hunting party finding her among the dead and raising her as their own.
The Hollowing left her connected directly to the life stream of Veyruun. She now has the ability to transform into bestial forms, commune with living creatures, and briefly inherit fragments of living beings that die near her.
She later earned the title of Bloodtooth after hunting the Fleshturned, a cult that had murdered members of forest tribes and assumed their forms through grotesque mutations. Though Kaita drove them away, surviving Fleshturned continued their rituals, becoming an existential threat and increasingly alien with every life consumed.
Kaita eventually became leader of her tribe, now called the Bloodtooth Clan. They have reclaiming the highlands her people lost to the Hollowing.
Then came the Convergence. The Sundered Reach gave Kaita a new purpose: to face the invading creatures before they repeat the devastation she once survived. If Veyruun's invaders believe themselves to be the ultimate hunters, Kaita intends to teach them its oldest lesson: there is always a bigger predator.
ECLIPSE
Celestial beings, the divine, and time itself. Eclipse harnesses control through disruption and manipulation. Their limitless power of the heavens allows them to see the future, altering turn order, and outright negating actions.
"Judgement and justice are not the same."
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The Heavens Above
The Empyrean Plane is less a geographical place than it is a sense of being. It exists beyond the Veil in impossible celestial structures culminating in the Watchtower, an infinite observatory over all Realms beneath it, and home to the Ilyri. It is also the seat of power for the order governing Eclipse: the Tribunal.
Tribunal Arbiters do not rule the mortal realms so much as they determine which events are permitted to unfold. Their divine attunement allows them to perceive consequences before they occur, making them uniquely capable of identifying threats to cosmic balance. To the Ilyri, history is rarely natural as almost any significant event is often the result of deliberate intervention on their part.
No Ilyri is born one. Each and every Arbiter was once a mortal elevated through Ascension, gaining a new form of existence and the ability to cross the Veil directly. The Tribunal has manipulated reality this way since before time itself.
Their interventions are called Corrections, usually subtle alterations to causality. The most extreme Corrections are Silencings, in which a species is erased by severing its existence entirely.
The Convergence changed this certainty. The newly formed Nexus and its Axions exist beyond the Tribunal's ability to fully predict, creating the first phenomenon in Ilyri history whose consequences cannot be reliably predicted.
The Therian Silence
The Therian were among the greatest scientific civilizations the Tribunal had ever observed. They conquered interstellar travel, making distance itself irrelevant. Eventually, they turned their attention to time.
The attempt to build a device capable of traversing chronology threatened the causal order the Tribunal had spent epochs maintaining. Unable to contain the danger through lesser means, Silence was ordered. For this task, they chose Solanthys, an Arbiter who had once possessed the same obsessive hunger for mastery that doomed the Therian. Rather than erase that ambition when he was mortal, the Tribunal had elevated and redirected it.
Solanthys entered the Therian's future and rewrote their history from its root. Generations unraveled, births became undone, and a trillion lives ceased to have ever existed. Their cities remained across a thousand worlds as monuments to hubris. The Therian had not been destroyed — they never happened.
The Tribunal considered the matter finished. Solanthys did not.
He remembered one particular Therian scientist at the heart of the forbidden project and began wondering whether the Therian were truly destroyed to protect cosmic balance, or because their ambition threatened the Tribunal's authority. He has never voiced the question.
Now, something within the Nexus evokes the same feeling he experienced during the Silence. Uncertainty, doubt, and perhaps guilt invade his thoughts. He has kept it hidden from the Tribunal, and from himself.
Solanthys, Divine Justiciar
Solanthys still believes the Tribunal's balance must be enforced, but every Correction reminds him that he was once the very kind of threat they destroy. He was spared for reasons the Tribunal has never explained, and he cannot reconcile that mercy with the judgment he delivers upon others.
His greatest critic is Valerius, an Arbiter senior to Solanthys who believes the Tribunal's patience allowed the Therian crisis to grow. He now demands immediate Correction of the Nexus and everything within it. To Valerius, hesitation is simply another form of the weakness that permitted the Therian to become a threat in the first place.
Valerius has not moved against him. Yet. Solanthys cannot tell whether the Tribunal is simply waiting or quietly judging whether his doubt warrants a Correction of its own. Meanwhile, the Nexus is being watched more closely than anything since the Therian. For the first time, its foresight cannot fully reach what lies ahead, and the Shapers possess powers approaching those of the Arbiters themselves. Whether they are potential instruments of balance or the next threat to be erased remains undecided.
Solanthys has begun to hope, secretly, that he will not be forced to make that judgment twice.
DOMINION
Greed, war machines, oppression, martial law. Driven by order and subjugation, Dominion wields total control through sheer might. They utilize heavily fortified forces to exert constant pressure with overwhelming force.
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ABYSS
Demons, corruption, and chaos, Abyss harnesses hellish powers. They thrive on sacrificing their own to grow in strength, and use powerful, dark spells. Entropy and apocalyptic destruction are their sole motivations.
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THE ANCIENT
Myths, legends, and medieval fantasy. Guardians of old, the Ancient focuses on creating legendary heroes. Epic might allows them to wield otherworldly magic, mythical beasts, and grand weaponry to uphold the balance of the realms.
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XENO
Aliens, cosmic powers, and the bizarre. With strange, unpredictable abilities, Xeno is mysterious and otherworldly. Their unique skills tap into cosmic energy, advanced civilizations, and the great unknown.
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NEXUS
Nexus is the absence of loyalty. They belong to no Faction and are agnostic to allegiance. Neutral, versatile support that integrates easily to any strategy. What it lacks in synergy is made up for in utility.
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