History of Thelemar

No one now knows how the world was made - no writing survived the ages, and no living thing remembers. What follows is the history as scholars and storytellers reckon it: the broad shape of the world’s long road from ruin to the uneasy present. Years are counted from the Cataclysm, the day the old world ended.

The Age Before

The oldest tales speak of a being so mighty that its words alone shook the earth, crowned with copper and moving through the world like a storm. Envious families conspired to slay it, and when it fell its power clung to the copper crown; passing it among themselves, they drank in its magic and became what the world now calls the gods - the Norse, the Greek, the Egyptian, and the Old Gods of the east. After years of strife the Old Gods locked the rival families away in a parallel realm and ruled the world from a distance, content with the power they had won. (See General-The Heavens of Thelemar and the pantheons.)

The Empire

Into that quiet world rose the Empire - so vast and singular it needed no other name. Under its emperor the world knew plenty: every need met by magic, a people who never tasted hunger, war, or want. But the Empire grew beyond what even magic could feed, and its emperor demanded an endless wellspring of power. His researchers strove for years to make it - until, in a single catastrophic error, they tore a hole in the fabric of creation.

The Cataclysm & the Age of Chaos

Magic poured out through the wound, and in one immense blast whole reaches of the world were erased. So ended the Age of the Empire. (See the Collapse and the Fall from Grace.)

For some five hundred years chaos reigned. Kingdoms rose and drowned in history; strange sicknesses warped bodies and stilled the unborn; magic - the very ground of life under the Empire - turned unstable and deadly, and the gods could no longer be reached. The blast had also shattered the prison of the rival gods, who returned in fury and began to drag mortals into their quarrels. And from the lingering radiation came new, intelligent but misshapen peoples - the Twisted Races - pushed to the margins of every land.

The Rise of the Nations

As magic slowly steadied, the first lasting realms took shape, and in time five great powers emerged:

• Clairnia in the south-east, a kingdom of nobles and mages.
• The Holy Theocracy of Olympus, heir to a reborn empire and devout in the Greek gods.
• Jaknia in the south, risen from a militarist tribe into a power of trade and weapons.
• The Lexalian Republic of the frozen north, forged in endless war against the monsters of the wastes.
• And, on the central coast, the lost Kingdom of Swadia - long since fallen, its heartland now the disputed lands of the Hub.

The Wars of the Modern Age

The centuries since were shaped by great wars: the Worldshaper Wars, in which the Republic broke out of its frozen north to conquer much of the world before its general was at last slain; and the War of Horrors, born when a single dreadful being - the so-called girl of the volcano - was unleashed, and the order of Ma’ar and the House of Horrors learned to make monsters of men and men of monsters. (See also Ostagar Worldshaper.)

The Present Age

Today a tense peace holds. The monsters of the north never truly receded, but the people have learned to fight back; the Theocracy has turned to a harsh, magic-fearing faith; and on the neutral central coast the four great powers signed the Verra Treaty - the work of the diplomat Achilius Clint - making the Hub a no-war zone of shared cities - chief among them the great port city-state of Teremisis. Far to the west, across newly crossable seas, a city of explorers and fugitives named Arcadia marks the threshold of a whole New World.

And there, at a guild that shelters those who would call the New World home, many a story begins.

Appendix

See Also

• The Ages of Thelemar · The Countries of Thelemar · Bloodlines of Thelemar · The Heavens of Thelemar · The Hub

Sources & Attribution

• Primary lore: content/private/_originals/General/WORLD.md (moved to private after mining), author TrueMichato. The narrative above is the broad, player-facing shape of history; the precise dated chronology below is kept for the DM only.