Rift Period¶
Contested
Named in the open question Dates of the Fifth Age periods (SM and AL): the Proturas timeline (S107) opens the Rifts period about 600 AL, the Fifth Age Timeline (S016) after the Ascendance of the Divine in 906.
"Proturas was founded in 626 AL as a secret refuge by exiled and outcast Kalari priests & Uk'Zerai from the Sancturi Empire and Northern Kingdoms." — Proturas Timeline (S107)
The Rift Period is the age of the Fifth Age in which the Rift, the torn-out Mithis Plane, became a place to be settled, crossed and fought over, and in which the hidden city of Proturas rose while the old kingdoms of the north fell. Proturas's own timeline counts it from about 600 AL, through an Elder Conjunction from 660 to 680 AL, to its present in 834 AL. In those two centuries Proturas fought the goblins of its tunnels, the Boreal Elves of its forests, the kingdom of Lorsythe, the Guhvils of the Rift and the Oesterkull of the plains, and then took in the refugees of every northern kingdom as the Araxians destroyed them one by one.
Also called: the Rifts, in the Proturas timeline's period headings (S107); the Age of the Divine, in the Post-Sancturi lore's heading for the Fifth Age (S112). The Rift as a plane is Cosmology's; its islands and settlements are Geography's, under The Rift.
The world after the Redemption¶
The Redemption tore the Mithis Plane out of the Material and left the Rift in its place, and the Fifth Age Timeline opens the Rift Period in the Divine Period's wake, after the Ascendance of the Divine in 906 (S016). The Rift is "an often unstable and shifting place," a bridge to the Abyss where Asmodeus still has much control (S112). Its islands come in chains and clusters, "inhabited by rift-beasts, elementals, demons or spirits," strewn with the ruins of Lorsythe, Dalmar, Droburg, Athagilion, Alghert, Brusau, Floren, Uthein and Miydol and even of far North-east Astia (S066). "Nothing living is able to grow in the rift and most living things there die unless they frequently return to the material plane for sustenance" (S078). Yet it could be crossed. Rift-gates link its islands to the Material; airships and riftships sail it; Proturas built a trade empire through it.
The powers of the world had changed. Most of the Younger Gods were dead or sleeping, the Elder God Seth'Arax fully awake, the Divine Authority fanatically orthodox, and the Araxians relentless (S112). The campaign notes of 2022 describe "the release of several of the Elder Gods" with "creatures from their planes crossing over, coupled with large scale invasions from the Araxian Empire" (S076). The Riftborn, "a sub-species of demon/human" who "can naturally move across the Rift easily," had been created by warlocks hundreds of years before to deal with the Rift's aberrations (S112).
The founding of Proturas¶
Proturan Outpost¶
Proturas "was founded in 626 AL as a secret refuge by exiled and outcast Kalari priests & Uk'Zerai from the Sancturi Empire and Northern Kingdoms" (S107). The Uk'Zerai and the Kalari came first, the Warlocks about twenty years later, and the three founding factions, the Children of the Light, the Marlezai and the Old City Administration, built the city in a volcanic grotto whose exact location "was a guarded secret" (S078, S107). This period of Settlement, from 626 to about 650 AL, was governed by a Mayor chosen by the Elders of the factions; roughly seven mayors served in nearly thirty years. The last attempted "to dissolve the council and elevate himself to king. After a brief civil conflict, the mayor and his forces were defeated and the position of Mayor was dissolved" (S107). What followed, the Proturan Federation, the Proturan Council under Harald and Eigurd Pallidine, and the Proturan Army and Brigades, is told on the Proturan Council and Proturan Military pages.
Goblin Wars¶
"Initial settlement was resisted by several goblin tribes and eventually expanded into a short, but wider conflict with the goblins living in the tunnels around Proturas. Most of these tribes were completely wiped out. The great goblin horde was decisively defeated by the early Proturan settlers in 644 AL in a great volcanic cavern about 15 miles north of current Proturas city" (S107). These are not the Goblin Wars of the Age of Magic, which share the name.
Frontier Wars¶
Needing food for a growing population, Proturas expanded into the southern forests, "clear-cutting the forest and establishing farms," from about 645 AL. The Boreal Elves who had lived there for centuries resisted strongly but "suffered from a lack of coordinated tribal response," and the Warlocks of Proturas "were especially effective at countering many of the elves' Fae-magic and territorial advantage." The wars lasted twenty years and "ended in a complete defeat for the Boreal Elves south of Proturas. Only a handful of small isolated tribes remain in a few enclaves within cursed territories which have continued to resist settlement" (S107).
The Elder Conjunction and the wars of isolation¶
The Proturas timeline marks an Elder Conjunction from about 660 to 680 AL, overlapping a period it calls Isolation (S107). The timeline names it and nothing more.
Gap
No source says what the Elder Conjunction was. The name suggests the Elder Gods, whose release and crossing-over the campaign notes describe (S076), but the connection is not made in any document.
