So, a few posts back I made an introduction to the Warlords of the Accordlands setting. Hopefully it made you interested in more information about the world itself. This post is definitely directed toward the gamemasters in the audience. Some of the stuff I go into here is a spoiler for things that the average inhabitant of the world in the 10th century don’t know, either because they have been lost or they have been actively suppressed. Also, while this may seem long, its severely cut down for both copyright reasons, but also for the sake of article length.

In The Beginning

Its uncertain if The Great Dragon was the original creator of the world, or if was merely the most powerful of the deities of the world, because there is no lore that tells of this time other than in brief snatches of rhyme or fragments of texts in unknown languages. All that is known for certain is that at that time there were hundreds, maybe thousands of gods that ruled over the mortals, and that there were peoples that have been lost because all of their member have been destroyed.

The one certainty is that The Great Dragon grew unhappy that It was the only dragon, and therefore It they had no worshipers. No one knows how long this festered in the Great Dragon’s mind, but eventually this envy grew into hatred and that hatred drove the Great Dragon to use its incredible power to change the very nature of the world.

It tore the mortal plane from its moorings, creating the near infinite planes of the astral realms. It caused the three moons to rise into the sky for the first time. And all of this was somehow in preparation for the most important part.

The Great Dragon laid a clutch of three eggs.

The First War

Afraid of what was happening, the gods went to the Great Dragon, the most powerful among them, to seek answers. Instead, they were slain. The Dragon laid waste to hundreds, maybe even thousands of gods, and when the gods were reduced to maybe a score, it turned it attention to the true object of its envy: the god’s worshipers themselves.

Alerted to the coming calamity by their gods, the mortals arrayed all of their forces against this existential threat, but the Dragon was only amused. After all, if the gods couldn’t hurt It, then what chance did these mortals?

Athanae, the greatest of humanity’s heroes missed the first assault, as she had just given birth to the twins Devernus and Deima. Knowing the only way to protect them was to destroy the Dragon, she took up her weapons. Granted a mysterious gift by an equally mysterious messenger, she knew that the only way to defeat the Dragon was through Its heart.

Armed with her knowledge and her mysterious gift, she joined the battle. As she approached, she withdrew the item in the sack: one of the Dragon’s own eggs. For fear of harming its treasured progeny, the Great Dragon allowed Athenae to enter its mouth and deliver the deadly stroke to the beast’s heart, killing the Great Dragon, but surrendering her life in the process.

She ascended to the heavens as a new goddess, while the Great Dragon’s soul, torn from its body, took the form of a tempest that devoured the souls of the gathered armies before wandering mindlessly away. At the same time the earth was torn asunder beneath the army’s feet and many of them, along with the Dragon’s corpse were swallowed.

The Dragon was dead. The Storm was born.

The Changed World

The world was forever changed by that first world. Stars lit the skies as pyres for the fallen, and the most powerful of the remaining people began to rebuild. Devernus and Deima, imparted some small degree of their mother’s divinity, grew up as demigod heroes. Deima became a master of the divine, a priestess of her mother, while Devernus was quiet, reserved, and exalted in the powers of knowledge, becoming a great sorcerer. As they led humanity forward, Deima founded the city of Athanaes on the scene of the final battle, while Devernus founded Luthlarius in what would become Devernia, named after his father, the first human to die in that battle. The founding of the two cities was the beginning of the sibling’s long estrangement.

In the heavens, many of the remaining gods were also divided on the status of Athenae herself. Her actions were not honorable, but they were effective. There was also the matter of her gift of divinity on her children, and the question of where her own divinity came from. None had ever became a deity before, one either was, or was not.

The humans that did not fall under the sway of either twin began building their own cities, and their deities changed to take on roles they had not had to fulfill before hand. Neus, in particular, underwent the most startling transformations, becoming not just a god of hunters, but eventually becoming a god of farmers and even of scribes as their burgeoning civilizations grew.

One of the most startling changes was that of the elves, considered by most to be the first-born of the mortal races, and definitely the ones most in-tune with nature and magic. They went from living lives measured in centuries to being lucky to reach the age of thirty. Many of their greatest minds withered and died, and the very world around them seemed to reject them. Thus began an increasingly demented search for answers across many generations of elves.

Finally, an elf by the name of Calix discovered the answer. In the final battle with Athenae’s forced, the Dragon had formed dragons from the very elements to do battle, and in so doing had warped and twisted those elements. The elves, whose nature’s were also tied to those elements, were then, in turn twisted and cursed. He found that by making sacrifices to these twisted elemental forms the curse was lessened, and thus began the new elven religion of worshiping the necromantic elements of Flesh, Bone, Spirit, and Blood.

The dwarves began to rebuild their forces in earnest, while the goblinoid races were locked in a war over the scraps of what remained of their homelands.

