I published The Realms of Chirak in early 2009 as a campaign book written for use with 4th Edition. This was largely made possible by how much more accessible 4E was to DMs than any prior edition; the mechanics of creature and NPC design were much easier and more transparent than in 3rd edition, and I avoided publishing anything for 3E back then because, even though I had a fully statted 3E version of Chirak I wasn't comfortable with the sort of scrutiny the game's giant stat blocks invited from the more rigorous members of the gaming community.....or to put it another way, I knew the stat blocks worked okay for my needs, but didn't (in my estimation) work for the gaming community at large. 4E was a different beast however, a much cleaner and more transparent system that made a decent adaptation easy.
Anyway, I'm working on a revision....I've run roughly 200+ sessions of weekly scenarios set in the Realms of Chirak since since it went to publication, many of them in Pathfinder, Runequest and now 13th Age. The new one I'm working on is either going to be branded for 13th Age, D&D 5th Edition (conditional to that even being a possibility) or maybe a generic tome designed for use with any D&D-like. I do have a Pathfinder version I've worked on, and while I am much more confident these days in the mechanical integrity of the stat blocks I also have a lot more work to do to complete them....and I just cannot find the energy to make it feel worthwhile. Who knows, though....my perspective could be quite different after August comes and goes.
Anyway, what follows is the first part of my new revision to the introduction in the book....
The Realms of Chirak, Revised Edition
Introduction: How the World Came to its
End…and a New Beginning
In today’s
era of exploration and discovery much lore about the past has been uncovered by
intrepid scholars seeking to understand the forces that made our world. The
modern world of the Realms of Chirak are a legion of small kingdoms who aspire
to greatness, but know they build upon the ruins of those who came before, who
mastered a sorcery so great that none today could conceive of just what it was
like to live in such fantastic times. The world of old had gods; the world of
today has pretenders who seek out the shattered remnants of the ancient Zodiac
Stones that powered the old gods.
In this lost
age of humanity had grown powerful. Mankind lived in a world of magic and
technology, merged in unique ways, allowing humankind to journey to other
worlds, other planes of existence, and even cheat death. Sorcery, drawn from
the lifeblood of the world’s spirit was so ubiquitous that to be born without
talent was to forever be of a lesser station in life. Humans were not alone,
either. The power of magic and the mastery of alchemy had led to the creation
of many servitor races. Minotaurs were among one of many bestial races uplifted
by the curious hands of sorcery. Animates were men of wood, metal and other
inert material suffused with elemental life. These races and others were
created by humanity to serve and obey. Such was this time that men were like
gods.
But men were
not gods, for there were already twelve deities who presided like potent
elemental storms over humankind and all the world. Among the men of Chirak
being a god meant being a caretaker of a great font of power, perhaps the
greatest such power one could ever attain: a Zodiac Stone. The Zodiac Stones
were indelibly associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac, each of which
was a pattern in the sky of stars that intersected with one of the twelve
roaming planets in the sky, many of which were otherwise invisible without a
magical or telescopic means of observation.
Man, in is
technomantic might, had visited all of these worlds, spread to them, and
interacted with their neighbors. It was through this means which certain races,
such as gnomes and ogres came to reside on Chirak as colonists over time. But
in the course of his voyages these planetary explorers discovered that each of
the twelve worlds of the sky, plus Chirak, carried within their cosmic makeup
an indelible imbuement of infinite power. This divine energy could be harnessed
by the Zodiac Stones, which had existed since the stone age of man on the world
of Chirak.
In the
prehistoric era of humankind the Zodiac Stones were said to have fallen from
the sky, and that there were twelve such powerful stone. There was a rumor of a
thirteenth stone, one which encompassed the might of the other twelve, but no
god in known memory has ever possessed this stone…so far as history recalls.
The gods of
prehistory were different than were during the height of humanity’s
technomantic society. The Zodiac Stones demanded much of their bearers, a
sacrifice that was great, albeit in exchange for access to divine power,
immortality of the flesh, and a legacy that could last ten thousand years. For
much of the rule of man the gods were ever present, and on occasion one would
relinquish his control of a Stone to a new, young candidate for the future.
