THE SOUTHLAND
A Fantasy Core Setting
© Jerry Harris 2014
(This link will take you to the
Fantasy Core Index.)
ANCIENT HISTORY
They were mighty. The
so-called Ancients (not what they called themselves, that word is eluding
translation) had managed to tap the knowledge of extraterrestrial and extra
dimensional beings and were given almost unimaginable powers. The greatest workers of miracles became their
leaders, the Wizard-Kings. They re-made their culture into a glittering
jewel of civilization and even their land into a nurturing paradise. The Ancients had been given otherworldly
knowledge and power, but were still very human.
The Ancients sent out emissaries around the world for surveillance,
subservience, and tribute. Civilizations
at the time were primitive by comparison, with little or no magic
knowledge. Their initial reconnaissance
of the rest of the world had revealed it to be ripe for plunder and
subjugation. The all-powerful
Wizard-Kings decided they would need a mighty army, fearless, relentless, and
utterly loyal. Thus they created the
Humanoids and other monsters.
On the brink of their world invasion, the Ancient Civil War began. Ultimately, it started from the madness caused
from using dangerous high-level magic.
The trigger cause was the Wizard-Kings fighting amongst themselves over
how to divide up the world before the invasion even began. The Humanoid armies and monsters built for a
war against the rest of the world, were turned on themselves. Incredibly, their civilization rose and fell
within one generation. With their
high-powered magic, cities were destroyed and much of the remaining population fled
underground.
Eventually, the capital of Circumsphere was the last Ancient
city left standing intact. It had
changed hands several times without any wide-spread destruction, but finally
became the coveted object of all the remaining combatants. A cabal of the most powerful Wizard-Kings held
the city and enacted a final defensive spell to secure it. It required a massive draining of human souls
to activate. The city’s remaining inhabitants
were unwillingly sacrificed to create a giant magic shield over the city.
The spell worked, but too well. It kept expanding. Everywhere it expanded, it kept absorbing
souls. It drained the besiegers first,
but kept expanding. The Circumsphere
Wizard-Kings couldn’t stop it. The vampiric
absorbing shield made an inexorable march across the continent. A few (such as the mythical Seven Sisters) were able to get ahead
of it and escape the Southland. A few
survived in deep underground bunkers.
Everyone else perished. The wave
was only stopped by the ocean when it ran out of souls to absorb. At that point, it collapsed and left behind a
magical “fallout” all over the continent.
Ironically, the city itself disappeared.
Its whereabouts and fate, unknown.
The “Catastrophe,”
as it was called, left the Humanoids and the monsters untouched. Worse, the magical fallout from the
Catastrophe allowed the Humanoids to breed themselves, unchecked. They would be the new masters of the
Southland and would proceed to mindlessly war on one another, just as their
predecessors had done.
There were survivors who escaped the continent. These survivors would be scattered all over
the world by various means. Myths of
their journey would follow wherever they went.
The Seven Sisters myth
is most common re-telling of the story. It
is said that if their stories in the Southland could all be collected, one could
retrace their route back to its origin, the lost capital of Circumsphere. The act of collecting these stories from
Ancient sources on the continent has been called the “Walkabout.”
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