“

One evening, at a roadside inn, I witnessed an iron-toothed witch preparing a haruspicy in the dung- and hay-covered courtyard. The goat she chose was dark, with egg-yolk yellow eyes, and when she opened it, the entrails turned green immediately, rotting under our very gaze. The young, love-struck suitor she was casting for sprayed his dinner all over his fine leather boots. Two days later, I spied a wolf eating its young, then a two-headed calf being born to a pig, and finally, a scarecrow walking its fields with murder in its eyes, carrying what I presumed was the farmer’s head in one hand and a rusty sickle in the other. These are strange times I am living in, witchy times.”

- Culloch Gull, Thane of the Grim

A Dark and Bloody Age

Welcome to Caledoria, a place of reeks and riches, robbers and royalty, haars, havers, and howffs! An imperial wave once washed over these lands, receding slowly through the years, leaving behind roads, forts, and hilly redoubts ringed by earthen berms and sharp-pointed palisades. 

But here, now, far from where the long-dead Emperor sat trying to stake his claim, it thrums with the power of a time when tribes fought one another under full moons while druids and clan chieftains whipped them into a frenzy. It is, in short, a dark and bloody age, and the high-water mark of once-proud armies, those who bore bloodied banners seeking conquest and tribute, is still visible, becoming part of Caledoria’s fabric. 

But time is cruel and creation relentless, and what once was is slowly returning to its natural state. In these lands, forests are haunted, witches warty, and you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. 

The Empire that Was

Too long would the annals of this Empire be to record here, but know that under Emperor Varion, it sought to subjugate all. He drove his legions ever outward, chasing wealth, land, and above all, glory; and for a time, they found it. Yet jealousy and strife among his closest allies and generals destroyed what he and the countless others before him had built. 

The Caledorian campaign and his failure to subjugate its people became a rallying cry for his detractors and ultimately his undoing. Emperor Varion himself fell to an assassin’s blade within his private gardens. His successor died a week later of a sudden and violent illness, his face turning a horrid shade of green as he spewed both bile and blood upon his panicked retainers. 

 In the following years, an Emperor’s reign was measured in months, if they were lucky, as the Empire became administered by assassination. Eventually, the Empire, both at home and abroad, became a shadow of its former self, clutching onto a handful of pitiful provinces and city-states where once it ruled nearly half the world. 

The Empire departed Caledoria some fifty summers ago, slinking down south like a whipped curr, its tail firmly between its legs, fleeing the island from their harbour at Castororex on the south-east coast of Loegria. There was no one there to witness the event as what little of them remained fled in the dead of night. In the following years, other Emperors tried again, leading ever-diminishing forces, but were quickly thwarted, never gaining more than twenty or thirty leagues before being pushed back to the sea from whence they came. 

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