The Kela Maritime Guild originated in Kela with uncertain historical roots, likely emerging post-Era of Fracture (~2,000–1,500 years before modern Geba); specialized in underwater technologies amid polar and maritime environments.
Founder: Not explicitly named; mysterious origins potentially linked to early Kela explorers or post-fracture innovators adapting to subsurface challenges.
Purpose: Produce expensive underwater arrays and gear; serve elites and military for subsurface operations, relying on energy from Sentinel and Joxi.
Values and Ethics: Prioritizes exclusivity for elites and military applications, valuing high-cost specialized technologies despite ambiguous beginnings; neutral-leaning, disliked for its inaccessibility and suspicion, which distances it from the general populace.
Vesselborn is the story of Geba — a world that has carried an empire for six thousand years.
It begins with Vaer’karesh, who unites five nations into the first empire and fixes a common language and law. Across the ages, the empire fights and finally breaks Thazvaar, welcomes Jeyrha through engineering and diplomacy, and liberates Berinu by choice. In Ngorrhal, the people of the mountain passes lose their ancestral name and are permanently renamed the Frost Sentinels, whose strength helps secure imperial rule. The Haavu cannon systems cement that dominance.
At its height, the empire spans continents and raises relay towers that bind cities, coasts, and passes into one network. Assassinations and civil wars follow — the Fracture — but the answer is not a vacuum. The Shadow Rule forms from imperial networks and manufactures peace, ending the warlord broadcasts and taking the world back from collapse. They are the empire made quiet: continuity without ceremony.
Today, the Shadow Rulers still govern from the background while the Energy Wars — covert struggles over power grids and relays in uncivilized regions — decide who controls energy, transport, and culture.
Stories range from relay-field defenses and inland recoveries to city governance and frontier resettlement; from rail lines and air programs that stitch regions together to festivals and work crews where culture and politics collide; from Frost Sentinel memory to families choosing the safety of hub clearings or the risk beyond the grid.
This is Geba. It began in silence. It has not yet ended.