Lorsythian War¶
From about 655 AL Proturas fought Lorsythe. "Scholars are divided on the exact cause of this conflict, but generally agree that there were two primary drivers: Religion+Fear and Wealth+Trade." Proturan metalwork, pottery and ale were undercutting Lorsythian ironworks, and Lorsythe "was becoming increasingly orthodox in its worship of The Divine. Kalari and Spellcasters were declared pagans and Uk'Zerai as heretics. All were hunted and many of these fled to Proturas." A Lorsythian raid on Proturas's southern trade outpost, two hundred miles south and reached by rift, triggered the war. Lorsythe destroyed Proturan outposts and Proturas counterattacked, but Lorsythe "was unable to mount an attack on Proturas itself" because it could not find it. The war "is considered a significant loss for Proturas": the city was cut off from the northern kingdoms, trade with them "all but ceased," and the Proturan military "was shown to be ill-organized and incapable of projecting power far from Proturas." With the Great Guhvil War it drove the founding of the Proturan Federated Army (S107).
Great Guhvil War¶
The long war against the Guhvils of the Rift, about 668 to 680 AL, "is credited with ending the Lorsythian conflict before further damage was done to Proturas" and brought a truce between the northern kingdoms, Proturas and the Boreal Elves. The first Riftborn were created in its early stages; it ended in stalemate when Proturas cut the Guhvil attack routes through the Fold; and the prosperous kingdom of Alghert fell to the Guhvils and "was left a sunken swamp." It has its own page: Guhvil Wars.
Barbarian Wars¶
A population boom drove Proturas onto the plains to its south-east, where the Oesterkull tribes lived, from about 700 AL. When "the Oesterkull realized the threat and banded together to drive the Proturans out," they "razed many Proturan towns, killed thousands of settlers and drove the Proturans back to the Vales." A grinding war followed "with limited success until the Second Araxian War caught up with the Oesterkull on their eastern flank. Caught between two foes, their western lines with the Proturans crumbled and the Great Khagan Council (Oesterkull chieftains) was forced into treaties ceding their land and effectively being annexed by the Proturans in exchange for their help against the Araxian threat." Together, "the Proturan army allied with the Oesterkull horde were able to push the Araxians back to the falls of Dalmarond" (S107). The Oesterkull entered Proturas around 710 AL.
The fall of the north¶
The Second Araxian War, fought in the 720s AL, destroyed the northern kingdoms one after another. Lorsythe held nearly twenty years and then fell in two; Droburg lasted two more; the Rift colonies of Lyrspire and Uthein were destroyed; and the war ended with Proturas's scorching of the south. Proturas absorbed the refugees, the Northern Refugees of about 725 to 735 AL, and with them the Divine Alliance, the Aegis of Lorsythe and the Wood Elves of Luiria as factions (S078, S107). By the time of the Proturan campaign, Proturas "is the last bastion of the Kalari races in the north-eastern part of Astia" (S077), and "the fall of every human kingdom on the north side of the Broken Sea" has left trade and communication with the rest of the world nearly dead (S076). The Fifth Age Timeline records the same catastrophe on its own count as "Fall of the Northern Kingdoms: Lorsythe, ?, ?" in the year 1210 (S016).
The refugees' own stories survive in the campaign records: a High Elf who spent a hundred and fifty years in a Lorsythian prison under sentence of death by fire, left to die when "during the fall of Lorsythe, the prison was abandoned," and who came north with Lorsythian refugees to wash dishes in the slums of Proturas (S074).
Expansion and the Riverdale War¶
Proturas entered a period of Expansion about 790 AL and reorganized itself into Counties under the Council of Eigurd Pallidine after the assassination of his father in 798 AL. Along the Ettermore river in the Riverdale region it shared "a stable, if uneasy, border" with the Boreal Elves.
Riverdale War¶
About 800 AL, "this war was sparked by an elven raid on a caravan carrying the Countess of Wrighthall's son. The entire caravan was slaughtered." The Countess obtained a writ "allowing the lawful settlement and annexation of all unforested areas of the eastern bank," six Proturan Brigades were allocated to enforce it, and "this amounted to a declaration of war on the elves." She built the fortified town of Etterdun, "the first permanent and safe crossing of the river"; the edges of the great forest of Etterwood were cleared and settled and the Boreal Elves pushed deeper in. Then, "for whatever reason, conflicts with the boreal elves seem to have largely evaporated and expansion further into the forest has for the moment halted due to other, more sinister obstacles" (S107). The timeline's table calls it the Riverdale Wars.
The Sack of Dunharr¶
The peace did not hold. In the years of the Proturan campaign the Proturan Council "has declared war on the Boreal Elves in the Ettermore Forest after the sack" of Dunharr, "the destruction of a town of 5,000 people ... with about 2,000 civilian casualties, the rest forced to flee" (S051). One of the three brigades guarding the city, the Silver Wolves, deployed to Etterdun with two new brigades of conscripts; the Warrens was annexed as the County of Claydun under a bond raised by every major faction, its able-bodied men and women conscripted, and the Raven Concord's hold at Ravenhold seized on a warrant for treason. The Boreal Elves, for their part, had called many warriors "south to fight the Proturans" from the tribes guarding the forbidden forest (S053). What the war did next is the Proturan Campaign's to tell.
Earlier accounts¶
The Fifth Age Timeline of 2021 (S016) places the whole Rift Period after the year 906, with the Guhvil Wars filling its early centuries and the fall of Lorsythe in 1210, where the Proturas timeline of 2023 (S107) has the Rifts begin about 600 AL and Lorsythe fall in the 720s. Whether the two count from the same year is not stated by either; see the open question and the Timeline. The campaign plans of 2022 (S076) call Proturas "the Grotto," located "near the old kingdom of Alghert, north of old Dalmarr," and name Guhvils, Elder Gods and the Araxian High-General Nicoleta as its enemies; the finished timeline of 2023 is followed where they differ.