Primordial War¶
Contested
Named in the open question Material Plane and the Mithis barrier: the 2026 cosmology revision (S001) says the Einar built the Material Plane after this war, where the 2022 cosmology (S013) says the Material Plane already existed and the war was fought for dominion over it.
"The Elementals resisted and began the Primordial War." — History of Terrun (S386)
The Primordial War was the first war of Terrun: the Einar, newly arrived, against the Elementals who had ruled the Elemental Chaos alone. The Einar won. The Elementals were subjugated and confined to their own plane, the greatest of them, the Primordials, were imprisoned, and at the war's end the Einar forged the Throne of Law to govern everything they had taken. The war closes the Primordial Age and opens the Age of Titans.
Also called: the Primordial Wars, the War of the Primordials (S208), the primordial wars (S529).
The war¶
When the Einar arrived, the elements were "in a state of constant conflict," and the Einar "claimed dominion and sought to bring order to the Inner Planes" (S386). The older cosmology describes the elementals' side of it: the Einar began colonizing, and "it took the elementals some time to realize the source of the drain on their energies and freedom" (S013). Then the Elementals resisted, and the war began.
The Einar did not fight alone. The Eldritch, ascended Primordials of immense psychic power, allied with them (S001). Against them stood the elementals and the Dwarrow, the "super-intelligent, technologically advanced earth elementals" who "sided with the elementals against the invaders (the Einar and their subjects)" (S529). The sources preserve no battles and no names from the fighting itself, only its outcome: "the Elementals were defeated and subjugated" (S386). After the defeat the Dwarrow "moved deep underground to avoid the influence of the new gods" (S529), where the younger races would find them ages later.
The settlement¶
The victory remade the planes. The Elementals were "imprisoned on their plane" (S001) or "exiled to their home planes" (S013). The Primordial Elementals, "the most powerful elementals that were unable to be controlled," were locked away: on the Astral Plane by the newest reading (S001), and in the foundations of Terrun itself by the older lore of the Fae, which says most Primordials "are bound/imprisoned and make up the foundations of Terrun," with "a handful kept in a sort of minimum security prison on the Elemental planes" (S279). Fae magic, which had ruled the Chaos, "became bound under Astral Law at the end of the Primordial Wars, when the Chaos was defeated and order was brought to the Material Plane" (S208, S279).
Then the Einar built. They forged the Astral, Shadow and Ethereal Planes "so that they could control and make use of the intelligences that would drift in from the Void" (S386). The Fae Realms were created after the war as the dominion of the Titans, who stood "in between the elements and the material and orchestrated the natural order" (S001, S013). The Throne of Law "was forged at the end of the Primordial conflict to govern both Inner and Heavenly Planes," and the High God Tamariel "sat on the throne and was the ultimate ruler of all things" (S386). The Nature of Magic puts it harder: the Throne was formed "to bind the elementals in eternal servitude and into its jailkeepers, the Titans," each Titan bound to a host of elemental subjects imprisoned on the Elemental Planes (S208).
The Throne cost the Einar an ally. It "redirected the energies of Terrun into a new Astral Realm under the control of the Einar," and the Eldritch "resisted this transition as the betrayal and direct theft of their greatest source of power that it was" (S001). That resentment runs through the Eldritch Succession Wars of later ages.
The Material Plane¶
The newest cosmology (S001) says the Material Plane itself was a product of the war: "The original Material Plane (also known as the Mortal Realm) was constructed by the Einar after their victory in the Primordial War," and when the Elementals were imprisoned "the Fae and Material planes were built on top." The earlier cosmology (S013) says the opposite, that "the Material and Elemental Planes pre-date the arrival of the Einar" and that the war was fought "over the dominion of the Material Plane," after which the sovereign matter of the Material was "extracted and embedded within the Astral Plane and Throne of Law." The newer reading stands in the body of this page; the conflict is an open question because S001 is a deliberate revision of S013 and the change reaches into every page about the planes.
The four freed Primordials¶
The imprisonment did not hold forever. When Kalar and his faction rose against the Throne in the Age of Demons, they "made a pact with four imprisoned Primordial Elementals and managed to break into the Astral Plane and destroy the Throne of Law" (S386). The four who assisted the young gods "were freed as part of the bargain" and, as the Elemental Aspects, "ruled the Elemental Planes exclusively" until the Age of the Dark Sun released many other Primordials (S001, S013). Conflicts are now common across the Elemental Planes as a new balance of power is found, and it is rumored that a portion at the center has reverted "into a raw maelstrom of energies: a new Elemental Chaos" (S001).
Second Primordial War¶
A single campaign outline (S010) speaks of a Second Primordial War. Calcadyia's Crystal Lance, "a titan-forged adamantine spear capable of mortally wounding powerful creatures, especially ethereal elemental ones," was "forged by Khardas for the Einar warrior Calcadyia during the Second Primordial War." The same outline places the prison of the Primordial Ambusthene, "Sovereign of Searing Refulgence," in the Illuri Fold of the Rift, surrounded by the Tethers of Ambusthene, a complex of Orandos, and its library holds a book titled Of Fire and Earth: The Late Primordial Wars. Nothing else about this second war survives.
Gap
No source says when the Second Primordial War was fought, who fought it, or how it differed from the first. Since Khardas and Orandos are younger gods, it postdates the fall of the Throne of Law; nothing narrower can be said.
Earlier accounts¶
The 2014 Compendium (S372, S384) does not know this war. Its history begins with the Age of Titans and the creation of the Titan races, and its Age of Faerie has the Faeries, not the Elementals, rule "the Elemental and Material Planes" before transitioning to the Elemental plane. The lore of the Dwarrow (S529) calls the victors "the new gods (Elder Gods)" where the newest history calls the Einar of this age the Elder Gods and Kalar's rebels the Younger Gods (S386); who counts as elder is Religion's question.