Kuroshar

Kuroshar is little known, except possibly for a rare explorer from neighboring Cernoa or Halaan.

Wild elves peer through the trees at a herd of domesticated mammoths tended by vampire shepherds. The white mass of the Great Glacier looms in the distance far to the north across the steppe.
Kuroshar is little known, except possibly for a rare explorer from neighboring Cernoa or Halaan .
By the end of the time of the Five Emperors (c. 200,000 B.C. to c. 15,000 B.C.), Kuroshar was ruled by the Emperor of the Light, a white dragon who kept the local elves wild, occasionally enslaving and torturing them, and feeding them to his servants. The Emperor was always careful not to over-hunt the elves, always leaving enough for large populations to survive. At the same time, he carefully hunted down and exterminated any non-elves in the country. He kept the remaining elves surviving as hunters and gatherers.
By c. 18000 B.C., a revival of the outlawed practice of druidism swept Kuroshar. A huge number of Kuroshari secretly trained to become druids. Despite being hunted by the Emperor’s secret police, the movement grew. The druids eventually began to preach a message of freedom and an end to the Emperor. As the druids grew in power and confidence, the people prospered, aware that at any moment, the Emperor could appear and destroy them all. Within a few years, the Kuroshari rebelled, their long elven lives giving them patience to wear the dragon lord down with raids and guerilla tactics. When after centuries, they destroyed the Emperor in one final assault, it sent shockwaves across the world. The Kuroshari elves had done what no one thought possible. Independence movements emerged everywhere, and those few refuges too powerful to fall to the Imperium began to openly support their resistance: supplies, recruits, and safety could now be found in Cernoa, the Carentan Forest, and Tanatra. In time, all five of the draconic Imperia would be overthrown and destroyed. In the aftermath of the war, a dark ages fell. For all their evil tyranny, the dragon-emperors had at least imposed order, and maintained trade and communications. Now, free to do whatever they wanted, millions of people began to travel, living nomadic lives. The druidic movement drove them on, extolling the virtues of the unconstrained life, along with increasingly radicalized preaching.
Providing support and an early model for the freedom fighters, the Kuroshari had largely been ignored during the war; the remaining dragon-emperors too busy putting down rebellions to re-take the northern Empire of the Light. For that reason, the Kuroshari were able to support other independence movements, providing mercenaries experienced in hunting dragons, as well as knowledge of living off the land.
In the millenia-long dark ages after the dragons were defeated, Kuroshar became isolated from the rest of the world. By the time ausrani trade caravans began exploring, Kuroshar had become a very different place.
No one knows where the infection started, or where it came from, but within a few thousand years of their successful rebellion against the Emperor of the Light, the Kuroshari were fighting a very different enemy. It is unknown whether it was a single vampire or a group, but sometime after the revolution, vampirism began to spread through the Kuroshari tribes. There was presumably a resistance to the vampires, possibly even a centuries-long war. No one knows. What is known is that a few thousand years after the Last Rebellion, nomadic ausrani caravans exploring Kuroshar found only vampires. Those few that returned alive, that is. Kuroshari have been seen from a distance managing great herds of mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses, presumably for their blood.
Ecology Pine forest in the south, shifting to tundra in the north. The Great Glacier which spans the width of Kuroshar in the far north is rumored to be impassable. Teeming with an enormous diversity of wildlife, Kuroshar is home to mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, saber-toothed cats, seven foot ground sloths, and all other manner of Pleistocene life, in addition to the more common deer, wolves, boar, etc.