Occasionally strife might take the life of another, for gods could still be
killed even if they were ageless and immune to disease. Once in a while a god
simply disappeared….and his Zodiac Stone was left behind to be claimed by the
first person of sufficient hubris.
Over the
eons the power of the gods grew, the reverence was great, and the knowledge
they granted their followers flowed freely. This eventually led to the time of
greatness, the time when humanity was at its peak of power, and was surrounded
by many other intelligent kin, including those who were from other planets,
from other planes, or had been created by the alchemical hand of man. It was at
the apex of this time of greatness that the Apocalypse descended upon all. Both
god and man had grown too great, their hubris too powerful to escape a fall
into oblivion.
The time was
nearly twenty-seven hundred years ago from the current era of man. In this era
there were several great empires, powerful dominions which had mastered their
world as well as gained control of other worlds and planar realms beyond.
Cities floated in the skies, nestled upon high mountain peaks, or even spread
into the sea; there was no environment man had not conquered. The greatest of
the old empires was the Mythric, an empire of unparalleled might which
dominated commerce and military control of the space lanes and planar portals.
The Mythric Empire was the emblem of power in a time when few worlds could
conceive of such might in the hands of man.
The Mythric
Empire competed with several other dominions for total control, but the strife
was carefully orchestrated to insure that the competition on spurred the
citizens of the world on to greater levels of success. Against the Mythrics
were the people of the Inadasir, the Occultics, the Eshadai and the Yin, the
Abraheili and the now lost Southern Empire who in later years would suffer a
terrible fate worse than anything. At the dawn of this age these empires
coexisted in a rough peace, with conflict carefully structured only to promote
growth and development.
There were
twelve gods at the dawn of this era, powerful beings who had already held on to
their divinity for up to ten thousand years or more in some cases. These were
old gods by the standards of the time, deities who had so enmeshed with their
Zodiac Stones that it was believed they no longer remembered what it was like
to be merely mortal.
The gods,
however, were restless. The people of the world worshipped them and sought them
out for advice. The kings and emperors of other worlds were entranced with
their power, and the kingdoms of twelve worlds sought to invite the patron
deities to their dominions for the blessings they offered. The planar realms loomed, a product of the
vast tapestry of creation in which all realities of an infinity of realms
refracted away from Chirak, creating mirror worlds of endless variety, and the
gods found these curious realms fascinating for a time…..but even after ten
thousand years the spectacle of infinity itself could no longer sustain the
interests of such beings who held such power, such vision.
How exactly
the end began is a matter of great speculation for those who have the resources
and ancient literature to speculate upon. Some say it was as simple as boredom
spawning out of the contentment of the age. Others suggest that power and greed
were motivators; that those gods labeled the Betrayers were not satisfied with
the rigid order that had been imposed on their ways and they conspired to
eliminate their rivals entirely, to sew chaos for its own sake. Still others
feel that it started harmlessly enough, just a minor grievance that might have
been settled by the carefully cultivated practice of controlled conflict in
that era, and that something spun out of control; someone’s hubris took the best
of him, and a slow process of escalation began. Before anyone knew it, they
were over the brink of no return and the Final War fell upon the ancient
civilizations of the world, made infinitely worse by the direct participation
of the gods and their vast armies of planetary and planar beings.
Some suspect
that the betrayer gods delved too deep into the fabric of the cosmos, and
discovered dark truths about the underpinnings of reality which drove them to
madness, creating a dark obsession within their guts to remake the universe in
an image they found more suited to their tastes. There is some precedent to
this suggestion, for whatever dark magic filled the world on the final days of
the war, it is certain that unalterable damage was done to the world. No matter
what direction one sails in today, you will eventually reach the storm front of
an elemental chaos at the edges of the world that consumes all who enter it.
Such dire magic was truly the final resort of the mad gods who were willing to
sacrifice all for victory.
The
historians who have studied this era have found it difficult to piece together
the full history of what transpired. So much propaganda was spread, and so much
misinformation as the great empires of the world ramped up from wargames to
full out wars that separating fact from fiction is difficult. Much of the lore
from this era comes from soldier’s journals, unique pieces of history that
describe in shocking details the immense destruction that was unleashed during
the war. What is known is that the “war” was believed to have started some six
hundred years before it culminated in a day of apocalyptic destruction, with
the murder of a god. But even before that god named Zephrys was betrayed and
slain there was another murder, two thousand years prior, that was the seed of
all destruction yet to come. It was with that assassination that the traditions
of generations ended, and a cascade effect began. And it all started with one
ambitious young minotaur named Minhauros, who earned the trust of his divine
master, and then stole his power.
