So this is what I've been up to.

[Tearen Wover]

AND then since my current campaign is centered around deepwood, I felt the need to elaborate.



The History of The Domain of Deepwood



The History of Deepwood begins as far back as the beginning of the Second Age, when the land was just barely being dried from the magnificent rays of the newborn sun. Though the Gods emerged from The World at Keystone Island, their trek across the alien landscape of young Logasior saw them eventually arrive in the Deepwood Valley, a geographic structure that they at that time called Sh’Megell, a Primordial word meaning ‘Sanctuary’ in the Terran dialect. The mountains were much taller at that time, having been some of the few peaks to have poked through the ancient waves of The First Age. It is truly one of the most ancient areas of Logasior, with early hints of both Dwarven, Elven, and even Human cultures hidden among the trees, if one looks for them.



It is from Sh’Megell that Amaduy first chose to spread the original plants and animals across the land. The Brothers’ Slab, the slate on which the original Laws of Nature were first written, is ensconced within the the roots of The First Tree, now known as Daskjall, and it is the presence of this divine demiurge that causes the practitioners of Druidism to gravitate to Sh’Megell. As previously stated, Elves, Dwarves, Humans and Fey can trace their ancestry back to this sacred valley. When Amaduy abandoned his sentient creations, Corellon and Lolth took great pride in being chosen by him to lead the Elves, who lived in tandem with the Fey for several million years. Stoneworking would not be discovered until later, when the divergent Dwarves returned to the surface and began to live among the Elves, for a time.



The Fey found the earthen Dwarves to be repugnant, and so they migrated south, into the eventual Feydom, leaving the humanoids to themselves. In turn, the Elves blamed the dwarves for the departure of their magical bedfellows, and some of the earliest wars were fought, with stick, stone and bone, to force the Dwarves away from Sh’Megell. They succeeded but this opened up the Elves for exploitation by the Races of Greuhms. Corellon, who still lived largely among his people at the time, could tell that Greuhms was encouraging them to attack his people, and gathered up the greatest tribes at the time, the Anahrini, the Aman Lindar, the Cunnien (Creators of the first bows and slings), and the Ele’miqula. These tribes, though numbering little more than in the thousand or so each, were an even match for the roiling hordes of Orcs, Trolls, Ogres and so forth that Greuhms had spawned.



It was in an open battle against the Ele’miqula, who were favored and led by the beautiful Lolth, that Greuhms first saw the face of the eventual Spider Goddess. He became passionately fixated with her, and when the first opportunity struck, presented himself to her as a suitor. Lolth initially found the Orc Lord repugnant, but over time his persistence charmed her, and he also promised that if she became his mate, he would ensure the safety of the Ele’miqula if they helped the Hordes take up permanent residence within Sh’Megell. Lolth was no fool, but stricken with fancy, she agreed.



Outwardly, it appeared as though Lolth had been taken captive by Greuhms, and the Ele’miqula forced to work alongside the Orc God and his forces lest the elder god slay the younger goddess. The Ele’miqula were natural masters of subterfuge and poison, cultivating spiders within their cave homes to poison darts and stone blades. Over the course of a few years, they secretly crippled the forces following Corellon against The Strong Races, and the horde swiftly overran and sacked the largest villages of the Elves. Corellon became suspicious of Lolth’s supposed helplessness at the hand of Greuhms, and so he took the form a jack rabbit, and stole away to Greuhms’ war camp. There he witnessed the Orc God and Lolth caught in the throes of passion.



Enraged, Corellon returned to his own war camp and called upon Amaduy, whom he viewed as a father, and beseeched the God of Nature for justice. Amaduy, who had chosen Lolth and Corellon to look after the prosperity of the Elves, was disappointed that Lolth now worked against this sacred purpose. As such, the God of Nature used a fragment of his divine power to mutate the cultivated spiders of the Ele’miqula and compel them to bite their masters en masse. The vermin obeyed Amaduy’s whim, and when they bit their elven masters, the Ele’miqula underwent a vile change, and took on the aspects of the hated Drow, which in ancient elven tongue means ‘Poisoned’. When Lolth was bitten, the venom mixed with her divine blood and she became the goddess of spiders and treachery that she is today. Though she and the Drow were not immediately exiled from Elven society as a whole, they became definite second-hand citizens, instilling a deep sense of bitterness that persists to this day.



