The Age of Earth—The Age of Agriculture—The Age of the Bull

Greater Powers of the Age include the good goddess of Agriculture and two good Giantish gods; the neutral creator god of the Giants; and evil gods of Oppression, Destruction, and War.

4300 BCE: The First Humans

Although this is the Fifth Age of Urthe, some name this time The First Age of Man, for it was at this time that the first true Humans, as cavemen, appeared on Urthe, evolved from the Elven-bred dakon apes.

4200 BCE — The Faithful Guardian

A Dwarven clan-warden, entrusted from youth with the keeping of his family’s tomb, asks at his own death only to continue the duty rather than pass into whatever comes after. The first crypt thing takes up its post that same night, and has never once left it.

4115 BCE: A Leader Among Men

Led by a man born this year, the Men soon trade with their fellow Urthe races, and become particularly friendly with the Elves, from whom they learn much lore and many skills, including Agriculture, which the Humans use extensively. The plow is first used in this age, and humans make their own pottery.

3900 BCE: The Grey Elf King’s Reckoning

The Elvish Bloodline has been sundered by this time, with the varied Elvish peoples splitting into distinct nations of their kindred, though all Elves still reckon this the Age of the Grey Elf King, whose lands stretch from coast to mountain range, ruling from his high seat in the ancient city he raised there.

3700 BCE — The First Pyramid

As the earliest human priest-kings begin experimenting with the deliberate preservation of the honored dead, one ambitious ruler survives the ritual’s completion just long enough to understand what it has made of him. The first mummy rises from that same tomb before its builders have even finished sealing the outer chamber, and, within a generation, the ritual’s more elaborate form produces the first greater mummy among his own priesthood, those who administered the rite themselves now bound to guard what it made.

3500 BCE: The First Word of Man

By this year, Humans have developed their own writing, a script born independent of the Elven and Dwarven tongues around them, though shaped in no small part by both.

3000 BCE: The Population Explodes

The population of Men explodes in the Age of the Bull. Some, very rare humans, begin to commune with the Powers, and the first human clerics and wizards begin their arts in the centuries that follow, a wholly new kind of communion no other people of Urthe has yet achieved in quite the same way.

2807 BCE: A Stone from the Sky

A stone from the sky strikes Urthe, a lesser echo of the Catastrophe two full ages past, though sages differ sharply on how much of this age’s turmoil, from Oppression’s rising cults to the wars that will soon follow, can truly be laid at its feet.

2400 BCE — The Warlord’s Circlet

A Dwarven king, dying in the midst of an unfinished campaign, commands his smiths to bind his own restless will into a golden circlet rather than let death end his war. The first skeleton warrior marches on under a commander’s control that a living hand still, technically, provides.

2300 BCE: The First Bronze

The movement of the continents has slowed to an apparent stop in this age, with the map of the fifth age looking almost identical two ages later; however, sages contend that the movement has not stopped completely, and that the continents are still moving, albeit very slowly. It is in this fifth Age that the Dwarves smelt the first bronze, which they trade for the papyrus invented by the Elves. The Elves forge their Blades of Ceremony, and the Dwarves write their first Scrolls of Metallurgy. Skills and products are all traded freely amongst the good races of the young Urthe.

2200 BCE: A Crown Briefly Worn

This age sees the rise and fall of a great human king, whose empire briefly binds a dozen warring cities under one crown before it crumbles as swiftly as it rose, the first and shortest-lived of the great human empires still to come.

A•OM looked on…