Ortho: The Beginnings

Now that I think about it, you are right. The younger ones WOULD probably be the easiest ones to sway. Growing up only knowing war, the peace that is brought by the Harmonium is probably something they only heard of in old wive's tales, and now.... it is HERE. Goddammit, the old fools were right! There is such a thing a "peace".
::said in an insidious manner:: Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!

We'll use yours, then! Those are good, and far more interesting than my vague ones. I particularly like your double agent.

I miscalculated the timeline above, somehow. I fixed it.

The formula should be:

Reign of Hashkar = Years of the Harmonium -373
If Reign of Hashkar < 1 then Reign of Hashkar = Reign of Hashkar -1

- How did the alliance with the beholders come about?
- Is Ortho still divided into Church, State, and Harmonium, or does the Harmonium now control everything? If things changed, how did that come about? (increasing influence of the planar part of the faction is my guess)
- What sorts of things have leaked in from the planes that the Harmonium didn't want to see leaked?
- More on the early history of the colonial period.

To answer that question we have to first answer this question:

-What stage or stages of colonization were they in right before, like a year or so before, the Harmonium got there?

I think with the wars and everything that they would be in a sort of Roman Empire-esq setting. With one colony trying to completely take over another colony, and change their gods, their politics, and their culture to fit within the winning colony's culture. (Like Rome did to all of it's conquered nations). Only because this will make the biggest "Rome" ever (the Harmonium) able to more quickly colonize and take over most of the planet.

Another question:

-Where did they first start to colonize?
A liittle of the Harmonium here and there? Or one big force in one place at a time?

And lastly:

-How many of the Harmonium came to do the real dirty work of colonizing all of Ortho?

Once we have these questions answered it will make the early colonization period easier to define.

-Ophelia

I think we need to define both, but have seperate names for them. Maybe colonization for the period of expansion on the planes, and Manifest Destiny (or something like that), or The Breath of Fresh Air, for the colonization of Ortho.

What I was talking about was the colonization of Ortho, though.

Sorry, it has been a while since I have re-read this whole thread. I see you already have the colonization down. Don't mind me. :oops:

::whistles and walks away::

Well I've been thinking and let me throw out some names

The Chaos Ages - The time before the Harmonium. This is the time that original band worked in.

The Foundation and First unification - The Foundation is today the nickname for the capitol city of Ortho the citystate that was first run by those guiding principals of law and justice. The First Unification is the set of ajacent city-states and kingdoms that joined with the Foundation city to defend against some invading force, perhaps dragons or elves.

The First Trial of Order - the term used to refer to the invasion that caused the First Unification. The trial lasts for over a hundred years and sees the end of most of the original party.

The Second Unification - This is the time after the First Trial of Order where the conquered lands of the enemy were colonized and civilized by the harmonium. This is also when the first (and officially only) attrocities occured with the slaughtering of the civilian elven population by over-zealous and corrupted govenors and free lance development companies. This was a period of about fifty years which started idealistically and then faded into abuse and uncheck corruption.

The Second Trial of Order - Unlike the first trial wich was a war, the second was a series of actual trials and investigations over the abuses of the defeated elven kingdoms. This is where stricter laws were put into place to prevent abuses and institute policies to quell uprisings. Also involved all through the procedings where several protests and upriseings. This period is often refered to by law scholars for precedence in trial procedings and many many laws date back to the Second Trial.

Just some ideas for the start.

How does the level of the spell work into the equation? Perhaps casters have to apply for licsences to cast spells of higher spheres.

The Riven Elves of Bluphoril have a myth of the creation of their world of origin, which is called Ortho.

It’s been centuries since the Riven dwelled in their homelands, before they were forced to flee through the moon gates to the elemental plane of Air before the Harmonium pogroms, but the oldest of them remember it well. They think back in their daily reverie and remember the pattern of stars, the four wanderers, the twin suns, the feel of trees and soil instead of bare rock and empty air. They think of their tall towers and hidden groves, of their mad delights and cruel fantasies before the coming of Man. They think, most of all, of the lost moon. At times they are moved to tell their story to the younger generation, so that it will not be entirely lost.