Corellon was not satisfied with justice against his sister, however. He then challenged Greuhms to single combat to decide the fate of their respective peoples. Greuhms, confident that he could best the younger god in a duel accepted readily. As it turned out, however, Corellon had an advantage that the Orc God did not have; archery. Greuhms had no answer for the divine arrows that pierced his dusky hide, and when he was weakened and vulnerable, Corellon added insult to injury by only then slashing the eye of Greuhms from his face. It is because of this decisive victory that elfkind adopted archery as their preferred method of war. Ashamed of his loss, Greuhms took his Strong Races and retreated from the mountains of Sh’Megell, swearing eternal vengeance against Corellon and his people.



Peace settled over Sh’Megell for a time, and so the elves began to rebuild their nascent society once more, wary of any outsiders moving among their ranks. This marked the Second Kingdom of the elves, and most of the elven ruins from modern-day Deepwood originate from this era of the Middle Second Age. Elves living in and around the forests of Daskjall were among the first of the humanoid races to discover a rudimentary form of shamanistic magic, pulled from the latent energy of the Brothers’ Slab within the great tree. The first coming of the Dragons is documented, though misinterpreted, on ancient stone edifice on the side of the Whispering Falls in southern Deepwood, depicting the great beasts literally flying out of the moon. Such it was on one fateful night that the eery moon first appeared in the sky, bringing with it great and powerful omens to the Elven shamans. It was not long after this that Dragons first appeared in the forests of Sh’Megell, almost as if this new celestial aperture had delivered them onto the face of The World. The arcane warping of the Moon also spawned another race of Deepwood natives; the Kenku, who would later come to be one of the most influential people of the region in later years.



The Dragons were initially feral, cultureless beasts; devastatingly intelligent, but ultimately still animals. The Elves, though wary of them, attempted to bring Dragons to heel, and succeeded in a few cases, giving birth to the first dragon riders. This was not to last, however, as dragonkind quickly absorbed the knowledge of their new environment and began to develop their own sense of identity. Humanoids quickly went from being cohabitants to prey, and the Elves of Sh’Megell suffered the worst losses as the beasts they had incorporated into their societies suddenly turned on them. Though metallic dragons would sometimes come to the aid of innocents against the slaughter of evil dragons, the so-called good dragons still ultimately saw humanoids as curiosities, little more than intelligent rats. Elven culture was quickly demolished once more, and the draconic reign of terror ruled supreme in Deepwood. It led to the complete obliteration of the Aman Lindar tribe, who had been the most interested in cultivating a relationship with Dragons. The few remaining elves who made up their people escaped to the mountains north of Sh’Megell, and still live in seclusion high on the bitter cold peaks, and are still the uncontested dragon riders they were at this time.



Amaduy’s attempt to also make a magically infused race of super-beings resulted in the Gnomes and Halflings, who had little choice but to immediately take refuge with the Elves to avoid being cut down before getting a chance to proliferate. Amaduy, for all his cunning of the natural world, was quite clueless to the ways of culture and society, in that regard. So, as he had done before, Amaduy selected a Halfling by the name of Ehlonna to lead her people as a divine figure, but she refused to lead them into battle out of concern for their safety. In the end, it wasn’t until the Cycle of Serpents began that the fortune of the people of Deepwood changed once again. With the departure of Corellon, Ehlonna, and even Lolth at the end of the Second Age, the Elves were left to fend for themselves, and gave in to the fear of being nearly wiped out for a third time.



The Anahrini struck out east, towards the coastline of Logasior, leaving scattered ruins along their path until they hit the ocean. They could just barely make out the land of Ereb Taure on the distant horizon, and so did everything they could to cross the Straight of Anar as quickly as possible. The Cunnien headed south instead, in an attempt to reunite with their Fey brethren in the deep woods of the Feydom. This left the Gnomes and Halflings, with little societal organization of their own, to try and make a living within the limits of the Deepwood Valley. It wasn’t long before the Strong Races noticed the absence of their hated Elven enemies, and rushed in to claim the land they had sought those many years ago.



