| Philip Knowsley |
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So, this is my write-up. It allows me to explain parts of the story that they would
otherwise never see. Much of it is just nicked from the book. Cheers Paizo! :)
I have used writings by (in my game) Vor Dakai (Vor being an ancient cyclopean rank
title, plus knowledge from Pendrod who survives & is rescued from a soul jar.
A history (as translated by Simile) from Vor Dakai’s writings of all that has transpired. (Supplemented with interludes from Maestro Pendrod’s musings.)
In the age before Earthfall, the fortunes of Golarion were forged by vast empires like Azlant and Thassilon. Yet other empires existed in these ancient times as well — empires ruled not by humans but by creatures of legend. The cyclops ruled many such empires, notably one in Garund and another in north-western Casmaron. Yet as with their contemporaries, Earthfall brought an end to their rule. And unlike Azlant or Thassilon, the cyclops empires have been all but forgotten in the Age of Lost Omens.
Yet while the cyclops may have been forgotten, they have not vanished from the face of Golarion altogether.
Pockets of their kind exist today, although they possess but a shadow of their former glory. Only in remote locations does evidence of the ancient cyclopian empires still exist, protected from the march of time by preservative magic akin to that which protected the mightiest of Thassilon’s monuments, or watched over still by ancient spirits and tenacious undead too stubborn to move on.
One such remnant, deep in the Tors of Levenies, was the cyclops lich – Vor Dakai. Although the name has long been lost to history, Vor Dakai was once a notorious tyrant and necromancer in Casmaron’s ancient cyclops empire. Vor Dakai himself did not survive the uprising and turmoil that followed Earthfall during the Age of Darkness, yet ironically his name did. The least of his apprentices appropriated Vor Dakai’s name in the hope of using its power to rebuild an empire; yet in the end, this task would require more than notoriety. This new Dakai became the last Vor when those she was attempting to command rose up against her and, in an ironic turn of events, trapped her in a crypt of her own design, hidden away at the westernmost edge of Casmaron, in a minor mountain range oft overlooked by explorers and colonists.
As thousands of years passed and Vor Dakai’s torpor changed into an ageless slumber, her name persisted in the legends of the region’s centaur tribes. Tribal shamans, inspired by visions, often brought the centaurs to a steppeland called the Dunsward in the region near Vor Dakai’s tomb, where they tasked their tribes with the sacred duty of guardianship over the Valley of the Dead — the legendary entrance to Vor Dakai’s tomb. These shamans saw that the ancient cyclops tyrant did not rest easy in her grave, and they foresaw a time when her wickedness and the pent-up evil of the extinct cyclops empire might one day be released by the unwary to plague the lands again.
“In the last few thousand years, the Nomen Centaurs have faced less exotic enemies and fears — Taldor’s expansion into the Stolen Lands led to much warfare between the Nomen and humanity and helped to maintain the Stolen Lands’ reputation for being inhospitable to civilization. Even as the domain of Rostland was forged, Taldan colonists ripped through the centaur war herds to the south, pushing them to the fringes of their former rangelands and farther and farther from their guardianship and traditional homeland. With the back of the centaur resistance broken and driven into the hinterlands of their new colony, the Taldan forces focused their efforts elsewhere and the cairn stood once again unguarded and largely forgotten.”
So great were the effects of this war that much of the Nomen’s lore and identity were lost as well. The original reason for their guardianship was forgotten within a few generations and transformed into a territorial aggression that extended around the eastern fringes of the human lands. When Taldor finally abandoned the Stolen Lands, the Nomen were hesitant to return to the Dunsward out of shame and fear. By the time Choral the Conqueror swept north through what would become the kingdom of Brevoy in 4499 AR, the Nomen centaurs were marginalized and largely forgotten, and the region of the cairn was a remote wilderness area of little to no interest to the new civilization of the area.
This status quo has remained over the last 200 or so years—until now, that is. When the swordlords of Restov sent agents south into the Stolen Lands, a new colony — Varnhold — was established at the edge of the old centaur rangelands, and along with these settlers came an ambitious treasure hunter named Willas Gundarson.
Ingratiating himself with Maegar Varn, using Varnhold as a base of operations and following an ancient map copied from an even more ancient tablet recovered from deep Casmaron, Willas hoped to find a previously undiscovered hoard of ancient treasure. Unfortunately for Willas, he mistranslated the ancient tablet—and what he had assumed was an indication of vast magical wealth was actually a warning of vast magical danger.
Armed with his mistranslated lore, Willas ranged far and wide while Varnhold was being established, operating under the guise of scouting to determine the lay of the land and identify any potential threats facing the fledgling colony. It was on one of these journeys that he discovered the site of Vor Dakai’s Tomb and crossed the deep waters of the Little Sellen on a folding boat. On the island, he located wards designed to prevent intrusion and grasped something of their dire nature. He was about to turn back when he glimpsed a cache of treasure just a short way down the corridor leading into the tomb. Greed forced aside common sense, and he crept inside to investigate — but as he did, he felt the ancient warding alarms go off. Pausing only to snatch a single jade bracelet, he fled the tomb and retreated back across the river.
Though all remained quiet as he watched from the far shore, he knew he had triggered the guardian wards and had a bad feeling about what he had done. He hurried back to Varnhold with the bracelet and adjusted his tale to say he had found it on the river bank, hoping to hide his momentary lack of judgment. Unfortunately,
Willas’s fears were well founded, for the triggering of the wards awoke Vor Dakai from her age of slumber. You now feel that what Willas & you thought was a bracelet, may in fact have been a ring…of giant proportions…
“Lord Varn, being something of an amateur archaeologist and historian himself, took a great interest in the jade treasure Willas had returned with, and tentatively identified its markings as being associated with the Nomen centaurs, the tribe with which his colony was involved in conflict. Believing the “bracelet” to be a prehistoric artefact of that culture, he sent word me, an old colleague from Oppara — a scholar who specialises in Casmar antiquities.
I was in the beginning stages of composing a sweeping epic opera dedicated to the millennia-sweeping history of the Iobarian steppes and gleefully accepted word of the artefact as evidence of a link between the Nomen centaurs and those of ancient Iobaria. Immediately, I set out for Varnhold to study this magnificent find and its provenance.”
Yet Maestro Pendrod was not the only individual interested in the “bracelet”, for with its theft and the activation of the tomb wards, the long-dead cyclops Vor Dakai had wakened. Turning her oracular powers to the recovery of the ring and the location of the thief, the lich located both in the settlement of Varnhold.
Faced with a new world of wonder, she began to send her minions out into the world to explore – and bring back word of how the world had changed. Vor Dakai became particularly obsessed with the audacious human who had unintentionally freed her, and upon noticing the theft of the jade bracelet, set about tracking the thief back to the settlement of Varnhold. Unleashing ancient cyclops magic calling forth all of the colonists in a daze, Vor Dakai captured each of the villagers in soul jars. She emptied the settlement of its inhabitants in a single night of horror. Up until your intervention, Vor Dakai had studied the lore she learned from Varnhold’s vanished folk and draws her plans to establish a new empire.
Her writings also dwell upon the amount of power she has lost over the eons of her slumbering. It is a sobering, but clear fact that had you met her in her full glory – the outcome would likely have been somewhat different… With her kin gone from the region, and considering the current locals as mere worms, the undead cyclops was confident that this time, her’s would be a lasting rule…she had not reckoned upon the fury of the rulers & adventurers of Greenland!