Guthreham's history was marked with typical MtG-esque wars between heroic and high-minded holy folk, angels, and knights and such versus powermongering demons, vampires and necromancers. You've heard it all before. Then something unexpected happened. An unassuming but passionate priestess named Janell "sparked" into her planeswalking powers. She tapped deep into the wild soul of the plane, organized the human, angelic, and elven societies of Gutherham, and they won the war. For good. Forever. They purged Guthreham of demons, vampires and powerful dark forces and brought about a new peace.
Janell started a new society worshipping the abundance and growth of life and a rejection of darkness and death. Some large cities in the plane were abandoned as incubators of corruption and greed. Instead, bucolic and pastoral communities dot Guthreham, though there are some remaining larger towns and ports. Among them is the Arbor, the seat of Janell's power and the home of the plane's green/white forces.
Life grew with abandon with Janell's influence and the support of her vast planeswalker magics. And then it began to speed up. Those abandoned cities were overwhelmed with plant and animal life over decades. Trees and plants grow exponentially faster than they do in other planes. Animals gestate and breed more quickly than they ever had before. Guthreham is so fecund that it is encroaching on communities and making it hard for people to find places to live safely.
And while Janell may have banished the darkest of dark forces, her obsession with growth and rejection of the end of the life cycle is incubating plagues and diseases, and ironically, undeath. Janell refuses to publicly acknowledge that her obsession is feeding this crisis. Instead she is devoted to trying to purge disease (and, unfortunately, disease-carriers) from Guthreham.
Janell is actually quite elderly and this background story has taken place over decades. I suppose technically she sparked prior to "The Mending," but let's just kind of work around that. She's very old and very experienced. She is very wary of artifacts and artificing and her society rejects it. She associates artifacts with dark powers and corruption, and she's not entirely wrong (She is aware of the existence of artificial planes and dreadful forces like the Phyrexians, though she hasn't revealed this info to the citizenry at all. They are not aware of other planes).
The spread of plagues and disease is starting to lead to new tensions and new possible conflicts. Coastal communities trying to rid themselves of disease had taken to dumping their dead and diseased out into the ocean or exiling them on small islands. The plagues then began to spread into the ocean and ocean life until it reached the deep-dwelling cepahlids. The cephalids on Guthreham tend to their underwater communities and led a fairly peaceful and isolated life away from the surface world. They traded with coastal communities and were focused on studying magic and deep ruins of old, long-gone sunken societies. They were completely ignored in all the previous warring and most have never even heard of Janell or the Arbor.
But their isolation did not protect them from the consequences of the overgrowth. The disease has spread to the cephalids, and many of them have become afflicted to a host of debilitating effects. They have had to turn to magic to try to research what is happening and desperately attempt to figure out a solution. They have begun turning to necromancy as an act of desperation (as have some human wizards as well).
One particularly skilled researcher named Xirn began developing symptoms of a pox of some sort. Rather than killing or disfiguring him, it remarkably sparked his planeswalking abilities.
Xirn's ascendancy to planeswalker status is new at the timing of this expansion, and he's still trying to learn (completely on his own) what it means.
But as he is exploring the deep underwater and hidden caverns of Guthreham with new, more powerful eyes, he is coming to some surprising realizations, ones that Janell already knows but has been concealing. Guthreham, the world, is alive, with a soul and hunger to grow. Janell has essentially been serving the plane's needs by demanding and fostering more life. The diseases and poxes and unlife that this has caused is just another type of growth, and Xirn's affliction has connected him to the plane's soul and leylines the way it has Janell.
And there's more, Xirn discovers. Guthreham is pregnant. Something is growing inside and has been for centuries. Something very, very powerful. It may well threaten the extinction of all of the cephalid race if Xirn does nothing. But fighting against the overgrowth will put him into conflict with one very powerful foe in Janell.
So there's the basic lore to start the ball rolling. Guthreham is a living plane, which is hardly a new concept--see Nissa and Zendikar. But what happens when a plane gets pregnant? What does it give birth to? And who's the Daddy?
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