Under Sleeping Suns: Outside In The Distance

A question that's come up in my recurring Under Sleeping Suns game (... what, you didn't think I just slapped all this down on paper and expected it to work without play-testing it, did you?) is "If all these people in the Four Nations came out of Harak-Ur with The Last Good King, where did they get all these different cultures from?"

That's a very good question, and it bears examining. The short answer is: They didn't.

The longer answer is that the refugees from Harak-Ur that would spread out and invest themselves in the lands that would grow into the Four Nations didn't walk into a tableau of pristine, untouched wilderness. There was no vacuum there, bereft of native inhabitants and waiting for a bold new Manifest-Destiny-style expansion across the landscape. There were native cultures, living and working and going about their merry business, when Almaria Rex led the survivors out of Harak-Ur and in to Angg Dath (in Haraki, "Safe Valley").

"But what about the history of the Eternal Kings leading the survivors of The Sunfall out of Kever and into Harak-Ur?" you ask.

Well, that did happen.

Kever was the greatest and most powerful civilization of its time. It was the shining beacon of cultural advancement during its era – with massive irrigation projects using the twelve sacred rivers as their source flow, the Sun Kings of Kever fed millions of people and connected their numerous cities by way of cheap and efficient water travel. The temple-cities, obelisks, and massive pyramids of Kever still stand today, a testimony to the once mighty empire and the permanence of its reach. Kever will forever be remembered as the most prominent and influential civilization in the history of Loris. But it was not the only civilization of the time.

Through the traditional methods of exploration, expansion, and cultural drift, the people of Kever spread out just as you'd expect them to. They sailed, walked, and rode out into new lands, where they set up camp and branched out into new and different cultures all over the known world. Many of them had centuries to develop, grow, and mature. A few of them even managed to become nearly unrecognizable when compared to their Keverite origins. When The Sunfall occurred, and fire rained down from the sky, it wasn't just Kever that was for all intents and purposes wiped off the map: it was just Kever that played host to the bulk of the devastation.

In the years following The Sunfall, the powers of the Gods Of Light And Darkness coalesced and manifested in the original Eternal Kings, who would in turn use that power to gather up the various survivors of the cataclysm and lead them out of Kever and into Harak-Ur. Where the Keverite refugees had Eternal Kings to bring their people into a new, prosperous land, the other, outlying civilizations had no such benefactors. Those smaller nations that weren't completely destroyed and turned to ash were blown back into the rough equivalent of the stone age - losing nearly all of their culture and history. Where they may have once had centers of learning and magic, now they had little more than mere survival as their priority. With the Gods out of the picture, there would be no more healing chants, no answers to the prayers for a good harvest, no hymns to quiet a raging sea and bring the boats home safely.

So, as Harak-Ur rose and fell, so too did the other, outlying civilizations scrabble their way back to some semblance of their former standing. Though they would not be able to compare to the majesty of Harak-Ur (which would still pale to Kever at its height), they nevertheless developed their own cultures, traditions, languages, and more. Even though their many disparate peoples would eventually coalesce into the Four Nations, at the time of the Reign Of Glass, there were hundreds of small pockets of civilization outside of Harak-Ur. Don't tell the King Of Laws this, either, but as the Eternal Kings degenerated into madness, there were also those many brave souls who, over the years, managed to escape from Harak-Ur and into the lands beyond the mountains that encircled the Land Of Kings. Most of these lucky survivors would in fact be the progenitors of the Cualish Free States: a jumble of loosely affiliated, constantly bickering City States if ever there was one.

So, when Almaria Rex led his survivors out of Harak-Ur and into Angg Dath, he led them out into a world that already had people in it. Lots of them. As the Dark Century came to an end, the Haraki people had spread out, intermingled with their neighbors, and begun new lives. The Haraki refugees and their descendants are in nearly every case directly responsible for the coalescing of many smaller civilizations into larger, stronger nations, make no mistake. But they did not simply walk out into a series of blank-slate landmasses and set up national-identity shops over night. It took a good long while, and a great deal of effort.

Interestingly enough, it would be the various clans and tribes of the Northern lands, the people who would unify and call their home Vetris, that would be the first to hear the songs of the Gods Of The Nine. Not the Eternal Kings, not the downtrodden and desperate commoners of Harak-Ur, but these fierce, proud Northlanders. With their spirit animals and their harsh, unforgiving homelands testing their resolve at every turn, the people of Vetris lay claim to the honor of being the first people to open themselves up to the return of the Gods to Loris. Scholars and philosophers argue about why this would be to this day, but the Vetrian mystics and priests insist it has a very simple answer: The Vetrians were the only people on Loris who were attuned enough to the "heart beat" of the world around them. When the Gods Of The Nine first sought to flex their power across the world, it was the spirits of the land and the animals that reacted – and as the various clans and tribes lived and breathed along with these spirits, it was only natural that the Vetrur would hear them first.

Whether or not that supposition on the part of the Vetrur is true, now, that's another story entirely.