This is the story they tell.

In the beginning there was only Faerie, wild and green, chaos and dream, reverie and twilight, all of it created by Rhiannon, the Mother. In the sky was a shining silver moon, the eye of the Goddess and the eternal sign of Her presence.

Then came the Lords of Law.

Sometimes they blame themselves, speaking of forbidden research into other planes. Occasionally they’ll blame the orcs, or the dwarves, or the beholders. Very rarely they’ll blame the curious pixies, always getting into trouble. Sometimes they blame the coming of the second sun. Usually they blame the humans.

They don’t know how humans first came to Faerie. Perhaps it was a mistake on Rhiannon’s part, or perhaps the Lords of Law sent them in as an invasion force. At first they were nothing of particular note: a little stupider and clumsier than elves, more short-lived of course, but primitives with only the most basic understanding of tools.

Then something happened. One day the humans were living in caves and bathing in mud, the next they were using the mud to make entire cities out of mud brick, writing on mud tablets, using “mud technology” to do things that had never occurred to the elves or any other race. And they started to expand.

The elves only took note when then the humans began turning their forests into mud in which to plant their filthy crops rather than being content to harvesting what the Mother chose to provide. This was obviously taking the human love of mud much too far. The elves fought back, fully intending to drive the humans back into their muddy caves where they belonged.

When it seemed like the last human was lying down in the mud in one position or another, aided by an elven spear point, a lone elven soldier heard a strange, unearthly series of syllables being read from a mud tablet he had forgotten to confiscate. Words of power, apparently, for a rift forced itself into the space of Faerie.

The moon shattered.

Shards of lunar rock fell onto the face of the world, devastating elven civilization and leaving vast areas of treeless waste. The voice of the Goddess fell silent. Eight androgynous, identical beings, taller than trees, appeared before the elves and their human prisoners. “We are the Lords of Law,” they said simultaneously. “We have been called. We have come. We accept your offering of this world.”

Faerie was no more. There was only Ortho.

The following centuries were troubled times. Humans, dwarves, beholders, and orcs, aided by the Lords of Law, spread throughout the world, building mighty cities in the treeless wastes (which the Mother’s lunar touch made more fertile than ever before). Using shards of lunar rock to focus their power, a few elven nations managed to open moon-paths into other planes, intending to found new Faeries on other worlds. This is remembered as the First Flight, and the Riven of Bluphoril do not know where their lost siblings went.

Other elves were determined to fight back. Working together for centuries, they learned of counterparts to the Lords of Law: the Lords of Chaos. Together they summoned them, and the cosmic war over the world of Ortho began.

Much later, it seemed that the elves and the Lords of Chaos they had sworn themselves to might be winning when a small group of mostly humans calling themselves the Knights of Harmony managed, almost single-handedly, to conquer the world.

With the humans now enraged, the Second Flight began. Some elves are thought to have found the moonbeam paths to where their lost siblings had vanished, or perhaps they just died. The Riven only know what happened to themselves, and of the city they founded in in the clouds, swearing off Chaos and Law both in the hope of finally being left alone.

Excellent Rip. I like both stories alot. I like how they vary so much from each other, and how the second one leaves out so much of the first one, as it should. Ans i love the last line of the second story:

Excellent.

Cool Clueless! I like how they are all sepia toned, kind of earthy. And how they all look a little bit like kanji. Again, very cool.

On the Schism, the Second Trial of Order

It wasn't long after the Intervention of Law and Chaos that the warring factions of the Blood War noticed that Ortho had become balanced on a razor's edge, and seperately came to the world in an attempt to push it to their respective sides.

The actions of the lord Alzirius in the land of Iathra and of the folly of the theurgists of Karesh in the land of Thaera have been documented elsewhere, but the schemes of the Dark Eight and the Lords of the Nine remain to be revealed.

In this case, it was Furcas who intervened first. Initially his erinyes went to the beholders of Keln'in, but the eye tyrants proved resistant to the ladies' ministries. They found greater purchase among the decadent merchant-princes of Han and in appealing to the fears of bodily corruption among the dwarves of Xaric, but their greatest success was found in what they thought their least likely marks: the proudly independent orcs of Motmurg.

