This whole discussion is giving the current game lore too much credit, but as they say, never underestimate the power of denial.
Regnum's back-story is an extremely badly written piece of lore. High-school kids would be able to write more interesting plots than what we get, no matter how complicated we'd like to think the story is just because we live in denial about the fact that our lore is:
"There was Syrtis, some split to do dark magic so they became Ignis, and oh by the way there were Alsius who we'll force into the storyline by some random plot device that makes no sense (emperor assassination)"
This is all there is to this game's lore. It is obvious in the first 5 minutes that the process went something like "we need to stand out in the MMO market, lets have 3 realms instead of 2" and then a back-story was slapped on at the last minute by someone who gave zero thought or even creativity into it at all.
Sure, there's probably some thousands of lines of text in quests and stuff, but quantity is not quality. Most of this text is messed up, half-written, badly translated ideas based on what that particular author (obviously they were more than one) had in his own mind as the game lore (obviously there was not even a consistent game lore within NGD for quest writers to look up, each quest text writer must have been making shit up as they wrote it).
It might not seem like an important part of the game to NGD and they have flat out said that they do not believe their game lore to be as important:
http://www.regnumonline.com.ar/forum...&postcount=110
But, in my mind, it is, and currently RO has a really, really, really bad one.