Once upon a time and space long gone there was a land called Avandriel, and on this land lived a race of intelligent beings who called themselves the Brell. They were a rational but inquisitive breed and so as to help rationalise the things they could not understand, they theorised about a set of beings who were responsible for the unexplained wonders in the world around them; and religion was born.

First the star which provided their light and then the moons which traversed their night-time sky and the forces of nature on Avandriel were each in turn personified as a deity and worshipped. Religion spread among the Brell like a forest fire after a long drought and with similar disastrous consequences. Differences of worship caused much fighting and killing with even brell with the same father slaying one another due to religious intolerance.

The leaders of the Brell were forced into setting up a guiding force for the new religion which they named The Temples of the Soul, wherein the people could worship their god, provided that they respected its place within the pantheon of the gods.

Naturally some groups rebelled against the new temples, destroying them with fire and killing their keepers, which greatly angered the rulers of the Brell who were strong in their resolve to keep the temples. So they created a policing force the like of which the Brell had not seen before, a group of Brell whose sole remit was 'Wipe out all who did not hold with the Temples of the Soul'. Thus followed the tyranny of those called 'The Keepers of the Faith'.

As the Keepers grew more and more successful, religious differences were increasingly discouraged (often with bloody examples) and so a uniformity of thought grew upon the Brell until the whole of the race believed in the theology of the temples.

Now belief is a wondrous thing, and on the plane of existence that included Avandriel, the fabric of reality was thin and easily warped by the force of belief of many minds. Thus when the number of Brell reached a certain level a section of their plane was forced away into the limbo between the planes creating a new plane. And on this plane the gods of the Brell, just as preached in the temples, came into being and the age of the gods began.

The Gods as their first act of divine power took over the running of the temples, and they regularly appeared to oversee judgement of disputes in temple courts, solve problems, teach and give advice and assistance to the needy. Thus the Brell fell into an age of peace and prosperity; the obliteration of the occasional unbeliever as the only ripple on the otherwise still water that their society had become.

This stable state would have persisted had it not been for the invaders with no gods of their own save themselves. They swept down on the defenceless Brell and began to systematically eradicate them from the face of Avandriel. The Brell beseeched their gods for aid, and indeed the gods came but they were impotent as the invaders did not believe in them and were not therefore in their power.

The Invaders had a science which the Brell had never needed, and so they could not be stopped.

Settlement by settlement the Brell were destroyed; and as the Brell dwindled in numbers the golds fled to their plane and mourned the loss of their worshippers.

After a time the gods saw the last remnants of the Brell die and resolved to try and recreate their former worshippers. However they found that the combined strength of their minds was not enough for the task. So it was decided that new gods would be created by the remaining gods by briefly combining their essences to create a new 'child' god that would be an amalgam of the parts of its 'parents'.

Initial attempts at creating such a child proved distressingly that the child could not exist on the plane they inhabited. So an area in Limbo was set aside as a 'nursery' area, and a part of their plane was given over to physical forms - Lomah - in which the 'children' could power their avatars with parts of their essence.

In this way, they might increase their level of existence through learning to the point where they could survive on the plane of the gods and help in the re-creation of the Brell.