Medieval Stasis: The Regreening

Medieval Stasis is the strange reality that a lot of fantasy worlds find themselves in a technological state akin to the Middle Ages for thousands of years when the real Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to around the 15th centuries, about a thousand years. That's a decent chunk of human history sure, but a lot of fantasy worlds have been medieval for thousands upon thousands of years. Why? How? Taking this idea seriously invites a lot of interesting questions, and I wanted to just do some world building to explore that and the other anachronisms so familiar to D&D which I was interested in as I have been lovingly coerced into running a game of 5e. It turned into a much expanded project in order to account for the weirdness of a world in stasis and all the cacophony of 5e. 

Inspiration from Was It Likely for the idea of a stolen world.

The Regreening

From Princess Mononoke

The continent was once covered in the black spires of the necromantic empire of the Deathless Prince, but so much of that is utterly gone now. The dark, angular labyrinths of their cities are now gone, as if they were never there. The torment pits of the Necromantic Houses are gone. The vast armies of their slaves both living and unliving are forgotten. The midnight obelisks which bound the gods of the lightless realm are lost among the endless towering trees. How could all of this have disappeared?

The druids of Ea know, at least some of them. The Circle of Elders conducted the Regreening to overthrow the Deathless Empire. They used the power of the Green Dragon which has become one with the natural world of Ea by the work of the Shaman.

Not only were the necromancers tormenting the peoples of Ea, enslaving them en-mass and fueling their foul magics from their torment, but the Deathless Empire was close to utterly shattering the barrier between this world and the Icy Veil, the realm of death.The druids could not allow their work to continue. The Regreening wasn't just nature rising up to overrate the ruins. It was the rewriting of reality. Strongholds and cities not just destroyed but erased from history, necromantic knowledge erased from the world and made nearly impossible to relearn. They rewrote the world to make the Deathless Prince's ambitions almost impossible.

But it is not just the necromancers who threaten the barrier between worlds. Any magically advanced enough faction brings the unwanted attention of entities from the other cosms. The Sovereignty has been growing in power quickly and perhaps another Regreening is required.

Thus the world is caught in perpetual cycles of history rising and being washed away, and yet everything is not forgotten but lingers on. And while the Deathless Empire is gone remnants linger and sometimes re-emerge suddenly. All at once another ancient ruin is there and had been there all along. Time is fractured and its pieces lie haphazard in the world. The wheel is turned by a cabal of Druids who have been taught time and time again to fear anything new, who probably cannot even remember how many times they have rewritten history and buried the world in green.

Welcome to the stolen world of Ea.

Myths of Origin

This world was stolen. Mother Ea was taken away by Aionious in days long past. In some stories, Aionious was a devious trickster, desiring the beautiful goddess and yet being unable to possess her, her tricked her into eating the food of a strange land and binding her there.

To others Aionious and Ea loved each other and he freed her from her wicked family and led her into a place of seclusion and safety.

But that family chased them and left their marks. Grandmother Night left one side of Aionious blackened. Grandfather Time caught hold of them with dragging chains and weights of entropy.

And the Other stabbed into Ea's heart a blade of death.

To save his bride or keep her captive, Aionious lulled her into a deep and healing sleep and bent himself over her as her protector or captor. 

Thus there was the sky and the earth. The two eyes of Aionious are the Sun and Moon. The stars are holes, wounds from his escape through which sometimes other things come through, things from beyond.

The scholars are quick to remind us that these old stories are likely heavily shrouded in metaphor and allegory: stories told by our ancestors to make sense of the ineffable. The dogmatic among the church treat them as gospel truths. Sages and shamans encourage us to look deeper to find the more profound truths for our own lives.

And while these gods are theoretic and prehistoric, the world as it is is lousy with very present and tangible gods. Call them spirits or even just magical creatures, but pretty much everything that is not of the humanoid form and not of beasts is a god.

The greatest of these were the dragons.

The first dragons were said to be arrows fired by the brothers and sisters of Ea which pierced her as she fled. 

They rose up and ruled the world with savage tyranny. All other creatures were as ants before them. The world was ruled over by bestial gods and dragons, meanwhile the furtive love child of Aionious and Ea quietly grew in secret places.

Peoples of Ea

Mankind is not so homogeneous as we might think of it. The distinctions between humans and halflings are more modern inventions. Mankind began in the womb of the earth: small and quiet to avoid notice of the things that would hunt them, living in holes and under hills. These are the Halflings and their family of mankind persists to this day.

Others dug deeper and these became dwarves. They built great things underground where they were safe, at least for now.

Those that braved the surface regardless are what we would now think of as humans. 

The elves claim to have come from beyond as spirits from beyond the stars sent to free Ea from Aionious. Those whose devotion for the Earth Mother remains became Wood Elves. Those that sought the secrets of their origins from among the stars became High Elves. And those who were sent as hunters from Mother Night were the Dark Elves. They hunted the dwarves in the deep smd founded their civilization below ground.

