Age of Courage

## A Golden Age For the Empire

Terrinoth was a wounded land after the Third Darkness, and many of its great cities were left in smoldering ruins, including, Thelsvan, Tamalir, and Archaut. The Soulstone Kings, who had been compassionate rulers for all of their hubris, were dead and gone.

### Rebuilding Terrinoth

The Council was reestablished. In the times following the Third Darkness, the Barons of Terrinoth who sat upon the Council (now of Thirteen) would often be referred to as the Daqan Lords, and they had a great challenge ahead of them.

The nation was impoverished. Treasuries had been emptied by the dragons, and those funds that had remained had been spent on the war effort. While Terrinoth would endure, its influence waned. The rubble was cleared from city streets, but the cities were mere shadows of their grandeur in the days of the Elder Kings. The countryside became plagued with bandits, goblins, and worse. The cities were claimed by new lords: merchants, guilds, and the greedy gangs that sprang up around them.

### Lorimor's Star Ascendant

While the dragons had ravaged the lands of the Lorimor Empire, Lorimor’s great cities had largely weathered their assaults, thanks to the invention of particularly powerful ballistae and the buffer that was Terrinoth separating Lorimor from the Molten Heath. While swaths of the countryside and certain city quarters had been consumed by dragonfire, enough remained to ensure that a thorough renewal of Lorimor was imminent. The rebuilding of Lorimor was overseen by Emperor Viason I. Of the so-called Elder Kings and other rulers of this age, it was he alone who had survived the Third Darkness.

In the centuries following the Dragons Wars, Lorimor would not only recover, but flourish. Many migrants from Terrinoth, refugees from the devastation of the Third Darkness, moved to the peninsula, and soon new settlements were founded to house them all. Many fine civic works were set in place, for while Lorimor had possessed Stars of Timmorran, its people had never relied on them for construction as the Soulstone line had, and their masons and engineers had kept alive the skills and ambition to produce great works.

Expansionist ambitions saw Lorimor establish colonies on the coastlines of the Torue Albes and other far-flung places. Fleets of trading vessels reached distant Ghom, and Lorimor began to foster close ties with the Caliphate of Al-Kalim.

Viason I was a beloved monarch, and he took advantage of his celebrity through self-indulgent hedonism. While he never grew fat or gouty, he was to go down in history as one of the world’s most fecund monarchs, and within a generation, his extended family made for a complex web of interwoven aristocracy. Palace intrigues and arguments over inheritance became a feature of Lorimor politics.

### The Sun Sets on an Empire

In 1312, the Emperor Derisian IV of the noble House Harthorn delivered a speech from the balcony of his palace. A rousing orator, Derisian carefully crafted his words as a polemic condemning the manipulations of his second cousin, but disguised as both a eulogy for his recently deceased mother and an acknowledgment of the hard work performed by the humble citizens of the empire. As Derisian raised his arms to accept the crowd’s thunderous ovation, a crossbow bolt stuck him through the heart. The assassin was never apprehended, although rumor has it that Derisian’s sister, Deliana, who had helped him draft the speech, also hired his killer.

The case for suspecting Deliana rests on her subsequent behavior. Derisian left an heir, but Emperor Viason III was still in his cradle, leaving Deliana regent until he came of age. From the outset of her rule, she was pronounced “more murderess than empress” and, while no hard evidence ever linked her to the assassination, she was subjected to widespread contempt.

In 1315, Viason III was seized by persons unknown. For more than a year, the fate of the young emperor was a mystery, until it was revealed that he was in the care of a distant uncle, much removed, who had an estate on one of the islands of the Torue Albes. While related, this uncle was allied with a rival noble line, that of House Varnii.

Deliana at once denounced her relative, calling him an abductor and a corrupter of children. For his part, the noble claimed he was the savior of Viason III, having rescued him from “a gang of pirates.” The implication was not lost on Deliana. She began a military response, but Lorimor was spared civil war at this time, as the empress regent became intensely sick and died. A poisoner in the pay of House Varnii was suspected, but never proven.

