A Brief History of Selanden

A Brief History of Selanden

Mortals emerged into a world dominated by the Great Powers, beings that bent the Material Realm to their liking and warred with other Great Powers. These Great Powers included Gods, Fiends, Elementals, Giants, Dragons, Fey, and the Great Old Ones. The young mortal civilizations (between Stone Age to Bronze Age) were caught among these mighty beings that warred around them. Mortals worshipped these great powers and some acted as protectors for mortal civilizations. Some mortals sought to understand magic,others made pacts with these Great Powers to be their patrons and understand the great secrets, becoming the first warlocks. Others sought to master magic through study, and the Fey, masters of wild magic, thought this silly. The Fey had created a second moon at some point in the Great War, a source of their power and anchor to the other Realms. These new wizards knew that they had to do something or the mortal races were doomed to be consumed by the creatures of might that warred around them. They combined their magicks and called themselves the First Cabal. They cast the greatest spell known in the history of the world. They pulled Vahinta, the Green Moon out of the sky, and it crashed into the world. It destroyed many lives, both mortals and the Great Powers themselves, and sealed the gateways to the other realms. Vahinta was filled with arcane energy, and the fall of it irradiated parts of the world with a form of arcane radiation, creating more new mortal races.
  It took many years for mortals to recover the cataclysm of the Falling of the Green Moon. But they were free and able to rebuild. New gods emerged and watched over the mortals, they being once mortal themselves and had ascended and attained divine status. New civilizations and the first true kingdoms were formed in this time. The greatest of these was the Gladrion Empire. An empire led by High Elves and noble Humans, they saw themselves as the beacon of civilization (modelled after Greco-Roman civilization). They experimented with arcane magic, and soon mastered it. Then the demons came.
  Fiends from outside the Mortal Realm invaded, and focused their wrath on the Gladrion Empire. The wars were brutal and long-lasting but in the end the Fiends were driven away and vanquished. There was peace again, but not all nations bent their knee to the Gladrion Empire, ones that refused to fight in the war against the Demons and did not lend aid.
  In their hubris, the Empire sought to bring more nations under their banner, through treaty and sometimes by force. Armies of the Gladrion Empire from the East met the various nations of the people from the West, and a great battle erupted. It was during this conflict that the Sundering occurred. The world broke, and the eastern continent where the Gladrion Empire was located fell into the depths of the sea. Arcane magic was stripped from the world. The cataclysm shifted many things in the world, and brought low other nations and civilizations.
  About seven centuries have passed since the Sundering. The Gods withdrew themselves from the Material Realm. The Westlands, the main continent of Selandan and the smaller landmass of Ishia have begun to rebuild, without arcane magic. The Divine Hand, a pantheon of five deities in concordance with each other, have established a religion on Selanden. The Divine Hand teaches that arcane magic is evil, that the Gladrion Empire was wicked for their use of magic, for it drew the Fiends to the Material Plane. That the Sundering was a punishment from the gods, and that magic was stripped from mortals to allow them to show their faith in the gods again.
  Within the last fifty years arcane magic has slowly been returning into the world, for reasons as of yet unknown. New arcane practitioners have emerged trying to master skills long forgotten, and sorcerous bloodlines that have been long dormant have now awakened. Some nations are using arcane magic as a way to strengthen their position, while others uphold their faith and try to hunt down those of arcane persuasion.