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omorkaFirst, a comment on website design: people who make their pages yellow text on black background are begging for their readers to complain of eyestrain.
Second: I am shocked at how much information on the old Jorune game is out there. Ah, the power of fandom on the Internet. Of course, it's full of spoilers. *sigh*
Note for potential players: this is background information. It is unlikely that your characters would know all of this (unless they have a very high Area Knowledge (Jorune) or History skill), but most characters, especially from Burdoth, would know the general outline of this and have reasonably detailed knowledge of the last thirty years or so.
Now, for the first installment of the GURPS Jorune background:
A Brief History of Jorune, condensed from Leker, Teves, and Kalish, authors of Jorune 3rd Ed.:
3500 years ago, a group of eighty colony ships, carrying just over 20,000 colonists, arrived on a new world from the planet known as the Blue World, Gaia, Terra, or simply Earth. A series of robotic probes had been sent out traveling faster even than the light of the stars, and the one designed and programmed by Kajida Jorune had discovered a planet that had not only the right conditions to begin life, which the probe would have seeded, but a planet already living, with breathable oxygen. And so it was that one of the first waves of human expansion landed on the world named after its "discoverer," Jorune.
The colonists were astonished to find out, upon arrival, that Jorune was not only host to oxygen-producing plant life and strange and beautiful animal life, but sentient beings. In fact, unlike Earth, Jorune was inhabited by a number of sentient life forms, most of which did not appear to be closely related to each other. The most common, dominant both socially and by numbers, were the eyeless shanthas, who had a mystical culture, mostly low-technology, except for an unusual transportation system of warps - gates through space that led instantaneously to other locations on the planet. Other races, such as the stalk-eyed thriddle, seemed to have more advanced technologies than the shanthas, and yet they lived mostly subservient to these monk-like, blind creatures. The shantha's reaction to the humans' arrival was neither surprise nor fear; they observed the first pair of spacecraft for a few months from a distance, responding to human attempts to communicate only with gestures. Then they sent a party armed with crystal swords and glass-tipped spears to the colonists, accompanied by one of the thriddle, who stated their terms in clear English: the humans could use the coastal lands between the ocean and the desert, as long as they did not venture into the forests, into the open plains marked by great shards of crystal, or into the mountainous areas. The humans were startled, but agreed to the terms, with the addition that they would meet again in twenty-five years to renegotiate, when the last of the ships was scheduled to arrive. The fledgeling colony began dismantling the ships to construct their new towns, and discovering which Terran crops would grow in this alien soil.
Then their transmissions from Earth began speaking of trouble. The balance of power in the global government was shifting rapidly - too rapidly. One of the final two ships for the colony, carrying necessary food and supplies, chose to turn back and return to Terra. The last transmissions the colony received spoke of civil war, of destruction, of the conflict even extending to the moon base - then, nothing. The last colony ship landed, and the colonists realized that they would receive nothing more from Earth for years, perhaps even decades. They dared not speak their greatest fear - that no other ships would ever come, that this had been Earth's final war.
The colonists pushed out from their ship-towns into the forests and a large, mostly cleared plain, clear-cutting the native vegetation and planting wheat, barley, corn, and other crops. They grew poorly in Jorune's soil, even with massive fertilizing, and to provide enough for the colonists to eat when no more shipments from Earth might be forthcoming, they had to expand beyond the boundaries of their treaties with the shanthas. When the shanthic delegation arrived, now no longer needing the thriddle translator, the colonists explained why they had pushed into the forbidden areas, to no apparent reaction - the shanthas merely repeated over and over, like a teacher trying to explain to a very small child, that the humans had passed their agreed-upon borders, that they now stood on grounds of mystical significance, and must immediately abandon their activities beyond the negotiated borders. A few shanthas attempted to disable or destroy the vehicles of the colonists, especially their tractors and bulldozers; skirmishes broke out, and there were injuries, even a handful of deaths, on both sides.
When, two years later, the colonists began plowing the center of the crystal-studded plains, the shanthic delegation disappeared. Two days after their sudden and silent absence, seventy-four of the seventy-nine landed ships exploded, from no obvious cause; explosions in two of the remaining ships were prevented only by disabling their engines. Strange storms of energy poured from the split-open power cells of the ships, interacting with invisible currents of what the shanthas called isho. Lightning began pouring from cloudless skies; colonists were wracked with nausea; intense, sourceless heat withered their crops in the field. The humans fought back with bioengineered traps and explosives, as well as their energy weaponry. Then an army of shanthas poured from warps in the forest and the mountains, wielding their crystal swords with deadly accuracy and deflecting the beams of the colonists' laser and blaster pistols with their bare hands.
The colonists who survived this onslaught retreated to the five remaining ships. One among their number revealed that he had developed a bioengineered virus that, he believed, would infect the shanthas and kill off enough of them that the colonists could hold them off. Debate raged for days whether this was necessary, or ethical even if it were, until one of the five remaining ships heated up like an oven, roasting the two thousand people inside alive. The remaining four ships reluctantly voted to release the virus.
It was much more potent than advertised. Within a week, 99% of the shanthas in the vicinity were dead. Although the colonists didn't know it until a ragged shantha delegation once again arrived at their doors, just over 99% of all the shanthas worldwide had died in the bioengineered plague. The shanthas' message was simple: "You have taken this world from us, for now. We cede it to you, until such time as the ripples you have made come back to you as crashing waves. But know that we still live, and we watch, as we did before. And we will never be your slaves."
With both shanthic and human societies shattered by the brief but devastating war, the colonists scattered with the remaining supplies from the surviving four colony ships and largely lost touch with both each other and the remnants of their technology, known to later generations as the Earth-Tec. The other races of Jorune had fared poorly during the Human-Shanthic War; the effects of the destroyed ships' engines, interacting with the forces the Shanthas commanded, known only as Isho, had destroyed ships and cities of the other races, as had the shanthas' use of the warps and the humans' bio-tech. The surviving colonists found that the other sentient races, in particular the shanthas and the strange blue-skinned warrior people called the ramian, were much less likely to consider them a threat if they showed no visible signs of their Earth-Tec, so much of it was buried, with the locations of the caches carefully memorized so they could be found later in an emergency - and lost to history when the memorizers died.
One of the original colony's greatest biotechnologists, known to later generations only as Iscin, had established a research station far from the main colony, in what is now known as the Gauss Valley. Originally, the station had existed to design crops that would grow easily in the soil of Jorune but be nourishing to Terran life. His first two experiments, the gerrig and the durlig, were based on cabbage and turnip stock, respectively, and are edible, but not tasty. His third attempt at a Jorune food crop was withered in the field in one of the shanthas' first attacks. He fled back to this base just after the early stages of the war, and when no response was forthcoming on his communicator from either human or shantha, he assumed that he was the sole survivor. In response, he began using the tissue samples brought from Earth, along with his own genome, to engineer races built from Terran DNA but well-adapted to life on harsh Jorune. His first attempt were the amphibious Blount, created with amphibian genetic material; they were fecund and could adapt to a number of areas unused by the other sentient races, but their low intelligence was a disappointment. Iscin used them as helpers to create his next race, built from puma DNA; these were the hot-tempered and quarrelous Crugar, whose inability to cooperate was a greater disappointment to Iscin than the blount's low IQ had been. (The Cygra, a lynx-like offshoot of the crugar well-adapted for cold areas and less prone to violence, appeared after the first generation.) His third attempt, built from wolf and coyote genes, were the Woffen, and he was much more pleased with their intelligence and temperament; still, they shared some of the weaknesses of Terran dogs, including a pack mentality and a lack of control of their instincts. His fourth race was a fusion of human DNA with that of the black bear, the Bronth, and these showed both human intelligence and great strength and adaptability. A fifth and final race, a second attempt at a feline fusion, is rumored but apparently died out, as none have been seen in centuries.
