"Driven before the Disjunction or drawn toward its black façade the people of countless states now live on the the very limit of existence. Though they can hardly be called 'a people' for many do not even speak the same language but they have come to be known collectively as 'the Watchers'. The camps, or cities as some of the more insane inhabitants insist on calling them, are terrible places filled with the stink of human misery and decay. As I walked through one of the largest settlements I saw Doomsayers screaming about the paradise that lay within the disjunction, slavers selling emaciated waifs to whoremongers and beggared Lords drunk in the mud."

"What was worse though, far worse, was to see the interface of the void itself creeping slowly towards the hovels that stood nearest to me. I watched speechless as a muck covered woman foaming at the mouth and mumbling some sort of hymn to herself sat motionless before the Disjunction as it washed over her. I do not know what she thought in those final moments but I saw her cease to be before my eyes and it was awful to behold."

Since its formation the Disjunction has swelled gradually enveloping most of the known world. It now encircles all that remains of existence, a black infinity beyond the boundary of which there is no life, substance or existence. As the nothingness has crawled inexorably forward, consuming all in its path, the people of the world have been driven before it. Scattered nations, terrified peasants, displaced Kings and landless farmers, all of them have had to flee before the darkness, flee or be unmade. Many of these refugees have stayed only a step ahead of the Disjunction living in vast moving shanty towns at the very rim of existence, moving inwards just fast enough to avoid oblivion.

So great has the displacement of mankind been that these shanty towns now circle much of what remains of the world, though the majority of refugees have found their home in the huge makeshift cities that lie at the cardinal points of the world; “Emperor's Drop”, “Brink”, “Astudan” and “The Rafts”. There is little order to be found in the melancholy; riots, rapes and murders are common as the last remaining citizens of a hundred dead nations are forced together in squalor and desperation. Men who once commanded armies and played the game of empires are forced to huddle next to starving swine herders and terrified orphans.

However the Watchers are not limited to the displaced and desperate. Something about the illimitable darkness of the Disjunction calls to people, compels them to come and stare deep into the void. In doing they are changed somehow, some would say driven insane, developing beliefs and obsessions that seem to be terrible perversions of the ideologies of the world that was. The void has been known to draw people from half the world away; leaving their families and wandering in a daze to the very edge of the nothingness, there to stand as if in awe while awaiting its annihilating embrace. Whatever the source of its grim fascination the Disjunction has drawn people from the remains of the world to it in tremendous numbers.

Among those called are prophets, preachers and messiahs and though their messages are incoherent – with some proclaiming the void a new God to be worshipped and sacrificed to, and others claiming it is the great destroyer and the world's final nemesis – all of them stay near it and their prayers and wailing grow ever louder as they stare into its depths.

More recently as the world has shrunk ever further some of these spiritual leaders have become ever more vocal and powerful as new religions spring up around them in the squalid camps. There have already been reports of massacres as cults have clashed and terrible ceremonies where children have been marched by the hundred into the hungry abyss.

"It is said that if you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you. Once I might have argued the point, I might have said that only in the life-giving light of the world that meaning can be found. I was wrong. For in the wretched squalor of the strongholds of the Watchers many have found meaning. It lies in despair, in hopelessness, in oblivion..."

- Navras of Myr, in his suicide note

The oldest of the Watcher's cities that grew out of the remains of the nomadic tribes of the east and was named for the great plateau it was founded on, where the last Ruby-Emperor Urusa sat on his throne before the approaching Disjunction and commanded it to halt.

The Drop is probably the most civilised of the Watcher encampments, with no notable atrocities or mass suicides yet reported, which is likely due to the number of eastern merchants and nobles who still attempt to maintain some semblance of normality and whose multitude of wagons and caravans make up the “city”. The calm is likely to last only until the last remains of the eastern Empire's goods are sold off and as these supplies have dwindled so the civility has gradually decreased with desperate traders instigating violent attacks on their competitors for control over their goods and caravans.

The Drop is notorious as a hub for slavery with many heavily armed syndicates of slavers active in and around the city who regularly round up fresh refugees or kidnap children left unattended by their homeless parents. More recently some of the most powerful cults have found a foothold in the Drop and have come into conflict with the merchants and slavers; not that many of them oppose slavery they just want to be the ones doing the enslaving.

Astudan or, as the Radiant Son would have it known, “The Silvered Gates” is the most inhospitable of the southerly Watcher strongholds and the centre of power of the Eisoptrophians, a cult whose power rivals that of the Church of old and whose fanaticism exceeds it a thousandfold. Little is known about Astudan since visitors never leave its dismal boundaries, and the white robed devotees of the Radiant Son are not talkative. At best it is assumed that any who visit are indoctrinated into the Eisoptrophian faith and don the white masks, at worst it is whispered that the cult sacrifices any intruders to whatever aspect of the Disjunction they worship in orgiastic rituals. All that is known for sure is that Astudan is a silent place, so utterly silent that it appears to be dead despite the large number of inhabitants. Sometimes however the silence is broken for occasionally the city has been heard to scream with a terrible cacophony of a maddened multitude that carries for miles as whatever fell rituals the Eisoptrophians preform reach their climax.

