World Of Midgard Lore Part 1
1: Preamble
Stand forth, heroes of Midgard.
Stand forth and hear the tales of battles past.
List, brave ones, and you shall hear of the follies of men and the darkness that swept our land.
You shall know what honorable blood watered the ground beneath your feet.
You shall know the harrowing brawls that created our realm.
2: The Savage Ages
You who stand before me cannot know the horror of the ages past, when man cut down man in search of nothing more than a patch of land, a cow, or a pathetic cluster of hovels.
These were the savage times.
The lawless times.
Before the Treaty of the Fallen Oak. Before the Swarm.
Before even the Schism of Midgard.
In those days, there were no villages or towns, but only itinerant factions who carved out territory by force.
They had no code but survival. Survival and conquest.
In these days, there were bands of Orcs that dwelled in the caves that dotted the sides of mountain ranges.
They lurked in the shadows, sharpening their blades and the edges of their shields.
These clans of ashen warriors subsisted for ages on the mushrooms and weeds of the rocky slopes and the wind-toughened meat of mountain beasts.
No living being dared accost these Orcs, who were renowned even there as vicious and unblinking fighters.
The lower mountain regions were theirs, but they longed to expand outward into the arable plains, lush woods, and plentiful shoreline.
To this end, a family of Orcs, that of Ofren the Bold, rose to power to unite the fractious warriors.
In the upper heights of the farthest of mountain ranges of Midgard, separated from the cave Orcs by miles, lived the proud Mountain Dwarves, who wore the skins of snow predators for warmth and hewed axe-blades from the diamond-solid rock found only in the highest summits of their homeland.
The Dwarves of this region had for centuries been led by a single line of stoic kings, a line that would eventually lead to the brave elder Dwarf, Gorst.
At the time of Gorst’s ascension to power, the fiercely independent Dwarf clans wanted nothing more than an isolated place in the stratosphere of their mountain home.
These ranges were theirs, and they were content to leave the Orcs in the lesser mountain systems, so long as they were left in peace.
History would force their hands, however, and bring them …