Since the Intervention the old gods had fallen into disfavor, and the orcs had not prayed to Gruumsh or Ilneval in many generations. Still, they had not responded to either the flirtations of Chaos or the entreaties of Law, seeing both as alien to their ancient culture and traditions. Thus it was that the erinyes were surprised when, in the guise of winged orcish maidens promising victory against rival tribes, the orcs dropped down to their knees and offered them worship.

The records of the Ministry of Mortal Relations are a dark and tangled place filled with many false turns and buried histories, so it took time for Furcas to discover the cause. It turned out that the Archduke Dispater had already planted a seed in the minds of the orcs of Ortho centuries before, the beginnings of a myth that only now bore fruit. And although Furcas attempted to hide this fruit from his former master, it was inevitable that Dispater would hear of it and demand his portion of the harvest. Yet Dispater could not become involved in Ortho's dealings without his rival Baalzebul becoming involved as well, and so it was that all the Lords of the Nine insisted on their place in Furcas' modest attempt at creating low-level minions among the orcs of an obscure material world.

Yet the bureaucratic apparatus of the Ministry of Mortal Relations turned out to be very efficient and connecting the disparate communities on Ortho that they had turned to their Cause, and so it was that the majority of the continent, human, dwarf, and orc alike, were eventually revering the Lords of the Nine alongside the Lords of Law.

The Lords of the Abyss stepped up their own enticements in other lands, as the baatezu expected, but what caught them off guard was a rare attempt by the archons to counter them by starting cults of their own. While the cults of the Seven Martyrs coexisted with the cult of the Nine uneasily in Three-Rivers, and Xaric, it was virtually unopposed in lands like Verinshen, Voll, and the northern coast of Iironda. Meanwhile, it made little headway among the traditionalist orcs of Motmurg, among the godless sorcerers of Heka, or in the scheming city of Han.

In the time of the paladin-king Romhel and his Knights of Harmony, the cult of the Nine was well established in Motmurg, Three-Rivers, and beyond. For this reason, Romhel was extremely reluctant to ally with them; however, the need for aid against the Flame of the North was dire, and his trusted advisor Jhary eventually convinced him that in times of war fine principles must sometimes be set aside. Conspiracy theorists have pointed out (not near the ears of Harmonium officers) that Romhel was seldom seen in public after that point, and have suggested that his death might have been much earlier than officially claimed. Wild-eyed speculation like that is hardly necessary to explain Romhel's actions, however, given the urgency of the nation's need. In a ceremony that referenced each of the Lords of Law but carefully avoided talk of the powers of the Heavens and Hells, the pact between Romhel and the Hierarchs of Motmurk was signed. This alliance would last for 200 years.

It was a hundred years into the First Harmony, during the reign of Composer Julhien the Reformer, that cracks in the relationship between the devotees of the Nine and those of the Seven began to widen.

Up to then the priests of both the Seven and the Nine had coexisted relatively peacefully, a representative of each standing on each side of the Composer acting as advocate for mercy or prosecutor of the weak. Julhien was a man, however, of Ideas, and he was content to let few things simply stand without examination.

The government of Ortho in Julhien's time consisted primarily of the Composer, who was head of the Harmonium; the Pontificator of the Lords of Law, the Pontificator of the Seven, and the Pontificator of the Nine, who together represented the official religions of Ortho; and representatives of the four quarters of the world. Together, these eight people made up the Octave Council. Each of the four Quarters ruled over a measure of Ortho's 17 provinces, the Composer controlled the military, and the Pontificators controlled the churches.

Julhien changed this balance, expanding the power of the Composer far beyond what it had ever been before. To Julhien, who saw everything in military terms, everything could be seen as in some way under military jurisdiction. Schools, hospitals, roads, ports, temples: everything had some military value and posed some military threat. He began slowly at first, posting military "advisors" in schools and churches, but within five years he had taken most public organizations over in all but name. Then he turned to the process of reforming them.

