History of Berth

Lady Tinkerfell took her most loyal men and followed the retreating Deep Gnome army into their home territory. There, in the bowels of the earth deep beneath Coias Peak, Lady Tinkerfell confronted the Svirfneblin general. She challenged him to a duel, the winner of which would take the rights to the enormous cave system. Their battle must have been mighty, for it is said that the echoes of it could be heard all the way back in the city. At the end of it, the Deep Gnome general knelt in the dust, vanquished, with Lady Tinkerfell's blade at his throat. The Svirfneblin proved true to their word and retreated, never again to approach the surface from the Noon Lord's caverns.

After their warlike tendencies abruptly ended, Lysymes had a period of relative peace. However, their return to tranquility did not erase the anger of their neighbors and in 231 AK, a coalition of Valford kingdoms rose up to destroy the capital at Zyvia, scattering the Lysymesian people.

The Udravia Clutch was the dragonborn kingdom which ruled a large part of northern Berth during the Age of Kings. This was far from an uncontested rule, but the Udravia parriarchs maintained at least a loose hold on the majority of their territory for roughly 1000 years.

An ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt by the Udravia Clutch to conquer the Husura Isles. What the wars did achieve, however, was a redirection of growing internal hostilities towards external foes, and an upswing in patriotic fervor amongst the citizenry.

By a process that had taken the better part of two centuries, the dragonborn kingdom which ruled much of northern Berth fell to its own internal politics, fracturing into three smaller kingdoms which immediately went to war with one another for the shattered corpse of an empire that, under different circumstances, might have been great.

The Imperial conquest of the eastern continent Nionibus. Once a year, on the day the generals of the Imperial Army and the armed forces of the major cities of Nionibus came to an agreement they called the Flamecrest Accord, the Imperium stops to remember the lives lost in the nearly thirty-year-long conflict between the Gnomish Dominion of Glemvale, the human Longhurst Kingdom, and the Chatia Empire.

A struggle for the throne of the Chatia Empire began in earnest in the year after The Sundering Cough's cause was discovered and a cure was developed. The Cough had wiped out the entire Imperial family but for a pair of distant cousins, one from the uncivilized southern reaches of the Empire and one from the devastated capital city of Solaria. Ilecia Nerris of Solaria, whose claim to the throne—through a marriage two generations back on her father’s side—was tenuous at best, began making alliances among the remaining highborn nobility in the grand tradition of Konaphar Chathya nearly 900 years previously. Meanwhile, Trisnall Vakian of Blackridge, a city on the farthest southern border, established his claim more directly. Having a relatively unaffected standing army of veterans, a few key connections in the capital, and a much more direct relation to the previous Emperor—whose youngest and least favored daughter was Trisnall’s mother-in-law—he set out to claim what he saw as his right. The resulting conflict leveled what was left of Solaria, and ravaged the already thin resources of the Empire’s seat of power.

The conquest of the island of Anteall, achieved within the lifetime of Emperor Vakian’s daughter and heir, was swift and nearly bloodless. Empress Iveani’s forces surprised the Sea Dwarves by arriving under cover of the dense fog banks characteristic of the Bellbonear Deep at that time of year, cutting off all escape routes from the island both above and beneath the surface. The sudden appearance of Imperial warships off their shores, combined with the very reasonable terms that the Empress’s communications officer broadcast into the mind of their ruling assembly, persuaded Anteall’s people that becoming part of the Empire was a better option than immediate annihilation. The only casualties of the entire process were two members of the Assembly who objected to the nearly-unanimous decision to accept the terms, and a member of the sea-going warrior caste whose superior skills of perception nearly revealed the whole plan, before one of the Imperial scouts removed his head from his shoulders.