About 30 years after the creation of what are now called the Iscin races, Iscin was murdered by one of the first crugar, Choundra, in a crime of passion, using a blaster modified by Iscin to be usable by any being with human DNA. The crugar, as the oldest and most numerous of what they to this day consider the "true" Iscin races (the crugar, and to a lesser extent the Woffen, largely discount the blount as a "failed race," despite their success at colonizing the swamps and bayous of Jorune's warmer lands), took over the Gauss Valley Research Center and began trying to manage it in accordance with their ideas of Iscin's wishes. What began as a panicked takeover quickly matured into slavery, as the crugar controlled the only energy weapon available. After nearly five years of the crugar's increasing tyranny, the bronth stole the blaster and destroyed it, and the subjugated races fled together. After wandering in the wilderness through the desert of Doben-Al for several years, during which the blount settled at Lake Dau-ou-dey and a large group of woffen chose to split from the bronth and remain in Anasan, the remaining Children of Iscin settled in what is now Ros Crendor, and spread in simple ships eastward across the Sea of Ir-Doth, the bronth founding the current nation of Dobre, the woffen landing in Lundere. Meanwhile, the crugar and cygra quarreled over their treatment of their younger kin; the cygra headed northward, near present-day Jasp, while the bulk of the crugar headed westward, eventually settling in Temauntro.
A small group of colonists in what is now Thantier had, by accident of geography, the largest remaining cache of Earth-Tec, including a fairly large stock of seed and one still-working transport hovercraft. For the next hundred years, most humans living outside of Thantier lived as hunter-gatherers, always on the run from such dangerous inhabitants of Jorune as the ramian and the cleash. Thantier, by contrast, was a relatively safe agricultural community. After the power cells and seed stock ran down, however, other communities began to spread from the center at Thantier, especially as the families that had established themselves as the protectors of the Earth-Tec began solidifying their control over Thantier. Humans re-discovered the Gauss Valley, now largely empty of the Iscin races (save for a few wetland communities of blount) and began establishing villages; around the same time, a fishing village was founded on the site of present-day Ardoth. In the same time frame, the cleash began their incursions from the north into lands recently settled by humans; villages hastily fortified themselves against the insectoid raiders.
The cause of the Age of Monsters is unclear. It is known that the moons of Jorune came into an unusual alignment roughly 400 years after the Human-Shanthic War, resulting in unusually large and chaotic flows of the substance isho, which permeates all things on the planet. It is also the case, as those versed in bio-tec point out, that humans were under a great deal of evolutionary stress at the time. Whatever the reason, about one in every four human births arrived as a mutant. Some of the mutants died immediately; others were killed by their parents, or others in the frightened human communities. In the Thantier and Gauss communities, the authorities demanded that children with visible mutations be removed from the community, either strangled or abandoned beyond the town's walls. Some mutations did not become apparent until puberty; in particular, the larger, more robust humans that became known as the boccord and the smaller, more gracile versions that became known as muadra were not recognizable until they reached their mature heights. These were driven away as they became obvious, and began forming their own bands of outlaw teenagers, scrabbling for survival and rescuing the abandoned infant mutants as they could. In contrast, the villagers in and around Ardoth typically accepted mutant children as part of "the curse of the shanthas;" boccord and the aquatic mutants (the freshwater acubon and the ocean-going salu) were accepted as helpful in fishing and sailing. The muadra were barely recognized as being different; they were mostly seen as runts. Even the ogreish mutant trarch were deemed useful for heavy lifting and plowing.
One of the full-blooded humans, Paul Gauss, re-discovered Iscin's abandoned workshop nearly 600 years after the Human-Shanthic War, and found among his papers the descriptions of what gerrig and durlig were intended for. The two plants, both prolific seeders, had spread across most of the continent of Tanidoth, but most humans considered them weeds. Gauss experimented with them and found that they were both nutritious, and far easier to grow than the feeble barley and corn raised by the settlements in the valley (wheat, in all its forms, simply will not grow on Jorune without intensive fertilizer treatment). The taste left something to be desired, although the starchy root of the durlig could be made palatable by boiling it to mush. After much convincing, he brought both plants to the people of his settlement, whose health began to improve dramatically. The remaining papers and data discs of Iscin were carefully preserved by the settlement, although many of them were indecipherable. The memory of Iscin, already worshipped by his creations, became revered as a great hero in human cultures from this point on.
A few years after the valley began intensive cultivation of durlig, a female scout from Ardoth, Mayatrish of the Krish family, was driven from the sky on her talmaron by scavengers and forced to land near Gauss's village. By this point, language drift had occurred enough that Mayatrish and Gauss had to teach each other their dialects to understand each other. Despite this barrier, they fell in love, and were married the next year.
Two years later, the head of the Krish family found his daughter living among a well-nourished people, healthy and happy. He thanked Gauss for rescuing his daughter, but refused to recognize their marriage, and took her back to Ardoth against her wishes. Eight months later, she gave birth to a son, whom she named Michael, and thanked her father for taking her from the Gauss Valley - for she recognized that her son was a boccord, who would be tolerated in Ardoth but would have been exiled from the Gauss settlement. The people of Ardoth began cultivating the wild gerrig and durlig, supplementing their diet of fish and occasional deer and thombo meat, and like the people of the Gauss settlement, their health began to improve. The two communities began to trade, and the boccord and muadra born to the people of Gauss began immigrating to Ardoth, where they were at least tolerated.
Mayatrish of Krish migrated back and forth between both communities, living with her husband during spring and summer, and returning to her son in the fall and winter. When Michael reached his 18th year, Mayatrish told him about his father's community, and their greatest problem: harvesting the durlig, whose roots delve three feet into the earth. Michael, remembering stories of yoked oxen from Earth, set about domesticating the thombo to the yoke, and within two years led a caravan of thombo to what was now the city of Gauss. Mayatrish rushed out to embrace him when he arrived, causing the people of Gauss to titter about her decadent Ardothian ways. She introduced him to Paul Gauss, who then publicly rebuked her for bringing a mutant into the valley. Michael led the thombos to the durlig fields and demonstrated the use of the rig he'd invented; a pair of thombos, properly harnessed and directed, could pull up a fully-grown durlig in less than a third of the time a team of men took to do it. After the people of Gauss admitted, ashamed, that a mutant had solved their worst problem, Mayatrish revealed Michael's parentage and appealed to the people of Gauss to accept all their children, no matter what their looks. Paul, weeping, embraced Michael as his son, giving him the additional name of Khaun, and the people of the valley swore never to kill or abandon a mutant child again. Ever since then, the names of Gauss, Mayatrish, and their son Khaun Gauss have been invoked in the service of equality among all the races of humankind.
Khaun Gauss went on to found a second city in the north end of the valley. Scouts from his settlement encountered a large agricultural community of thriddle, growing a corn-like grain they called codditch; they traded seed for a breeding pair of trained thombos, giving the Gauss valley a third important crop, though codditch is not as nutritious for humans as durlig.