The Accords

Sometime in the second century after the First War, demonic creatures began emerging from the earth, misshapen, hideous, and full of rage. Sorcerers lead by Devernus were able to confirm that they emerged from the corpse of the Great Dragon. This combined with the mindless predations of the Storm, as well as the elves desperate struggle with the Elements led Deima to conclude that the battle with the Great Dragon was not yet over, but was only changed.

Thus, the three great races, humans, dwarves, and elves, drew together in Athanaes and formed a pact. The humans would find an answer to the Storm, the dwarves would descend into the earth to battle the demons, and the elves would continue seeking to undo the damage to the elements. If any of the three flagged in their responsibilities then the others were called upon to enforce the Accord on them.

The dwarves had lost all of their deities in the war with the Great Dragon, however. With Deima’s help, they sent out a call to all the gods, seeking any that would lend them their aid. The only one to answer was Kor, who changed his nature to match his charges. Together they marched into the deep, with no idea what would await them.

Not long after it was formed, the Accords were shattered by an outbreak of conflict between the long strained siblings, which led to Devernus slaying his sister in battle. Beset by fury from both sides at this action, Devernus declared his sister a goddess and promised Athanaes sovereignty. The young Accords already broken, Devernus set out to do the only thing he could. He conquered the entire world, stopping short only because of the first lunar conjunction that unleashed the fury of Bascaron, moon of madness, on to the land, destroying both his armies and those of his foes.

Then, on the eve of his 200th birthday, Devernus was assassinated in his sleep.

Time Moves On

The dwarves eventually made a pact with Sjonegaard, the last King of the Earth Elementals left unmarked by the Dragon. He taught them to make gargoyles to help them in their battles, and assisted them in living in their new home. They founded many cities and outposts and changed to suit their new home, creating a new culture of service and loyalty and they largely forgot about the events above, assuming that the others were as dedicated to the Accord as they had been

The Deverenian Empire fractured but was eventually made whole again, forming the basis of the Knightly Orders that would come to define the Society of the Empire. Gradually the divine blood of Devernus found its way into the population as a whole through his six children, and eventually their society became split between the “normal” humans and the much smaller numbers of “pure” Devernians, who held some amount of blood relation to Devernus himself.

Still seeking to find an answer to the problem of the elves mortality, one of their leaders, Dythanus, traded his help in their civil wars to gain the arcane knowledge of necromancy, one of the many schools of magic that Devernus had unlocked in his long years uncovering the secrets of the arcane. After using it to destroy a huge group of Deverenian soldiers (and many mages of an allied elven house), Dythanus used that knowledge to sever his connection to the elements, a connection every elf had, freeing himself from the curse at the cost of becoming a lich.

After a duel that saw House Syneri exiled and the first lich Dythanus killed, Dythanus’ son Morghen took up the leadership of his father’s house and convinced the other houses to abandon their other searches and instead to embrace necromancy as the path forward. This time also saw the birth of the Nimbics as a failed offshoot of the elven people, an experiment that lead to even shorter life, not more.

The goblinoid races, during all of this, had their own issues, and had slowly conquered and reconquered each other until finally all that remained was a single unified group, whose intermingled bloodlines gave them a tremendous advantage over the other goblinoids. Calling themselves the Nothrog, they set out to redfine their culture, embracing the power of the spirits instead of their long dead gods and declaring all goblinoids one against the rest of the Accordlands.

The Fourth Century On

The Devernian Emprire had grown weak over the years, as the nobility fell to fighting among themselves. Finally, a knight by the name of Signon grew tired of it all, and did what had become the standard way of all great Deverenian knights to end their lives: he marched into the Storm as an act of suicide. Instead, he woke in a dark cavern, beset by demons. Fighting his way free, he then encountered small, bearded warriors, whom he also slayed in great numbers before breaking through their lines and into the caverns behind them.

He eventually found his way back to the surface and made sense of everything he’s seen. The Storm and the Dragon were connected! It then became clear to him that the Storm’s wandering was it looking to reclaim its body. He knew that would never do, and so he made a daring plan. He would found a religion that worshiped the Storm so as to placate it, and knowing the darkness in the hearts of men, he made it a religion based on cruelty and control so as to spread it more easily and thoroughly. Thus the worship of the Storm came to Devernia, and eventually it became the state religion.

Conclusion

Many other things happened over the centuries, including two more instance of Bascaron coming into conjunction, and laying waste to huge swathes of the world, but this is the important set up for everything. And mind, this is just a brief retelling of the first 15 pages of the 30 pages of history in the World Atlas. There are so many details I left out for brevity, and so many more things to come of great interest when actually playing and running the game, like the 100 year geas against necromancy that was placed on the elves, the reemergence of the dwarves, and much more.

I hope this has shown in brief why I love this setting so much. It has a detailed and fascinating history that is rife with political undercurrents and events that feel believable from the cynical understanding of human nature they are working from. Is it dark? Yes. Is it hopeless? At times. But ultimately it makes enough twisted sense that I can see how we got here.

Hopefully you found this as fun as I did. Next time we’ll get in depth into the Devernians and the Dwarves.