The Calamity

**The Calamity** was the most monumental event in the history of Gavelor and Shaijara. Little is remembered, at least outside of the elven kingdom of Yenai, of what precisely occurred during The Calamity, but a few things are universally known to be true: it was brought on by the actions of a half elf sorcerer named Riss Alberon, it involved great and powerful magics which have now been lost to time, and it shattered the world, toppling cities, breaking the land itself, and resulting in the deaths of over 75 percent of the population of Gavelor. While each nation and each race felt the effects of The Calamity differently, none were unaffected.

## Karekanur and the Dwarves

### Fall of Mordingard

During The Calamity, rifts opened in the mines beneath Mordingard, the capital of the dwarven kingdom of Karekanur. From these rifts emerged an army of fiends that launched a sudden and brutal attack on the city. The dwarves of Mordingard fought valiantly to defend their home, but were ultimately driven back and out of the city. The last king of Karekanur, High King Galdric Truesilver was slain during the fighting, as were all four of his sons.

As the dwarves retreated from Mordingard, the mages of the Alabaster Lycaeum made the decision to remain behind in order to ensure the escape of their countrymen and to lay magical protections of the most important and sacred parts of the city. Six hundred mages remained in Mordingard while it fell to the fiends, and every one of them was either killed or captured.

Two sphinxes living near Mordingard, Rennarokh and Kalani, also came under attack from the fiendish army. Rennarokh was gravely wounded in the attack, but survived. His mate, Kalani, was not so lucky, and was slain by the pit fiend known as Vargek.

### Shattering of Karekanur

With the loss of King Galdric and the fall of Mordingard, there was no longer a unifying force holding the other five cities of Karekanur together. Galdric's young daughter Frytha, who had fled to Darenkad, was named High Queen of Karekanur, but her reign was short-lived. The governing families of each city had close blood ties to the Truesilver line, and several competing claims were made against Frytha's.

Korinfell was the first to split off from the kingdom. The dark magics of The Calamity had left deep scars upon the city and its inhabitants and the dwarves of Korinfell, now referring to themselves as the duergar, asserted their own sovereignty, claiming that they ought to no longer be bound to the rule of ordinary dwarves.

Within the next fifteen years, the rest of the cities followed. A civil war errupted between Nuramek and Darenkad when Vorden Deepforge, the husband of Frytha Truesilver, and Torrhen Stonesong VIII, the grandson of a Truesilver prince, each declared themselves the true king of Karekanur. Meanwhile, Mahalinor began their own theocratic government after an influential priest of Moradin claimed that he had been granted a vision by the Mordinsamman and had been told that Mahalinor was the true spiritual successor to Mordingard. Haldur, a city of merchants, overthrew their own claimant king and established a ruling council of mithril barons, which declared their independence from any of the remaining dwarven cities.

## Loltheruan and the Drow

### Destruction of Loltheruan

Few who are still living know exactly what happened in Loltheruan during The Calamity, but it is well established that, shortly before the final disappearance of Riss Alberon, he had amassed a large force in the drow nation, including most of Queen Mallara Elluviel's own army. What happened to them is unclear, but reports from across Gavelor speak of a column of smoke rising above Loltheruan, forming a black cloud that blocked out the sun above the entire continent. Some who were close to Loltheruan during its destruction speak of walls of flame, of great tremors in the earth, and of burning cyclones that tore through the forests. After the smoke and fire had receded, the dense forests of vast marshes of Loltheruan were gone, replaced by a barren and inhospitable expanse of stone and sand thereafter known as Alberon's Waste.

### The Drow in Exile

A people without a homeland, those drow who survived The Calamity became a nomadic race, traveling across Gavelor in caravans. They found no welcome with their brethren in Yenai, who referred to them as "Urdenite oathbreakers," nor among the humans, who had grown distrustful of drow after Loltheruan had joined Alberon's war. Eventually, a small number of the drow were able to make a home for themselves in the Faewood, but most remained transient, developing a reputation as thieves and charlatans.

## Silduras and the Humans

### End of the Sildur Dynasty

A plague of seemingly magical origins swept through the human kingdom of Silduras during The Calamity. Included in the victims were many of the nobility and the entire of the Sildur royal family. When the dust of The Calamity settled, no one family was able to exert control and influence over the entire nation. Dozens of Silduran nobility declared themselves independent monarchs. Over the years, the dozens of tiny states were consolidated into a handful of nations, each under the control of one powerful royal family, and the Corlester, Falkenried, Hale, Blackmont, Letharr, and Tavore kingdoms were founded. A small area of land on the eastern coast of the nation, called Seaspire, remained under the control of the Mayakara, separate from any kingdom.

### The Mayakara's Fall from Grace

Because The Calamity began with a magical war and many of the scars wrought upon Gavelor were the result of battlemages, this period in human history also represented a turning point in popular opinions on magic. While mages had always been regarded with reverence and awe by the common folk of Silduras, these feelings turned quickly to fear and distrust. There were uprisings across the nation against village druids, small town wizards' colleges, and other mages. When these mages fought back, the flames of fear and hatred were only fanned.

Many of Silduras' mages were killed in the years following The Calamity, and many of the rest retreated to the larger cities, such as Kainen's Hollow, Westmarch, and Harrenridge, where they were more welcome. The largest refuge for magic users was Seaspire Keep, where the main college of the Mayakara, although diminished, still stood. In constrast, the city of Deep Harbor became the largest city to officially outlaw magic, demolishing the Mayakara college that had previously stood there.

## Yenai and the Elves

### High Death Toll

The same plague that had swept across Silduras also spread to the elven lands of Yenai, with even more devastating effects. With a population already ravaged by war, Yenai struggled not to collapse as the plague tore through their cities. All told, nearly 80% of Yenai's population was killed in The Calamity and the years that followed. Most prominently, the Queen Consort of Yenai, Lucerine Marigala, died of the plague.

Because elves generally do not marry or have children until they are at least 100 years old, and typically only have two or three children per family, repopulation of Yenai has been very slow, and, even 500 years after The Calamity, many of the halls of the elven nation remain empty.

### Closed Borders

Shortly after The Calamity, the nation of Yenai closed their borders to the outside world, strictly limiting what traders were allowed to come in to their ports and maintaining guardposts at Ygdral's Gap. Some wood elves still leave the nation as sailors and traders, and drow caravans do travel to and from Yenai, bringing some goods into and out of the nation, but very few high elves have left their homeland since The Calamity.

## Other Races

### Dragonborn

The dragonborn are, seemingly, a race born of The Calamity. No records of dragonborn have been found predating Alberon's war, and the dragonborn's own history of their people only stretches back for a handful of generations. Some theorize that the dragonborn were once men or elves and were transformed by the powerful draconic magic brought to bear by Riss Alberon, while others believe that they are the offspring of men and dragons, or that they are constructs, created from clay and breathed to life by dragonsbreath. The dragonborn themselves contend that they are the creations of Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon, and were put onto Shaijara to guard against the coming of Tiamat, the queen of evil chromatic dragons.

After The Calamity, this new race of dragonfolk settled in the ruins of an ancient elven city that had been built as an outpost on the edges of Loltheruan's forests. Rebuilding the city from stone and glass, they named it the Sandstone Freehold and settled there, standing guard against Tiamat's arrival.

### Orcs

Arzak-Nath's orcish tribes saw some of the smallest losses in The Calamity, retreating up into the Two Sisters mountains. As a result, they saw themselves as the heirs to Gavelor following The Calamity, and began raiding into Falkenried and Corlester lands with greater frequency.