The next thousand years were a Dark Age for humankind, and for much of thriddle-kind and the Iscin races as well. A series of virulent plagues raced through human and Iscin settlements, leaving anything from crippled governments to ghost towns in their wake. The crugar, more resistant to disease than humans thanks to Iscin's genetic manipulations, struck back into human territories both in Thantier and in the Gauss Valley, burning all of Khaun Gauss but the mountain fortress itself to the ground. Many of the boccord, and some humans as well, began migrating northward, encountering a small but relatively plague-free nation centered on the city of Jasp. As Thantier, Gauss, and Ardoth suffered under the waves of plague and the incursions by the cleash, the crugar, and by ramian pirates from the south, Jasp began experimenting with the crystal outcroppings that caused the skyrealms - plateaus suspended hundreds of feet above the ground by unusual flows of isho, especially the golden isho governed by Ebba, the silver-and-golden moon of Jorune. Roughly 850 years after the Human-Shanthic War, Ton Harik of Jasp developed the first crystal-powered airship. Shortly afterwards, the ramian diplomat Kah Denni Harangire arrived and negotiated a treaty between Jasp and the ramian pirates, who feared the ships that needed no water to sail.
A gap of almost 200 years exists in the records of all the human and Iscin races here. It is known that a particularly virulent wave of plagues struck, and that the births of mutants essentially stopped, during these "missing years." It is known that in the year 1162 PC (Post-Colony), the ramian broke their treaty and invaded Jasp, seeking to steal levitational crystals for themselves. They were driven back by an army of humans and boccord, and the next year the Jaspian airships wiped out the ramian's northern fleet by dropping flasks of lit oil onto their wooden decks. It was discovered that the muadra, the small mutant humans who were weak but quick and who had this strange tendency to explode when the isho currents grew stormy, often made the best pilots of the airships, seeming to have a natural affinity with the streams of isho they rode on.
Intermittent wars with the crugar continued as the plagues continued to strike the human territories. The cleash gradually retreated from Thantier from 1200 to 1300 PC, only to be replaced by crugar and ramian pirates, who were no longer interested in raiding to the north. In addition, a wave of "rot plagues" - viral diseases striking crops, causing them to blister and rot in the fields - struck human and native plants alike, causing many small settlements to starve. During the 1600s to 1700s PC, the crugar pushed back into Gauss Valley, driving out most of the humans and razing their settlements. The next clearly documented major incident is the Jaspian-Ramian Trade Agreement of 1798 PC; Jaspians had developed crystal schooners permitting trade as far as Voligire. It is known that they also made contact with communities in Ardoth and Burdoth, although no long-standing trade agreements were reached. During the 1900s, the crugar found themselves suffering from the rot plagues and drought, and were driven back into the Doben-Al; the cities of Gauss and Khaun Gauss were reclaimed and resettled by humans, accompanied by a small population of muadra and boccord. In 2113, the ramian again reneged on their treaty, and attempted to capture the crystal fields of Jasp; again, the Jaspian arial and naval forces destroyed the ramian fleet, and formally threatened to firebomb the ramian capital at Vinteer if any further incursions were attempted. Again, the ramian turned their attentions southward, this time towards the coastal cities of Burdoth.
In the early 2200s, humans encountered both their freshwater cousins, the acubon, and the blount at Lake Dau-ou-dey, and successfully opened relations with both races, after an initial diplomatic faux pas. Through the next 500 years, the plagues began receding from most of the lands of the continent of Tanidoth, and human influence spread, especially near the coastlines; trade with the saltwater mutants, the salu, also grew. Minor skirmishes with the crugar and cleash did not prevent significant headway into establishing permanent cities and improving technology in architecture, metalworking, and especially glass and ceramic manufacture. In the late 2700s, Laindra Elayn, a high-born scout and artist, traveled from Heridoth to the crugar lands of Temauntro and back, and upon returning created sculptures of many of the places and beings she had encountered. This encouraged travel on a scale previously undreamed of.
In 2914 PC, Caji Gends, a young muadra fleeing anti-mutant discrimination (which had reappeared in Gauss Valley after being absent for some time) stumbled upon a shanthic temple that was still in use. Astonishingly, the shantha who served as the temple's keeper chose not to turn the young near-human away; instead, Sho Copra Tra took the mutant in for a time and taught him how to weave the threads of isho into dyshas, the shanthic word for focused patterns of isho that produce physical effects. After ten years of intensive training, Sho Copra Tra pronounced Caji Gends ready, gave him the shanthic title of Copra, and told him to return to his people and teach them how to control the isho that flows through their bodies.
Copra Gends set up a small school in a remote part of the Gauss Valley, teaching any muadra who undertook the trek to find him the basics of shanthic philosophy regarding the isho and how to weave it into the basic orbs and bolts. His students took on his prior name, calling themselves the Maustin Caji, and returning to their own communities to pass this new knowledge down. Bennid Ho'Gomo, a thriddle who befriended Copra Gends near the beginning of his exile, joined him at the school for a time and took the knowledge of the dyshas back to the thriddle of Gauss Valley.
In 2933 PC, the crugar once again invaded the Gauss Valley, intent on reclaiming their ancestral home. In the following year, a plague once again struck in their wake, this time falling only on the woffen, who were weakened and even paralyzed. The crugar ruthlessly slew any woffen they found, claiming that this was the only way to end the plague. Copra Gends and his Caji came to the defense of the valley, and in particular to the defense of the woffen. After driving the crugar back out of the valley and into the Doben-Al once again, the Caji taught defensive dyshas to the woffen who showed the talent for it, to help prevent the Plague Slaying from ever occurring again. Woffen and muadra have had an affinity for each other in the centuries since this time. The Caji began to spread to other lands, teaching muadra the defensive dyshas and other basic orbs and bolts across the eastern parts of Burdoth and up into Jasp.
Having regrouped, the crugar changed tactics and invaded Ardoth in 3007 PC. Ardoth called on its ally, Shandane of Heridoth, to come to its aid. Shandane and his army successfully drove out the crugar, sending them once more into the Doben-Al desert, and then remained in Ardoth, claiming it as the rightful spoils of war. After three years of popular revolt verging on civil war, the Ardothians ousted Shandane, who retreated back into Heridoth with his army. The unrest followed him, as several cities within Heridoth declared independence; Shandane died in battle at Sholis in 3017. The provinces under the protection of the city of Ardoth began to form a more coherent self-defense plan, with the military leader being called the Sage.
Jasp also began using the same terminology at this time; in 3077, a popular revolt ousted Sage Khanat of Jasp, who was held responsible for chronic grain shortages - he preferred to trade codditch and barley with the ramian for profit instead of feeding his own people. Deprived of this source of food, the ramian invaded the northern shores of Burdoth in 3113, pressing down through Lusail towards Ardoth. The inhabitants of the cities of Trosoe and Sydra were pushed back into the dark forest of Glounda; the ramian destroyed the town of Telmin and slaughtered its inhabitants. The army of Ardoth, led now by the Dar-Sage, drove the ramian back to the sea in 3160 and attempted to annex the area, but its people, especially the former inhabitants of the town Sychill, rebelled. The low-grade civil war came to a head in 3181, when a group of muadra Caji held off the Ardothian army for three days. When they finally ran out of isho, the army proceeded to slaughter them, only to be stopped by a group of six shantha, who offered no reason for their interference, merely demanded that the fighting stop. A period of relative peace and trade between Jasp and Burdoth followed, as Jasp developed its trade network even down to Thantier.
By the 3400s, the Sage-ship or Dharsage-ship of most human realms had become a hereditary position, rather than an appointed military one. The crugar began to push outward from the Doben-Al again, beginning with attacks on the small realm of Carrissey in 3411. The coastal towns of Koistra and Sholis began fighting over trade routes in 3431; this became a conflict across most of Heridoth and western Burdoth, requiring Dharsage Khodre to send out the armies of Ardoth. His attempt to bring the warring states directly under Ardothian control was interrupted by the crugar once more assaulting Gauss Valley in 3436; they penetrated as far as the walls of Ardoth itself when the thriddle and the salu intervened. A tall salu ship bearing a load of Earth-Tec, discovered by thriddle experimenting with the shanthic warps, arrived in Ardoth harbor in late 3437, and the newly-armed people of Ardoth, especially the drenn, the formal citizens of Ardoth, and the kesht, the new hereditary aristocracy, used this new technology to drive the crugar back yet again.
