Local History

This thread is dedicated to different areas of history relative to this campaign.

In it, you can read about:
- The Drakall Empire and Mara
- The Burning Isles and the Drow

In days of old long ago, an extended family of men befriended a dragon and arranged a mutual-assistance treaty between them. they built an edifice to commemorate the event and for future meetings; they called it Drake Hall. The man who arranged this treaty was honored by the family. The dragon who made the treaty became fat and wealthy from all the tributes he was paid. Together they intimidated and coerced various other groups to submit to their rule, and the kingdom of Drakall was born. Drakall's human leaders established a royal line, and as the kingdom grew, the dragon convinced others to join it in alliance with the descendants of the humans who treated it so well. So over the human generations, Drakall grew, expanding across the region, and prospered. Drakall became an economic force as well as a military one, and great was the knowledge that the wizards of Drakall gleaned in their coexistence with the dragons. Other nations grew envious or afraid of Drakall, and attempted to subdue it through force. For two human generations, the kings and dragons of Drakall defended its borders from various attacks and invasions. But then the grandson of the first human king who defended the realm decided that the only way to stop these offenses was to attack and subjugate the nearby aggressors. Thus was the empire of Drakall born.

The Drakall Empire grew to encompass most of the continent, all the land between the eastern sea and the vast western forests, from the vast tundra to the north to the southern jungles. Various regional centers developed; some of them were former capitol cities of lands that had been conquered or absorbed into the Empire. So it continued for centuries: long enough to even span the generations of dragons.

But then, one of the elder dragons died, and the human Emperor who had bonded to that dragon died not long after. He left no heirs, and had not bonded with another dragon who could give its weight to the question of succession. This led to civil war in the Drakall Empire, as two cousins made competing claims for the Imperial throne, each with a dragon of their own.

One cousin, bonded with a red dragon, led an army whose colors were red and white. The other cousin, his enemy, paired with a blue dragon, and commanded an army whose colors were blue and green. Officials, nobles, knights, merchants, writers, admirals, artists, and wizards: all took opposing sides in the conflict, and soon enough the entire Empire was embroiled in the struggle for control. This became known as the War of Imperial Succession. Some generals of the Imperial army refused to take sides or fight their fellow citizens, and attempted to remain aloof from the budding conflict. These generals and the armies faithful to them became known as "The Grays," for they would not choose to support one color over another. Rather they eschewed such internecine warfare, declaring that no Imperial citizen should lift a hand against another, lest the Empire destroy itself or external threats emerge unopposed.

But there were many other generals and admirals who were willing to commit their forces to one side or the other. The red & white armies grew ever larger; so, too, did the blue & green host. The Gray Generals realized that they would eventually be drawn into the war, even if was just because some faction or another decided to attack them to eliminate their threat. Rather than stay and risk compromising their principles, the Grays fled the war of Empire vs Empire, heading away from settled Imperial lands and eventually reaching the elvish kingdom of Ser'Alun in the vast forests of the west. After much entreating of the elves, these refugees were granted a bit of land at the border of the elven territory in a harbor on the shores of the western ocean called The Great Sea. There the generals and their followers settled and tried to eke a living out of the wilderness. Their settlement quickly came to be known as "Grayhaven," the refuge not only for the followers of the Grays, but also anyone who wished to not take sides and escape the war. Grayhaven grew and prospered as the Empire collapsed.

Some time after the war had shattered the Empire into smaller but still-powerful city-states, the Elder Dragons not beholden to Drakall decided that the world needed direction, and they began to remake the world into their conception of perfection. But the Dragons did not agree as to what perfection meant, and they too began to fight amongst themselves, each one striving to enact their vision for the world. This began the Dragon War, a larger and vastly more terrible conflict than the War of Imperial Succession. The creatures of the world and its peoples cried out, and the dragons saw what devastation they had wrought. They formed the Dragon Council and ended the war, assigning different regions of the world to the different dragons.

Now, thousands of years after the War of Imperial Succession, the ancient city of Mara remains as one of the last vestiges of the Drakall Empire. Mara was a regional hub for the far west of the empire. But Drakall fell ages ago, and the provinces that survived dissolved into separate kingdoms, and in the intervening centuries, most of those kingdoms fell apart, leaving only a few city states with myths and legends of the Empire that was. Mara, decrepit, hedonistic, and corrupt, remains, its citizens addled with drugs and sybaritic pursuits, convinced that they remain the greatest city in the world.

You know better.

You were raised in or around Mara, and have long dreamed of going to someplace else, a place of opportunity: opportunity for change, opportunity for wealth, opportunity for social advancement, opportunity for learning, opportunity for adventure, opportunity for discovery. All of these things are possible elsewhere, you believe, and none of them seem possible in Mara.

