Battle of the Beasts

This is a Summer Camp article written AT GREAT SPEED! It has not yet been edited, so apologies for the copious typos and small text issues.

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"Black ran the beasts from the bowels of the ground,
Red ran the blood from all that were found,
The air fell thick with screams and dust,
As the creatures slaked their foul blood lust."

— Translation of an Ancient poem describing the Battle of the Beasts

The Battle of the Beasts was a seven day skirmish that followed the Underdark Collapse, during the age of the Ancient Empire. As the tunnels beneath the ground at the heart of the Empire began to collapse, both the monstrous creatures and sentient species that had lived in them escaped to the surface.

The northern continent above the underdark was a peaceful place at the very centre of the Ancient Empire and, according to sources from the period, the settlements there had little in the way of defensive walls. Many of the creatures, maddened with fear by the world above the ground as they emerged from the crumbling tunnels, savagely attacked any they came into contact with.

The Underdark Races aid the surface dwellers

For 2 days, the settlements fought the unfamiliar creatures the best they could. Meanwhile, the sapient species from the Underdark - the goblins, the glow-elves (now known as the moon-elves) and others - who had been hiding since their escape from the collapsing U Underdark, made an agreement. They would help the Ancients to stem the monstorus tide.

Diplomatic reltations between the overland and underdark species were at an uneasy truce. Both had an agreement not to enter the others territory. Both occasionally violated that agreement, with dire consequences. So when emiserries of the newly formed Underdark Concordant presented themselves to the Empire, it was with trepidation. They proposed an alliance against the beasts, which included sharing their tactics and weapons against such creatures, in return for land for their people within the Empire.

The story of the Empire's later betrayal of the Underdark Concordant - sometimes called The Grand Betrayal - is well known to history. But in this period, the Underdark Concordant swayed the tide and, by combining forces with the Ancient Empire, many were saved from the slaughter of the Battle of the Beasts.