LGG Outtakes: The Great Embarkations [Archive] - Wizards Community

LGG Outtakes: The Great Embarkations [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
heirodule
02-20-04, 12:30 AM Elven legends tell that, prior to the coming of their race, the lands of
the Flanaess were overrun by the scaly races and their amphibious
brethren. The elves viewed these creatures as abominations, leftovers
of an ancient era in which the aboleth created foul spawn to take their
evils from the seas and the underdark to the realm above. Whether
fittingly or not, the elves saw many of the world’s oldest beings as
servitors of the aboleth, and marked them for extermination. In this
manner, the elves gained the enmity of dozens of races, including
troglodytes, lizard men, grung, grippli, skum, bullywugs, firenewts,
ingundi, blindheim, muckdwellers and kou-toa. These last were seen by
the olvenfolk as the very worst of their kind – ambitious, industrious,
fecund and supported by at least one god who sponsored potentially
powerful clerics. For these reasons and more, the elves named the fish
men their primary target.

Few records remain of the centuries of warfare between the two races. If
the kuo-toa had any relations with the gloomy aboleth, nothing came of
them during the conflict. Evil to their cores, they had enslaved or killed
all races they had contacted in the early aeons, and thus enjoyed no
allies. The olve, on the other hand, recruited many to their cause.
Unable to rouse the dwarves from their underground lairs, they
nonetheless enlisted many gnomes, as well as extremely early Flan and
the dying race of the Rujari, primitive antecedents of human beings.
These latter folk coined the name "gogglers" for the kuo-toa, an
appellation that remains popular to this day.

Only one race of note defied the elves, the strange furred folk known as
quaggoths. These creatures had profited much from their relations with
the kuo-toa, and saw themselves as masters of the northern forests,
near which most of the fighting in the final years of the War of
Extermination took place. When the olve arrived, and claimed much the
same territory, the quaggoths rebelled, attacking an elven encampment.
The minor skirmish ended with the death of Amaranthe, a great olven
princess thought to be more than 2000 years old. Her death is still
heralded as the major loss of the war, and the violent retribution
against the quaggoths defied both the elven reputation of goodness and
all perceptions of scale. Thousands of quaggoths were put to death for
each member of Amaranthe’s slain party. Though far fewer in number
today than in those ancient times, the quaggoths of the Forlorn Forest
remember still this slaughter at the hands of the olve, and they take
every opportunity to return the favor in kind.

Eventually, the elven alliance defeated the kuo-toa, laying waste to
their cities and culture and destroying vast hatcheries of kuo-toan
young. Finally admitting defeat, the gogglers pulled back to the shores
and took to the waters. Though the tide had been for the elves all
along, losses numbered in the hundreds of thousands – unacceptable to
the olvenfolk rulers. At a great war council near the front of the final
battles, the elves entreated their gods, the Seldarine, for a means by
which to follow the kuo-toa to the seas, and exact their vengeance upon
them completely. Their mournful pleas found purchase in the ears and
hearts of their gods, who instructed a fifth of all elves in the Flanaess to
take to the ocean.

This event, known as the Great Embarkation, saw thousands of elves
simply walk into the sea. These chosen olve found their hands and feet
webbed, their necks marked by fully-functioning gills. Accepting this gift
with great happiness, the newborn race of aquatic elves took to their
task immediately. Within four centuries, every kuo-toa who had fled to
the seas had been hunted down and destroyed. Within a millennia, the
sea elves had spread to all the oceans bordering the Flanaess.

Today, the sea elves are as numerous as any of their kind, and can be
found around the entire globe. Though the gogglers of the ocean were
destroyed, those who fled underground survived, where they yet plot a
return to their place in the surface world. The tale of the Great
Embarkation remains a tightly guarded secret among the elves. Some
decry it as myth. Others deny it completely, citing the brutality of the
olvenfolk as an example of an attempt to make the race look much more
violent than they actually are. The oral tradition of the quaggoths does
not equivocate on the matter.

