Faction Introduction: The Void

Voiding Things for Fun and Profit

The Void is a spooky place, and it's no wonder that its denizens are a bit...changed for the experience. Nor is it any wonder that beings who dwell in the realm to which Monsters are banished are well equipped to fight against them. The Void faction in Ascension specializes in two elements of the game – banishing cards and defeating Monsters.

It is in the Void faction where you will find the best cards at generating Power, with heroes like Emri, One with the Void, and constructs like Muramasa far eclipsing what you'll find in other factions. Their focus on Monster slaying also shows through in cards like Voidthirster, which increases the Honor reward you earn for defeating Monsters from the center row. The Void are a tough, battle hardened faction, and they know better than to let their guard down when danger could be lurking around any corner

Defeating Monsters is pretty straightforward, but not everything The Void does is so easy to understand. The Void is the one faction that has the ability to banish cards from its own deck, with cards like Void Initiate and Arbiter of the Precipice. While banishing cards from your own deck doesn't have any immediate benefit, early in the game it is one of the best ways of improving the average quality of your deck. Every Apprentice or Militia you remove is one fewer you'll draw in the future, ,which makes your average hand that much more powerful once you start acquiring new Heroes and Constructs.

This ability makes the Void pair well with any other faction, but particularly well with the Enlightened and the Lifebound. The combination of deck thinning from the Void and card draw from the Enlightened lets you draw through your personal deck incredibly quickly, giving you the use of your most powerful cards repeatedly. Similarly, with the Lifebound, you can reuse the powerful Rune- and Honor-generating cards over and over, which can give you a huge edge on your opponents.

The place between worlds is a dangerous place in its own right. If The Void can survive there, they can survive anywhere.

What is the Void?

Before there were gods, or monsters, or humans, there was the Void.

To understand the Void, one must first understand the nature of death in the world of Ascension. Back before the besieged land of Vigil was mature, the custodianship of the cosmos was handed down to five gods, each tasked with sculpting the newly formed mankind, with assembling the higher natures of this new and burgeoning sentient race piece by piece. The gods did this by starting with the basic and instinct-driven form they’d been given and adding uniqueness from their various areas of dominion.

The goddess Nyx, who granted the gift of death, provided formerly ageless and deteriorating beings some much-needed rest for the soul. Nyx’s process of granting souls dissolution and rest was achieved by leading them back to their point of origin- the Void.

The Void is a vortex-like connection point where the physical cosmos intersect with a huge pool of creation energies- the primordial material from which the universe was made. It exists as a swirling emptiness, vast beyond imagining.This portal is a whirlpool drawing all into anti-existence, the doorway into a place beyond human understanding, where souls bob like corks in an ocean of half-formed stars.

On a latticed superstructure known as the Obsidian Ring wrapped around the vortex dwell the members of the Void faction- caretakers who were once tasked with guiding souls to their peaceful end.

Now, things have changed. Due to a certain unfortunate cosmic event, the details of which I will not utter here, they are now tasked by their goddess, Nyx, to fight an endless battle against creatures emerging from the Void. These tentacled, many-eyed horrors come in a million different shapes and forms, all of them deadly, all of them eager to escape the Void and wreak havoc on the other realms…including Vigil.

Luckily, the Void faction is up to this task. Residing on the battlements that completely surround the vortex in a gleaming, irregular ring, they forcefully banish any creature that emerges.

The lookouts of the Void faction are known as the Black Watch. They spend extended time in wakefulness on battlements that are close to the vortex. An elite subgroup of the sect are known as Shades, and have the task of taking subdued monstrosities back to the Void... by diving towards the vortex until they're close enough to release their prey and let the forces of existence do the rest. This may sound dangerous, but the people of the Void do not eat, sleep, or engage in any sort of revelry whatsoever. All they do is kill monsters, day after day after lightless day, and all of that time is spent in a state where life is precarious and could end at any time. If you were to run into a member of the Void faction just walking down the street, he or she would not know how to carry on a conversation on any topic other than weapons, monsters, or how to use one on the other.

That said, not everybody on the Obsidian Ring is a warrior.

Through various mistakes of both gods and men, certain things sometimes come to exist that shouldn’t be. When Void faction members aren’t murdering horrors by the bushel, they preside over ceremonies wherein dangerous objects are erased from the history of the universe. The Void priests who preside over these ceremonies are called Arbiters.

With the breaking of the Great Seal, beings from across the Old Realms and Vigil have journeyed to the section of the Obsidian Ring known as the Precipice, where they gain the blessing of the goddess Nyx. This serves as permission to throw whatever object they have brought over the side and into the vortex.

Once this happens, the object ceases to have ever existed. The Arbiter who presided over the drop will not remember what was dropped, nor will the person who made the journey. The previous owners of the item lose all memory of it, but that’s not all. The resources and effort used to make it have never been used- time, materials, you name it. It’s as if the universe shifts minutely to an entirely new existence in which the object was never present.

For all I know, there may have originally been four or five cards more cards in the first release of Ascension. None of the designers or developers remembers anything, but there’s no way to be sure. The Void is very mysterious that way.

But wait! There IS one being who has fallen into the Void and survived.

Emri, One with the Void, is the foremost slayer of the Void faction. She almost didn’t make it into the set at all. Right around the time the Great Seal was falling, she was dragged back into the vortex by a kraken-looking horror and presumed dead- though her Void faction brothers and sisters showed about as much combined emotion at this loss as you’d get from a chunk of volcanic rock.

It was only a few minutes later when she appeared to crawl out of the vortex, her entire body transformed into a swirling purple substance contained only by her will. Her fighting abilities increased by several orders of magnitude, and she hasn’t been in danger of being dragged in again since that day.

There are no scientists on the Obsidian Ring, no scholars, no true culture of any kind. They exist only to watch, to guard, and to destroy that which never should have existed- and if you can gain their trust, you can put those skills to use defending your world of Vigil.

After thousands of years of nonstop battle, these warriors are eager to test their strength against something new.