Gnomes? What are those?

Dragonborn? Well they are another story...

The dragon's own children were... ill suited to our world, being born deformed and crooked. Instead, they took on humanoid forms and took partners from humans to create their new subservient line of creatures. These were the Dragonborn, and through hybridity with creatures native to Ea, these offspring were far better suited for survival.

As a consequence, Dragonborn can appear more or less draconic depending on how much their ancestors interbred with humans or other races.

Tieflings came to this world latest of all, indeed they are still coming. Even as Ea is both the world and a goddess, her brothers and sisters are likewise worlds and goddesses, worlds similar and yet different from our own, worlds from which the dragons came. 

Tieflings stumble into our world as children usually, climbing out of holes or caves or hollows in trees. They have only dim memories of the worlds they hail from and a profound sense of belonging somewhere else.

The first outbreak of orcism happened in the aftermath of the slaying of the Red Dragon. The Slayer was from the tribes that live out in the Great Wastes and he faced the dragon with blade and bow over the rolling hills and plains of his homeland that the beast had long haunted. 

When the final blow was struck, the blood of the creature spilled onto the ground, polluting the land and plants of the area. The first time a young tribesman ate of the plants, the outbreak began. It spread from biting as the orcs in the early stages of the infection were afflicted by a terrible blood madness. They tore a bloody swath through the world, spreading their infection as they went. The Sovereignty stood against them and managed to stop them, multiple kingdoms taking shelter in the growing empire, but not before a great dwarven stronghold was sacked and slaughtered. This also began the alliance of certain High Elves with the Sovereignty who crafted weapons that were especially effective against orcs. 

After their defeat, the orc's blood madness and their ability to infect others went away, leaving the infected with permanent physical alterations and the horror of waking up from a terrible dream to find it was all real.

Religion

The Old Religion is the faith of the druids. It is less a matter of devotion and more a matter of propitiating and acting as intermediary for the countless wild gods that inhabit the world, little gods of streams and flowers, or great and terrible gods that haunt the deep woods.

Most of the civilized peoples of the world have at least one foot in the Old Religion but have some other choices as well.

When the dragons were overthrown, the humanoids responsible took their place of divinity.

• The Saint destroyed the gold dragon by means of incredible virtue and piety. Her Church is one of the largest organized religions in the world. They venerate all the New Gods but they praise the Saint and Aionious most of all. 
• The Singer lulled the silver dragon into endless sleep. She is a High Elf New God.
• The Sovereign led an army to destroy the brass dragon and established a great empire called the Sovereignty.
• The Sage helped the bronze dragon achieve enlightenment. The bronze dragon continues to pass on its master's teachings.
• The Slayer killed the red dragon single handedly. He is the God of violence both noble knights and barbaric champions.
• The Shaman made the green dragon one with the forest. Druids sometimes hold the Shaman in honor.
• The Sailor wrestled with the blue dragon and drove it off. He is said to continue to hunt the dragon to this day.
• The Scholar asked a question of deep lore that the white dragon could not answer. It remains frozen in icy contemplation.
• The Sorcerer imprisoned and bound the black dragon by fell sorcery. Another title by which the Sorcerer is known is the Deathless Prince.

Religion in this corner of Ea is diverse but the church can look at the druids and think of them as misguided rather than evil and vice versa. There are extremists to be sure and intolerance on the small scale of families and communities, but generally the two groups tolerate each other on the large scale.

However, the church has declared Heresy the worship of the Family, the cosmic divinities of whom Aionious and Ea were kin. The church casts this Family as demonic beings that held Ea captive before Aionious freed her. It remains a belief among some high elves that they are the pure children of Aionious before Ea seduced him and robbed him of his purity. The Family, then, are cosmic deities who have maintained their purity and escaped the corruption of combination and so there is a fascination with them, to ridding one's self of earthly impurity to rise up as pure celestial spirits, so as to join the Family in the pure realms, often by seeking the guidance of spirits from the realms of the Family.

The State of the World

The world as it stands now is a circle: in the middle is the Brass Sovereignty who has been spreading out further and further to unite all civilization into its expanding network of empire. On the outer ring of that circle is the petty kingdoms and wilderness, a frontier where much adventure occurs, and where the remaining Necromancer Houses might be hiding. Where the circle ends is where the Great Forest begins: an endless sea of green, massive trees reaching up to the heavens, a whole ecosystem vaster than all the known world, yet might there be other islands in the oceanic jungle beyond? What else lies among the endless boughs? And underneath all of this is the bubbling up refuse of ages thought to be long forgotten, ruins ancient beyond memory suddenly appearing and having always been there at the same time. The Deathless Prince may yet live up to his name.