The settlement itself looks strangely out of place in the gloom of the Disjunction's edge; its mobile battlements and buildings painted a flawless white and covered in shards of broken glass and crystal so that the violet light of the dying sun makes the city burn. They sit on titanic sleds that are pulled over the dusty bed of the Sea of Bones by hoards of white robed Eisoptrophians, the grinding of the sleds the only sound in the dead air. Outside of the battlements the “suburbs” of Astudan are less rigorously controlled by the Eisotrophians but the cowed inhabitants still retreat to their hovels when the white-robes move wordlessly through the encampment.

Brink is a place of freezing hopelessness in the mountainous north of the remains of the world, it could barely be described as a settlement were it not for the legions of Watchers that call it home in flimsy huts made of dead wood and frost-cracked stone.

The refugees here come primarily from the once isolated mountain kingdoms of the northerly continents who have little in common with the rest of the world and even less with each other. Their lands and homes destroyed, food and fuel scarce and the Disjunction pushing them further and further south the people of Brink are destitute, desperate and dying. In fact they would likely already be dead were it not for “She who Levels” the venerated Messiah of the Levellers. It is said that her faith has cast a veil of unnatural calm over Brink turning back the freezing gales and winter storms allowing people to just survive within the boundaries of her holy influence. This is no great act of charity however but rather a way to encourage the peoples of the world to come to Brink, following the preachings of the Leveller's prophets, there to surrender to the ultimate darkness. For beyond the boundaries of the encampment stretching toward the Disjunction are grim fields of people, hundreds of them, simply sitting and waiting for the nothingness to end their hopeless existences. They do not cry out or pray, they simply stare into oblivion as it relentlessly flows over the people before them.

Obliviate Philosophers, Abstracters and crazed Numerologists make their home in The Rafts, a city of precarious towers floating on those waters of the western ocean that have not yet flowed away into nothingness. Primarily composed of what remains of the grand republics of the western archipelagos the towers were hastily assembled from whatever could be salvaged from the island cities as they were abandoned and have since been augmented with two decades worth of flotsam and jetsam. The towers' of the rafts are disjointed derelict things that sway violently in the storms that rage near the disjunction, creaking and groaning as the ocean heaves beneath them and lightning crackles in between their spires.

Of all the Watcher settlements the rafts lie closest to the Disjunction, with the greatest barges floating mere inches from the edge of the void their spires occasionally swaying into the nothingness there to be unmade. This proximity to the Disjunction is a vital component in the insane experiments and studies conducted by many of the inhabitants of the rafts who consist of what remains of the the intelligentsia of the west and those that seek to uncover the mysteries of the void. Many of the towers are pinnacled by twisted observatories looking straight into the Disjunction, their massive brass telescopes lensed with exotic crystals the philosophers hope will reveal something hidden deep within the nothingness; others have flimsy extendible platforms that are used to walk right up to the interface itself where null-alchemists probe the void in an attempt to extract its essence and distil its secrets.

For two decades the rafts have been anchored in relative safety upon the waters of the western ocean with only a handful collapsing into the Disjunction or sinking beneath the torrent, but now the coast of the last continent draws closer and their future is in doubt.

"Come to see it have you? Come to gaze? To look? To Watch? I thought so...or did I? Can you feel it? The Dark? The nothingness? Yesssss. Once I stood in a hundred courts in a hundred kingdoms but never did I see a sight as sweet, a lass as fair as the void. Its voice is the scream of broken earth and its song the wail of despairing winds. She calls to us! To her children! To return to the shadows of the great womb from where the world was birthed. So I gave her the children, all I could find. I wrapped them in night and sent them on there way as the music played. Such a harmony t'was it."

"Come Oh come dark mother!"

"All the world without while we cry within!"

"Hail the dark!"

- Ravings of a watcher preacher outside Brink

Some watchers are not simply content to watch all that exists vanish into the disjunction. They want to preserve the fading world, recording the geography, history, culture and even the geology of the land as it dies, keeping their libraries moving, one step ahead of disintegration. They are known as the map-makers, and can be found in all watcher communities, though they are suppressed in Astudan by the Eisoptrophians who consider their action as demonstrating a lack of faith in the Radiant Son. Map-maker tend to posses large collections of possibly genuine artifacts of the world that was, that they diligently protect and add to. They often interact with the Church (who generally tolerate map-makers attempts to preserve Church archives from doomed monestaries) and the Unaligned - even bandits being slightly less likely to prey on them, as they have a reputation of being fanatically devoted to protecting a collection of not-very-valuable artifacts. The City sees them as trouble-makers and thieves, though, and the other Watchers often view them as 'not totally committed to the program'.