For the next century and a half, the noble houses quarreled over legitimacy and the need to redress historical grievances, and rather than funding civic works and feats of exploration as they had in the past, they squandered their treasuries in political pageantry and the buying of favors. Finally, in 1485, the inevitable came to pass. The competing factions gathered armies to their sides, and Lorimor’s dynastic difficulties were settled in a ferocious civil war.

### The Battle of Ranthor Bay

For the next five years, the Lorimor Empire underwent tremendous strife and misery as families and communities tore each other apart based on their allegiances to the disputatious imperial factions. This came to an abrupt end in the nearby Torue Albes.

The sitting emperor, Gentias II of House Harthorn, possessed the advantage in that his faction was the most powerful, but the disadvantage in that were his enemies to form an allegiance against him, he would surely be overwhelmed. Gentias II is believed to have won the war more through his clever propaganda battle than military genius. He is said to have compromised a number of the messengers employed by his rivals and private enterprises, and to have tasked them with relaying a constant stream of deliberate misinformation regarding various factions’ intentions and movements. At three points during the course of the civil war, armies clashed under the impression that they were fighting the forces of House Harthorn when, in fact, they were battling allied forces.

Finally, Gentias II brought the war to an end at the Battle of Ranthor Bay in 1490. At this time, his enemies amounted to three rebellious cousins, all with equally tenuous links to the throne. These cousins represented the interests of House Varnii, House Crosta, and House Ferastii. He convinced two of them that the third wished to combine their might in Ranthor Bay, a minor feature on the nearby island of Alben. In reality, his own force was encamped around the cliffs, and as his enemies landed and assembled their troops, he launched a surprise assault, burning their boats with magical fire as massed ranks of archers rained bolts on their soldiers.

By the battle’s end, the head of House Crosta was dead, the head of House Varnii was in chains, and the head of House Ferastii, once news reached him, abandoned his cause and fled into exile. The Battle of Ranthor Bay marked the end of the war, but it is also considered the end of the Imperial Golden Age. The empire would endure, but would never dominate the continent as it had done in the past.

### The Queendom of the Torue Albes

After the civil war ended, the focus of imperial power shifted away from strife and establishing colonies—most importantly, those in the Torue Albes—and back to the Lorimor peninsula. House Varnii’s possessions on the nearby archipelago were liquidated by House Harthorn, and everything of value was lost, either pawned or looted for the benefit of the greater empire. The people of the islands began to curse their distant rulers.

In 1497, the first of a series of rebellions took place. While House Varnii had been effectively destroyed, the remnants of older noble families and military dynasties emerged from the chaos, each making a play for control of the Torue Albes. By 1505, the self-proclaimed Grand Duke Consino had established himself as the ruler, having first won a victory against the small army belonging to House Harthorn, which had been sent to try to maintain Lorimor’s interests in the area. He immediately set about repairing his reputation with his enemies, for he knew that if Lorimor were to turn its attention to the reconquest of the Torue Albes, it would be able to conclusively beat his remaining army.

To demonstrate his loyalty to Lorimor, Consino tried to arrange for the death of the famed mercenary captain Lutetia Dallia. She had conducted a brilliant campaign on Consino’s behalf in order to win him the throne, but he was happy to sell her out if it meant gaining the favor of House Harthorn.

Lutetia survived several assassination attempts organized by Consino, and she managed to capture and interrogate one of her intended killers. She would not show him any mercy until he provided her with information about who had paid him. She then led a force of elite mercenaries to storm the Grand Duke’s castle and threw him into his own deepest oubliette.

Lutetia then took the position of ruler of the Torue Albes for herself, naming the city for her line. In time, she would give birth to many sons and daughters and, wishing to keep control of the islands in the family, she established a strong system of royal rule that persists there. To this day, the rulers —especially the queens—of the Torue Albes are fierce in their independence and have a reputation for ruthless governance.