The Kenku remained free from the clutches of the Blueskin invaders, developing a knack for stealth and avoidance that they continue to cling to in the modern age. The Halflings and Gnomes did not fare so well, however, and began to be forced into servitude of the giants and monstrous races en masse, before the two Small Races had even had a chance to organize themselves into separate tribes or cultures. Not all Small People were so quick to be taken, however. Many Halflings and Gnomes fought valiantly against the giants, who were surprisingly easier to defeat than Orcs or Ogres, thanks to the vast difference in size. The two races founded their emblematic traits in this era, with the Halflings learning to be brave in the face of almost anything, and the Gnomes developing cunning traps and devices to capitalize on the weakness of their enemies.



Ultimately, however, Sh’Megell was incorporated into the territories of the banded tribes of Keldren Øsst, and it was at this time that the valley’s true name was lost in favor for what the Blueskins called it; , Dyopskøgr, or Deepwood, in the common tongue. Despite the brutality of the Keldrish invaders, their domineering presence did force the Halflings of Deepwood to develop some of the very first agricultural techniques that lend to Deepwood’s self-sustaining economy in this day.  The Halflings found that by not only cutting terraces into the hilly landscape of Deepwood, but also choosing crops of powerful roots, cereals and produce, they could sustain an ever-growing hunger in the Giants and their ilk. The Kenku, who lived in relative hunger, came in secret to some of the early Halfling farming communities and traded knowledge of terrace farming for knowledge of sabotage and subtlety.



Daskjall, ever the font of divine natural energy, drew the attention of the few free Gnomish societies still remaining, who had learned to burrow into the earth itself to avoid capture by their cumbersome and clumsy foes. A few, sacred Gnomish elders who had lived with the Elves still remembered the fundamentals of calling upon the Old Magic, and began to explore the beginnings of Druidic culture. The Keldrish invaders saw little use for the tiny natives of Deepwood in open warfare, so when the War of Three Beasts broke out, they actually took great value in their small slaves and considered them an asset to be protected, particularly because they were responsible for most of the Keldrish Army’s food supply.



With less attention on them as a whole, this gave the Gnomes and Halflings a chance to organize a decisive blow against the Blueskins once the war was at its nadir. The rebellions started when a guerilla group comprised of Kenku, Gnomes and Halflings known as The Green League was able to amass a covert force in the northern city of Lúgren, the primary means of transporting food through the Bluewall mountains to the central Keldren Øsst provinces. Though it was heavily guarded, The Green League had a secret weapon on their side; a young Amethyst dragon by the name of Thelldrenalokan. With his strength behind their crippling strikes, The Green League was able to quickly overrun the giants living in the city and hold their ground.



From there, with the assistance of advance parties of Kenku saboteurs, The Green League was able to liberate ever larger amounts of slaves from the Blueskins, and sweep across the entirety of the Deepwood valley. With their forces largely in defensive position, Keldren Øsst was quickly forced to retreat entirely. Small explorative parties from Sinjai and Gurn’Gedat began to enter the eastern and western reaches of the valley, but when they saw how the Deepwood Druids were able to turn the very rivers they were entering on against them, they quickly determined that they didn’t have the manpower to overtake The Green League either.



There was one significant piece of damage the Frost Giants were able to inflict before they departed entirely, however. They lit the great World Tree of Daskjall ablaze, hoping to see the overgrown timbers crash to the ground completely. A massive effort was mounted to put out the intense blaze, with the Druids using every ounce of their knowledge at the time to see to the survival of what they viewed as a divine being. The most powerful Druids took up permanent residence within the boughs of Daskjall to administrate the effort, and over time, the entirety of Deepwood’s revival efforts were organized from here. These druids, constantly covered in the cinders of the burned limbs of Daskjall, came to be known as the Ashen Council. No one on the original council was a Kenku, however, so a very little assistance, or thanks for that matter, was given to the crow-people of the Greenwall Mountains, fomenting a deep resentment that would stew for centuries.



The villages of the Kenku, hidden in the southern mountains of the valley, and relatively unscathed by the Keldrish Invasion, were seen almost as an entirely separate nation. This did not, of course, mean that the Ashen Council would be willing to give them their own territorial rights. Given neither support nor freedom violated the very core beliefs of the Kenku, but they did not have the means to act out against the might of The Green League or Thelldrenalokan, who essentially became the new military of The Domain of Deepwood.



At the beginning of the Fourth Age, Thelldrenalokan had essentially retired from leading the Green League army in preference for learning this curious form of magic that the Little People wielded all on their own, sovereign from the Cycle of Serpents. By this time, he was well-loved as a national icon, so when the Ashen Council moved to elect him as the King of Deepwood, there was very little dissent (aside from the Kenku). Thelldrenalokan was reluctant to once against be put in charge of something so large, but saw the growing restlessness of draconic interference growing in Logasior as a whole, and decided it was in the best interest for him to make a firm claim to the entire nation of Deepwood.



