+Adam Muszkiewicz and I have been batting around ideas for a long time about the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad setting. We agree on most everything. Even when we disagree, it's more like he has a story about something and I have a story that's different or even contradictory. Our solution is to say, "Well, probably there's truth in both of these, or maybe they're both bullshit" and we just roll with both versions. It works pretty well, because it grants us a lot of freedom in how we approach our individual installments to the Metal Gods campaign. Even more fun, each of us tends to use what we write to introduce new... complications, shall we say... to the setting. Even the bullshit can have permanent effects, in-world. It's pretty neat. It also give me more impetus to write more stuff, as it can become a real part of the story that our group is busy telling through the adventures we have together.
The longer adventure I've been working on deals with reprecussions of the history of elves on Planet Ore (where Ur-Hadad is found). In this history, the elves had enslaved the humanoid races for their own purposes. They were cruel masters, but they reaped a bitter harvest in the end. Here's a bit of that history. It mixes the elves, their political battles, Lovecraftian Old Ones, the reptiloid races, and the peculiar iron allergy affecting the elves metabolism.
I've been meaning to post it for a while, but have delayed doing so for a variety of reasons, some to do with the subject matter, discussed in this post. At this point, I'm not sure how much I want to play elven characters when I'm not GM. I'm weirdly affected by my ideas about them, to the extent that I asked last night if I could play a different character in one of Adam's other campaigns, instead of "a stupid elf." Very strange.
Anyway, here it is:
The Elves of Planet
Ore
What we now refer to as "Elfland" isn't just on
another plane. It's on another planet, orbiting a binary star, and is
impossible to reach from Ore without arcane means. However, the elves of the
Old Kingdom were masters of arcane magics and amazing technologies capable of
bridging the distance between the realities.
The race known as Elvenkind first came from out of space and
time, bent on the conquest of Ore. Man only recently threw off their Dominion,
ironically with the help of other elves, sent by the King of Elfland. The conquering
elves of Ore were the Dominionists. They were part of a faction of elves within
the Old Kingdom who were in favor of expanding the dominion of the elves into a
universe-spanning empire.
This Dominionist contingent was also pushing back against
the elven caste system. They came from all walks of Elven life, and believed
that Elven culture had stagnated to nothing but tradition and formality, and that
even those things were hollow and symptoms of a culture in decline. They saw
the ruling caste as infected with malaise and ennui, and unable to see beyond
the narrow confines of their particular obsession with cataloging and
reproducing, with narcissitic abandon, the relics and practices of the past. The
Dominionists wanted remake the world in a new image, in which a new way will
emerge, and one's position in life will be according to merit and not birth.
They believed that their Elven Dominion would be the greatest empire in the
history of everything, everywhere.
The elves of the Old Kingdom, and especially the Dominionists,
were students of other, less savory technomancies, and these allowed them to
dabble in manipulating the very stuff of life itself, breeding sentient
starships and a variety of servitors and subject-races. The mainstream elven
civilization now regards these as abominations, as they are machineries
animated by magic and by the souls of the dead, who are thereby enslaved.
The elves arrived on Ore in two waves. The first consisted
of Dominionists who did so in an ark ship (others of which went to other,
unknown locations). They arrived hundreds of millennia before their
planet-bound brethren of the Old Kingdom would.
Upon their arrival, the Dominionist elves found themselves
locked in a savage war with the Old Ones of Ore, a race of god-like creatures
and their various minions and subject races (including the serpentkin and
lizardfolk, and various other reptiloids). The Dominionists also had a hand in
creating humans and other humanoid races to be their slaves, and to build their
armies. After many milennia of war, pretty much their Vietnam, the
Dominionists sent the Old Ones packing, and the Old Ones fled Ore to find
refuge among the stars or into the depths of its hollow core. The Dominionists,
now trapped on Ore, set about securing the Dominion, and their bloody rule
would last for many more milennia, up until the rebellion of Mankind.
While the first-wave Dominionists battled with the Old Ones,
civil war broke out in the Old Kingdom of the elves, between the Perfectionist
and the Dominionist factions. The war went on for milennia, resulting in the
fall of the ancient elven empire, and effectively leaving the Dominionist Elves
of Ore to their own devices. Eventually, the Perfectionists won the war, but it
would be many thousands of years before they recovered from the conflict. By
this time, they had developed new means of transport by way of arcane gateways,
but had made it the highest of treasons to dabble in the technomagical
manipulation of life essences, punishable by death of the body and soul.
The Perfectionist doctrine was another casualty of the elven
civil war. The Elves of the New Kingdom, as they were now called, for the most
part did away with the traditional caste system, but another hierarchy quickly
replaced it, one based on power. Those who were the greatest warriors and the
most powerful mages now ruled as a confederation of warlords and their
retainers, all vying for position. Secret societies also emerged in the New
Kingdom, some of which were offshoots of the Dominionists. Most of those secret
societies had little real power. However, an extremely powerful group emerged
very early in the history of the New Kingdom, a secret society of the most
powerful magic users. This group had membership in other secret societies and
in mainstream society, using their involvement in civic affairs to mask their
actual activities. In truth, this group, the Coulara Mak'Shi (Winds of Eternal
Change) controls the direction of the New Kingdom's activities and politics.
However, they seem (so far) to have little interest in the poisonous planet of
Ore.
The elves of the New Kingdom arrived on Ore to find that
several of the Dominionists' servitor races (Dwarves, Men, and Halflings) had
banded together to fight both their Dominionist masters and the remnants of the
Old Ones' most loyal minions, the lizardfolk and serpentkin. The newly arrived
elves of the Old Kingdom joined the fight, but not as part of any stated
alliance with the humanoid races. They had a grudge to settle, but were not
particularly pleased at the rise of these primitive races, which they
considered abominations of the highest order. Subsequent generations of
Ore-born elves have become more tolerant as they've been assimilated into the
dominant human culture. Still, there's a healthy streak of elven supremacism
among even the "nice" elves.
The presence of iron, unknown on the elven homeworld, was
the downfall of the Dominionist elves of Ore. Iron changed and corrupted elven
magic, driving elves with particularly weak constitutions mad from exposure, causing
low birth rates and terminal birth defects, and occasionally producing outright
mutations among the children born to elves. These iron-mutated children and
their descendents are a long-held secret of the elves, and their ancient shame.
Some of these creatures escaped into the wilds of Ore, and are hunted relentlessly
by elvenkind, but they are a more prolific race, and not as prone to iron
infection. They have thrived in their new environment. Some call them Orcs.
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