Gromdalia: The Ancient

Gromdalia

The Ancients

On the northern edge of the known world lies one of the oldest confederations known to history. It is inhabited by tribes of the duerthi people, or dwarves as they are more commonly known. Gromdalia lays claim to the Gromdal mountains, snowy high-rising mountains found in one of the coldest climates of the world on the northern edge of Velas butting up against the Fangs. Underneath the peaks and within the rock of the mountains themselves lies the Gromdalian civilizations. They have cities hewn from the stone of the mountain that are covered with statues and great inscriptions of art formed upon the walls, buildings, and sides of caves. The Gromdalian's vast history is written on these walls but some has been lost to time due to neglect or pure age. Connecting the great cities, known as kyrgs are great underways, highways built between the cities that patrolled by heavily armored guardians. Each kyrg contains a ruling Teyrg, a merchant guild that serves as the government for the duerthi people. While a high king once ruled Gromdalia long ago, the royal dynasty was lost to a horrible plague and in its place rose the second most powerful institutions of Gromdalia: the guilds. Gromdalia is home to one of the oldest forms of magitek in the world: rune scribing.

Duerthi

Duerthi are short, stout people that stand at between three feet and four feet tall. They are often robustly built and long lived, reaching around six hundred years in age before succumbing to natural causes. They are one of the oldest Kinds in the world and have seen and lived through many ages.

Ancient History

Gromdalia has existed since before the Age of Twilight, the time when the great elven empire of Velas took its mysterious exodus away from the known world. The duerthi and the aelthi once worked in concert together before the empire took power and the elves treated all other kinds as beneath them and only suitable for submission or extermination. Before the aelthi could put the boot to the dwarves, the ancient kind had seemingly disappeared. Gromdalia avoided being conquered by the ancients hiding within the deep parts of the mountains. It was a miserable experience that saw many dwarves die by starvation without the massive fungal farms they had cultivated with the kyrgs of the upper mountains. Along with this, monsters rose in hordes the deeper in the mountains one goes. The fight for survival was on two fronts. When they retreated, they created a system of scouts that could stealthily creep to the upper levels and watch if the Aelthi still continued on their path of destruction. This went on for centuries. The duerthi were able to settle the lower levels and quell the numbers of the monsters to manageable levels by the end of their time in the depths. They still longed for their homes. Eventually, the strangest thing occurred. The Velassian Empire was no longer in the known world. In its place new primitive Kinds that now claim the earth. The duerthi of this time recognized these Kinds and knew their origins. They disregarded the new Kinds of men, bestials, and the others as little more than upright animals and kept to their own business for thousands of years. Over time, the knowledge of why the dwarves refused to communicate them was lost with the death of several venerable longbeards, a name for the oldest dwarves going on 500-600 years old. Duerthi are long-lived but they can succumb to death from natural causes. The newer generations would eventually reach out to these young Kinds and parcel out information to help them prosper. This resulted in the technological advances of humans becoming accelerated to iron age level. Along with this, many discoveries the duerthi had known on a scientific and philosophical level were shared with the humans to their south, the Lekkenics. Giving out of select information over time was done out of fear of creating a brand new Velassian Empire. In the ancient days, the duerthi helped the aelthi and suffered for it. So, these new Kinds were given bist and pieces. This information along with their own newly found advancements would lead them to the technological and societal level they were before the Epoch of Flame. The main vectorrs of this knowledge were the humans of Lekkas.

Runic Inscription

Runic inscription has long been part of duerthi culture. It is credited for allowing the dwarven kyrgs some of their greatest works and their beautiful hewn cities. How it works is that the runes are built into different objects, not just stones, and their shapes intrinsically draw upon aeth, the energy of magic. A similar phenomenon was seen with the chordant stones of Talah except instead of notes focusing music, the inscriptions summon it through their physicality. They often glow with the power of aeth once finished. Runic inscription was one of the very last things the dwarves passed onto the younger Kinds and forr two good reasons. One, they were trying to not allow them too much power. Two, it is exceedingly difficult unless one knows how to do it. It takes specialized tools and a special form of enchantment magic to work. It can take decades to learn how to use both, which is one reason why the discovery of the more easily used aetherium was so valuable to advances in magitek. Still, runic inscription is used in the Age of Flame, especially on aeroships to make them light enough to float.

Scriber Guilds

Scriber guilds can be hired for high prices to mark runic inscriptions on different objects. They are renowned across the world and hired for special projects by the wealthy and powerful. (In game terms they mainly use the enchantment system of GURPS Magic)

Equitianism

The guilds of Gromdal do not care for equitianism. They see it as an upstart movement that has not had the millenia of testing that their ancient traditions have had. However, not all duerthi in Gromdalia agree. Many have chafed under the power of the guilds for hundreds of years and find truth in the ideology. This truth is exemplified by the multiple ways the upper class of the guild masters have oppressed the lower classes in Gromdalian history. Underpaying them, keeping food when famine struck, forcibly suppressing dissenters, and always keeping the senior members of the guild at the top and almost never allowing the younger dwarves to prove themselves in a cyclical nature that sees new generations finally receiving the positions they yearned for and then keeping the next at the bottom. Along with this, open equitianists had to keep their alliegances secret or risk the shuttering of their jobs and exile. Because of all this, many Gromdalian dwarves flocked to the Skalovian Revolution and became key figures in the early history of the Uhlionic Republic. One Gromdalian resident that stayed in the Gromdal mountains, Regar Jarnsir, was a homegrown equitianist that had known Sylvaras Zelie, the elven creator of equitianism, and was a known theoretician and freedom fighter. He took part in the original rebellion against the Dai Empire in Liresku but left with the disappointing rise of the Dominion, the legalistic Prythian cult that ruled the lands with an iron fist. He was a supporter of the Uhlionic Republic, the newly raised revolutionary government that toppled the Scale Princes of Skalovia that ruled the land before. Regar saw it as his personal mission to pass on his personal friend Sylvaras's movement in liberation of the workers of Gromdal. He turned against the Republic and denounced vanguard-theory-based Equilibratism with the atrocities committed in Klastte and the invasion of Gromdalia in a clear act of imperialism.

The Gromdal War

Many of those dwarves would see themselves fighting against their own kin in what was to be known as an ultimately pointless war between the confederation of guilds and the Republic, now an ascendant land-conquering republic to their east. The Republic outwardly fought to liberate the dwarves from the masters of the guilds; it was actually thought up as a land grab to gain more resources including new veins of aetherium, the crystal that is key to modern magitek tools and creations, found within the Gromdal mountains. The URA, the black powder using Uhlionic Republican Army, was exhausted from two consecutive wars beforehand and the occupation of Klastte, a fallen kingdom now under the control of the Republic. Along with this, the revolutionary spirit of fighting in defense of the motherland was drained with those wars and the premier's cruel policies taking their toll. Along with this, the URA's weapons were not suited to the underground, requiring wide spaces to form lines upon. The Gromdalians knew the terrain, had prepared for such a war, and were ready to fight back the invaders. While not an excessively bloody war, totalling at around 20,000 casualties, many did die on both sides and this was the final black mark against the Republic in the eyes of even fellow equitianists, let alone the rest of the world which planning to create a massive coalition to smash the Republic. The black eye given to them was seen as enough for the time. Gromdalia won and expelled the URA from their lands.

Changing Times

Gromdalia is going through a relatively massive amount of changes in a short time throughout the Epoch of flame. The powers of the guilds are waning and the newer generations have a bevy of new ideas. Only time will tell if the ancient kingdom changes from its ancient traditions.