Major Time Periods

WARNING
If you are a player in these campaigns, or plan on being one, and care about spoilers, DON'T READ THIS PAGE. It outlines the large scale story lines of the campaigns, and gives away secret identities, major plot ideas/reveals, and endings. If you are planning on GMing, don't care about spoilers (just don't meta at the table, yes?), or are just curious and reading through, continue forward. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDcaringaboutspoilersisdumbbbbbbbbb

Pre-Firestorm
- The Beginnings

- 500,000-100,000 years ago: No one knows exactly when permanent settlements appeared in western Calaset, people debate evidence showing the Elves creating their first cities from 500,000 to 100,000 years ago. The Elves themselves claim that they weren’t the first to settle the land, but refuse to hand over any evidence they have of this claim, or their historical records, leaving the truth murky. But the one thing everyone is sure of is that Elves have been here a very long time, long before anyone else currently here.

The Elven cities are protected within possibly one of the most powerful ongoing spells in all of the Material Plane, which enchants the entirety of The Endless Woods with a certain kind of intelligence. It watches everyone who enters it’s loosely defined borders, and makes sure that any who mean it harm are lost forever, wandering a pocket dimension of itself that has no entrance or exit. This has let the Elves live in isolationist peace and harmony as much or as little as they wish over the course of history, as they live their long lives perfecting their skills and crafts, tending to the woods and land.

- The Dwarven Ascension

- 20,000 years ago: Approximately 20,000 years ago the first Dwarven clans arrived on Calaset, coming from far south. They found a large natural cave complex in the Horns of Beshaba, and began building their society, trading up and down the coast with the Elves and the Dwarven clans they originated from, south across the sea. A grand citadel was created in the center of the cave complex, and a larger hidden civilian center deep within the mountains, made by tunneling into the hard rock surrounding the cave complex. As populations increased, tunneling continued, creating a network of loosely connected underground small towns and villages.

- Rise of the Goblins

- 7,500 years ago: The Dwarves and Elves comfortably ignored each other outside of minor trade contact for thousands of years, leading to an idyllic peace in the area until about 7,500 years ago. At this time, an alliance of goblin tribes arrived in the area and began their own construction inside of the Horns. Overzealous Goblin colonists and content Dwarven scouts led to disaster. A Goblin tunnel caused a massive cave in over a moderate sized dwarven village, burying all 3,457 Dwarves and rippled through the local Goblin tunnel network for a casualty count of 1,243. The Dwarves responded quickly in anger, demanding reparations and copies of Goblin work plans ahead of time, well the Goblins called them arrogant and foolish. Inevitably, war broke out, and when the dust finally settled fifty years later, an uneasy truce was created. Both sides harbor enmity to this day, and border skirmishes continue.

- The Dragon Wars

- 4,000 years ago: Western Calaset settled into slightly more tenuous peace for another few thousand years, until the arrival of a mating pair of blue dragons about 4,000 years ago. They claimed they had ancient territorial rights to the entire mountain range, which the Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins staunchly refused. The dragons then proceeded to fly off seemingly rebuffed, only to come back with an entire army of kobolds under their command. The Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins were all able to recognize a mutual threat when they saw one and quickly establish pacts of mutual defense and non-aggression until the Draconics could be driven from Calaset. The war would go on for around 250 years, with the eventual victory by the Elvish/Dwarven/Goblin alliance. However, they were never able to quite completely remove the kobolds who had settled in the area, creating a small but ever growing pocket of them to the north of the Dwarves in the Horns, which has persisted to the present.

- The First Undead War

- 2,500 years ago: Orcish war bands start arriving across the entirety of the plains, being driven west by an unknown force

- 2,480 - 2,200 years ago: The First Undead War begins, the living versus a powerful necromancer and her thralls. An alliance is formed between the Goblins, Orcs, Dwarves, and Elves to fight her off, who eventually succeed through a combination of martial and arcane might.

- The Refugees

- 800 years ago: Humans refugees from an empire far across the sea land on the coast.

- 725 years ago: Manage to gain a significant coastal foothold due to massive disorganization of kobolds and the goblin races at this period of time, lack of interest from the elves, a want for allies and trading partners from the dwarves, and orcish war bands being unable to effectively cross the Horns few passes in large, organized numbers.

- Manifest Destiny

- 650 years ago: Humans continue building closer to the Horns, settling the immediate foothills near them. They eventually push through the main pass in the area (Later known as Lich Pass) and start building away from the coast on the plains

- 600 years ago: This drive for land causes an ongoing conflict between human settlers and orcish war bands who play tug of war over territory.