## A Time of Heroes

Even as Lorimor rose and fell, Terrinoth struggled to slowly rebuild itself in the wake of the Third Darkness. The monumental task of restoring raised castles and replanting scorched fields was only compounded by how fractured and isolated the baronies found themselves. Each baron focused on their own lands and their own people, and as a result, generations were born, grew old, and died without seeing anything more than a frail echo of what had been. The magic of the shards that had fueled such wonders in the past were gone, now, and many had to reinvent the old ways of doing things.

It would take centuries to restore what had been lost, and such a momentous task was only compounded by the exodus of peoples to “fair” Lorimor. Many of Daqan’s brightest leaders and most skilled artificers left their ravaged lands behind, and not a few Dwarves and Elves followed suit.

Those races faced similar struggles as well. Amongst the charred cinders of the Lithelin Gate, Aeoneth of the Latari had taken up his dead brother’s crown. He set to work rallying an ancient and tired people driven to the brink of total destruction by the very creatures the First had named their wardens. Meanwhile, the Dunwarr Dwarves mourned the loss of not just their rulers, but their entire ruling line. An entire people suddenly found themselves leaderless and bereaved.

Lorimor itself withdrew and its Empire grew fractured, and much of Human civilization grew quiet. Trade between Terrinoth, Isheim, and the Sunderlands slowed as only a few brave captains would risk the pirates and monsters that plagued the seas. Even on land, traveling amongst Terrinoth’s scattered cities became infrequent and risky. For each merchant caravan that made it safely to its destination, two more fell prey to bandits and goblins.

Soon, each barony became a small collection of hamlets and villages surrounded by trackless wilderness. Dust lay thick upon the Council chairs at Archaut, as the Daqan Lords traveled to convene the Council of Thirteen less and less frequently. Decades would pass between their meetings, and when they did, they were naught but broken men and women huddling together and mourning the passing of better days.

### Rise of the Guilds

Years before that fateful reconvening of the Council of Barons, the Dunwarr Dwarves began the long and slow process of restoring some shadow of their own former glory. After five centuries, the Dunwarr Deepholds had split and fractured much as the Daqan baronies had, and each holdfast and fortress had dwindled into isolated communities ruled by whatever noble had some glimmer of legitimacy. This likely would have continued had not Ingunn Vergsbold, the head of the Masons’ Guild in Thelgrim, set out to rebuild the long-destroyed portions of the city.

The Guild’s work was slow to start, yet it continued without pause through the last decades of the 1500s, and in that time steadily grew in scope. Ingunn did not stop with reconstructing Thelgrim’s destroyed districts. Calling upon the last of Thelgrim’s nobles’ wealth—what little had been hoarded and preserved through the Dragon Wars—the guilder worked with the Miners’ Guild to link a great chasm between Thelgrim and the Hearth Road that led to the outside world. By then, the Merchants’ Guild had partnered with the Miners' and Explorers’ Guilds to reestablish ties with the other Dunwarr holds. As each road in the Deeps reopened, trade and travel increased, and the power of the guilds grew.

Yet, many lords refused to invest their painfully scrimped gold, too wary to lose what little they had left. When trade along the Hearth Road finally blossomed, these lords lost out on the profits. Many of these pauper-lords lost their estates in Thelgrim to the expansion of the guilds, but they have not forgotten their past, and even now they plot in the shadows of far-off holds, dead-set on clawing their way back to the top or, at the very least, getting their revenge against the Miners', Merchants', and Explorers' Guilds.

By 1550, the Guilds ruled Dunwarr in all but name. It would take two more decades for them to consolidate their power and codify the laws that governed the elections of Dunwarr’s speakers by and among the Guildmasters. But by the time of Elyana’s council, First Speaker Ingunn was busy rebuilding the glory of the Deepholds.