Reflections in Silica: Sulm and Itar

In the dying days of the Greyhawk Wars, the treachery of Rary
introduced a new enemy to the City of Greyhawk. When the smoke
cleared, the archmage and his cohort, Lord Robilar, had fled to the
relative safety of the Bright Desert. There, in the heights of the Brass
Hills, Rary constructed a massive fortress and entrenched himself for the
long days to come. The Circle of Eight, the governments of Greyhawk,
Hardby and Urnst turned their eyes to the Bright, watching the horizon
for some new attack from the "Empire of the Bright Lands."

Though empire-building is trying work, and the dervishes of the Bright at
first offered token resistance to Robilar’s men, Rary soon turned his
attention to the sands of the desert itself, or rather, what lay beneath
the sands. For Rary knew of the great secret of the Flan, a civilized
kingdom at the heart of the Flanaess. Rary knew of Sulm.

Sulm rose to prominence some 2500 years ago, in what was then a
fertile, if somewhat arid, basin south of the Abbor-Alz hills. No one
knows what differentiated the early settlers of Sulm from the other Flan,
who for the most part remained hunter-gatherers until the great
migrations following the Twin Cataclysms. Perhaps because Sulm
willingly allied itself with powerful Ur-Flan necromancers, or perhaps
because its first kings possessed some unique spark of civilization, the
people of Sulm first conquered agriculture before moving on to masonry,
irrigation, brass and ironworks. Other tribes settling the same region
learned from Sulm, aping their works and building kingdoms of their
own. Of these, only one, Itar, which comprised of the small flatlands
southeast of the desert proper and on the Sea of Gearnat, would stand
as a serious threat to Sulm’s dominion over the entire region, and only
then because Itar had a god on their side.

Few priests or scholars of the Flanaess know of Atarra, the Flannae god
of ingenuity. Those who know of him assume him dead, and
mythologically ascribe the "backwards" plight of the Flan, who many still
see as primitive despite a millennia of evidence to the contrary in the
form of Tenh, Perrenland, Geoff and elsewhere, to his passing. The
theory holds some truth to it, for had Atarra existed longer to guide his
chosen people down the path of civilization, their plight during the great
migrations, and even today, may have been very different. Instead, he
chose to throw all of his influence to a single group of Flan. Atarra chose
Itar.

If Sulm’s allegiances with Nerull and other malign beings made it a
champion of darkness, Itar unquestionably stood on the side of light. Its
divinely-inspired coat of arms, the rising sun, symbolized not only the
birth of a new nation, but the birth of a new legacy for the Flan people.
Under the rising shadow of Sulm, however, the sun would set sooner
than anticipated.

Territorial expansion on behalf of Sulm soon saw expansion from the
heart of the basin to the Bay of Durnak (Woolly Bay), where the
fledgling kingdom of Ronhass fell within a sennight. To the north, Sulm
eradicated hill-dwelling noniz in a short series of extremely bloody wars.
Conflict in the west brought Durha, Rhugha and the lands of the
nomadic Truun peoples into the Kingdom of Sulm. Finally, tensions
brought Sulm and Itar to the inevitable.

The kingdoms fought for more than three decades, Itar always standing
up to Sulm, even when its levies swelled with men from each conquered
territory. Finally, when it appeared as though Sulm might be weakening,
Heirot, the Theonarch of Itar, personally led his army over the Abbor-Alz
and into the border lands of his enemy. If legends are to be believed, he
did not stand alone. Atarra himself stood with him.

Legends relate generalities, and are seldom specific. In the case of the
last battle between Itar and Sulm, we know only the result. Within a
day of fighting, every single troop from Itar had been slain. Legends do
not tell us how such a thing is possible, and they do not record the final
fate of the day’s most important casualty, Atarra, who from that point
forward failed to respond to the prayers and queries of his faithful
around the world. Itar fell to Sulmish rule within the week.

