Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Southland: Ancient History

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.”

At various points in this setting, parts of the myth will be included with certain locations.  Much like the Players’ Characters, you’ll be given the information in an out of order, fragmentary fashion.  It won’t make sense and there won’t be any way to logically reconstruct the Sisters’ journey.  Ultimately, that’s not the point of the “Walkabout” journey.  It is the act of gathering the stories and visiting the sites mentioned in them that will make the explorers worthy of finding the “lost city.”

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