The period from 3438 to 3445 is commonly known as the Energy Weapons War. After driving the crugar back, onto the waiting spears of the Thantierian army, Dharsage Khodre turned his new energy weapons on the neighboring realms, starting with ravaged Carrissey, which he divided into the two new realms of North and South Khodre. Meanwhile, the Kesht Harsri, left as the steward of Ardoth itself, expelled the muadra from the city, believing there to be no need for the mystic nonsense of the dyshas when there were energy weapons to be used and seeing the mutants as an "enemy within." The bronth realm of Dobre, concerned about the sudden increase of Ardoth's influence, sent a fleet to harass Burdoth's eastern shores; many woffen privateers joined this force. Meanwhile, the exiled muadra encountered the remnants of the Maustin Caji in the forests of the westernmost parts of Burdoth, and once again took up the serious study of the dyshas and the philosophy of Gends.
Pressed between an army of well-trained Caji in the west and the Dobren League in the east, and running out of energy cells to power the large blasters, Dharsage Khodre found himself deadlocked in the Sommint Valleys of Heridoth and withdrew back to Ardoth, where he fired Harsri and installed Mashill Cardis as the new chell of the City of Ardoth. In 3445, the thriddle negotiated the Klein-Khodre Accord, ending the Energy Weapons War, requiring both Dobre and Ardoth to give up any claims on Heridoth, and permitting the muadra to return to their homes throughout Burdoth (especially within Ardoth itself). The Accord also established a council with representatives from Ardoth, Dobre, Gauss, Heridoth, Lundere, Lusail, North Khodre, South Khodre, the Sobayid, and the thriddle island of Tan-Iricid, with a non-voting observer invited from Temauntro. Burdoth was now united as a nation, with Ardoth as its capital, and made up of the provinces of Ardis (the area immediately around Ardoth itself), Lusail, Gauss, and the Sobayid.
The return of the muadra was not uneventful. The Dharsage, mistrustful of the Caji, began importing daij meat from the ramian; ingestion of this substance allows a human to perceive disruptions in the flow of isho. Boccord who possessed this skill were also recruited from Ros Crendor and southern Jasp. Employees of the Dharsage, called daijic, enforced a no-dyshas policy within the city limits. Kerning bays, places where muadra can release isho that builds up in their bodies, were built, but in the worst parts of the city. Anti-muadra gangs burned the homes of muadra known to be Caji or even to have associated with them. The remnants of the Maustin Caji were arrested and fined for retaliating; many of them leave Ardoth again, disillusioned and bitter.
In 3455, the disillusioned Caji formed an army, also called the Maustin Caji (despite not following Gends's philosophy), which cut a swath of destruction from the woffen ream of Anasan through Thantier across the Sea of Ceredis to Tan-Iricid. Blaming the thriddle for the terms of their "surrender" to Ardoth, these pseudo-Maustin Caji attacked the Mountain Crown itself, causing not insignificant damage. The Dharsage sent his navy to protect Tan-Iricid; the thriddle Seer Salrough Gomo tricked the pseudo-Maustin Caji into a warp-trap, from which they could not escape, and turned them over to the Ardothian navy to mop up.
In 3462, Dharsage Khodre fell ill. He passed the Dharsage to his son, Dardrenn, and also publicly acknowledged that the Keshtia Saress of South Khodre is also his half-daughter; he named her the ruler of the twin realms of North and South Khodre. In return, she took his family name and promised to rule in his name. This significantly reduced resistance to Ardothan rule in the realms, as they saw (and still see) Keshtia Saress as one of their own. Within Ardoth, a number of muadra Caji women took the situation into their own hands and began offering their services as healers and midwives, performing healing dyshas for small, reasonable fees. The childbirth survival rate climbed, and the intolerance for the muadra began to subside.
The cleash were once again sighted in the southern jungle lands in 3464, a year before the death of Khodre. Marshall Cardis retired from the position of Chell and was replaced, by a vote of the Council, with Rhan Trohan. Dharsage Dardrenn declared that all kerning bays would no longer charge fees, and Chell Trohan declared that new kerning bays would be constructed so that they would be convenient to all areas of the city - including the Citadel. They also embarked, beginning in 3466, on a standardized system of street names and an official map of the city.
In 3470, two important events occurred. The first was that Dharsage Dardrenn discovered that the thriddle had in fact discovered more Earth-Tec that had not been turned over to Ardoth. For this "treachery," all thriddle were expelled from Ardoth. In return, the thriddle let slip to the Council that the source for the daij meat allowing the city to control its muadra is the ramian, who were receiving in return the shirm-eh limilate, a product of Iscin's research that allows the normally slow-healing ramian to heal wounds and even regenerate limbs. The Council members, especially the bronth, were furious; ramian without such supplies are hesitant to attack, the bronth asserted, but when assured that they can heal themselves, they give in to their bloodlust.
The next year, a plague struck - in Voligire. For the ramian, the equation was simple: those with shirm-eh stood a very good chance of surviving; those who had none, would die. They began raiding both Burdoth and Dobre in search of the bio-tec. The war lasted until 3474, when a combined bronth-human force, supported by humans with energy weapons and muadra with destructive bolts, drove the ramian back to their homeland and once again torched their fleet. the diplomatic fallout, however, lasted for several more years, with Dobre and Heridoth demanding restitution from Ardoth for beginning the shirm-eh trade in the first place.
In 3475, an incredible isho storm struck Tanidoth, especially Burdoth and North and South Khodre. Dozens of warps opened up where previously there had been none - including within the city of Ardoth, and (some rumored) within the Citadel itself. Travelers told strange tales of creatures never before seen on Jorune appearing out of these warps and disappearing again - some innocuous, some vicious. Some who traveled through the new warps never returned. Within a week, a large group group of thriddle - over a hundred - appeared at the gates of the city, asking whether they might be allowed to investigate this disturbance and offering their expertise in the mathematics of warp connections in return. The Dharsage accepted, and the thriddle began investigating immediately. Just over a week later, the thriddle caused a small explosion in the Lower Masner neighborhood, after which the extraneous warps all closed within one day. The thriddle declined to explain exactly how they'd solved the problem, suggesting that a crystal outcropping underneath the city attuned to the isho of Tra, the warp moon, usually protected the city from warps and had unexpectedly changed polarity during the isho storm - they had merely re-reversed the polarity, and explaining how would require math that the Dharsage probably wouldn't understand. This level of bluntness is unusual in a thriddle; the Dharsage let the semi-explanation stand, and rescinded the expulsion order on the thriddle "until further notice."
Since then, Jorune has been relatively quiet. The Crugar have made some tentative excursions into North Khodre and been repulsed. Recently, the Dharsage has ordered research into creating crystal schooners of the same type that Jasp has been using for centuries. There are rumors that among the Earth-Tec recently discovered is a ship with an operational engine; an apparition in the sky over Ardoth in 3482 may have been either such an Earth ship or a crystal skyship of very unusual size and design. In 3489 an assassination attempt on the Dharsage, probably financed by Jasp, was foiled by a boccord bodyguard. Recent discoveries on the edge of the Doben-Al suggest there may be ruins of a city built by humans and mutants together, without the aid of either Earth-Tec or durlig; thriddle are investigating to find out if this is true.