### The Council Restored

The plight of the baronies worsened with each passing season until the last years of the 1500s, when a dreadful famine gripped the lands of Terrinoth. Thousands starved, and those few fortunate enough to have food hoarded it behind guards and locked doors. After the third failed harvest, the baronies teetered on the edge of savagery. It was then that Baroness Elyana of Kell mustered her loyal retainers and dispatched riders to the barons and the Free Cities. The barons would convene the Council of Thirteen that winter in Archaut.

By now, the Council had not met for thirty years, but desperation spurred them to action. Each of the barons, as well as many of the merchant princes and guild masters of the Free Cities, made the long and arduous trek to Archaut. The last arrived just before the first snowfall, at the end of 1596.

The first two days of the Council quickly dissolved into petty squabbles and the airing of old grievances. Finally, on the third day, Baroness Elyana slammed her mailed fist onto the Council table so hard the wood cracked beneath the blow. Were all of them, she demanded, not the inheritors of a great kingdom? Did they not have a responsibility to save it? And if not them, then who else would?

Under her harsh words, the barons slunk from the hall. But when on the morrow Elyana laid out plans to restore some semblance of trade between their baronies and distribute food to fight the worst of the famine, they grudgingly agreed. And though none spoke of it, the barons would return to Archaut on the following year, and the Council would never go so long without convening.

That is why the people of the baronies remember the baroness’s death with a day of fasting and night of feasting, and why they say that King Daqan forged their realm, King Soulstone doomed it, and Baroness Elyana restored it.

### The Return of the Elves

The Latari Elves navigated the quiet lessening of civilization better than their neighbors. Though their kingdom and capital had been scorched, they had not been razed, and King Aeoneth proved to be as wise and capable as his brother. Slowly and methodically he restored the Aymhelin, healing the wounds that Dragonlord Baalesh had wrought on his forest and his people. He tried to heal the rifts that had divided the Eolam and the Verdelam Elves, renewing their bonds as fellow members of the Latari Tribe. The Leonx Riders, once considered savages by their city-dwelling kin, earned names for themselves as couriers of important messages and hunters of any remaining dragon hybrids beneath the boughs of the Aymhelin.

In the early years of the 1600s, Aeoneth finally judged that it was time for his people to take interest in the outside world once more. At the urging of the sorcerer Maegan Cyndewin, he dispatched scouts into the lands of Terrinoth and beyond to see what had become of the other races.

Prince Faolan, protector of the northern borders and son of the late King Aanir, opposed this move vehemently. Nevertheless, the scouts rode forth to find the lands slowly rebuilding themselves. The scouts also established ties with those Elves who had emigrated to the Free Cities so long ago, and some even chose to settle with their cousins rather than return to the Aymhelin. Much of the Elves’ involvement (or as some might say, “interference”) in foreign affairs can be traced to this point in history.

### The Three-Lords Alliance

In the decades following the restoration of the Council, the baronies tended to remain distrustful and isolated from each other. The Wardens of the Citadel worked tirelessly to try and unite Daqan’s heirs with greater ties of diplomacy and trade. Though they had some successes, the barons still tended to drag their feet at every turn.

This nearly proved disastrous in the summer of 1627. In that year, the dread Waiqar the Undying charged a loyal follower known only as the Raven Priest with destroying the Citadel once and for all. To accomplish this goal, Waiqar gave his minion the Carrion Fetish, a grim talisman infused with the bone dust of dozens of Reanimates. With this powerful artifact, the Raven Priest raised a massive army of skeletons and wraiths from one of the ancient battlegrounds deep in the Tanglewood in a single night. Then he marched his Raven Horde north across the Flametail River and towards Archaut, burning and looting as he went.

The guards at the Citadel were but a token force, and though the Warden petitioned the barons for aid, none would arrive in time. Fortunately, to the south of the city, Count Aleks Fairfax of Dragonholt County in Allerfeldt raised a muster of troops and quickly allied with the neighboring counties of Rostum and Haverford.