He was not alone in his ambitions, of course. Movers and shakers within all the departments of the Council quickly realized Julhien's power and sought to take advantage of it. Engineers came to him with plans for better roads, scholars came with plans for better schools, doctors came with plans for better hospitals, sailors came with plans for better ships and ports, and clerics came with plans for better churches. And, naturally, most of these plans contradicted one another.

Julhien soon tired of the clamorous supplicants. Citing the words of an ancient Iirondian philosopher, he declared that Harmony could never be acheived amidst contradiction. The strategy that had served Ortho for the past 100 years, since the reign of Composer Angelus the Even-Handed - the idea that truth could be found by reconciling conflicting views - he called poison and the seed of civil war. "As there can only be one truth," he said, "Only one mouth can speak it. Only one hand can execute it. Oneness comes only from oneness; multiplicity only leads to division."

To make his point, Julhien unilaterally banished the Pontificator of the Nine from the Octave Council. For the Council, who had watched with growing unease as the Composer slowly usurped all of their authority, this was the last straw. Quite a lot of power can be claimed in the name of security, but dismissing one of his own was something a Councilor may not do, even one of Julhien's charisma. If the Pontificator of the Nine could lose his station, any of them could. Of the Councilors, only the Pontificator of the Seven remained at Julhien's side.

In the name of the gods of Law, the remaining two Pontificators urged soldiers to defect from Julhien's army, and began to form an army of their own made up of clerics and layfolk of the various churches. This had a very real effect on military morale, as the Pontificator of the Seven lacked the confidence of some two thirds of the troops. Yet the discipline of Julhien's military was such that most of the soldiers remained even with the threat of a loss of clerical magic and a place in the afterlife.

Undeterred, the Four Quarters stirred up revolts in the more rebellious provinces, promising better conditions than they had felt under Julhien's rule. Then the civil war began in earnest.

Iathra, Voll, Kelmen, and Heka stood unapologetically with Julhien and the Seven. Thaera, the Isles, Motmurk, Ruko, and Hazhkan joined the other Councilors; regardless of how they felt about the Council or the Lords of the Nine, they were eager to rebel against the military, who represented the Harmonium authority to them as nothing else did.

Other provinces, such as Iironda, were torn in half. The Province of the Isles was torn between the mainland region of Verinshen and the chaotic isles themselves, while Three-Rivers and the whole South of Motmurk were similarly torn, brother against brother and sister against sister.

For the first time in a hundred years Ortho was plunged into war. For five long years Julhien's hardheaded troops fought pirates, clerics, and guerillas in places believed long since pacified.

More than four years into the fighting, a group of sorcerers from Heka met with prominent leaders and merchants of Northern Thaera, Han, and elsewhere in the beholder capital of Coldash. The beholders had mostly stayed out of the war; though one of the Four Quarters was a beholder, the war was still seen in the province of Keln'in as a human, orcish, and dwarven affair. But the conflict had gone on long enough, the beholders felt, and many others agreed. Together they drafted a proposal and delivered it to the leaders of both warring parties. With soldiers of both camps beginning to rebel due to dwindling supplies and general weariness, the generals agreed to discuss terms. After months of negotiations, the treaty was signed.

The terms were these: henceforth, planar lords were not to be worshipped by citizens of the Harmonium (who included, under the treaty, all of Ortho), except as intermediaries for the "true gods." Both the Pontificator of the Seven and the Pontificator of the Nine were to lose their positions in the Octave Council; these Pontificators, in exchange, would be given new positions as the newly created Councilor of Education and Councilor of Public Health and Safety. In this way the civilian power of the Composer would be checked, but religion on Ortho would be undivided, resting under the authority of a single High Pontificator.

For the rebel provinces, this compromise solved none of the problems they had with the Harmonium military, but nobody asked them what they thought and they were too tired of fighting to continue warring against the now united military, religious, and provincial leaders.

Julhien continued to rule as Composer for another twenty years, and though his authority was more limited than before he made the most of it. While he continued to push for reforms at every level, the foremost acheivement of his later years was institutionalizing the philosophy of oneness, which would become the central ethic of the Harmonium in the centuries to come.