05/27/2011 Conversation

A (cleaned-up) conversation between the DM and a player, concerning Fyrall and the history of the Orodravian.

Player - Is there any established lore for Fyrallish clans?  Naming, rule, how many there are, etc?

DM - They favor matriarchy and family names are passed on from the mother.  They follow normal elven naming convention--first name then family name--which has a slightly Tolkien bent to it.  The website has a few sample elf names on the pages for the Ascendancy and the Circle States.  As for numbers, even they're not certain, but there are more than sixty clans with most having populations under 300-400, though a few of the larger have more than 1000.

Player - Do clans control territory, have names, and identify as political entities?  Are they simply extended families who happen to live in an area (or are nomadic?) and don't contest with one another, or are there any kind of intra-cultural differences and strife?

DM - Most clans have their territory, the borders of which are generally marked with clan totems so they don't go wandering into each others territory without permission (which generally just requires a small offering of food or crafting supplies for clans on good terms).  The clans have names generally based off their totem or the story of their founding, like White Eagle or Children of the River. They use the elven words for such things amongst themselves, of course, but with foreigners, they're generally polite enough to translate them.

Player - Do you have established clans, or do you care if I make one up?

DM - Most clans are extended family groups, but the matriarchs of each are generally in close contact with neighboring clan leaders. This allows them to organize communal hunts so that the young members of the clan can meet and marry members of other clans, with the husbands always moving to the wife's clan. It is considered somewhat embarrassing to marry into the same clan as you were born to.  Go ahead and make one (or more, if you need it for your backstory) up.

Player - Do clans ever fight over resources or territory or anything, or is it just sort of amicable? And how much tie to their past as the Leaf Knights to the Wood Elves retain? Anything, or has it sort of been forcefully suppressed?

DM - As for inter-tribe strife, the forests are large enough and the need for marriage partners outside your clan strong enough that it is rare for there to be much conflict between neighboring clans. It isn't unheard of, of course, but if it comes to the point where elves are killing each other, the Lady of the Hunt will generally intervene. There has been a time or two in the past when clans were so bent of fighting each other that the Lady has organized larger groups of elves to forcibly re-locate the fighting tribes, but that hasn't been done within any elf's living memory.  As for their heritage serving the Orodravian, it was abandoned quickly and completely. Even discussing the topic is considered rude and trying to dig up information about it is a quick way to get one's self disciplined in most tribes.

Player - Okay, And just to make sure I'm understanding: Fyrall is ruled by a resurrected Ardrua of demigod-like power?

DM - Yeah, the Lady of the Hunt. Reclusive, but considered to be one of the most powerful individual beings alive in Faengleis.

Player - Hopefully just a few more questions... how educated are Fyrallish? History and geography-wise, I mean. Do they sort of stick to the basics and ignore scholarship, or are they aware of the historical events affecting the world at large?

DM - Their knowledge of their lands is encyclopedic, but their interest in the outside world depends on their tirbe. Generally, the further away from Feranacht and the center of the forest, the greater their knowledge of what lies beyond their borders. Coastal tribes know almost as much about the lands they trade with as they know about their own homes, while deep in the interior, you can probably find small tribes that have never even heard of non-elves, let alone seen them.

Player - Oh yeah, one last question: wood elf lifespan? Standard D&D elf?

DM - Yeah

Player - Okay.  Now, part B of the interrogation!  The Ascendancy was forcibly rehabilitated through magic, from a wasteland to viable, right after the end of the war, right?  Rather, the land was, not the ascendancy.

DM - It took nearly a century, but yeah. The land had been poisoned by two millennia of Orodravian occupation and then by the war and Skathika's death.

Player - Does anyone know how it was poisoned, exactly? Pollutants, the taint of evil itself, magical corruption?  Rather, is is knowledge available to my character.

DM - If you've done research on the subject, you'd probably know that it was the byproduct of powerful magic done without concern for the consequences. The exact nature of it and the exact solution would require focused study at Crimson Dusk itself to ascertain, most likely.

Player - The Ardrua, they showed up one day to knock everything down in the name of the Great Azuri - does anyone know why? (Again, these questions are from the POV of my character.)

DM - Common knowledge holds that the Ardrua were a last gift from Great Azuri to the world of Faengleis. Most people didn't really ask questions while they were alive--they were all too happy with a force on their side that could finally stand up to the Emperor Penultimate after 2,000 years--and by the time people started looking more deeply into it, they had already passed on except for the Lady of the Hunt, who isn't known for giving interviews.  Priests have confirmed--through Communing with their various deities--that the Ardrua were representatives of Great Azuri, but the other gods hold themselves apart from the works of their mother and so know very little about them as well.

Player - What is known of the Orodravian before they kicked the bucket? They used druidic magic badly, obviously, but what does that mean exactly? What did they do that was so bad? Does anyone know, or just that it was bad? And the Emperor Penultimate, did he rule as a heartless tyrant, or was it just the magic they used that made him bad?