The gods of
Chirak could create servants, imbued with a portion of divine power by means of
a ritual which allowed them to remove a sliver or shard of their Zodiac Stones
and place them with their chosen servants. This was a common practice in a time
when having allies strong enough to stand up against one’s divine enemies was
useful. Minhauros was one such agent, chosen by the goddess of the Taurus Stone
then known as Yvartes. Yvartes, according to a fragment of lore from a tome
kept under lock and key in the Librarium of Eristantopolis, was a stern and
cruel woman but also well regarded for her alchemical talents. She was believed
by some to have created the tauric races, including minotaurs, gnolls and other
beasts some ten thousand years ago as servitor races, lesser sapient species
designed to fight wars for mankind. It was during her travels in the southern
lands of Huron that she met the shaman known as Minhauros and grew fascinated
with him, taking him on first as guardian, then servitor, and at last as lover.
Yvartes groomed
Minhauros for the rank of private captain on her guard. She eventually trusted
him with a sliver of the Taurus Stone, making him a servitor of divine power.
Minhauros served Yvartes for decades, but in the back of the minotaur’s mind he
was always scheming, always seeking out some means of gaining more power.
Exactly how
Minhauros learned of the means to kill a god remains unknown. Thought one could
with luck and perseverance kill a deity, the odds of successfully doing so are
so infinitesimal that even daring to succeed is sheer folly. Minhauros,
however, did succeed. One rumor is he found the secret of the so-called “God
Killer” weapon, a fable which has never proven true. Another was that he
managed to gain the trust of other servitor captains of Yvartes, and that as
one they turned on her, after which Minhauros then killed his allies to steal
their shards of power. A third tale is that he did the opposite; killing his
fellow servitors, and using the greater combined power of multiple shards to
strike a fatal blow at Yvartes.
In the end, the
result was the same: Yvartes was slain, and Minhauros held the power of the
Taurus Stone. Though his action was heinous and the other gods moved to punish
him, much to the surprise of the Twelve Ga’Thon, Malib and Zephrys refused to
punish him, demanding instead that his right of power by action be granted.
This shocked the other gods, who refused such clemency and instead cast
Minhauros down, sentencing him to the Abyssal Realm as punishment. Their only
concession was that he would be allowed to retain his power over the Zodiac
Stone he had seized; they would let him lose it in the same manner as he gained
the stone, or so historians suggest.
Minhauros
dwelt in the planar realm of the Abyss for decades, perhaps longer. He learned
of the nature of the demon races and mastered them, teaching himself the chaos
magic that the demons used to mold and shape themselves through the primordial
magic of alchemy into something stronger. He reached out to the mortal plane
from his dominion in the Abyss and offered the same corrupting magic to other
races who were easily temped, including the Xylom of Perdition.
Minhauros
met another exiled prisoner named Shaligon during his time in the Abyss. The multi-limbed
shapeshifter was a criminal and mass murderer, a cruel woman (and man) who had
committed terrible crimes centuries earlier and had been condemned to eternal
imprisonment in the Abyss, a common punishment for the worst criminals of the
old empires at that time, and the basis for many modern beliefs that evil men
find themselves dragged down into the Abyss when they die.
Shaligon, it
turns out, had a secret: she was studying under the tutelage of Megdinon, one
of the Twelve, whom himself had found a home millennia before in the Abyss.
Megdenon and Minhauros fast became allies as he revealed his tapestry of dark
plans for the future. This was not to last however, for it was in short order
that Minhauros realized the greater value of a young, powerful ally in the form
of Shaligon. Minhauros worked closely with Megdinon to learn how to become a
true god, and to gain great power from the worship he received from the demon
races. He sparked within the demons the seed of even greater chaos, and from this
spawned the first of the Demon Lords, who were themselves like lesser gods.
Minhauros’s aspect was suffused with chaos throughout this time, and he in time
became as close to a demon as he could get.