With its borders reaching the geographic limits created by water and
hills, Sulm rested for centuries. Some 2000 years ago, the kingdom’s evil
became too much for even itself, and it began a plodding slide toward
decadence and, finally, destruction. A kingdom based on the foundation
of gifts from untrustworthy, evil gods has a way of floundering, and
when unholy pacts with infernal powers play an important role in the
land’s solvency, additional problems ensue. So it was for Sulm. Some
seven hundred years after the beginning of its fall, Sulm’s last king,
Shattados, pleaded with his dark gods for a way that he might have
eternal dominion over his own subjects, who at that point had started to
slip away.

At least one god heard, and presented him with the Scorpion Crown.
With it, this dark entity whispered, Shattados would command his
people forevermore. Donning the crown, Shattados found himself
transmogrified into a gigantic scorpion. His wicked subjects suffered a
similar fate, turning into manscorpions or, in the case of truly evil men,
dune stalkers. As a final insult, the dark god who granted Shattados his
final wish altered the land itself. What once had been arid land fed by
irrigation became a stark desert. The ruins of Utaa, Shattados’ capital,
were buried in sand, and remain so to this day. Somewhere within the
Bright, Shattados himself still "rules" his manscorpions, though what
little humanity he ever had died more than a thousand years ago.

The current era has seen the advent of a new tyrant in the Bright Desert
region. Rary knows the legend and curse of the Scorpion Crown, yet he
seeks it out all the same. Perhaps he feels he can succeed where
Shattados failed. Perhaps he seeks to tap the dark secrets that once
built an empire from a primitive people.
Mortepierre
02-20-04, 02:51 AM Very nice! I especially like how you have expanded upon what little of Sulm's history was revealed in the LG Journal.

<thumb up>
heirodule
02-20-04, 09:46 AM I didn't write these.

They were written by the LGG authors (I'm not sure exactly which ones, probably Erik Mona) but were cut for length or other reasons.

They were on the messageboards way back when LG started and they've never been on any other official site.
ajs
09-09-06, 02:13 PM They were on the messageboards way back when LG started and they've never been on any other official site.
Found this old article when trolling for the original. Note that this article was re-published on Canonfire: Reflections in Silica: Sulm and Itar (http://www.canonfire.com/cfhtml/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=224)