Thelldrenalokan could see where events were leading to in the early days of the Dragon War, and ordered several emergency projects to build fortifications all around the borders of Deepwood, as well as a fortresses in almost every major city and town. The town of Gatewall was first erected during this time, instantly raising outcry from the Shining Frontier of Gurn’Gedat. Unfortunately for the Dwarven Kingdom, they were too busy dealing with draconic attacks across their lands to seriously oppose the power grab. Furthermore, seeing that Deepwood had indeed fortified its otherwise meager land holdings so stalwartly, Gurn’Gedat sheepishly requested that Deepwood open its homes and villages for refugees of Gurn’Gedat as the war progressed.



Thelldrenalokan was slow to accept, but eventually did permit asylum to the millions of dwarven citizens, in the hopes that this generosity would be payed back one day. Deepwooders at the time were leery of letting people into their homes that had only a century prior been trying to burn their homes down, but at the insistence of the all-powerful Druids, the populace relented. All but the Kenku, that is. The Crow-People refused to let anyone, Deepwood or Dwarven, into their hidden aeries, and it was at this time that a national distaste for the Kenku people was solidified. Overall, however, The Domain of Deepwood lost very little during the course of the Second Great War, so when the Gods finally intervened, the Druids were able to simply resume their national development where it had left off, as opposed to the Three Beasts, who had to start rebuilding from quite a low-point.



The new relatively peaceful Fifth Age and introduction of Arcane Magic did very little to change Deepwood in a larger sense, aside from a generally new interest in archaeology and other such scholarly pursuits. This was especially true of Elven sages who desired to travel from Ereb Taure back to the ancient homelands of the Elves to discover their roots. The Domain quietly developed and enriched its own existence, observing the tumultuous outside world with a great deal of smugness on the part of the Ashen Council.



One thing that did happen, however, was the Branching, where several Druidic sects splintered off from one another to form individual Braids. Many of these are concerned with individual biomes of Logasior, such as the Braid of Willow who revere rivers and ocean, or the Braid of Pine, who revere tundra and frozen wastes. Two of these Braids, however, would prove to be much more momentous than the rest. The Braids of Sycamore and Yew respectively represented the absolute worst and best of Druidic practice. The rest of the Braids chose to remain out of the inherent conflict of these New World and Old World way of viewing the natural world. Aside from the intermittent, small-scale natural disasters or eco-terror attacks, not much happened in Deepwood worth noting, for several centuries. Just the way Thelldrenalokan liked it.



That is, until roughly two-hundred years ago, when the Dragon Queen Amber came to power in rule over The Shining Frontier of Gurn’Gedat. For nearly a millenium, the Dwarf Lords and Ladies of Gurn’Gedat had refused to cede control of the dwarf fortresses of the Bluewall Mountains to The Domain of Deepwood, and had also given the Ashen Council more than a few headaches over who exactly controlled which half of Gatewall. Queen Amber, however, was quick to recognize how much Gurn’Gedat owed the Domain of Deepwood for harboring their refugees during the Second Great War, and turned over both full jurisdiction of Gatewall, as well as control of the Bluewall forts, to Thelldrenalokan. Relations between the Amythest Dragon and Queen Amber have been highly amicable ever-since.



Unfortunately, this did not mean the end of problems for Gatewall. Though the ownership of the town had changed, the leadership did not, which means that many dwarves and other Frontier citizens suddenly found themselves under the rule of the Druidic culture they had resisted for so long. Even two hundred years later, the still living governors of the eastern half still try to claim complete authority over the entire city. This has angered several members of the Ashen Council, and as such, with the blessing of Thelldrenalokan, they have covertly contacted the Kenku-She to try and undermine the dwarven influence over the eastern half once and for all.


Though the Kenku still hold a great deal of hatred for the Druidic regime of Deepwood, they could not ignore the utterly inappropriate amount of gold offered to their clans for assistance in this matter. Thelldrenalokan hopes that this cooperation will complete what he considers the cultural unification of Deepwood, both with East Gatewall secured from dwarven influence, and with diplomatic channels once again open with the long-estranged Kenku.