- 580 years ago: Humans suddenly make significant gains into Orcish territory as several war bands suddenly pull up stakes and move east

Firestorm
The Second Undead War (Elves)/The Lich War (Surface Races)/The Long Darkness (Underground Races)

- 550 years pre-Old Wounds: The Lich Tower suddenly and cataclysmically appears in the middle of the main pass through the Horns, severing the only thing connecting the coastal human settlements and the settlements on the plains.

- 540 years pre-Old Wounds: The Second Undead War begins, as seemingly endless waves of resurrected dead rise from the depths of the Horns and spread in every direction in an all out assault on anything not under the Lich’s control.

- 540 - 90 years pre-Old Wounds (~450 years): The Second Undead War continues for many years with the living races unable to rally together this time, allowing the Lich to drag them all into a mire of attrition warfare.

A somewhat more typical grim dark DnD fantasy universe. Everyone is paranoid, xenophobic, and violent, creating lots of bandit/guard encounters, lots of caves full of undead and necromancers, and large battles happening regularly. Basically the most LoTR/classic dungeon crawling version of the setting.

Old Wounds
- New Beginnings

- 90 years ago: Graal and Myneve gather their army and lead what many assumed would be a suicidal attack on the Lich’s Tower. Graal’s ranger cadre gets them access to the Lich’s phylactery. Then, having destroyed it, Myneve and a cabal of fellow wizards cast a spell of colossal power that reverses the Lich’s tower sudden appearance, causing a giant rift to appear beneath it and dropping it far beneath the earth, then leveling the ground again.

- 90 years ago: Myneve and her cabal complete one last immensely powerful spell to create the now famous Graal-Myneve walls. Following this, they put out a call for any not welcome in their home kingdoms to come to their newly created trade post now in control of the trading pass.

- 90 - 70 years ago: Anyone looking to start a new life after hundreds of years of devastation and increasingly xenophobic, paranoid governments flocks to Graal-Myneve. This allows the sudden creation of an independent kingdom that none of the Human, Orc, Dwarf, Elf, or Goblin factions want uprooted as it proves to be an incredibly stabilizing influence on local trade routes while also managing to be nearly entirely impartial in terms of who they do business with.

The THIRD reappearence of Our Lady of Being a Lich and the blue dragons, invasion of the coast by the kobolds led by the Adherents of Selvans, and their secretly a blue dragon leader. The major themes of this version of the setting are utilitarian nonsense (ends justify the means always forever if you can come up with a convoluted enough justification), the lasting legacy of large scale warfare (society/cultural level scars and traumas, as well as personal ones even decades after a conflict), the complicated politics of "What do you do with a group of people who have been living somewhere for generations when another group of people shows up and claims it as their ancestral place, fun twist: particularly in a fantasy universe where various races can live centuries or even thousands of years."

Major Storylines for PCs to get involved in:
 * Invasion of Tai'an by the Draconic peoples, can support one or the other side, this forms the basis of the first part of the campaign. Alarans are obviously upset by being invaded, the Draconic peoples are retaking their former homeland from their perspective. Whole thing is a fucking mess, neither side should come off as "correct".
 * Clues point to Our Lady of Being a Lich reappearing, over time her plot is out lined: turns out the Lake of Selvans in the north is quite literal, there is a point where the barrier between the higher planes of the gods and the Material Plane is thin. Our Lady of Being a Lich plans to try and summon a major aspect of Selvans and murder it, in order to weaken or out right destroy them.
 * Turns out this has been her plan since The First Undead War, and she justifies the endless casualties by saying that she is going to defeat death itself and save untold trillions into the future, thus justifying any of her actions.
 * From a GM/world level picture, she is incorrect on this point, trying to kill Selvans would just unbalance the way the world works and fuck a lot of things up. No one on the Material Plane really knows this however, some people suspect it, but it can't be proved if Our Lady of Being a Lich is correct or not.
 * See Eliezer Yudkowsky's weird "I am going to use magical technology to make everyone magically immortal"/"One person getting tortured for 500 years is better then a 'significantly large' number of people getting sand in their eyes" bullshit for additional inspiration for this character.

Eclipse Phase
Somewhere between 80-100 years post Old Wounds.

Assumptions
 * Heroes of Old Wounds failed/died/didn't exist
 * Lich Queen returned, but was ultimately defeated again, but her death blew up a penninsula
 * The Dragons and Kobolds were forced south, have a kingdom settled there now
 * The Alaran Empire was overthrown in a revolt supported by the Kingdom of Vladislak, leading to the two human kingdoms becoming one again
 * Graal-Myneve has become more closed off and suspicious due to the fact they now have a united Human kingdom on both sides of them, pinching them on both sides.