Vedalken and Simic Hybrid

*The following is the Adventurer's Guild's explanation for fitting the lore of the Vedalken and Simic Hybrids from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica into the Forgotten Realms.*

## The Price of Progress

When the human tribes of Katashaka fled in -2809, they began again in the harsh jungles of Chult. The Tabaxi, Thnguth, and Eshowe did not talk about their lost homeland, or what had caused them to flee. The Vedalken people of Katashaka remained for as long as they could.  The blue skinned, tall, elf like species of humanoids experienced the sundering as a slow burn away at their once great culture. They saw the humans flee and thought nothing of it, not yet aware of their effect on their homeland.

Their machines and creations fueled by arcane power had drained their lands of its power, tearing apart at the magic weave as the Vedalken toiled to perfect constructs of metal and glass. It took the Vedalken too long to recognize their error, their spell casters unattuned to the natural world in the same way as the humans. Many persisted in their efforts, their search for perfection too valuable to be stopped by petty natural disasters and portents of forthcoming destruction. There were those among the Vedalken who saw these constructs for what they were, welts upon their homeland. At their core they were imperfect, unable to overcome their natural drain on the world. Many Vedalken kept their constructs, and fought to keep them as their world burned away. Others sent theirs away to far off lands in deep slumbers, many of them considered a part of the now reawakened Warforged race.

It was a wizard of the Vedalken, Morai Simica, who created the Simic hybrids in an effort to alter the course of her people’s demise. She offered her people a new challenge, to perfect what the gods had made incorrectly. The Vedalken needed to be reborn culturally, and as a result would be changed physically. The challenge of perfecting nature was enough for many to abandon their artificing for the new school of thought, the search for biological perfection.

Quickly the two sides were in opposition, the artificers with their machines against the Followers of Simic and their hybrid warriors. A civil war tore the land apart for the next 4000 years, and Katashaka’s fate was sealed as battles scarred the land. Arcane production reached an unprecedented scale, and Simic laboratories were placed off continent to secure future reserves of soldiers. The continent of Katashaka was scoured, its end decided.

The Vedalken fled their destroyed homeland in the year of Three Sailing Ships (1492), a truce declared in order to preserve their race. Their vessels of artifice and biological components sailed across the Eastern Ocean, into the Shining Sea and Sea of Swords. Others made their way to Zakhara, drawn by the allure of High Imaskar where its people also practiced artificing. Others followed the human tribes into Chult, only four centuries late, settling the jungles where they built their labs and raised their hybrids of Vedalken, human, and eventually, elf.

The Simic were released from their duty though many remained to continue being experimented on. Many of the laboratories from the war days, now called the War of the Divide, were lost or forgotten. Some Simic Hybrids died in their containers but others were released or escaped. These Simic ventured out into the world, in search of a purpose.