Prologue: The Nature of the Hero System

Since the ancient times of the Archaic Dominion, the cosmic balance of the world was maintained by the opposition of extremes. The cataclysmic rise of a  Dark Lord was inevitably met by the miraculous appearance of a True Hero. 

The True Hero was born from the collective consciousness and desperation of an oppressed populace—A single, absolute entity endowed with the divine power to catalyze their deliverance and achieve the overthrow of the Dark Lord. 

By the dawn of the Second Dominion, however, the ruling elite came to a sudden realization: The spontaneous and unannounced arrival of a True Hero was a potential threat to the state itself. Such an individual was an uncontrollable variable capable of shattering the existing power structure  as easily as ending a Dark Lord's reign.

To preserve the status quo, state strategists and church leaders attempted to subvert the order of the universe and introduce a shift in the heroic paradigm. The emergence of heroes could no longer be left to random chance according to the rulers of the Dominion. If the state could pre-emptively develop and indoctrinate potential heroes, they would effectively preserve the balance of power in the world.

The new system invested noble houses with divine regalia that anchored their lineages to the sources of mythic archetypes and placed figures recruited from among their ranks at the pinnacle of the heroic hierarchy. By the time of the Third Dominion the appearance of heroes was no longer defined by divine intervention, but by the institutional cultivation of heroes in specialized academies.

Heroes were produced to fight monsters, clear dungeons, and defeat nascent Dark Lords. The leaders of the Dominion believed that by their actions, the collective desperation of the populace would never fall low enough to trigger the universal call for a true, revolutionary savior.

Despite the bureaucratic industry designed to churn out powerful, sanitized, and highly marketable tools under the strict governance of the Dominion, the ruling elite found that True Heroes originating from primal imagines could still appear from among the population during times of seemingly insurmountable crisis.

Thus was born the age of egalitarianism in the Fourth Dominion, when heroes were no longer exclusively members of the privileged elite. In this era, institutions like the Eisenfelde Heldkadettenanstalt opened their doors to anyone with heroic potential after being appropriately filtered and repackaged into assets of potential value for the state.