The Age of War—The Age of Fire—The Age of the Ram

This period concerns the rise of powerful early civilizations. During this period religious, political, and ethnic differences became pronounced, dividing humans into a host of different groups. Belief systems and culture became codified. Civilizations became more advanced as the state emerged as a powerful entity. Increasingly, people groups became subjugated to other people groups. Transregional trade also became important, as distant peoples began trading across long overland routes.

Greater Powers of the Age include the gods and goddesses of the Titans, as well as gods of Tyranny and the Dead.

2150 BCE: The Border Dead

Called the Age of Iron by the Dwarves, and the Arian Age by the Elves, this Age sees the nations of Man, Dwarf, and Elf expand until at last, clashes erupt at borders, and war springs between them all. Though some individual Gnomes and Halflings are pressed into service on all sides, their kind generally stays out of the warmongering of this age. Battle lines are drawn between racial groups, and within them.

As war finally erupts between the nations of Man, Dwarf, and Elf at the dawn of the Age of Fire, the first wight rises from a battlefield too vast and too bitter for proper rites, and the first wraith, once among the most powerful warriors of the age, refuses the death a lesser soul might have accepted, spreading its own corrupted strength to whatever it can drain in turn.

2140 BCE: The Spread of the Weave

It is in these opening years of the age that the Powers of Urthe freely give magical control of the Weave to their Human worshippers: Arcane and Divine Magic crackle over the surface of the young Urthe for the first time. In this same season, the Power of Nothingness, long dormant, grows in strength, only to split into three new entities, and the Power of Chance splits in two, taking on distinct and contrasting good and evil identities.

2100 BCE: Riders of War

Though horses have been tamed, befriended, and occasionally mounted by the Elves since the early ages, and had been used in the fields of farmers and as beasts of burden in the previous age, it is only now, in the Age of War, that Men first saddle them for riding, and for battle.

2050 BCE — The Desperate Wizard

Amid the same age that first grants mortals real command of the Weave, one archmage, having achieved mastery no living wizard before him had reached, refuses to let death claim what he’s built. The first lich is made not by accident or curse but by careful, deliberate design, a phylactery sealed and hidden before his mortal body ever stops breathing.

1900 BCE: The Lawgiver

One leader of Men, a Cleric of the Power of Justice named Kelemos, aged eighty years, climbs the great peak of Har-Sedeth for the first time in the reckoning that would come to be called Year One of the Covenant, and delivers the Tablets of the Unbroken Law, a Powerful artifact, to his followers. According to legend, this Cleric will live to a hundred and twenty years of age, and his followers, scattered among the desert tribes, become known in later ages as the Sworn People, bound to his god above all others.

1860 BCE: The Lawgiver’s Death

Kelemos dies at the full age legend grants him, leaving behind no single successor, but a scattered priesthood already arguing over the truest reading of his Law.

1700 BCE: The Holy Wars Begin

Worshippers of different deities begin to fight for the primacy of their faith over all others in a succession of destructive, decades-long conflicts now called “The Holy Wars.” Scribes report a desert-kingdom sovereign, known to his people as the “Living Sun” and rumored to be of half-Elven descent, begins the earliest of these crusades some two centuries after Kelemos’s own ascent, declaring the Power of the Sun to be the one supreme deity above all others, and demanding every shrine to any other Power in his lands be torn down. Many sages speculate that Kelemos’s own successors, the priest-kings of the Sworn People, were provoked into their fiercest campaigns by this ruthless example, declaring their own Patron Power the one true god in turn, and their people chosen above all others to carry his law. Such wars as these spread over Urthe, kingdom answering kingdom, faith answering faith, for generations.

1628 BCE — The Temple’s Silence

In the wake of an underground explosion that levels the Grey Elven capital, “the Dark Princess’s Revenge” as some call it, one survivor, denied even the dignity of a marked grave amid the ruin, becomes the first ghost recorded on Urthe, bound to a wrecked city and determined, more than anything, to get even. Some blame the Drow for the blast outright, though no Elf will speak plainly of the matter to outsiders.

1500 BCE: The Great Temple Raised

A king of the Sworn People raises a great Temple to the Power of Justice upon a hilltop sacred to his line, its construction taking seven years and drawing craftsmen, cedar, and gold from every allied nation the kingdom could call upon.

1300 BCE: Rise of the Titans

Titans and their gods appear on Urthe in these centuries, and immediately clash with the Giants, and their gods, a war whose echoes are still felt in the oldest mountain ranges of the world.

1150 BCE: The First Mithril

In the middle of this Age, the Dwarves mine the first “Mithril,” mythrillium ore, which Elves and Men alike come to lust after as “true silver.” Many wars are fought over this rare metal during this age, though it appears that Men have little success in these ventures, with most of the known spoils of Mithril ending up in Elvish or Dwarvish hands.

1100 BCE: The Temple’s Fall

For four centuries the Great Temple has stood as the heart of the Sworn People’s faith, until the High Elvish army, marching against the kingdom in this age, enters the sacred city and puts the Temple to the torch. The siege and burning last three days, and the fall of the Temple marks the end of the Sworn People’s ancient royal line, its last kings scattered or slain, its priesthood carried off into a long exile among strangers.

1000 BCE: Return from Exile

Some generations later, the exiled Sworn People are permitted to return, and rebuild the wall around their sacred city stone by stone, though the Temple itself, and the line of kings that had raised it, are never fully restored.

900 BCE — The Fallen Temple’s Wrath

Among the priesthood scattered by the burning of the great Temple, one figure, convinced his own faith’s destruction demands a reckoning he alone can deliver, becomes the first revenant, his soul judged worthy of return by conditions few before or since have met.

300 BCE — The Judged Champion

A warrior once celebrated as among the most righteous of his age is condemned, in the final reckoning of his own patron Power, for a single act of cruelty he never atoned for. The first death knight rises not from any grave, but from a divine verdict, his old virtue turned entirely against him.

As this bloody Sixth Age wore on, A•OM stirred…