Southland: Pre-Colonial History

THE SOUTHLAND

A Fantasy Core Setting

© Jerry Harris 2014

Published here as Open Game Content.

(This link will take you to the Fantasy Core Index.)

Southland Index

PRE-COLONIAL HISTORY

This continent was never really “lost,” or unknown to the rest of the world.  “Terra Australis” (Southland) was well known to the Oriental Empire.  After the sudden destruction of the Ancients, the Empire’s explorations found it to be unsustainable to human life, filled with legions of dangerous, man-eating sub-human creatures.  They charted its coasts and left the interior blank, labeled with the word, “Unknown.” 

Zealous emissaries from the Prophecy Empire would arrive a century later and would be promptly exterminated to the last man.  The Prophecy spent its next century attempting to consume its neighbors.  The Southland could wait until after the conquest of them, but that moment never came.  The Hegemony nation which followed the Prophecy Empire, simply regarded the continent as a mystery, as did any other country that visited it.

Another century passed.  Brave Commonwealth nautical explorers, with their navy ruling the seas and equipped with second or third-hand Oriental maps, would “discover” the Southland.  By this time, the contamination from the Catastrophe had receded from the coasts, along with the Humanoid tribes.  Certainly explorers quickly found them in the interior, but that still left that prime beach front property wide open.  The Commonwealth Emperor decreed all the Southland as Commonwealth property by right of discovery and mandated the immediate establishment of a colony to legitimize the claim.  It was now just a question of who those colonists would be.