After
centuries of study Megdinon felt Minhauros was worthy of joining the Council of
Twelve, the sacred insititution at which the gods had convened for one hundred
thousand years. They stole their way out of the Abyss, backed by an army of
demons from the planar pit as well as the forces of Perdition and made their
way to the Council of the Twelve, to rightfully take their two places at the
thrones of the gods. The initial conflict was quick and brutal, but the other
gods were not prepared for the chaos that Minhauros and Megdinon had mastered;
the servitors of the other gods were defeated and the gods were forced to
reconcile with the elder god and his prodigy. It was reluctantly agreed that
they would allow Minhauros entrance on the council by virtue of his heritage
and ownership of the Taurus Stone. The other gods now agreed: letting Minhauros
out of their sight had been the wrong choice, and letting Megdinon explore the
darker nature of the chaotic realms of the planes was an even greater
oversight. The only way to insure that these two did not do more harm was to
watch them closely.
At this time
the gods who ruled included the wise and beneficient Akquinarios who was the civic god of the Mythric Empire, the
dualistic Pornyphiros who always
offered both sides of every tale, wise Gerigos
who sought to spread knowledge and peace, stern Durinalia who despised weakness, kind Zephrys who sought to bring out the good in all, secretive Ga’Thon who studied the mysteries of the
cosmos, harsh Med’iniel who sought a
way to the glorious days of the forgotten past, brilliant Pallath who studied the workings of the Sun itself, Malib, the dour lord of death and
darkness, and Ithenor, who had
sequestered himself deep beneath the world’s oceans.
The young
god joined the council with surprising humility, and for a time it looked as if
Minhauros at least understood his place in the cosmic scheme. This was not to
last, however, for it was only a matter of time before he struck again, to
further cement his power base. Minhauros had the attention of Megdinon, who was
just now beginning to realize that his fever dream of a new world born out of the elemental chaos was a
genuine possibility. It was not long after that Ga’Thon approached the two, and
revealed even greater visions: in his cosmic wandering he had discovered
ancient secrets about the very fabric of reality itself; he felt that he had
uncovered the means by which they could literally rewrite existence, to reform
it in a world of their own liking. He could not do it alone, however; the might
of the other gods was too great. He needed help to do this, and those who aided
him would reap the glory of a universe in which they had ultimate control and
design. Ga’Thon revealed that he already had an ally: Malib, who rested in the
depths of the earth, ruling over the dominion of the dead.
With this
meeting a special secretive council was formed, one known in later times as the
Betrayer Gods by its enemies, though no one can say what they called
themselves; visionaries, perhaps, or the true gods of a new era of creation.
With Ga’Thon’s secrets, the mighty demon armies of Megdinon, the undead horde
of Malib and the power of Minhauros these four felt that they could at last
change the nature of the cosmos to favor their dark designs.
Six
centuries before the day of the Apocalypse the Betrayer Gods convened for one
final session of preparation. Ga’Thon had called upon cosmic powers of chaos
which were ready to bring havoc upon the world. Minhauros had forged an army of
disenfranchised races and demons under his command, ready to strike against the
complacent human empires. Malib had pulled terrible power from the realm of
shadow to forge a vast army of the dead, and Megdinon had a seemingly infinite
army of demons awaiting his command. Megdinon’s eager lieutenant Shaligon was
ready to lead this army into war.
The tipping
point was the assassination of the benevolent got Zephrys. Minhauros gathered a
trusted cadre of vile warriors and mages around him and trained them in the art
of god killing. Each was imbued with a fraction of his power, a shard of the
Taurus Stone, to aid them in battle as servitors. He sent his two greatest
agents, Orgain and Hadrakor, to strike at the god who had once vouched for him
on the grounds that all beings held some good to be nurtured: Zephrys. He sent assassins to the other gods as well,
but each was sent with a failsafe, in which failure led to the dissolution of
the fragmentary shard of power they had been granted to avoid being identified
should they fail.