The allied armies met the Raven Horde at the ford of Carum’s Cross, which the quick thinking Fairfax had ordered fortified on the river’s northern bank. A hail of arrows met the undead horde, and as they slogged up the northern bank, Countess Belmont of Rostrum led the combined knights of three counties in a counterattack that drove them back to the water. When the Raven Priest attempted to resurrect his fallen troops, Countess Cunningham of Haverford called down a bolt of lightning to burn the foul creature to cinders.

While the victory at Carum’s Cross was a cause for great celebration, what is more troubling is that though all three counts searched for the Carrion Fetish after the battle, none claimed to have found it. Perhaps such a powerful artifact was incinerated by the same blast that killed the Raven Priest.

### The War of Ten Brothers

In the fall of 1659, Baron Deiterhelm of Otrin died suddenly, leaving ten sons from various wives and consorts and no clear heir amongst them. A vicious civil war quickly consumed the barony, fought between three alliances of siblings. The other barons were willing to let Deiterhelm’s children settle this among themselves, until a new player entered the conflict. One of the brothers had long ago left the barony and renounced any claim of inheritance to study in Nerekhall. What he learned in that cursed city no one knows, but two years into the conflict, this Geist suddenly returned at the head of an army of vicious ferrox raised from the wildlands of the Broken Crags.

Geist quickly crushed one of the alliances, and is said to have personally slain two of his half-siblings. The other brothers quickly decried this “Usurper” and begged for aid against his obviously evil magics. When the barons still refused to answer the Warden’s call to convene the armies of the Citadel, Lady Anastel of Kellos’s Order was anointed as Justicar to combat the threat. She retrieved the Shield of Coals from its resting place in the vaults beneath the Eternal Flame and marched alongside a force of zealous priests and knights.

Anastel assumed that with such a powerful artifact and her followers’ bright-burning faith, she could bring this Usurper to heel quickly. However, Geist’s magics warned him of her approach, and he ambushed the forces of Kellos as soon as they crossed the border. Most of those who did not fall were corrupted and turned by the foul bite of the ferrox, and barely one in four lived to return to Vynelvale. Anastel was not among them, and Geist pried the Shield of Coals from her dead hands.

Geist seemed unstoppable, and in the winter of 1662 he laid siege to the fortress of Black Rock. A victory here would allow him to dominate the Morshan River all the way from Skydown to the Aymhelin forest. Geist bore the Shield of Coals, and used its power to summon a hail of fire onto the defenders. It fell to the free city of Riverwatch to stand alone against Geist. The city depended on trade along the Morshan, and they knew that if the Usurper took Black Rock, he would soon be at their gates. During the coldest days of Deepwinter, the entire company of the Riverwatch Riders mustered forth from the city and rode to meet the Usurper.

The Riders were outnumbered ten to one by Geist’s ferrox, but the Usurper had deployed his forces to surround Black Rock. The company attacked his flanks before his horde could turn to meet the foe. As the charge drove deep into the horde, the ferrox faltered before the steel-eyed riders in blue. They fled with their master to the frozen river. But even as they crossed, the shield in Geist’s hands began to glow with searing heat. With a howl, he dropped it on the ice, which melted away in the face of Kellos’ wrath. In moments the ice was gone, and Geist and his ferrox drowned in the freezing water.

Under the urging of Riverwatch’s Lords of the Watch, the surviving children of Deiterhelm peacefully chose a successor. But this war also demonstrated to the barons that the Free Cities were not to be ignored. When Riverwatch and Tamalir pushed for an organization that would watch the wilderness for nascent threats, the barons had to agree. This saw the establishment of the Outland Scouts, who two centuries later still patrol the wilds of Terrinoth.

### The Destruction of Tairnheath Castle

Though the Third Darkness ended centuries ago, the threat of dragons remains ever-present. No stories demonstrate this more ably than the cautionary tale of Count Hector Ysphane.