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
heirodule 02-20-04, 12:30 AM	Elven legends tell that, prior to the coming of their race, the lands of the Flanaess were overrun by the scaly races and their amphibious brethren. The elves viewed these creatures as abominations, leftovers of an ancient era in which the aboleth created foul spawn to take their evils from the seas and the underdark to the realm above. Whether fittingly or not, the elves saw many of the world’s oldest beings as servitors of the aboleth, and marked them for extermination. In this manner, the elves gained the enmity of dozens of races, including troglodytes, lizard men, grung, grippli, skum, bullywugs, firenewts, ingundi, blindheim, muckdwellers and kou-toa. These last were seen by the olvenfolk as the very worst of their kind – ambitious, industrious, fecund and supported by at least one god who sponsored potentially powerful clerics. For these reasons and more, the elves named the fish men their primary target. Few records remain of the centuries of warfare between the two races. If the kuo-toa had any relations with the gloomy aboleth, nothing came of them during the conflict. Evil to their cores, they had enslaved or killed all races they had contacted in the early aeons, and thus enjoyed no allies. The olve, on the other hand, recruited many to their cause. Unable to rouse the dwarves from their underground lairs, they nonetheless enlisted many gnomes, as well as extremely early Flan and the dying race of the Rujari, primitive antecedents of human beings. These latter folk coined the name "gogglers" for the kuo-toa, an appellation that remains popular to this day. Only one race of note defied the elves, the strange furred folk known as quaggoths. These creatures had profited much from their relations with the kuo-toa, and saw themselves as masters of the northern forests, near which most of the fighting in the final years of the War of Extermination took place. When the olve arrived, and claimed much the same territory, the quaggoths rebelled, attacking an elven encampment. The minor skirmish ended with the death of Amaranthe, a great olven princess thought to be more than 2000 years old. Her death is still heralded as the major loss of the war, and the violent retribution against the quaggoths defied both the elven reputation of goodness and all perceptions of scale. Thousands of quaggoths were put to death for each member of Amaranthe’s slain party. Though far fewer in number today than in those ancient times, the quaggoths of the Forlorn Forest remember still this slaughter at the hands of the olve, and they take every opportunity to return the favor in kind. Eventually, the elven alliance defeated the kuo-toa, laying waste to their cities and culture and destroying vast hatcheries of kuo-toan young. Finally admitting defeat, the gogglers pulled back to the shores and took to the waters. Though the tide had been for the elves all along, losses numbered in the hundreds of thousands – unacceptable to the olvenfolk rulers. At a great war council near the front of the final battles, the elves entreated their gods, the Seldarine, for a means by which to follow the kuo-toa to the seas, and exact their vengeance upon them completely. Their mournful pleas found purchase in the ears and hearts of their gods, who instructed a fifth of all elves in the Flanaess to take to the ocean. This event, known as the Great Embarkation, saw thousands of elves simply walk into the sea. These chosen olve found their hands and feet webbed, their necks marked by fully-functioning gills. Accepting this gift with great happiness, the newborn race of aquatic elves took to their task immediately. Within four centuries, every kuo-toa who had fled to the seas had been hunted down and destroyed. Within a millennia, the sea elves had spread to all the oceans bordering the Flanaess. Today, the sea elves are as numerous as any of their kind, and can be found around the entire globe. Though the gogglers of the ocean were destroyed, those who fled underground survived, where they yet plot a return to their place in the surface world. The tale of the Great Embarkation remains a tightly guarded secret among the elves. Some decry it as myth. Others deny it completely, citing the brutality of the olvenfolk as an example of an attempt to make the race look much more violent than they actually are. The oral tradition of the quaggoths does not equivocate on the matter. Reflections in Silica: Sulm and Itar In the dying days of the Greyhawk Wars, the treachery of Rary introduced a new enemy to the City of Greyhawk. When the smoke cleared, the archmage and his cohort, Lord Robilar, had fled to the relative safety of the Bright Desert. There, in the heights of the Brass Hills, Rary constructed a massive fortress and entrenched himself for the long days to come. The Circle of Eight, the governments of Greyhawk, Hardby and Urnst turned their eyes to the Bright, watching the horizon for some new attack from the "Empire of the Bright Lands." Though empire-building is trying work, and the dervishes of the Bright at first offered token resistance to Robilar’s men, Rary soon turned his attention to the sands of the desert itself, or rather, what lay beneath the sands. For Rary knew of the great secret of the Flan, a civilized kingdom at the heart of the Flanaess. Rary knew of Sulm. Sulm rose to prominence some 2500 years ago, in what was then a fertile, if somewhat arid, basin south of the Abbor-Alz hills. No one knows what differentiated the early settlers of Sulm from the other Flan, who for the most part remained hunter-gatherers