Ancient Cultures of Thelemar

Long before the present age, the world was home to peoples whose names now survive only in legend and scholarship. A few of these ancient cultures left a mark deep enough to shape the world that followed.

The Zog’agi

The Zog’agi were one of the ancient warrior tribes of Jaknia, and among the first of them to make the turn from warfare to a mercantile life. Legend holds that the tribe found a place in the desert called the Glittering Desert, where they discovered a mysterious and singular way of making glass of exceptional strength and beauty.

The Zog’agi made everything from glass - armour, weapons, jewellery, furniture, toys, and works of art. They believed that to shape things from sand was the natural course of existence, and that in keeping to it they preserved the natural balance of the world. To this day Zog’agi glasswork is reckoned the most reliable and strongest ever made, and Zog’agi glass remains a coveted and costly material that only those belonging to the Zog’agi Corporation still know how to produce - a secret they guard with jealous care.

The Bergmaal

The Bergmaal were a nomadic tribe of the Aghaimer ranges in the north. Very little is known of them: they died out before the Republic was formally founded, and they left few writings - perhaps by design. They were wanderers who lived in the mountain ravines and would not be drawn down from the heights.

What survives of their story explains why. The Bergmaal used the echo of the ravines and ridges for communication and for song. Travellers who found their way into those mountains spoke of awe-inspiring melodies - a deep, rich weave of sound that no human throat could ever produce alone. More than one bard has tried to imitate those songs, but none has ever been judged to have truly succeeded.

The Celestari

The Celestari were a relatively minor civilisation of very broad influence, who lived in Clairnia before the fall of the Order of the Watchers. They were isolationists who lived their lives on reversed hours - waking by night and sleeping by day - who placed no value on permanent dwellings or building, and who married only among themselves, which was part of what led to their fall.

The Celestari held a striking philosophy of the lights of the heavens. They believed the stars to be distant worlds, identical to our own save that things may unfold differently there, because the people who live in them possess free will. The shapes in which those lights appeared, the strength of their glow, and their nearness to the world all told, the Celestari taught, of the choices and consequences of the people living in those far worlds - and from them one might learn about the choices that stand before oneself, and where they might lead. For the Celestari, the stars were a map by which to live.

Many scholars today hold that Celestari philosophy is the conceptual root of modern astrology, of the reading of the zodiacs as a means of divining what is to come, and of all the star-mysticism that has followed.

Appendix

Sources & Attribution

• Primary lore: Collection of Ancient Cultures (worldbuilding document), translated from the original and archived privately.