From the Introduction
The setting is "the real world", in the present. The Earth once was a magical place, full of dragons and wizards. That was thousands and thousands of years ago. Tapped too often, too much, the magical energies faded into nearly nothing. The Earth now is a discharged battery with barely an echo of what once was real and possible.
Other worlds, other planes, are still magical. Various travelers, purposeful or accidental, occasionally visit Earth. Some come prepared with enough magic to leave. Others arrive accidentally, or through an emergency, or simply assume the earth will have available magic. These others find themselves trapped on earth, unable to gather enough magical energy to open a gate, or shift plane, or escape. So trapped, they seek their own purposes, make their own goals, turn their skill to other fields. Most want to find, gather, or steal enough magic to go back home. Very few succeed.
Tapping into magic on earth once was as easy and endless as plugging a blender into a wall socket. Now the only magic that’s left is like a mostly discharged battery. A trickle. Barely enough to cast a minor spell.
The vast majority of people on earth are unaware of any magical existence or realm. They are people of science. Agnostic, skeptical, eager to explain away the unexplainable. Only the few – usually those considered the lunatic fringe – have some credible view of the invisible world. Governments are eager to suppress anything that seems unexplainable or dangerous. Churches that once fought against demons now say they never existed. The truth of history has been rewritten into a past age of superstition.