until the great migrations following the Twin Cataclysms. Perhaps because Sulm willingly allied itself with powerful Ur-Flan necromancers, or perhaps because its first kings possessed some unique spark of civilization, the people of Sulm first conquered agriculture before moving on to masonry, irrigation, brass and ironworks. Other tribes settling the same region learned from Sulm, aping their works and building kingdoms of their own. Of these, only one, Itar, which comprised of the small flatlands southeast of the desert proper and on the Sea of Gearnat, would stand as a serious threat to Sulm’s dominion over the entire region, and only then because Itar had a god on their side. Few priests or scholars of the Flanaess know of Atarra, the Flannae god of ingenuity. Those who know of him assume him dead, and mythologically ascribe the "backwards" plight of the Flan, who many still see as primitive despite a millennia of evidence to the contrary in the form of Tenh, Perrenland, Geoff and elsewhere, to his passing. The theory holds some truth to it, for had Atarra existed longer to guide his chosen people down the path of civilization, their plight during the great migrations, and even today, may have been very different. Instead, he chose to throw all of his influence to a single group of Flan. Atarra chose Itar. If Sulm’s allegiances with Nerull and other malign beings made it a champion of darkness, Itar unquestionably stood on the side of light. Its divinely-inspired coat of arms, the rising sun, symbolized not only the birth of a new nation, but the birth of a new legacy for the Flan people. Under the rising shadow of Sulm, however, the sun would set sooner than anticipated. Territorial expansion on behalf of Sulm soon saw expansion from the heart of the basin to the Bay of Durnak (Woolly Bay), where the fledgling kingdom of Ronhass fell within a sennight. To the north, Sulm eradicated hill-dwelling noniz in a short series of extremely bloody wars. Conflict in the west brought Durha, Rhugha and the lands of the nomadic Truun peoples into the Kingdom of Sulm. Finally, tensions brought Sulm and Itar to the inevitable. The kingdoms fought for more than three decades, Itar always standing up to Sulm, even when its levies swelled with men from each conquered territory. Finally, when it appeared as though Sulm might be weakening, Heirot, the Theonarch of Itar, personally led his army over the Abbor-Alz and into the border lands of his enemy. If legends are to be believed, he did not stand alone. Atarra himself stood with him. Legends relate generalities, and are seldom specific. In the case of the last battle between Itar and Sulm, we know only the result. Within a day of fighting, every single troop from Itar had been slain. Legends do not tell us how such a thing is possible, and they do not record the final fate of the day’s most important casualty, Atarra, who from that point forward failed to respond to the prayers and queries of his faithful around the world. Itar fell to Sulmish rule within the week. With its borders reaching the geographic limits created by water and hills, Sulm rested for centuries. Some 2000 years ago, the kingdom’s evil became too much for even itself, and it began a plodding slide toward decadence and, finally, destruction. A kingdom based on the foundation of gifts from untrustworthy, evil gods has a way of floundering, and when unholy pacts with infernal powers play an important role in the land’s solvency, additional problems ensue. So it was for Sulm. Some seven hundred years after the beginning of its fall, Sulm’s last king, Shattados, pleaded with his dark gods for a way that he might have eternal dominion over his own subjects, who at that point had started to slip away. At least one god heard, and presented him with the Scorpion Crown. With it, this dark entity whispered, Shattados would command his people forevermore. Donning the crown, Shattados found himself transmogrified into a gigantic scorpion. His wicked subjects suffered a similar fate, turning into manscorpions or, in the case of truly evil men, dune stalkers. As a final insult, the dark god who granted Shattados his final wish altered the land itself. What once had been arid land fed by irrigation became a stark desert. The ruins of Utaa, Shattados’ capital, were buried in sand, and remain so to this day. Somewhere within the Bright, Shattados himself still "rules" his manscorpions, though what little humanity he ever had died more than a thousand years ago. The current era has seen the advent of a new tyrant in the Bright Desert region. Rary knows the legend and curse of the Scorpion Crown, yet he seeks it out all the same. Perhaps he feels he can succeed where Shattados failed. Perhaps he seeks to tap the dark secrets that once built an empire from a primitive people.
Mortepierre 02-20-04, 02:51 AM	Very nice! I especially like how you have expanded upon what little of Sulm's history was revealed in the LG Journal. <thumb up>
heirodule 02-20-04, 09:46 AM	I didn't write these. They were written by the LGG authors (I'm not sure exactly which ones, probably Erik Mona) but were cut for length or other reasons. They were on the messageboards way back when LG started and they've never been on any other official site.
ajs 09-09-06, 02:13 PM	They were on the messageboards way back when LG started and they've never been on any other official site. Found this old article when trolling for the original. Note that this article was re-published on Canonfire: Reflections in Silica: Sulm and Itar (http://www.canonfire.com/cfhtml/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=224)