The Count was an avid collector of rare artifacts, and in 1701, he obtained his greatest prize yet. Three dragon eggs, each the size of a small man and covered in iridescent scales of marvelous hues, were discovered in a cave on Ysphane’s lands. The Count had the eggs carried at great expense to his ancestral castle at Tairnheath. There, he ignored the frantic advice of his court wizard, and displayed the eggs in a place of honor— directly next to the great hall’s hearth.

The wizard, of course, wisely fled that very night, and carried the story to Greyhaven. He waited for a month for news from Tairnheath, and when none was forthcoming, he enlisted the services of a group of adventurers before returning.

They found the castle reduced to a burned-out husk. It appeared that not a single person within had survived. As the adventurers explored the ruins, they came across the culprit quite by accident. In the cellar beneath the castle, a dragon hatchling (now twice the size of a horse) had made its lair.

The fight that followed cost the wizard his hand, and things would have been far worse had the group’s apothecary not been skilled in the arts of healing. But in the end, the young dragon was slain, and the group rightfully picked over the Count’s treasury as payment before returning to Greyhaven.

### A Voyage of Discovery

As the baronies grew and ships began to ply the waves once more, tales of long-forgotten lands entranced would-be explorers. Two of these were the Free Cities Elf Lathina Veintralla and the Gnome rogue Keiren O’Brallen. The unlikely duo met in Archaut and traveled to Dallak in the Torue Albes, where they commissioned a sturdy vessel called Wavedancer.

Lathina hired a crew and the ship set sail, heading west into the sunset. As the weeks dragged on to months and months to years, the folk of Dallak assumed the ship lost. They were shocked when five years later Wavedancer returned to port, less one of its masts and half its crew. Lathina brought back marvelous tales of the lands of Zanaga and the Sunderlands. Lest anyone think her stories fabrications, she also had a hold of animal and plant specimens, gems, exotic spices, and even the skull of a “great aquatic wyrm” that they had just barely slain.

Keiren had merely brought back a small gold humanoid statue, and a newfound paranoia towards “curses” and “monkey hunters.” Even as Lathina granted Greyhaven the great gift of maps from her travels—maps still in use today— Keiren vanished into the crowded streets of Dawnsmoor and was never heard from again.

### The Rise of the Willful

Baronial politics have ever been the plague of Terrinoth, not least because it seems few barons can resist delighting in a good scandal—especially if it concerns their rivals. Such was the case when Baroness Georgiana Delacroux of Frest abdicated her position in 1827 to marry the orc chieftain Lazra the Huntress. Since the baroness had no children and she had failed to name an heir before her departure, soon her various relatives vied to control the barony.

The other barons treated the situation as a great sport, backing one noble then the other in a conflict that ranged between court politics and occasional clashes between groups of loyal supporters. But their amusement waned when a local carpenter named Harriet Laurel grew tired of the constant fighting and led a rebellion of Frest’s peasants and merchants.

The rebellion quickly grew in strength, and Harriet proved a capable leader and commander. Before the neighboring baronies could muster their levies, Harriet had eliminated most of Georgiana’s legitimate claimants to Frest and taken control of the barony’s major towns. She and her generals ruled under siege for fourteen years, repulsing all attempts by the other barons to put down this “peasant uprising.”

Eventually, the barons relented and treated with Harriet at Archaut. Under the neutral eyes of the Warden of the Citadel, they agreed that she should be granted title and domain of Frest. Harriet became Baroness Harriet the Willful, and though the other barons resent her common heritage, none can argue that she has not ruled Frest justly in these recent years.

### The Slow Dawn Rises

And thus we arrive to the current day. Terrinoth is still beset with political discord. Horrid creatures still lurk everywhere it seems, and certainly many regions are still unsafe for open travel.

This is an age of what is most crucial now—courage! This is an era of exploration, adventure, and heroism, but also of looming threats. The undead stir in their graves, demons terrorize the Borderlands, and dragons burn what they please. The actions of all people now will either mark the end of Mennara or the beginning of a new age to rival the glories of the past.