Bazaar Balazar

rstites's Griffin Mountain Runequest IIish game.

History of the Elder Wilds

During the Age of Darkness, the creatures of Chaos marched here from the frozen North, and mighty glaciers followed close behind them. When the waters of the Elf Sea froze, the people of the Elder Wilds saw their impending destruction, and realized that the only way to survive was cooperation. Dwarf, elf, troll, dragonewt, and human fought side-by-side, and together they were able to defeat the Chaos and hold off the ice, but the survivors of the Chaos Wars were extremely few.

At the Dawning, the region was dotted with clumps of gaunt trees where lonely elves huddled in bitter defense. Human families skulked in the shadows, seeking stark fare to eke out their miserable lives. The humans at this time were children of Votank, and his descendants were called Votanki. Dwarves were buttressed in Greatway, but their interests were in Dragon Pass and they sent few patrols to this region. Only troll war parties stalked the land in strength, crossing the cold mountains from Dagori Inkarth to fulfill their pledge to fight and destroy Chaos everywhere.

During the First Age this was an elf stronghold. The Aldryami forests grew to cover what are now the Redlands, Garsting, Balazar, and spilled into Dragon Pass. At first, after the Dawning, elves were friendly with the nearby trolls and dwarves, and gave free access. But the races began quarreling about the time that the Second Council moved to Darastor. Northern Fire worshiper depredations dwindled the Redlands forests. Balazar was burned sometime in the era, too, though no one knows if by Gbaji the Chaos god, by Zorak Zoran, or by some Fired god.

When the Second Council unveiled a plan to construct a god, the trolls objected heavily and withdrew, followed shortly thereafter by the dragnewts. One of the first acts of the new golden god Nysalor was to curse the trolls and dragonewts. The dragonewts sloughed off his curse and sent it into the maws of a hungry dragon. But the trolls were overcome, and tragically began birthing trollkin instead of healthy offspring.

The struggle between the council and troll also turned into a fight between all the Elder Races, and opened many old sores closed since the Dawn. The elves were aided by the council, and the trolls were driven from the Elder Wilds. Elf and human warriors from the region are known to have served with the armies of the Broken Council in their wars against the west, though no details are known.

When Arkat defeated the Broken Council and their elf allies, terror and fear reigned. Tribes swarmed over the Wyrms High Pass and Giants Pass to burn woods and kill elves. Some settled; the fighting went into the next Age, after Arkat was long gone.

As with many kingdoms of the Elder Races, the peoples of Balazar fought and troubled each other mercilessly through the Second Age. The dissension between elf, dwarf, troll, and the dragonewts left the region badly weakened, and the Votanki humans were able to improve their own position by carefully playing the one side against another to their own advantage. This made them half-enemies of all the non-human races and established a distrust that plagued relationships ever afterwards.

When envoys from the Empire of the Wyrms Friends came to the lands and solicited support, the Votakni consented and so did the local elves. In 721, these two forces, with imperial dragonewt aid, suppressed the dwarves and drove the trolls back over their mountain, and then entered a period of relative peace. The trolls sacked the city and shallower tunnels of Greatway about this time, probably in the year 747, and also burned the forest covering the land now called Dangerground.

In 826, the rulers of the Empire of the Wyrms Friends altered their government to be a magical theocracy bent upon re-establishing the magical powers of the Gods Age in their land through their manipulation of unusual dragon magics. They called their new organization the Third Council. For some time this succeeded, but internal dissension began in 889, when the rulers ordered their subjects to worship them as gods. This brought protests, and the Aldryami of the Elder Wilds were the first to protest militarily. They seceded, and in 890 invaded with a strong raid which escaped unscathed.

The elves were hard pressed by their traditional foes, the trolls, for the elves now had no imperial aid. The humans gained the southern forests as their realm by promising the elves that they would kill trolls, and by telling trolls they would kill elves. This was the first clear-cut agreement that delivered any of the region to humans directly. The elves probably planned to retake it at their convenience, but that has not come about yet.