Left horribly disfigured by exposure to the wastelands of distorted reality left in the wake of sorcery the League consists entirely of former members of the Church. Their bodies left twisted and inhuman they were cast from the protection of the Church and hounded from Church lands, leaving them no option but to flee to the rim of existence, there they are at least accepted if not liked and they can often be seen shambling through the outskirts of the major Watcher encampments. Members of the League tend to be given a wide berth by other Watchers especially when they move in groups. There are many rumours surrounding the Society, many concerning the unearthly abilities some of them seem to posses, and recently the Church's Misericorde have begun to actively hunt them, though whether out of fanatical hatred or fear is unknown for the moment.

It is said that when the world was broken the greatest Emperors and Kings of the world sent forth their mightiest champions to find some way to save all that was. Together they allied themselves to form the Order of the White, sworn to save creation from the Disjunction they rode out across the world that was to find some way to turn back the darkness. No one knows if those chosen heroes ever found what they searched for and they vanished from the pages of history, however it is said that galloping around the rim of existence can be glimpsed a cadre of hollow faced knights bedecked in rusting armour upon emaciated horses, never stopping or resting even when one of their number falls dead from their saddle. Those who have seen them say they seem driven by some maniac urge; eyes glittering with desire or possibly fear as they endlessly race around the diminishing rim of the world. They are known to all who see them as the Knights of the Round.

"Ya wanna watch dem kookaboos. Those Watcher folk I means. There be something queer about dem alright, something in'da eyes. Half o'them will try to bring ya round to their mad religion and da'ovur half will try to stick ya, that or march ya inda black. Batty da lot of dem. Dangerous too, 'haps more so den da black, least it can't hunt ya."

- Words of a Refugee, heading east along the Great Way

Son of Radiance, The Shining Man, He That Blinds, The Lord Fantastic, the Gatekeeper. All these are names given to the Radiant Son by his loyal followers who would gladly die in service to their prophet. Non-Eisoptrophians have bestowed on him some rather less flattering titles in response to his efforts to expand his influence with words and the sword. He rarely leaves Astudan and little is known about the man himself except that he did once walk the lands after the formation of the Disjunction; his faith & charisma drawing a cult of personality about him the likes of which the world had never seen before. Some have claimed he used to be a priest of the Trinity, others that he was a small time hustler and some claim he is a fiend from the depths of the void itself. Whoever he was he is one of the most powerful and enigmatic figures in what remains of the world and those that oppose him must answer to his legions of silent white robed servants. The exact nature of the beliefs of the Eisoptrophians are obscured to the uninitiated though their missionaries speak of the “mirror of the world” and the “radiance that lies without” and promise a glorious future to those who pledge themselves to the Radiant Son.

When they found her she was only a child, sitting lonely on a rock as the Disjunction approached, her eyes never blinking nor looking away from the darkness that came for her. So they moved her further from oblivion, though they could not tear her gaze away from it. Still she sat unnamed, uncaring, never eating or drinking and it was said that in her eyes the heart of the nothingness was reflected and to gaze at her was to be watched by the void itself. In time rumours of the silent girl who was sustained by nothing spread and the starving and the desperate came to her and looked upon her and cried to her for aid, but never did she respond. Yet her silence spoke to them somehow for many who made the pilgrimage to her would turn away and look to the Disjunction and then they would sit down and wait for annihilation never uttering another word, just staring as she did into eternity. So “She Who Levels” came to be and around her arose a priesthood that preached of the path of futility and guided those who came to them into the void for that is the destiny of all things.

A vast woman both in influence and frame. Leader of the Dionin Cartel and the most powerful slaver in the eastern world maybe even the entire world. She runs her Camorra with a fist of Iron; disposing of any who get in her way and sending her mutilated lieutenants to do business in the inner lands and capture new wares. It is said that she became too obese to move over ten years ago but that has done little to stop the expansion of her cartel and her cut-throat mercenaries and shadowy agents operate over much of Anicca. More recently she has taken to consolidating her power with the brutal murders of her competitors and ever more fierce enslavement drives, though who exactly she sells all her slaves to is unclear. Rumours of her unusual tastes abound around the encampments of the rim as do exotic tales of her “palace” in Emperor's Drop where, it is said, the finest “delicacies” in all that remain of the world are brought to her night and day by half-a-hundred nubile slaves.