The
assassins who sought out Zephrys succeeded, but not before Zephrys turned the
tables on them and managed to hide his own Zodiac Stone to prevent Minhauros’s
assassins from seizing control of it. It was known that dead flesh could not
sustain the power of the Zodiac Stone; even Malib, lord of the dead, dare not
join his creations in undeath for fear of losing his own power. As Zephrys was
mortally wounded he cursed his two assassins to each carry a third of the Libra
stone in their own chests, after they had been in turn killed during the
attack. The final portion of the stone was in turn carried by Zephrys…..or a
simulacra of such, who spirited it away. The assassins, none the wiser for
their curse as was part of the magic returned victorious but shamed that so far
as they were aware the phantasm Zephrys summoned had escaped with the entire
Libra Stone. Minhauros was furious, but still he had gotten his wish: another
enemy eliminated.
All other
attempted assassinations failed, though the strike against Ithenor was badly
injured and retreated into the darkness of the oceans once more for a very long
time. Nonetheless, the other gods were alert: they had been attacked, and a
great effort to destroy them had been narrowly squelched. It took little to
determine that it was Minhauros, the only known assassin of gods on the
Council.
The early
days of the war focused on vengeful armies forged by the gods themselves on a
crusade to the world of Perdition where Minhauros fled to vast bastion of
darkness, and into the depths of the Abyss itself to eliminate the forces of
Megdinon. In these early days the battles were carefully focused on off-world
locations, to keep the peace in the Empires of the world.
Eventually
the forces of one god or another would weaken and be forced into retreat or
even surrender. For much of the six hundred years that conflict raged and
escalated things fell in this manner. War would die down, treaties would be
signed, divine proclamations of exile would be announced and things would go
quiet for a bit before another uprising, another amassing of power and another
furious attack. The gods of the Council spent most of their time reacting and
not enough time considering what the strategy of their enemy was. For much of
this time they had no knowledge of Ga’Thon or Malib’s interests in these
battles with the demon hordes of Megdinon and Minhauros; they were shocked and
surprised when it was at last revealed that the incursions of chaos were in
fact all the workings of Ga’Thon himself, and his acts of destruction proved
far greater than anything the great armies had yet caused.
Behind all
of this the Betrayer Gods had a plan, one in which they pushed and fought for
attrition, to force social change and to breakdown the orderly nature of
society. They looked for great weapons, and found them in strange places. When
at last their grand vision was revealed it was with the use of a powerful living
weapon: the draconic goddess Tiamat, who was due for rebirth, and who’s very
being was believed to be a goddess of another plane, the first one to be born
into this world of gods uniquely tied to the Zodiac Stones. In darker corners
it was said that Tiamat contained within her the seed necessary to unmake
entire worlds, and indeed the Betrayer Gods had a direct plan to use her as an
ultimate weapon as well as a catalyst for the change they desired….but forces
opposed to them realized what was transpiring and slew the divine goddess as
she was born; this caused an explosion of violence as the dragonkind rebelled
and joined the cause of the Betrayer Gods, who in turn pulled away from the
Council during this brief period of peace and engaged in an all-out war against
the forces of the opposition. Some accounts claim this period lasted forty
years, but there is evidence that such transcriptions were wrong and it only
lasted forty days.
In the end, it all culminated in one final day
of destruction commonly called the Apocalypse. Ga’Thon, tired of waiting and
scheming unleashed the full cosmic might of his chaotic energy upon the world,
engorging his form to millions of times his original size as he allowed the
energies of some distant Far Realm to pour into his being. Minhauros and
Shaligon, who had seized the power of Megdinon when he was badly wounded and
used the power of her stone to forge an army of her own called orcs drove hard
against the great empires and the armies they used to back the defending gods.
Malib’s power boiled the undead of the world to the surface, giving hideous
unlife to every creature that fell on the battlefield.
What
happened next was a rapid succession of death and destruction culminating in
the death of the gods. The destruction was so vast, the repercussions so potent
that no accurate historical treatment has been given, but the best scholars of
the order of the Preservationists roughly agree on this chain of events:
First,
Ga’Thon began to grow, drawing on the chaos energy at the edge of creation. He
pushed his way into the planar realms and began to devour the fey realm itself,
destroying the Feywild entirely as he absorbed its mass. Soon his
chaos-engorged form blotted out the sun as his full mass entered the physical
plane, even as tendrils of chaos reached out to the solar orb and engulfed it.