Drow are extremely rare to encounter in the Greenwold, even rarer in the remnants of the Drakall Empire further east. Most people have never seen a drow, and all they know are rumors and legends of these people that seem fictional/mythical. There are different levels of knowledge/awareness of the drow that people will have as a baseline. PCs can know more than that, either by learning it in game or rolling History checks when prompted. The levels are:

Base level knowledge: Just about everyone has heard some stories about drow, in which they are always the villains, whether outright antagonists or, more often, betrayers. Many drow stories involve spiders, perhaps because spiders are ambush predators and that dovetails nicely with the common portrayal of drow as creatures of stealth, darkness, and subterfuge. The stories also often involve necromancy, with drow despoiling and/or reanimating dead things, because that's an easy shorthand for EVIL. Most people take the stories at face value, but a lot of the stories don't make a lot of sense with any kind of analysis. Why are they always trying to take over the world? How can they be everywhere trying to steal people's children or take their jobs when no one has ever seen one? Do they really have a penchant for spider husbandry? If so, how does one domesticate a spider? Bramlin, Gunter, Ishi, Morik, Princess, and Woody all have this level of knowledge without needing to roll.

Conversant knowledge: Common church and elven lore tells that the drow were a family of elves who were led astray from Lunea's path by their leaders. The story goes that, at the dawn of history, Ireldion was prince and heir to the elven throne, and he was deeply in love with a princess of another house named Agrissa. But he had a rival for her affections in a heroic young elf, of humble origins and no prospects, named Balakan. Everyone knew that Ireldion and Agrissa were destined to be King and Queen of the elves. But Balakan stole Agrissa away. For a long time did Ireldion hunt down the kidnapper. After many years, Ireldion found Balakan as he was fishing in a river. The prince challenged Balakan to a duel and the challenge was accepted. Ireldion fought and slew Balakan in single combat. As Balakan lay dying, repenting of his blackguard ways, Agrissa arrived with Balakan's bastard children. Ireldion offered to forgive her, but Agrissa turned away with darkness in her heart. The elven woman spurned the Prince's offer of marriage. When he had left, dejected, Agrissa turned to dark powers and attempted to reanimate her dead lover. For this abomination Greaf the god of the dead cast out Agrissa and all her descendants, cursing them to live away from the sun and forever at odds with all other races. Sorrowfully did the other elves drive them away into great pits in the ground, and ever since the drow have been doomed to wander the halls of the dead, always away from the light and life of the surface. Adran, Elowin, and Faith have this level of knowledge without needing to roll.

Informed knowledge: Some who were raised in high society learned a good deal more about the "dark" elves than just the popular histories. There's the classic elven mytho-history that an ancient prince, Ireldion, loved a beautiful elven maid named Agrissa, but she was seduced by a dashing young elf rogue named Balakan. Ireldion fought Balakan for Agrissa's favor, and Balakan was killed. Agrissa chose the dead elf over Ireldion, and tried to reanimate her dead lover. For this, she and all her descendants were banished to the "halls of the dead:" the Underdark.

But privileged people also learned a different history: that the drow have existed forever as just another breed of elf, and that they have not always been separated from the rest of elfkind since they were "cursed" for "misdeeds." Rather, the drow were a powerful splinter faction in the larger elven society even into the early days of the Drakall Empire (relatively recent history, as elvish histories go). The drow faction was ever in favor of fighting the humans, and, following their advice led to the elves and humans warring on one another for centuries. Eventually the King of the Elves and the Drakall Emperor acknowledged that there was a stalemate, and they arranged a peace treaty that established borders between the elven lands of the west (what later became known as the Greenwold) and the human lands of the East (the Drakall Empire). One of the key conditions of that treaty that the Drakall throne insisted upon was the banishment of the warlike drow faction. So the high elves and wood elves banished their pugnacious drow cousins to exile in unknown lands for the sake of peace. The drow found and settled on a distant archipelago named the Burning Isles, but true to their nature, they have fought with each other ever since. Despite their incessant strife, the drow are a prosperous and clever people. For a long time there was trade between parts of the Drakall Empire and the Burning Isles, through the Greenwold, but about a century ago, the Alabaster Academy outlawed necromancy, and the nations of the continent cut off all legal commerce with the Blazing Isles. This is because the drow have always had a hard time discriminating good from evil: the drow not only engage in both necromancy and slavery, those practices are intrinsic to their entire society.

Sometimes rogue traders or illicit explorers still visit the Burning Isles and return with tales of wonders and treasure, brutality and abomination. By all accounts, they are terrifying primitives compared to gracious, genteel elves of good breeding. This is what the elite teach their children, anyway. But discriminating young minds are prone to wonder: how much of those stories is true, and how much is cautionary rumor meant to discourage others from seeking to trade with the Burning Isles and potentially disrupt a monopoly on drow trade (that may have been the secret basis of many a family's wealth)? Eir and Eozindra have this level of knowledge without needing to roll.