Known by his students as the Supreme Scholar and first enlightened Obliviate Philiospher of the Jabirian College and by everyone else as a raving octogenarian lunatic. His tower on the rafts is the tallest of all, and by far the most precarious; its teetering wooden spire being lost in a baffling array of incomprehensible instruments all of which point or whir toward the Disjunction as lighting strikes crackles between golden rods and chromatic glass orbs. What exactly Ismaili studies remains utterly unclear and those unwise to enquire are treated to a three hour rant on the void-streams of oblivion and the hyper-causal topology of nothingness. While considered insane by all but his devoted students few question the extent of the manic drive that inspires him for he lacks one arm from the elbow down, supposedly lost during a past experiment that required him to reach into the Disjunction itself, the stump of which now blossoms with a vast array of lenses and probes that he uses to conduct his meta-experiments. It is said that few people know more about the nature of the void than does Ismaili but then that could just be because no one knows anything about it.

"If they breach the gates abandon the outer quarter and set the buildings afire. The flames should hold them for awhile and give our forces time to withdraw to the Citadel."

"Yes my Lord. I..."

"Was there something else Earnshaw?"

"My Lord...what...what if they breach the Keep?"

"...if they enter the citadel; distract them in the courtyard as long as you can...I'll...I'll order the household guard to garrotte the women and children..."

"But Sir!"

"I'll not let those monsters have them Earnshaw. It will be kinder to spare them the ravages of whatever those fiends have in store. I can do that for them at least...and may the Trinity forgive me."

- Duke Maine, last of his line, to his Castellan before the fall of Castle Men-rath

The delimitation between the Watcher and the Unaligned is ever changing as the Disjunction advances. Those who once numbered themselves among the Unaligned now count themselves among the multitudes of Watchers, their lands and homes consumed. However the transition is not always one of necessity; many sects and orders within the Watchers feel it necessary to take the resources and often the people of the lands before them, using them to increase their own power and influence.

The Eisoptrophians are particularly feared in the wastes of Anicca and have been known to silently empty entire settlements overnight, though they are by no means the only Watcher group to antagonise the Unaligned.

There is little the Church fears and hates more than those who name themselves Watchers, though not all Watchers hate or even care about the Church.

Those Watchers that do loathe the Church are those who have found enlightenment in the darkness of the Void; a new path to truth with no room for empty prayers to the fallen Trinity. Inevitably they see the Church's death-grip on the old faith is a thing that holds back the multitudes from the revealed gospel of oblivion and often they seek to purge it with the flame and sword, or corrupt it through charismatic missionaries.

However many Watchers simply do not care about the Church; what matter dowdy bookish men in robes when the song of nothingness rings in your ears or slaves fulfil your every perverse desire.

The City has had little experience of the Watchers to date being presently far beyond the edge of the Disjunction. The few Watcher prophets, doomsayers and emissaries who have made it beyond the walls of the city have in general then been hung from them by order of the Lord Protector who will brook no religions in his city.

As the City draws ever closer to the Rim of existence many rumours have begun to spread around the major Watcher settlements that the powerful and influential are starting to take an interest in the city and the wondrous artifices it has at its command.

In a dying world wherein all that was is disintegrating the Watchers represent the creation and establishment of new orders and ideologies, beliefs that could never have existed, or would never have been tolerated, in the world before it was broken. The change they represent is an inherently corrupted one however, a thing of madness and nihilism, born at the edges of the infinite uncaring oblivion that is eroding away creation. Whatever dogmas and creeds they have evolved the Watchers are united by the influence of the Disjunction and although they have a myriad divergent objectives in the end the Disjunction lies at the heart of the insanity that drives them, for of all the factions the Watchers understand to the greatest extent that the world is now defined by its own end.

Do you enjoy playing a gibbering lunatic, a predatory psychopath, a charismatic evangelist or an unhinged scholar? Then the Watchers are for you and you'll find plenty of similar minded people there too, though you need not be beholden to any of them. Living near the Disjunction inspires insanity in a thousandfold ways and if you want to explore the depths of madness then this faction is for you. Watchers need answer to no one allowing you to create entire religions, moving cities or anything else you can think of. There is no need to join any of groups listed above, though they represent the mix of insanity and fanaticism that is typical of the watchers.

Those who stare in the void are altered by it in some indefinable way. Some say the void murmurs to them through dreams and nightmares, others that the Watchers' insanity is merely manifested in hallucinations, whatever the truth Watchers know things, things they shouldn't be able to. Playing a Watcher allows you to take the Void Theoria trait which will provide you oracular powers…of a sort.

Watchers have spent the last thirty years keeping ahead of the Disjunction and are particularly adept at avoiding the void. While others may be overcome by the creeping void the Watchers will endure. If they want to that is.