The year is now 3492 PC. Welcome to Jorune.
Second: I am shocked at how much information on the old Jorune game is out there. Ah, the power of fandom on the Internet. Of course, it's full of spoilers. *sigh*
Note for potential players: this is background information. It is unlikely that your characters would know all of this (unless they have a very high Area Knowledge (Jorune) or History skill), but most characters, especially from Burdoth, would know the general outline of this and have reasonably detailed knowledge of the last thirty years or so.
Now, for the first installment of the GURPS Jorune background:
A Brief History of Jorune, condensed from Leker, Teves, and Kalish, authors of Jorune 3rd Ed.:
3500 years ago, a group of eighty colony ships, carrying just over 20,000 colonists, arrived on a new world from the planet known as the Blue World, Gaia, Terra, or simply Earth. A series of robotic probes had been sent out traveling faster even than the light of the stars, and the one designed and programmed by Kajida Jorune had discovered a planet that had not only the right conditions to begin life, which the probe would have seeded, but a planet already living, with breathable oxygen. And so it was that one of the first waves of human expansion landed on the world named after its "discoverer," Jorune.
The colonists were astonished to find out, upon arrival, that Jorune was not only host to oxygen-producing plant life and strange and beautiful animal life, but sentient beings. In fact, unlike Earth, Jorune was inhabited by a number of sentient life forms, most of which did not appear to be closely related to each other. The most common, dominant both socially and by numbers, were the eyeless shanthas, who had a mystical culture, mostly low-technology, except for an unusual transportation system of warps - gates through space that led instantaneously to other locations on the planet. Other races, such as the stalk-eyed thriddle, seemed to have more advanced technologies than the shanthas, and yet they lived mostly subservient to these monk-like, blind creatures. The shantha's reaction to the humans' arrival was neither surprise nor fear; they observed the first pair of spacecraft for a few months from a distance, responding to human attempts to communicate only with gestures. Then they sent a party armed with crystal swords and glass-tipped spears to the colonists, accompanied by one of the thriddle, who stated their terms in clear English: the humans could use the coastal lands between the ocean and the desert, as long as they did not venture into the forests, into the open plains marked by great shards of crystal, or into the mountainous areas. The humans were startled, but agreed to the terms, with the addition that they would meet again in twenty-five years to renegotiate, when the last of the ships was scheduled to arrive. The fledgeling colony began dismantling the ships to construct their new towns, and discovering which Terran crops would grow in this alien soil.
Then their transmissions from Earth began speaking of trouble. The balance of power in the global government was shifting rapidly - too rapidly. One of the final two ships for the colony, carrying necessary food and supplies, chose to turn back and return to Terra. The last transmissions the colony received spoke of civil war, of destruction, of the conflict even extending to the moon base - then, nothing. The last colony ship landed, and the colonists realized that they would receive nothing more from Earth for years, perhaps even decades. They dared not speak their greatest fear - that no other ships would ever come, that this had been Earth's final war.
The colonists pushed out from their ship-towns into the forests and a large, mostly cleared plain, clear-cutting the native vegetation and planting wheat, barley, corn, and other crops. They grew poorly in Jorune's soil, even with massive fertilizing, and to provide enough for the colonists to eat when no more shipments from Earth might be forthcoming, they had to expand beyond the boundaries of their treaties with the shanthas. When the shanthic delegation arrived, now no longer needing the thriddle translator, the colonists explained why they had pushed into the forbidden areas, to no apparent reaction - the shanthas merely repeated over and over, like a teacher trying to explain to a very small child, that the humans had passed their agreed-upon borders, that they now stood on grounds of mystical significance, and must immediately abandon their activities beyond the negotiated borders. A few shanthas attempted to disable or destroy the vehicles of the colonists, especially their tractors and bulldozers; skirmishes broke out, and there were injuries, even a handful of deaths, on both sides.
When, two years later, the colonists began plowing the center of the crystal-studded plains, the shanthic delegation disappeared. Two days after their sudden and silent absence, seventy-four of the seventy-nine landed ships exploded, from no obvious cause; explosions in two of the remaining ships were prevented only by disabling their engines. Strange storms of energy poured from the split-open power cells of the ships, interacting with invisible currents of what the shanthas called isho. Lightning began pouring from cloudless skies; colonists were wracked with nausea; intense, sourceless heat withered their crops in the field. The humans fought back with bioengineered traps and explosives, as well as their energy weaponry. Then an army of shanthas poured from warps in the forest and the mountains, wielding their crystal swords with deadly accuracy and deflecting the beams of the colonists' laser and blaster pistols with their bare hands.
The colonists who survived this onslaught retreated to the five remaining ships. One among their number revealed that he had developed a bioengineered virus that, he believed, would infect the shanthas and kill off enough of them that the colonists could hold them off. Debate raged for days whether this was necessary, or ethical even if it were, until one of the five remaining ships heated up like an oven, roasting the two thousand people inside alive. The remaining four ships reluctantly voted to release the virus.
It was much more potent than advertised. Within a week, 99% of the shanthas in the vicinity were dead. Although the colonists didn't know it until a ragged shantha delegation once again arrived at their doors, just over 99% of all the shanthas worldwide had died in the bioengineered plague. The shanthas' message was simple: "You have taken this world from us, for now. We cede it to you, until such time as the ripples you have made come back to you as crashing waves. But know that we still live, and we watch, as we did before. And we will never be your slaves."
With both shanthic and human societies shattered by the brief but devastating war, the colonists scattered with the remaining supplies from the surviving four colony ships and largely lost touch with both each other and the remnants of their technology, known to later generations as the Earth-Tec. The other races of Jorune had fared poorly during the Human-Shanthic War; the effects of the destroyed ships' engines, interacting with the forces the Shanthas commanded, known only as Isho, had destroyed ships and cities of the other races, as had the shanthas' use of the warps and the humans' bio-tech. The surviving colonists found that the other sentient races, in particular the shanthas and the strange blue-skinned warrior people called the ramian, were much less likely to consider them a threat if they showed no visible signs of their Earth-Tec, so much of it was buried, with the locations of the caches carefully memorized so they could be found later in an emergency - and lost to history when the memorizers died.
One of the original colony's greatest biotechnologists, known to later generations only as Iscin, had established a research station far from the main colony, in what is now known as the Gauss Valley. Originally, the station had existed to design crops that would grow easily in the soil of Jorune but be nourishing to Terran life. His first two experiments, the gerrig and the durlig, were based on cabbage and turnip stock, respectively, and are edible, but not tasty. His third attempt at a Jorune food crop was withered in the field in one of the shanthas' first attacks. He fled back to this base just after the early stages of the war, and when no response was forthcoming on his communicator from either human or shantha, he assumed that he was the sole survivor. In response, he began using the tissue samples brought from Earth, along with his own genome, to engineer races built from Terran DNA but well-adapted to life on harsh Jorune. His first attempt were the amphibious Blount, created with amphibian genetic material; they were fecund and could adapt to a number of areas unused by the other sentient races, but their low intelligence was a disappointment. Iscin used them as helpers to create his next race, built from puma DNA; these were the hot-tempered and quarrelous Crugar, whose inability to cooperate was a greater disappointment to Iscin than the blount's low IQ had been. (The Cygra, a lynx-like offshoot of the crugar well-adapted for cold areas and less prone to violence, appeared after the first generation.) His third attempt, built from wolf and coyote genes, were the Woffen, and he was much more pleased with their intelligence and temperament; still, they shared some of the weaknesses of Terran dogs, including a pack mentality and a lack of control of their instincts. His fourth race was a fusion of human DNA with that of the black bear, the Bronth, and these showed both human intelligence and great strength and adaptability. A fifth and final race, a second attempt at a feline fusion, is rumored but apparently died out, as none have been seen in centuries.
