Bard Tales

Across the Old World, the bards keep the memory of things that history has half-forgotten. Some of their tales are true, some are legend, and some are a little of both - but all of them are told and retold in tavern and hall until the names within them become as familiar as old friends. What follows are a few of the most enduring.

The Fall of Loreshia

Many hundreds of years ago, in the Second Age, there arose between the sea and the forest a kingdom that is no more: Loreshia, the roof-beam of the broken. This was after the gods had come into the world, after the Dark Age had ended, and the world was a more hopeful place - like a smiling farm-boy setting out on his first adventure after a storm.

The farm-boy met the monsters of the mountains and never returned; and so too did Loreshia. The Dark Age had ended, but beyond our own world lived beings who yearned to bring it back. The fiends - the demons - burst into our world like a flood, threatening to drag us down into the depths of darkness. For decades they washed over the land, burning and murdering and forcing their schemes upon mortals. Their names were carved into our memory, becoming words for fear and dread:

• Temeria, Queen of the Fear Dragons, whose dragons burned the land and filled the hearts of men with terror.
• Kroni, hunger and slaughter, whose demons brought ruin to villages and left behind only the remnants of corpses and terrible fiend-plagues.
• Maricha, the Great Liar, under whose hand the few libraries built in Loreshia to record the Old World were destroyed, and who made the bugbears - silent man-beasts that hunt people in the night.
• Rangda, Queen of Dark Magic, under whose spells new monsters were made that brought terror to every corner of the land.
• Chronozon, madness itself, under whose wings the people of Loreshia began to lose their human likeness.
• Lucifer, pride and betrayal, who blinded the eyes of those with the power to help Loreshia, and made the hobgoblins - people whose hearts were twisted, so that all that beats in them now is the ambition to raise a vast legion and subjugate the world.
• Tamamo, corrupter of hearts, who brought Loreshia to war with itself rather than with the demons, and made the goblins - small, treacherous creatures who seek each day how to bring ruin upon mortals.
• Mara, lord of temptations, who brought the high priests of Loreshia to betray the gods and refuse their aid.
• And last, Asmodeus, the Dark Strategist, who conducted all the chaos and saw to it that every step brought Loreshia nearer to its end.

But there was in Loreshia one priestess who did not fall into Mara’s net, whose heart did not heed Maricha’s lies or Tamamo’s deceptions. This was Asendrea, daughter of Bryngwen, a young priestess whose eyes always looked forward, to the future. She inflamed the warriors, moved the hearts of the multitudes, and nature itself bent to her will when she commanded it. She was the flame of the resistance, the last thread on which the hope of Loreshia hung.

The lords of the demons, who feared her power, reached their hand into the world to destroy her. And when she died, there rose a cry so great, so full of pain and loss, that the gods strode upon the land itself and with their mighty power imprisoned the demons anew. It was Asendrea’s sacrifice that planted in the hearts of the people the will to go on living, and it was that plea that called the gods into our world again.

Loreshia fell, and many hundreds of years passed before its people rose again to their feet. But its story has not been forgotten by us, and Asendrea’s sacrifice still echoes through the depths of history.

This is the tale of the first Fiend Flood, when the nine Archfiends of Mictlān poured ruin upon the world - and the reason the goblinoid races are counted among the twisted kindreds born of that age.

Mithridates, King of Poisons

In the years after the fall of Loreshia, the land filled with many kingdoms, all of them claiming to restore order while spilling the blood of men in wars of succession and conquest. In the north arose a kingdom called Swadia, which went so far as to build its capital upon the ruins of Loreshia’s own, claiming to be the heir of that fallen land.

Swadia too knew little peace - and over the years, after many battles against demon-cults and enemies from without, a harsh civil war broke out within it. So harsh and divisive was it that families were torn apart from within: brothers spilled their sisters’ blood, and children imprisoned their mothers.

It was a young boy of a simple farming family who ended the war.

Young Mithridates - called “the Sixth” by many, for his name had passed from father to son for six generations - was by all accounts a brilliant child. When the war knocked at their door, he chose to enlist in the armies of the monarchy. He fought at Arashz, at Komrak, and at Levontaine. Luck and talent were his armour, and when the battles brought him to the capital, Kios, he claimed the gods themselves guided him through the streets and led him to the command tent of young Cyrus, leader of the rebels.

The two fought, and so it came to pass that Mithridates the Sixth, son of farmers, stood before King Atraksias as the hero who had ended the great war. Atraksias, who was old and without heirs, was taken with the youth’s daring and sharpness, and adopted him as his own son and heir.

Mithridates spent the following years in study. When he rose to the throne, only thirty years old, his name was known not only as the hero who ended the civil war, but also as a renowned and respected polymath, and scholars and men of letters from across the world were guests in his court.

He was known as an amateur alchemist, and over the years pursued one of the three great goals of alchemy - the Panacea, the cure for all illness. In his youth he survived a flame-snake’s bite, and over years afterward made himself immune to every poison - so immune that he would boast of it in public and eat whatever was set before him, never checking who had prepared it. His greatest dream, he would say, was to see the world flourish once the alchemists cracked the secret of the Panacea.

I would be glad to tell you that Mithridates lived to see his dream come true. Truly, I would be glad.

When Ostagar Worldshaper the Great came forth with his armies from the lands of frost and began his conquests, Swadia was the first to fall to his might. Old Mithridates and his daughters were taken captive and condemned to public execution. They were dealt with as was the custom for royalty in those days - three drops of poison, and their suffering would end.

But the poison, like all poisons, had no effect on Mithridates.

And so came to its end the tale of the farmer’s son who became a ruler - upon the gallows, his kingdom in ruins.

We do not know whether he ever found the cure he sought. There are tales that name it Mithridate, and say it lies in the heart of the treasure vault of ruined Kios. I do not know whether I believe them - I know only that few are the adventurers who have been to Kios and returned, and fewer still those who did not return empty-handed, if they had hands at all.

Other Tales the Bards Tell

A great many other stories pass from mouth to mouth across the Old World. Among the best known:

• Raven and Ismareldor - the tale of the legendary heroine Raven and her war with Ismareldor, the Crimson Knight, and of the battle in which she stopped him from bringing a second Fiend Flood upon the world, at the cost of both their lives.
• Ostagar Worldshaper, Conqueror of Lands - the conqueror who came down from the frozen north and broke kingdom after kingdom.
• Olander the Shade - the figure who brought an end to the Great Gang War of the Theocracy.
• Ventura Estaban and Her Many Tales - the many adventures of a much-storied heroine.
• The Travels of Gazio the Road-Walker - the story of a man said to have stood at every point in the Old World, and of his wanderings.
• Albran and Ausan, the Cursed Lovers - the tale of a tiefling father and an aasimar mother who against all odds brought a childW into the world, and of how the child was taken from them.
• Indalamar Quickblade - a legendary warrior who held the Clairnian invasion of Kepostheon at bay with his own body for fifty days; he holds a place of honour in Theocratic history.
• Fontina and the Watchers, Agrinog and the Black Knight, Olander the Shade, and Marian Winterbeck - older tales still told in fragments.

The bards also retell the classical myths inherited from the old pantheons, adapted to the lands of Thelemar - chief among them the tragedy of Princess Cassandra, gifted prophecy by the god Apollo and then cursed, when she refused him, so that none would ever believe her warnings; she is said to have foreseen both the Lexalian Invasion and the fall of Troy.

Appendix

Sources & Attribution

• Primary lore: Bard Tales (worldbuilding document), translated from the original and archived privately.
• A tale based on published material (Dragonlance) and a body of copied classical-mythology research notes in the source document were intentionally omitted.