The deep history of Meridia¶
Locked The master timeline of the continent, from its first peoples to the generation before the campaigns. Campaign events hang off the end of it. Dates use the shared calendar, counted from the Peace of Selorin: BP before it, AP after. The dates are settled by R-024.
Names for the continent
Meridia is the Tide City merchants' neutral trade word for the whole continent, and its people are Meridians. Aldorians call it the Sunward Lands. Kaelen have their own proud phrase meaning "all beneath the sky" Azhuran (R-021). Merchants, sailors and caravan folk know the word Meridia. Most farmers don't.
The two peoples (before 1200 BP)¶
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- The Ferrin, the people of Ferry, were the continent's native tribes. They worshipped the sun, and over millennia that faith became the Order of the Sun and the customs of Aldoria. Their tongue is the root of modern Aldorian.
- The Kilian came later, about 1200 BP, as seaborne invaders out of the eastern islands. They were a raiding, expansionist people, and they are the ancestors of the Kaelen.
- The Kilian drove the Ferrin west over the mountain spine onto the plains. Centuries of coexistence and skirmishing followed, and a border settled roughly along the mountains beside the Marches. It has mostly stayed there ever since.
The Age of the Two Kingdoms (about 500–75 BP)¶
Locked (R-008)
- The Ferry Kingdom in the west, really a loose conglomerate of city-states, was strong in magic.
- The Kilian Kingdom in the east was strong in science and technology.
- There were skirmishes but no great war. It was a balanced, prosperous age.
The First Empire and the Flight (75 BP)¶
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- The Kilian built an ultimate weapon. Their king, Mordakar, drunk on it, turned conqueror and swallowed the neighbouring tribes and city-states. The Crimson Empire of Kaelen was born from this first conquest.
- The Ferry city-states defended themselves with magic and failed.
DM only: the Flight west
The Ferry royal family and several mages fled west by ship, over the sea. These refugees founded Farrow, which Meridians know only as the legend of Hesperra, "the Evening Land". Aldorian descends from Ferry's language, which is why Farrowans and Aldorians can still understand each other. Nobody in Meridia knows any of this.
Magic went west with the mages, then faded within a few generations across the Grey Wall, which is why Farrow turned to steam. In Meridia only a few low-key traditions survive, such as hedge-arcana and alchemy. (R-009)
The Empire's fall and the birth of Aldoria (61 BP to 1 AP)¶
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- The first Kaelen Empire ruled the whole continent only briefly. In 61 BP Mordakar's nephew, Prince Fenrak, assassinated him, and civil war tore the Empire apart.
- In 58 BP, in the wreckage in the west, five great houses founded a kingdom free of the Empire: House Aldor (which became the royal line), Thessaly, Ardent, Corvane and Morrow. The kingdom took its name from its founding house: Aldoria. Corvane was then a minor house, and Ardent's founding lands lay in the Marches. See The great houses. (R-007)
- Kaelen restabilized. A benevolent Emperor, Selorin, whose name means "peace", rose and signed a peace treaty with Aldoria, the Peace of Selorin, in the spring of 1 AP. It began the Two-State Era: two nations living side by side, trading and prospering across the mountain border.
The long peace and its wars (1–880 AP)¶
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The Kaelen imperial line continued, complicated and contested but unbroken. Across the centuries there were two great wars between Kaelen and Aldoria, now half legend. Both ended in mutual loss with no victor. The border shifted a little each time but always settled back to the mountains by the Marches.
| War | What's remembered |
|---|---|
| The Sunfall War (the first, about 310 AP) | The Aldorian sun-faith nearly broke against Kaelen steel. Remembered through an eclipse omen and a burned sun-temple. Ancient, mythic, taught to children. |
| The Hollow War (the second, about 640 AP) | A long, grinding stalemate in the mountain passes, with armies bleeding out for years over ground that never changed hands. It named the hollows where they died, and it foreshadows Hollowpass. |
These two wars are the deep, mythic grievance both peoples carry.
The last war: the burning of Ashmar (880 AP)¶
Locked (R-002)
In 880 AP, about 20 years before Campaign One, a short border war ended in a bloody stalemate along the Marches. Villages on both sides were burned. King Aldor IV fought it to a standstill, House Corvane grew great by financing the Crown through it, and Ardent sons fought in it, as they have in every border war.
It is not one of the two great wars. The courts remember it as a stalemate. The border villages remember it as a massacre.
Draft The Kaelen Codex calls it the Ember Raids. That name can stand for how Kaelen remembers it, as a season of raids rather than a war.
Among the burned villages was Ashmar, a mixed border village in western Kaelen. Jade Lotus scavengers pulled a small, silent boy from its ash and raised him as Ghost-9. Years later, another Ashmar child, Alyssa Kruger, came from the same scarred border.
The founding of the Jade Lotus (about 800 AP)¶
Locked (R-012)
About 800 AP, about 100 years before Campaign One, a Kaelen Emperor, Ekhar the Wounded, was nearly assassinated by Aldorian spies. Enraged, he secretly founded the Jade Lotus Syndicate: assassins taking direct orders from the Throne, recruited from orphans and trained into killers. The original order was twelve numbered operatives plus Zero, thirteen in all. See The Jade Lotus.
The modern crisis (899–900 AP)¶
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- In 899 AP the Kaelen Emperor Zaruth fell mysteriously ill. His only child, Prince Ishar, was an infant, which left a power vacuum. Malakor, a cadet-branch prince of the imperial blood outside the line of succession (a "vassal" lord), became Regent and head of the Jade Lotus. See the family tree. (R-010)
- Malakor had secretly poisoned his own Emperor. He then conspired with two others to manufacture a war between the nations and profit from the chaos:
- Archon Solaris of Aldoria's Order of the Sun was to secretly poison the Aldorian King.
- Grandmaster Vane, Kaelen's ambassador to Aldoria and head of the Lotus in the field, was to strike first by assassinating the Trade Prince, in spring 900 AP, of House Morrow.
- The plan unravelled. The Aldorian King signed a treaty, and both courts chose not to go to war. To bury the scheme, the three men burned the agent who had killed the Prince: Ghost-9.
- Later: when Zaruth died in 908 AP during the conquest of Aldoria, Malakor took the throne himself and passed over the boy, but kept him alive as a justification for later. See the family tree. (R-017)
Campaign One begins here. Continue with the campaign timeline.
Sources¶
- Kaelen Codex, §0 "The Deep History of Meridia"
- Rulings R-001, R-002, R-007, R-008, R-009, R-010 and R-012
- The Aldorian Codex: Lands Beyond, "Names for the world" and "The Western Ocean and Farrow"
- Campaign Three handoff, §1 and §2