A Brief History of Trid
Trid’s history is tallied by the rise and fall of empires. The Ardic Republic is the most recent Continental empire to fail, but it is not the first. Likewise, humans aren’t the first race to try their hand at Continental dominance—merely the most current.
First were the Builders of the Before Times. Despite their obvious technical advancement relative to the primitive humanoids with whom they shared the Continent, the Builders disappeared for reasons unknown, leaving behind their only tangible legacy: the Far Paths, a system of magical teleportation portals that dot the Continent.
In the Dim Ages that followed, sometime long after the Builders’ disappearance, the squamate Ophidians rose to cruel supremacy, enslaving the primitive humans, humanoids, and demi-humans they conquered to expand their empire. The elves, armed with steel and arcane magic, resisted and allied with men to destroy the Ophidians. This victory ushered in the Age of Fable and the Ardic Republic, under which the elves united two-thirds of the Continent under a common language, law, worship, and coin.
Four hundred seventy-six years ago, humans of the Midlands “discovered” divine magic, and the subsequent rise of clerical power proved an effective counter to the elves’ arcane advantage. Firebrands launched crusades as oppressed peoples rose up with the literal power of their gods behind them. The slow but persistent decline of the Ardic Republic began in earnest.
History and the Trid Referee
As a campaign setting, Trid is a sandbox of sandboxes, so its “world history” is necessarily chronicled in broad terms via a handful of tremendously impactful milestones. In this respect, the chronicle here is best viewed as a foundation upon which each sandbox’s more detailed history is laid. It is, as a consequence, a litany of outcomes, with very little attention paid to what caused them.
As such, Trid’s history is a sequence—a sparse timeline only—that justifies the state of affairs in the present day, while promoting maximum flexibility to support individual campaigns. Put another way, the framework below tells us what happened—it is up to individual Referees to bolt on their own ideas of how and why.
The Before Times
Trid’s earliest engravings and pictographs suggest a warm and verdant planet populated by giant reptiles, primitive humanoids, and a race known today only as the Builders. Virtually nothing is understood of their origin, their culture, or their fate. Their single legacy is the Continental network of teleportation portals called the Far Paths, which they within a variety of stone ziggurats, labyrinths, henges, and stela.
The Far Paths are the only tangible trace of the Builders, and it is within their stone vaults that explorers found their precision engineering, while scholars found their graven script. Translators debate the cause, but it is clear that the Builders departed Trid. The abruptness of their evacuation suggests an accident, though the fact that all Builders left simultaneously suggests a coordinated effort. Regardless, their exodus marks the end of the Before Times.
The Dim Ages
It is unclear how many (thousands of) years passed between the Builders’ departure and the rise of the elves and the ophidians, but the Dim Ages are agreed to begin when these two cultures achieve a bronze-age standard. The elves have by this time established a polity of aligned city-states along the shores of Mare Incantum, while the Ophidian races have spread across the Serpent Sea from their island homeland of Skaelor. Their naval skirmishes grew into coastal raids then into protracted warfare; the two sides clash in earnest along the Glittershore.
As the elves and ophidians fought to a stalemate, various humanoid races developed in small stone-age tribal units, avoiding the conflict around them. The dwarfs of The Great Ridge fled underground to the Deepreach, humanoids hid in the rugged wilds, and humans roamed the Continent as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
The ophidians eventually gain the upper hand by sending their armies across the Continent through the Far Paths, quickly challenging the elves along multiple fronts. The elves enlisted the help of humans, and through local alliances exchanged weapons, food, and tools for manpower against their common enemy. Humans quickly adopted elven technology, social structures and, in some cases, observance of the The Circle. While the elves withheld their knowledge of the arcane, the alliances proofed all too efficacious, savagely advancing against the ophidians, pushing them out of their borders, and bloodily driving them to cultural extinction.
The Age of Fable
After defeating the ophidians, the elves cemented their alliance with humans by establishing the Ardic Republic, which, at its height, spanned two-thirds of the Continent. As the elves helped men to rebuild and grow after the so-called Saurian Wars, they effectively annexed the territory, building fortified settlements and connecting them via paved roads to facilitate trade and make it easier to send troops to defend them.
These roads became the de facto territorial borders within the Continent today. Each territory was ruled by a plenipotentiary governor, who in turn commanded a significant bureaucracy of elves and humans alike to administer, cultivate, and defend the territory under Ardic Law. Temples devoted to The Circle of elven gods gained human devotees and, later, human ritualists.
The Age of History
The Fall of the Republic turned settled areas to wilderness nearly overnight and ushered in the current Age of History. Mankind’s chief occupation today is expanding settled borders to create order and safety, pushing back against the dangers posed by raiding humanoids, savage monsters, volatile magic, and forgotten secrets waiting to be discovered by bad actors. Perhaps ironically, it is precisely the lure of rich treasure and magic from ancient ruins that feeds the ambitions of power brokers who would reshape Trid to serve their own needs, ultimately replacing the unknown perils of the wilderness with more familiar dangers. It is now 476 AH, the 476th year of the Age of History. While almost half a millennium has passed since the Fall, there is still much chaos for man to tame.