About 30 years after the creation of what are now called the Iscin races, Iscin was murdered by one of the first crugar, Choundra, in a crime of passion, using a blaster modified by Iscin to be usable by any being with human DNA. The crugar, as the oldest and most numerous of what they to this day consider the "true" Iscin races (the crugar, and to a lesser extent the Woffen, largely discount the blount as a "failed race," despite their success at colonizing the swamps and bayous of Jorune's warmer lands), took over the Gauss Valley Research Center and began trying to manage it in accordance with their ideas of Iscin's wishes. What began as a panicked takeover quickly matured into slavery, as the crugar controlled the only energy weapon available. After nearly five years of the crugar's increasing tyranny, the bronth stole the blaster and destroyed it, and the subjugated races fled together. After wandering in the wilderness through the desert of Doben-Al for several years, during which the blount settled at Lake Dau-ou-dey and a large group of woffen chose to split from the bronth and remain in Anasan, the remaining Children of Iscin settled in what is now Ros Crendor, and spread in simple ships eastward across the Sea of Ir-Doth, the bronth founding the current nation of Dobre, the woffen landing in Lundere. Meanwhile, the crugar and cygra quarreled over their treatment of their younger kin; the cygra headed northward, near present-day Jasp, while the bulk of the crugar headed westward, eventually settling in Temauntro.
A small group of colonists in what is now Thantier had, by accident of geography, the largest remaining cache of Earth-Tec, including a fairly large stock of seed and one still-working transport hovercraft. For the next hundred years, most humans living outside of Thantier lived as hunter-gatherers, always on the run from such dangerous inhabitants of Jorune as the ramian and the cleash. Thantier, by contrast, was a relatively safe agricultural community. After the power cells and seed stock ran down, however, other communities began to spread from the center at Thantier, especially as the families that had established themselves as the protectors of the Earth-Tec began solidifying their control over Thantier. Humans re-discovered the Gauss Valley, now largely empty of the Iscin races (save for a few wetland communities of blount) and began establishing villages; around the same time, a fishing village was founded on the site of present-day Ardoth. In the same time frame, the cleash began their incursions from the north into lands recently settled by humans; villages hastily fortified themselves against the insectoid raiders.
The cause of the Age of Monsters is unclear. It is known that the moons of Jorune came into an unusual alignment roughly 400 years after the Human-Shanthic War, resulting in unusually large and chaotic flows of the substance isho, which permeates all things on the planet. It is also the case, as those versed in bio-tec point out, that humans were under a great deal of evolutionary stress at the time. Whatever the reason, about one in every four human births arrived as a mutant. Some of the mutants died immediately; others were killed by their parents, or others in the frightened human communities. In the Thantier and Gauss communities, the authorities demanded that children with visible mutations be removed from the community, either strangled or abandoned beyond the town's walls. Some mutations did not become apparent until puberty; in particular, the larger, more robust humans that became known as the boccord and the smaller, more gracile versions that became known as muadra were not recognizable until they reached their mature heights. These were driven away as they became obvious, and began forming their own bands of outlaw teenagers, scrabbling for survival and rescuing the abandoned infant mutants as they could. In contrast, the villagers in and around Ardoth typically accepted mutant children as part of "the curse of the shanthas;" boccord and the aquatic mutants (the freshwater acubon and the ocean-going salu) were accepted as helpful in fishing and sailing. The muadra were barely recognized as being different; they were mostly seen as runts. Even the ogreish mutant trarch were deemed useful for heavy lifting and plowing.
One of the full-blooded humans, Paul Gauss, re-discovered Iscin's abandoned workshop nearly 600 years after the Human-Shanthic War, and found among his papers the descriptions of what gerrig and durlig were intended for. The two plants, both prolific seeders, had spread across most of the continent of Tanidoth, but most humans considered them weeds. Gauss experimented with them and found that they were both nutritious, and far easier to grow than the feeble barley and corn raised by the settlements in the valley (wheat, in all its forms, simply will not grow on Jorune without intensive fertilizer treatment). The taste left something to be desired, although the starchy root of the durlig could be made palatable by boiling it to mush. After much convincing, he brought both plants to the people of his settlement, whose health began to improve dramatically. The remaining papers and data discs of Iscin were carefully preserved by the settlement, although many of them were indecipherable. The memory of Iscin, already worshipped by his creations, became revered as a great hero in human cultures from this point on.
A few years after the valley began intensive cultivation of durlig, a female scout from Ardoth, Mayatrish of the Krish family, was driven from the sky on her talmaron by scavengers and forced to land near Gauss's village. By this point, language drift had occurred enough that Mayatrish and Gauss had to teach each other their dialects to understand each other. Despite this barrier, they fell in love, and were married the next year.
Two years later, the head of the Krish family found his daughter living among a well-nourished people, healthy and happy. He thanked Gauss for rescuing his daughter, but refused to recognize their marriage, and took her back to Ardoth against her wishes. Eight months later, she gave birth to a son, whom she named Michael, and thanked her father for taking her from the Gauss Valley - for she recognized that her son was a boccord, who would be tolerated in Ardoth but would have been exiled from the Gauss settlement. The people of Ardoth began cultivating the wild gerrig and durlig, supplementing their diet of fish and occasional deer and thombo meat, and like the people of the Gauss settlement, their health began to improve. The two communities began to trade, and the boccord and muadra born to the people of Gauss began immigrating to Ardoth, where they were at least tolerated.
Mayatrish of Krish migrated back and forth between both communities, living with her husband during spring and summer, and returning to her son in the fall and winter. When Michael reached his 18th year, Mayatrish told him about his father's community, and their greatest problem: harvesting the durlig, whose roots delve three feet into the earth. Michael, remembering stories of yoked oxen from Earth, set about domesticating the thombo to the yoke, and within two years led a caravan of thombo to what was now the city of Gauss. Mayatrish rushed out to embrace him when he arrived, causing the people of Gauss to titter about her decadent Ardothian ways. She introduced him to Paul Gauss, who then publicly rebuked her for bringing a mutant into the valley. Michael led the thombos to the durlig fields and demonstrated the use of the rig he'd invented; a pair of thombos, properly harnessed and directed, could pull up a fully-grown durlig in less than a third of the time a team of men took to do it. After the people of Gauss admitted, ashamed, that a mutant had solved their worst problem, Mayatrish revealed Michael's parentage and appealed to the people of Gauss to accept all their children, no matter what their looks. Paul, weeping, embraced Michael as his son, giving him the additional name of Khaun, and the people of the valley swore never to kill or abandon a mutant child again. Ever since then, the names of Gauss, Mayatrish, and their son Khaun Gauss have been invoked in the service of equality among all the races of humankind.
Khaun Gauss went on to found a second city in the north end of the valley. Scouts from his settlement encountered a large agricultural community of thriddle, growing a corn-like grain they called codditch; they traded seed for a breeding pair of trained thombos, giving the Gauss valley a third important crop, though codditch is not as nutritious for humans as durlig.
