This is exactly the sort of thing the franchise is missing. It has no definitive
anything plotwise, canonical and extra-canonical "facts" are all over the place and often times conflict with themselves. There's no real "time" that all this happens, which is a serious problem setting-wise. Time is half the setting, after all. A reboot of the franchise would do well to establish time, and a sense of it, with just one simple addition to the stories: 1 AWB. The start of a new era, the first year after William Black slayed the members of the court. Boom, done. From there you can talk about the rise of the Old Kingdom, establishment of the guild, rise and fall of Nostro, and give these things dates and then, finally, the player has a sense of belonging.
Your request is a somewhat vague and broad one, but here's a general timeline of events.
In Fable, the whole of the original plot revolves around the Sword of Aeons. It is the beginning. The objective is to get and destroy or keep the sword, as long as it is kept out of Jack's hands. In TLC, the plot switches up to Jack, his origins, resurrection and intent on possessing the Hero, successfully if the player so chooses which gives some insight on Jack. Let's go over all this from the beginning.
The Void. Don't know what that is, don't care. The Court, consisting of three members, Queen of Blades, Jack of Blades, Knight of Blades. They commanded Albionites obey them, and being the drunken Brits they are, they told the court to bugger off. So the court set the land on fire and then flooded it and is maybe responsible for Necropolis being in the state it's in. So people obey.
Some people did not obey. Some folks challenged the court and the Knight of Blades would turn these people's heads into fence post decorations. Then came William Black who slew the Knight of Blades in pithy fashion. Jack faced young William and dueled the future king with the Sword of Aeons. Black escaped this encounter, stealing the Sword of Aeons in the process. The sword promised Black success over Jack in exchange for his soul. Black agreed, returned and lopped off Jack's head. Jack, being a sore loser, refuses to die and keeps his soul safely stowed away in his mask. Black then fought the Queen of Blades for some weeks, apparently causing the earth to shake and other dramatic whatever, and Black won.
Using the power of the Sword of Aeons, it's said Black ruled the world, including Knothole Glade, Hook Coast, and Snowspire. Probably not "the East" where Thunder is from. This was the Old Kingdom era, and it started and ended badly. The Sword of Aeons corrupted Black, and during this time he had all the key structures and artifacts the Hero would encounter during his quest to stop Jack such as the Hook Coast structure, the focal sites, and the Septimal Key. Finally the hold that the Sword of Aeons had on Black hit the tipping point and both he and the sword disappeared. My guess is that this was the finalization of the contract he made with the sword, and the construction of the focal sites was the sword's hindsight - allowing it to be summoned back with the aid of Black's now cursed bloodline.
There isn't much in-game to detail what happened to the Old Kingdom after Black's disappearance. It's implied that the Kingdom just fell to hell right away without Black guiding it. In The
Tales of Albion, which is supposed to serve as a sort of bridge between Fable I and Fable II as well as fill in plot holes, says Black's descendants went to war with each other, each claiming to be the new Archon, and civil war is a pretty good and very real way for a kingdom to fall. It continues to explain that it was the Archon's descendents who constructed the Spire and a bunch of other weird Old Kingdom stuff. After a while of this war of succession, the Archons are all presumably dead or in hiding, which would explain why the Hero and his family are the last of the bloodline. If only he had cousins, then maybe they could have been slaughtered by Jack instead. But back to ToA, But finally, just as Albion was on the verge of complete and irreversible ruin, a Hero showed up.
Nostro, bandit, mercenary, man of the East. I ponder how far East, as he might have some connection to Thunder and that'd be worth speculating. He pops in to find a ruined land, hardly worth pillaging. Scythe, who "appeared from no where" (which is a terrible way to fill plot holes) guided Nostro to become a new leader. He founded the guild, slayed bandits left and right, brought peace back to the land. Again, not a whole lot of details here, but everything indicates he was a good, righteous and proud leader. ToA continues to explain that Nostro commissioned the Arena and Avo's Tear, a story I take strong dispute with.
Here's where things get tricky. In
Tales of Albion, it's explained that power, greed and some harlot corrupted Nostro, and over time his followers and even Scythe abandoned him, and all by his lonesome an assassin took the opportunity to kill Nostro with poison. I don't like this story either. In the game, it's somewhat implied that Maze and Weaver collaborated to slay Nostro and take the guild for themselves. I like that one a lot better, as it gives a little depth to otherwise shallow characters and it's easily to believe considering Maze is already a traitorous fiend and
Weaver's not nearly as powerful as he claims, and clearly had different ideas about how the guild should be run, such as having heroes take good or evil quests, as long as they get paid for them.
Interestingly, a player trying to put this together will get insight not explicitly stated anywhere. The Hero is born into a world not very far long after the fall of the Old Kingdom, or even after the fall of Nostro. This provides an explanation on why the world is veritably empty and devoid of life. It's post-war, population dwindled, towns destroyed, manors cursed, mayors corrupt, etc. and so on.
That just about catches us up to the time of Fable. If you have a more specific question let me know, I'm better at specifics than broad strokes.
