The Orgoth Occupation

Era beginning/end

The blackships of the Orgoth invaders were first spotted by the Khadoran Empire in the north. The Orgoth’s abominable fleets were propelled by winds summoned by dark magic, crewed by scores of indefatigable warriors, and commanded by warwitches with the power to boil the seas and call down death from the sky. Unflinching in the face of such a terrifying enemy, the mighty Tordoran navy—the envy of western Immoren—sailed out to meet them.

Not a single ship returned.

Rulers of nations throughout the continent began fortifying their borders in an effort to stave off these seemingly inhuman invaders, who fought tirelessly and without mercy. Clad in dark armor engraved with howling faces, the Orgoth were savage in battle and pitiless at any other time. Attempts at diplomacy were met only with the return of the emissaries’ severed heads—or the ripping of their screaming souls from their bodies.

With each kingdom looking first to its own defenses, unified resistance was impossible, and one by one the nations of western Immoren fell before the strange artifacts and terrible Magic of the Orgoth invaders. Warwitches called down rains of burning blood and filled the sky with green eldritch flames. Undead monstrosities marched to battle alongside fierce armored warriors (see Necromancy). Worse yet, the Orgoth carried with them blackened cages capable of capturing the souls of the fallen and using them to power their dark magic. “Your bodies in life are ours,” the Orgoth warlord Kolegzein IV famously said as the Orgoth lay siege to the great city of Caspia. “In death, your souls shall also belong to us.”

Some kingdoms held out for decades against the Orgoth onslaught, but within two centuries of the landing of the first Orgoth blackships, nearly all of western Immoren was under Orgoth occupation.

Caspia was the only one of the Thousand Cities to escape Orgoth conquest. Its walls proved insurmountable even for the might of the seemingly invulnerable invaders, and its unique geography made a protracted siege untenable. Unable to take the city, the Orgoth blockaded it and left it in isolation for the next four centuries while the rest of western Immoren suffered under their lash.

Not every other part of the continent fell to the invaders, however. In 542 BR, the dwarves of Rhul drove off an Orgoth attack so decisively that the invaders never attempted another. Similarly, the Orgoth never made any effort to strike against the heavily forested lands of Ios. No one really knows why the Iosans were spared the ravages of the Orgoth, but the invaders’ refusal to attack them contributed to the mystique of these isolated peoples.

After the Orgoth sank several Cryxian vessels, Toruk himself was roused for the first time in centuries. The Dragonfather singlehandedly laid waste to an entire fleet of Orgoth ships, demonstrating to the invaders that the island nation of Cryx would prove too potent a foe, even for them. For those among the human kingdoms on the mainland, however, the number of those who died as a result of the Orgoth Occupation was beyond reckoning. For every thousand slain or sacrificed, many others perished beneath the lash or were shipped across the sea to the Orgoth homelands as slaves.

Despite all this, life carried on, even under the cruel yoke of the Orgoth. Cities such as Corvis were built during this time, and many Immorese peoples were allowed to continue their faiths and other practices—even as slaves—so long as those practices did not interfere with the invaders’ goals.