The next thousand years were a Dark Age for humankind, and for much of thriddle-kind and the Iscin races as well. A series of virulent plagues raced through human and Iscin settlements, leaving anything from crippled governments to ghost towns in their wake. The crugar, more resistant to disease than humans thanks to Iscin's genetic manipulations, struck back into human territories both in Thantier and in the Gauss Valley, burning all of Khaun Gauss but the mountain fortress itself to the ground. Many of the boccord, and some humans as well, began migrating northward, encountering a small but relatively plague-free nation centered on the city of Jasp. As Thantier, Gauss, and Ardoth suffered under the waves of plague and the incursions by the cleash, the crugar, and by ramian pirates from the south, Jasp began experimenting with the crystal outcroppings that caused the skyrealms - plateaus suspended hundreds of feet above the ground by unusual flows of isho, especially the golden isho governed by Ebba, the silver-and-golden moon of Jorune. Roughly 850 years after the Human-Shanthic War, Ton Harik of Jasp developed the first crystal-powered airship. Shortly afterwards, the ramian diplomat Kah Denni Harangire arrived and negotiated a treaty between Jasp and the ramian pirates, who feared the ships that needed no water to sail.
A gap of almost 200 years exists in the records of all the human and Iscin races here. It is known that a particularly virulent wave of plagues struck, and that the births of mutants essentially stopped, during these "missing years." It is known that in the year 1162 PC (Post-Colony), the ramian broke their treaty and invaded Jasp, seeking to steal levitational crystals for themselves. They were driven back by an army of humans and boccord, and the next year the Jaspian airships wiped out the ramian's northern fleet by dropping flasks of lit oil onto their wooden decks. It was discovered that the muadra, the small mutant humans who were weak but quick and who had this strange tendency to explode when the isho currents grew stormy, often made the best pilots of the airships, seeming to have a natural affinity with the streams of isho they rode on.
Intermittent wars with the crugar continued as the plagues continued to strike the human territories. The cleash gradually retreated from Thantier from 1200 to 1300 PC, only to be replaced by crugar and ramian pirates, who were no longer interested in raiding to the north. In addition, a wave of "rot plagues" - viral diseases striking crops, causing them to blister and rot in the fields - struck human and native plants alike, causing many small settlements to starve. During the 1600s to 1700s PC, the crugar pushed back into Gauss Valley, driving out most of the humans and razing their settlements. The next clearly documented major incident is the Jaspian-Ramian Trade Agreement of 1798 PC; Jaspians had developed crystal schooners permitting trade as far as Voligire. It is known that they also made contact with communities in Ardoth and Burdoth, although no long-standing trade agreements were reached. During the 1900s, the crugar found themselves suffering from the rot plagues and drought, and were driven back into the Doben-Al; the cities of Gauss and Khaun Gauss were reclaimed and resettled by humans, accompanied by a small population of muadra and boccord. In 2113, the ramian again reneged on their treaty, and attempted to capture the crystal fields of Jasp; again, the Jaspian arial and naval forces destroyed the ramian fleet, and formally threatened to firebomb the ramian capital at Vinteer if any further incursions were attempted. Again, the ramian turned their attentions southward, this time towards the coastal cities of Burdoth.
In the early 2200s, humans encountered both their freshwater cousins, the acubon, and the blount at Lake Dau-ou-dey, and successfully opened relations with both races, after an initial diplomatic faux pas. Through the next 500 years, the plagues began receding from most of the lands of the continent of Tanidoth, and human influence spread, especially near the coastlines; trade with the saltwater mutants, the salu, also grew. Minor skirmishes with the crugar and cleash did not prevent significant headway into establishing permanent cities and improving technology in architecture, metalworking, and especially glass and ceramic manufacture. In the late 2700s, Laindra Elayn, a high-born scout and artist, traveled from Heridoth to the crugar lands of Temauntro and back, and upon returning created sculptures of many of the places and beings she had encountered. This encouraged travel on a scale previously undreamed of.
In 2914 PC, Caji Gends, a young muadra fleeing anti-mutant discrimination (which had reappeared in Gauss Valley after being absent for some time) stumbled upon a shanthic temple that was still in use. Astonishingly, the shantha who served as the temple's keeper chose not to turn the young near-human away; instead, Sho Copra Tra took the mutant in for a time and taught him how to weave the threads of isho into dyshas, the shanthic word for focused patterns of isho that produce physical effects. After ten years of intensive training, Sho Copra Tra pronounced Caji Gends ready, gave him the shanthic title of Copra, and told him to return to his people and teach them how to control the isho that flows through their bodies.
Copra Gends set up a small school in a remote part of the Gauss Valley, teaching any muadra who undertook the trek to find him the basics of shanthic philosophy regarding the isho and how to weave it into the basic orbs and bolts. His students took on his prior name, calling themselves the Maustin Caji, and returning to their own communities to pass this new knowledge down. Bennid Ho'Gomo, a thriddle who befriended Copra Gends near the beginning of his exile, joined him at the school for a time and took the knowledge of the dyshas back to the thriddle of Gauss Valley.
In 2933 PC, the crugar once again invaded the Gauss Valley, intent on reclaiming their ancestral home. In the following year, a plague once again struck in their wake, this time falling only on the woffen, who were weakened and even paralyzed. The crugar ruthlessly slew any woffen they found, claiming that this was the only way to end the plague. Copra Gends and his Caji came to the defense of the valley, and in particular to the defense of the woffen. After driving the crugar back out of the valley and into the Doben-Al once again, the Caji taught defensive dyshas to the woffen who showed the talent for it, to help prevent the Plague Slaying from ever occurring again. Woffen and muadra have had an affinity for each other in the centuries since this time. The Caji began to spread to other lands, teaching muadra the defensive dyshas and other basic orbs and bolts across the eastern parts of Burdoth and up into Jasp.
Having regrouped, the crugar changed tactics and invaded Ardoth in 3007 PC. Ardoth called on its ally, Shandane of Heridoth, to come to its aid. Shandane and his army successfully drove out the crugar, sending them once more into the Doben-Al desert, and then remained in Ardoth, claiming it as the rightful spoils of war. After three years of popular revolt verging on civil war, the Ardothians ousted Shandane, who retreated back into Heridoth with his army. The unrest followed him, as several cities within Heridoth declared independence; Shandane died in battle at Sholis in 3017. The provinces under the protection of the city of Ardoth began to form a more coherent self-defense plan, with the military leader being called the Sage.
Jasp also began using the same terminology at this time; in 3077, a popular revolt ousted Sage Khanat of Jasp, who was held responsible for chronic grain shortages - he preferred to trade codditch and barley with the ramian for profit instead of feeding his own people. Deprived of this source of food, the ramian invaded the northern shores of Burdoth in 3113, pressing down through Lusail towards Ardoth. The inhabitants of the cities of Trosoe and Sydra were pushed back into the dark forest of Glounda; the ramian destroyed the town of Telmin and slaughtered its inhabitants. The army of Ardoth, led now by the Dar-Sage, drove the ramian back to the sea in 3160 and attempted to annex the area, but its people, especially the former inhabitants of the town Sychill, rebelled. The low-grade civil war came to a head in 3181, when a group of muadra Caji held off the Ardothian army for three days. When they finally ran out of isho, the army proceeded to slaughter them, only to be stopped by a group of six shantha, who offered no reason for their interference, merely demanded that the fighting stop. A period of relative peace and trade between Jasp and Burdoth followed, as Jasp developed its trade network even down to Thantier.
By the 3400s, the Sage-ship or Dharsage-ship of most human realms had become a hereditary position, rather than an appointed military one. The crugar began to push outward from the Doben-Al again, beginning with attacks on the small realm of Carrissey in 3411. The coastal towns of Koistra and Sholis began fighting over trade routes in 3431; this became a conflict across most of Heridoth and western Burdoth, requiring Dharsage Khodre to send out the armies of Ardoth. His attempt to bring the warring states directly under Ardothian control was interrupted by the crugar once more assaulting Gauss Valley in 3436; they penetrated as far as the walls of Ardoth itself when the thriddle and the salu intervened. A tall salu ship bearing a load of Earth-Tec, discovered by thriddle experimenting with the shanthic warps, arrived in Ardoth harbor in late 3437, and the newly-armed people of Ardoth, especially the drenn, the formal citizens of Ardoth, and the kesht, the new hereditary aristocracy, used this new technology to drive the crugar back yet again.
