History

The Great Church describes the beginning of history thus:

• In the beginning, the world was a primal chaos of pure elements, ruled by nameless, inhuman gods: the Chaos.
• From the infinite possibilities of that chaos were born the True Gods, who defeated the Chaos and made a new world of order from it.
• Into this new world, they bore children: the Great Dragons. They were the perfect children of the new world.
• One among them, The Maker, did not agree with the perfection of the Dragons. He created a new race in his image: the Titans.
• The Titans fought the Dragons for an age, and, at the urging of their gods, finally made peace with this understanding: to the Titans went the Earth and Fire, and to the Dragons was the Sky and the Sea.
• Some of the Dragons, too proud to accept only half the world, decided to take Earth and Fire for themselves. They burrowed into the Earth, toward the Fire at its core, in an attempt to conquer it. But it conquered them. They became the Wyrms--evil, fire-breathing dragons who know only deceit and strife.
• The war brought by some Dragons ignited a new conflict, deadlier than the last. Before it could consume the world, The Mother brought forth a new race to protect and preserve the world: the Eladrin.
• As the two elder races fought and destroyed one another, the Eladrin preserved their fraction of the world, what they call Tellandor, the Last Land.
• Not to be outdone, the Maker forged a new race, the Dvar, or Dwarves, an improvement on the Titans. They kept alive his dream of creating like creatures, those who build and reshape the world.
• The Winged Dragons saw the wisdom of the Mother, and learned the ways she taught to her youngest children, the Eladrin. Their might diminished, but they learned words, and magic, and they took names and became a people.
• The Titans, diminished by their wars, became lesser creatures, the Giants, and conquered the skies yielded them by the Dragons.
• The three races of Tellandor, Elf, Dwarf, and Dragon, were joined by a fourth: the race of Man.
• Thousands of years later, after many empires have risen and fallen, Man has established a great presence in Tellandor. It was a man who built Oathkeep, the City of Peace, but it is all races who keep its dream alive.

:Main Article: History of Man

The Race of Man landed approximately 7,000 years ago, after migrating from another world across the sea. Since then, he has grown much; his earliest works were small cities barely worthy of the name, and his warriors carried stone weapons, but today, he is a force to contend with, whose craft of war and peace rival the other great races.

As man is wont to do, he formed many communities great and small over the millennia, flaring up and dying out so fast the other races couldn't be bothered to keep track of them. Only the great empires were worth their notice; the most enduring of them are the Kingdom of the Sword, the Junean Holds, and the Ahrimid Empire.

Through strength of arms, esprit de corps, and a strong talent for arcane magic, Man holds his own on the world stage, equal to the other great races.

:Main Article: History of the Elves

Elves have dwelled in Tellandor since the age of Dragons and Titans. It is difficult to say exactly how long this is, but scholars believe it accounts for approximately 70,000 years of history.

In the early millennia, elven society was much different, as they lived in a world where colossal powers clashed in the skies and deep in the earth. Though elves are naturally immortal, they experienced many deaths, due either to direct confrontation with the elder races, or simply the indirect effects of their battles.

Thus, none of the elves who live today were actually alive during that time, with the possible exception of The Elven Queen, who is continually reborn in spirit throughout the ages.

While elves can live forever, they inevitably choose to pass after some time; this can vary, from a scant few centuries, to tens of thousands of years. Most elves pass after about 5,000 years. The reasons vary, but elves are often moved to pass by the accumulated grief of centuries; elves never truly forget the sorrows they have experienced in life, and, in time, those can outweigh the joys.

Thus, elves do have "generations", after a fashion, and subsequently they have developed ways of passing on knowledge of their history from one to the next. Their primary method for this is song; elven bards are the lorekeepers and historians of the race, charged with the sacred duty of remembering all who have passed, and all that has transpired. Such bards spend lifetimes carefully memorizing long tales, telling of the long lives and many deeds of those who cam before. The death of such a bard, having not passed on his knowledge to a successor, would be a terrible tragedy for the elves, and thus few elven bards take to the profession of adventuring.

:Main Article: History of the Dwarves

:Main Article: History of Dragons