Gerigos, Durinalia and Med’iniel all fell during this event, unable to stop
Ga’Thon. Then Pallath attempted to slay Ga’Thon, realizing what he intended,
but was instead killed by Minharos and Shaligon; he fell to the earth like a
meteor and was destroyed. Malib’s army of darkness and Minhauros’s demon forces
had all but slain the entirety of the Mythric Empire; Malib’s prodigy,
Piscrael, saw a moment of opportunity to strike and steal his master’s power
but it was at that moment that Akquinarios drowned the army of the dead and
flooded the rift of the Abyss with a vast body of water formed from his own
mass. When it was done the armies were gone, but so was the Mythric Empire, and
Akquinarios perished in his own grief at the vastness of the destruction; not,
however, before he grabbed Minhauros, ripped the Taurus Stone from his chest
and cast him into the depths of Limbo itself, a gigantic floating corse.
Elsewhere a
despairing Ithenor gave up her Zodiac Stone entirely and allowed thousands of
years of restrained aging to take her, for she could not sustain herself in the
wake of such destruction. But the greatest sacrifice came next when
Pornyphiros, realizing that his allies were falling all around him, seized upon
the excessive loose divine energy which had formed into the exotic natural
phenomenon known as the Divine Wind, to unleash a torrential fury upon the
Betrayer Gods. His harnessing of so much energy ruptured the westerlands of the
world but it engulfed Shaligon and ripped her to shreds; Shaligon in a moment
of panic placed her own spiritual essense, her soul, inside the Scorpio Stone
itself and in this way a portion of her lived on, but the Divine Wind met the
chaotic mass of Ga’Thon head-on and ripped through the chaos god like a storm
of razors. Ga’Thon was slain, and the vast energy of the Divine Wind was spent
at this time. Pornyphiros turned to stone, his dualistic form frozen in the far
west as a testament to his sacrifice; Ga’Thon’s body plunged into the lands
below forming the Kossarit ranges as the elemental chaos converted his flesh
into earth, stone and other elements. Much of the armies fighting in the west
were annihilated in this single instant of destruction.
When the
dust had settled, there was a vast sea, to one day be called the Sea of Chirak,
where the entirety of the Mythric Empire once rested. A vast and horrifying
mountain range rested like an immense barrier in the west, testament to the
death of Ga’Thon. Buried within the Kossarit range was a great rift of basalt
called the Weeping Wall, where evidence of the horrors endured by the Feywild
as it was destroyed could be seen. An
immense crater where Pallath fell had obliterated an entire nation. In the
south the armies of the Southern Empire had been engulfed in a sea of volcanic
lava. Across the world a great, seeping elemental chaos brought about by
Ga’Thon slowed to a near standstill, though it did not cease entirely; to this
day the elemental chaos creeps at the edge of the world, devouring inches or
even feet of soil per year. One day, scholars say, there will be nothing left
if someone does not learn to harness the lost power of the Zodiac Stones and
use that power to stop the destruction Ga’Thon began.
The people
of that time crawled from the wreckage, their divine energy depleted, sorcerous
power all but exhausted by the actions of the gods. Once great machines of
technomancy had ruled the skies but now they were almost all destroyed, and
what few relics were left were nearly depleted of power. The many races forged
by man were suddenly free….but they were so few, and lost without the great
leaders and gods of the old era. Horrible storms ravaged the land for a
century. The planar beings known as fey who were migrants from the Feywild went
mad as a whole, and only the youngest among them who had been born into the
material plane survived the mind-searing madness of the loss of their planar
homeland. A few beings prospered, or at least survived; Animates, long used to
serving as the front line workers and soldiers of the human empires found
themselves free of their masters, and began to consolidate their existence into
strongholds that were once factories. Their logoi,
once control operators for their mystical creation engines, became like gods to
them, and so they rode out the storms, refining their existence from one of
servitors to fully realized beings.
During this
first century there was one man, said to have been a wise scholar and priest
who once served Akquinarios as a servitor. He did what he could to rally
humanity, to find the pockets of civilization that had not been ravaged by the
destructive power of the gods, and taught them how to survive with the fallen
technomancy. His name was Chirak, and when the storms at last abated, and his
teachings were three generations old, the people of the new inland sea named
the body of water after this beneficient traveler who taught them how to live
again. So was born the Sea of Chirak, and the Realm of Chirak. The name of the
old world was lost to memory, but the new world was ready to look forward.