The period from 3438 to 3445 is commonly known as the Energy Weapons War. After driving the crugar back, onto the waiting spears of the Thantierian army, Dharsage Khodre turned his new energy weapons on the neighboring realms, starting with ravaged Carrissey, which he divided into the two new realms of North and South Khodre. Meanwhile, the Kesht Harsri, left as the steward of Ardoth itself, expelled the muadra from the city, believing there to be no need for the mystic nonsense of the dyshas when there were energy weapons to be used and seeing the mutants as an "enemy within." The bronth realm of Dobre, concerned about the sudden increase of Ardoth's influence, sent a fleet to harass Burdoth's eastern shores; many woffen privateers joined this force. Meanwhile, the exiled muadra encountered the remnants of the Maustin Caji in the forests of the westernmost parts of Burdoth, and once again took up the serious study of the dyshas and the philosophy of Gends.
Pressed between an army of well-trained Caji in the west and the Dobren League in the east, and running out of energy cells to power the large blasters, Dharsage Khodre found himself deadlocked in the Sommint Valleys of Heridoth and withdrew back to Ardoth, where he fired Harsri and installed Mashill Cardis as the new chell of the City of Ardoth. In 3445, the thriddle negotiated the Klein-Khodre Accord, ending the Energy Weapons War, requiring both Dobre and Ardoth to give up any claims on Heridoth, and permitting the muadra to return to their homes throughout Burdoth (especially within Ardoth itself). The Accord also established a council with representatives from Ardoth, Dobre, Gauss, Heridoth, Lundere, Lusail, North Khodre, South Khodre, the Sobayid, and the thriddle island of Tan-Iricid, with a non-voting observer invited from Temauntro. Burdoth was now united as a nation, with Ardoth as its capital, and made up of the provinces of Ardis (the area immediately around Ardoth itself), Lusail, Gauss, and the Sobayid.
The return of the muadra was not uneventful. The Dharsage, mistrustful of the Caji, began importing daij meat from the ramian; ingestion of this substance allows a human to perceive disruptions in the flow of isho. Boccord who possessed this skill were also recruited from Ros Crendor and southern Jasp. Employees of the Dharsage, called daijic, enforced a no-dyshas policy within the city limits. Kerning bays, places where muadra can release isho that builds up in their bodies, were built, but in the worst parts of the city. Anti-muadra gangs burned the homes of muadra known to be Caji or even to have associated with them. The remnants of the Maustin Caji were arrested and fined for retaliating; many of them leave Ardoth again, disillusioned and bitter.
In 3455, the disillusioned Caji formed an army, also called the Maustin Caji (despite not following Gends's philosophy), which cut a swath of destruction from the woffen ream of Anasan through Thantier across the Sea of Ceredis to Tan-Iricid. Blaming the thriddle for the terms of their "surrender" to Ardoth, these pseudo-Maustin Caji attacked the Mountain Crown itself, causing not insignificant damage. The Dharsage sent his navy to protect Tan-Iricid; the thriddle Seer Salrough Gomo tricked the pseudo-Maustin Caji into a warp-trap, from which they could not escape, and turned them over to the Ardothian navy to mop up.
In 3462, Dharsage Khodre fell ill. He passed the Dharsage to his son, Dardrenn, and also publicly acknowledged that the Keshtia Saress of South Khodre is also his half-daughter; he named her the ruler of the twin realms of North and South Khodre. In return, she took his family name and promised to rule in his name. This significantly reduced resistance to Ardothan rule in the realms, as they saw (and still see) Keshtia Saress as one of their own. Within Ardoth, a number of muadra Caji women took the situation into their own hands and began offering their services as healers and midwives, performing healing dyshas for small, reasonable fees. The childbirth survival rate climbed, and the intolerance for the muadra began to subside.
The cleash were once again sighted in the southern jungle lands in 3464, a year before the death of Khodre. Marshall Cardis retired from the position of Chell and was replaced, by a vote of the Council, with Rhan Trohan. Dharsage Dardrenn declared that all kerning bays would no longer charge fees, and Chell Trohan declared that new kerning bays would be constructed so that they would be convenient to all areas of the city - including the Citadel. They also embarked, beginning in 3466, on a standardized system of street names and an official map of the city.
In 3470, two important events occurred. The first was that Dharsage Dardrenn discovered that the thriddle had in fact discovered more Earth-Tec that had not been turned over to Ardoth. For this "treachery," all thriddle were expelled from Ardoth. In return, the thriddle let slip to the Council that the source for the daij meat allowing the city to control its muadra is the ramian, who were receiving in return the shirm-eh limilate, a product of Iscin's research that allows the normally slow-healing ramian to heal wounds and even regenerate limbs. The Council members, especially the bronth, were furious; ramian without such supplies are hesitant to attack, the bronth asserted, but when assured that they can heal themselves, they give in to their bloodlust.
The next year, a plague struck - in Voligire. For the ramian, the equation was simple: those with shirm-eh stood a very good chance of surviving; those who had none, would die. They began raiding both Burdoth and Dobre in search of the bio-tec. The war lasted until 3474, when a combined bronth-human force, supported by humans with energy weapons and muadra with destructive bolts, drove the ramian back to their homeland and once again torched their fleet. the diplomatic fallout, however, lasted for several more years, with Dobre and Heridoth demanding restitution from Ardoth for beginning the shirm-eh trade in the first place.
In 3475, an incredible isho storm struck Tanidoth, especially Burdoth and North and South Khodre. Dozens of warps opened up where previously there had been none - including within the city of Ardoth, and (some rumored) within the Citadel itself. Travelers told strange tales of creatures never before seen on Jorune appearing out of these warps and disappearing again - some innocuous, some vicious. Some who traveled through the new warps never returned. Within a week, a large group group of thriddle - over a hundred - appeared at the gates of the city, asking whether they might be allowed to investigate this disturbance and offering their expertise in the mathematics of warp connections in return. The Dharsage accepted, and the thriddle began investigating immediately. Just over a week later, the thriddle caused a small explosion in the Lower Masner neighborhood, after which the extraneous warps all closed within one day. The thriddle declined to explain exactly how they'd solved the problem, suggesting that a crystal outcropping underneath the city attuned to the isho of Tra, the warp moon, usually protected the city from warps and had unexpectedly changed polarity during the isho storm - they had merely re-reversed the polarity, and explaining how would require math that the Dharsage probably wouldn't understand. This level of bluntness is unusual in a thriddle; the Dharsage let the semi-explanation stand, and rescinded the expulsion order on the thriddle "until further notice."
Since then, Jorune has been relatively quiet. The Crugar have made some tentative excursions into North Khodre and been repulsed. Recently, the Dharsage has ordered research into creating crystal schooners of the same type that Jasp has been using for centuries. There are rumors that among the Earth-Tec recently discovered is a ship with an operational engine; an apparition in the sky over Ardoth in 3482 may have been either such an Earth ship or a crystal skyship of very unusual size and design. In 3489 an assassination attempt on the Dharsage, probably financed by Jasp, was foiled by a boccord bodyguard. Recent discoveries on the edge of the Doben-Al suggest there may be ruins of a city built by humans and mutants together, without the aid of either Earth-Tec or durlig; thriddle are investigating to find out if this is true.
The year is now 3492 PC. Welcome to Jorune.
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Date: 2007-03-13 09:34 am (UTC)