DM - Druidic magic as it is done today basically means you partner with the elemental forces of the world, asking their help in return for devotion to the care of the natural world. Orodravian druidic tradition saw the natural world more as a battery, brute-force taking the energy and spending it without regard either for replenishing it or caring for the world as a whole. That was one of the secrets behind their success: tapping into an almost unlimited power without any real rules or restrictions. It's a bit like the difference between building a solar energy farm in a carefully selected location and strip-mining for coal, I suppose.  As for the Orodravian themselves, they were driven by conquest and bent on ruling the entire world. They were bloody and merciless in their wars, though they were actually a fairly decent society to live under once you were actually conquered and assimilated. They guaranteed certain basic human rights to their citizens (which required that you either be a landowner or registered with a guild for some sort of craft or service) which was enough to get a lot of commoners they conquered to agree to their way of life after they'd liquidated the local nobility.  Klad Skathika is widely considered the worst of the Orodravian Emperors, in part simply because of how long he ruled but the rights of citizens were curbed under his reign (though they were still guaranteed a minimum standard of living, the right to own property, and access to healing magic). However, he was the one who started breeding the elves to be Leaf Knights and enslaving dragons. Also, as an individual, he was apparently rather hedonistic and had a violent temper with people he didn't like.

Player - So, sort of a Seanchan-type thing? A surprisingly healthy society except for the attached horrendous practices and the off-chance that you'd do something that could get a whole class of people wiped out.

DM - Similar, though higher social mobility led to corruption and abuse being more common because there wasn't any idea of the inherent superiority of those in charge except for the Emperor himself.

Player - A corrupt, egalitarian dictatorship. And then 12 guys showed up to kick the shit out of it.

DM - Well, 12 girls; the Ardrua were all female.

Player - I didn't realize they were all female. Cool.

DM - I guess I didn't actually mention that anywhere on the website, now that I think about it.

Player - So the Leaf Knights were created out of, what, conscripts, slaves, citizens, volunteers? Was it a magical transformation, or genetic?

DM - The process was begun with captured enemies, though once it began to provide results citizens were "volunteered" to join, usually through kidnapping, though a fair number were forced into the situation to pay off family debts or as punishment for increasingly trivial crimes.  The process was originally a combination of intense training and--if they succeeded there--limited magical augmentation. As the program evolved, selective breeding was also employed and the nature of the magical transformation became more extreme: grafting or implanting magical devices, drugs and alchemical concoctions designed to boost short-term performance at the expense of longevity. Order was generally kept via regular indoctrination that began when they were children as well as some use of mind-controlling magic in extreme cases where an individual was too valuable to simply retire to the breeding pits or eliminate outright.

Player - Did they ever attempt to rebel?

DM - Not en masse. There were stories of individuals and even the rare unit that went rogue, but Skathika had a personal hand in the Leaf Knight program and kept it clean of the corruption endemic in most of the rest of the Empire and never allowed corners to be cut. Given his masterful understanding of human nature, he was able to keep the project from ever getting out of hand; it never grew TOO large (relative to the size of the Empire) and despite their treatment, the Leaf Knights were instilled with an idea of their superiority that was maintained mostly through isolating them from imperial citizens and giving them plenty of enemies to work out aggression or frustration on. That's one of the reason the fall of the Orodravian broke their spirits so completely: until that time, most of them simply assumed they were invincible.

Player - So when the Orodravian fell, the Leaf Knights became the Wood Elves under the guidance of the Lady. Was it just the ones too young for training yet, or did that include the already enhanced and trained ones - or were they all dead?

DM - It was probably about 2/3rds the young ones, but there were also the breeders in the pits, a few older Knights who helped train the youths, some injured who were recuperating, prisoners captured during the course of the war, and a few who were still alive when Skathika fell, though a number in those last categories committed suicide rather than admit they had been defeated.  Though, because of the nature of their transformation, that first generation didn't last very long.

Player - Are there any remaining effects of the breeding or magical influences?

DM - At this point, the only real, physical effect is the +2 Strength, -2 Intelligence racial modifier wood elves have in addition to normal elven modifiers.

Player - Is there anything else a contemporary wood elf would know about the events surorunding the end of the Orodravian? How common is the knowledge about the Tower of Godsfall and the 20-mile exclusion zone?

DM - The Tower is well-known by pretty much everyone. It's meant to serve as a memorial for everything lost in the war. The exclusion zone is fairly common knowledge as well, especially to someone whose been researching the war and its immediate aftermath.  As for other knowledge...hmm...everything else I can think of at the moment is already on the website, such as the fate of the other two Ardrua. Well, no, Utata's fate isn't up yet. She went with the Hobgoblins into the mountains of the Shield of the World and lost herself amongst the growing Tribelaw.  You'd also know that the final portion of the war was fought between the armies of the Ardrua led by Garand Forgemaster against the Orodravian Army under the black dragon Onyxile in what is today known as the Killing Lands. While Garand was defeating Onyxile, the twelve Ardrua went by themselves to Kloh'Thoon in the modern-day Ascendancy (then known as the Orodravian Heartlands) and defeated the unprotected Skathika. Only the three surviving Ardrua (and now, only the Lady of the Hunt) know exactly what happened there.

Player - The Ardrua, were they mortals from the races of the world, or celestial, or something else entirely? Does anyone know?

DM - No one is entirely sure. There is no record of them existing as people before they became known as the Ardrua. They weren't normal people elevated to that position or anything like that. They were somewhat elvish in appearance, though there are differences recorded: slightly less pointed ears (almost more like half-elves), snow white hair, silvery skin, eyes with black sclera and no pupil. It is believed they were created by Great Azuri specifically to defeat the Orodravian and free Faengleis.

Player - Okay. I think that's enough information to go on... assuming I don't forget most of it. But even if I do, I've got half-remembered stories I heard, which is more in-character anyway.

DM - Let me know if you need anything else!