Regional Lore

Ardis is broken.

Her lifeblood, the lifeblood of the people who built her, leaks from the dying continent like water from a sieve.

But it was not always this way.

One and a half thousand years ago, the race of man first landed on these virgin shores. They prospered - for these lands are rich - and grew, building great wonders, cities like Crownfall, and tending to this land like their own children. The First Empire, as some scholars have called it, was the peak of civilization, the only time in recorded history where the race of man cooperated.
Then the Sundered Years came. It started slowly - as all declines do - as the peoples of the Empire drifted apart. Languages, religions, and cultures - formed by hundreds of years of experience in different environments with different values - began to clash. Great famines fell upon the land, destroying the earth Man had so loved. Insurgencies and rebellions burned towns, cities, and farmsteads, and the Empire shattered under the burden of it’s own weight. For two hundred years Men clashed, shedding blood over the same land their forebears had shared. The light of knowledge and learning faded out of the world.

But there were some who resisted. From the vast mountain ranges of central Ardis came a hero - Arron Goldcloak. Arron was a warrior of legendary ability, a leader without peer, who organized his disparate people and set out to remake the world of men to a better plan. The famines stopped. The land, satiated with blood, bloomed again, and Ardis was made whole through one man’s image of a better life. Arron was a man of upstanding character and high morals, a point of unity for the many different ethnicites and cultures of Ardis. But not all shared his values…

On the 40th anniversary of the Second Empire, Arron was murdered by a cabal of his most trusted generals. They established a junta, a council of military rule, and the light that the Second Empire had brought to Ardis faded. It limped on, as general murdered general, as Emperor after Emperor was crowned and deposed, all while the border regions slipped again into darkness. The degenerate nobles, too consumed with their own power and gain, were soon scheming over only a fraction of the land Arron had gained. The race of man had again failed itself.

Now, for over five hundred years, Ardis has stood fractured, broken, bleeding. The throne sits empty, derelict, with no-one to claim it. And who would? The Fereldens, squalor-dwelling heathens who value strength over wisdom? Uutobaar? The horse-lords, who lay with animals and think only of pillage? Or Qyrys, the scion of Arron? No. They are proud to sit in their mountain strongholds, laughing at the struggles of us... lesser men.

But now we lie broken. We need a leader who could rule the world, like Arron did. He took his armies to the deepest forests of Ferelden, the driest deserts. But Arron is dead. His armies, gone. So now we live in evil days. The men of Ardis have turned on each other, instead of their proper enemies - those who profane the legacy of the Empire. Arron must weep. If the dead weep. But - he may also hope. The world still turns. The One still weaves the webs of men’s lives. So perhaps it is time for a new Arron to take up the sword. Bring order where there is chaos. Remake the world of men for the better.