Expansions

The Shattered Lands

November 9th, 2004

In the five hundredth year following the elder age, the world of Norrath stood transformed beyond all recognition. What had once been a realm of ordered power and divine presence had become something altogether different: a world broken, remade, and still bleeding from wounds that no mortal hand could mend.

It began with the gods.

Through events whose full weight remains a matter of solemn debate among the scholars of Qeynos and Freeport alike, the divine powers withdrew from Norrath entirely. Their departure was not swift, nor was it merciful. It was simply final. And in the silence they left behind, the Age of Cataclysms was born.

The first catastrophe came to be known as the Rending. The very bones of Norrath shifted and groaned beneath the feet of its peoples. Earthquakes of terrible fury split the earth asunder. Tsunamis rose from seas driven mad by the upheaval, consuming coastlines and swallowing whole what had stood for generations. The land did not crack in one place or two, but everywhere at once, as though Norrath itself had been seized by some great and anguished convulsion.

Then came the Shattering.

Luclin, that ancient and constant moon which had watched over Norrath since before living memory, broke apart in the heavens. The force of its destruction hurled great fragments from the sky, and those fragments fell. Upon a world already torn and staggering, the ruin from above completed what the earth below had begun.

Nothing was spared.

The great continent of Antonica, that vast and storied land which had been the cradle of so many civilizations, did not survive whole. It shattered as its name foretold it must. From the wreckage, new lands rose in isolation. Qeynos and its surrounding territories became the isle-realm of Karan. Freeport and the dark reaches about it formed the land now called D'Lere. Halas was lost entirely, consumed without remainder. Maj'Dul and the Desert of Ro vanished from the known maps. Lavastorm, the Feerrott, Rivervale, each was carried away on its own course, scattered like leaves upon a flooded river.

The world that emerged from the Age of Cataclysms was not the world that had been. It was something new, scarred and strange, populated by peoples who had survived the unthinkable and were only beginning to understand what they had inherited.

It is from this broken and reborn Norrath that our age takes its name, and upon its changed shores that the Society has kept its long vigil.

Desert of Flames

September 13, 2005

In the days when the Age of Destiny stretched still before us, word came upon the wind of lands uncharted, sands unwalked, and secrets buried beneath the scorching silence of the Desert of Ro. This was no rumor. It was a summons.

The Desert of Flames opened its borders to all who dared answer, revealing a vast expanse of ancient peril and forgotten glory. Adventurers who had proven their worth upon the fields of earlier conquest found the path forward steeper still, for this land demanded more of them, testing mettle honed through a decade of hard campaigning. Those who endured emerged with capabilities unknown to their former selves, able now to scale sheer stone and reach heights once denied them.

The great quest line that drew the most seasoned of warriors deep into the desert's heart came to be known among the learned as the Peacock Line. Seventeen trials and more awaited those who took up its burden, each step carrying the seeker further from safety and deeper into ancient darkness. The path wound through the Sinking Sands, through the Living Tombs where the dead remembered old oaths, and at last into the Silent City itself. There, at the end of all endurance, stood the Godking, a being of terrible sovereignty who could not be felled by any lone blade. Only those who stood together, shoulder to shoulder with their sworn companions, could hope to bring him low. The rewards given to those who succeeded were worthy of the deed: relics of power shaped to the calling of each order, items whose very form could be remade at their bearer's will.

Beyond the Peacock Line, the desert offered much to the curious and the bold. Maj'Dul, the dervish city of veiled allegiances and shifting loyalties, opened its gates to those clever enough to navigate its intrigues. The Pillars of Flame rose against the sky like the fingers of some buried god. The Clefts of Rujark harbored dangers best left unnamed. And within the hidden places of this land, great palaces and citadels waited in silence, their halls full of trials for those who sought them out.

The arenas of the desert, too, offered a different kind of proving ground, where blade met blade not against the monsters of the wild, but against the skill and will of other souls. There, reputation was built or broken in the span of a breath.

Thus did the Desert of Flames endure as one of the great chapters of Norrathian history, a proving ground worthy of the age that bore it.