Black Collapse

Antiquity's Apocalypse

3900sc - 4200sc

What is known to modern historians as the Black Collapse was a time of a widespread crumbling of societies across northern Ethae. Taking place during the Valmon Age, between 3900sc to 4200sc, the Collapse hit the seafaring peoples of western Novyum and northern Anbar particularly hard. Cultural development was disrupted as violence erupted. Civilizations across the continent had a sharp economic downturn. Trade between regions stopped as large states broke apart into little more than isolated towns.

With little written records, or oral traditions, surviving from the time, reasons for this collapse of society remains largely unknown. Some historians believe that civilizations grew far too quickly under the umbrella of the Areian Nations then they might have naturally. Without the Elf control it was only a matter of time before mankind's self-destruction. This theory of course come from areian sentiment. Critics point to the fact that the Areian Nations had been gone for almost a millennia by the point of the Black Collapse.

A second theory looks to the Kephic Empire, and the Dwarf trade networks across the continent. Internal strife and wars with the Juhl'are and Orc had shifted the kephic people into a more isolationist society. By the Heroic Era, the once vast network had been reduced to a few strategic outposts, most of which vanished just prior to the Collapse. Fans of the Areian Nation fall theory suggest that the dwarves had only been a temporary life-support system on the wound keeping the civilized people alive for a few extra centuries at best.

Still others suggest that according to surviving records, legends and tales from the Heroic Era, just prior to the Black Collapse, saw a world in chaos. Conflicts between nations had been a regular thing and several natural disasters such as the eruption of Mount Sessil hit the surrounding regions hard. The Heroic Era is named for the many individuals that rose up during this time to defend the nations from enemies and fight monsters pushed closer to civilization by the natural disasters. While the Kephic Age was known to many as the Age of Heroes, the world could only sustain this for so many generations before a decline was inevitable.

The Heroic Era came at the end of the Kephic Age and continued into the Valmon Age. Transitioning into the Black Collapse that followed. Whichever theory is correct, perhaps all factor into it, the world entered a reset during the Collapse. For the modern historian the Black Collapse marks a transition from the age of elf and dwarf to the age of Human. The Valmon Age, of which the Black Collapse falls near the center, is the time of transition from the world of oral tradition and sparce understanding to that of a modern record keeping. As the Black Collapse fell farther behind them, the people seemed to understand the loss of their past. Written records become all important to societies. Libraries began showing up in the emerging civil centers and remember what was became a part of life to most, from the small family to the greatest nations. For all its darkness, the Black Collapse was the embers that reignited mankind into the bonfire that is the modern world.