The Ashari
The Ashari are a multiracial people divided into four tribes: Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. Each of the four tribes live in locations where the Elemental Planes have bled into the Material Plane. The Ashari make it their duty to guard these portals, ensuring that nothing dangerous is able to pass between the planes.
They take on the responsibility for other planar instabilities as well, and from time to time have been called upon to assist with Fey or Shadow planar incidents, as their powers of nature are well suited to such tasks.
Structure
The Ashari are ruled by an archdruid known as the Voice of the Tempest, a position to be held by Keyleth of the Air Ashari for the next thousand years.
Public Agenda
The Ashari are, for the most part, insular, living in remote areas and not interacting much with the outside world or even each other. Their tribes are made up of a diversity of races.
In their role as guardians of the Elemental Planes, the Ashari have developed deep connections to their respective elements that influence each Ashari's culture. Their leaders are usually skilled in druidic or other nature magics, but their societies include a variety of professions and classes aside from druids.
In addition to the elemental planes, the Ashari have always opposed any planar incursions into the prime. They specialize in closing rifts to any other plane and as such have become an integral defense of the continent against extraplanar threats.
The Ashari greet each other with the word "Kaitiakè" (meaning respect, guardian, keeper) as a sort of salute.
Assets
The cities of Vesrah, Terrah, Pyrah, and Zephrah
History
A thousand years ago, the Ashari were a wandering monastic order that studied the balance of the four elemental planes. They befriended elemental spirits and shunned the ways of the great arcane civilizations of the age of arcanum, preferring to live in the wilds at areas where the connection to the elemental planes were thinnest.
After the Calamity, when the gods left the world and the great cities of the age of arcanum fell, the Ashari were the only individuals left in all the world with both the knowledge and ability to deal with the ebbs and flows of planar instability that continue to threaten the delicate balance of the Material plane. The Ashari broke into four tribes, making their homes at the four stable rifts to each of the planes of the elements, and training druids who would shepard the world's fragile planar balance.
Following the ascension of Vecna, the Whispered One, and the destruction of the dragons during the Chroma Conclave attack on Tal'dorei, many refugees fled to the Ashari for refuge, and when the dust cleared they found themselves with thousands more individuals willing to take up the call to understand and protect the natural balance. As such their druidic teachings have become more widespread and the Ashari have made formal connections to the other small druid circles that operate throughout Tal'Dorei.
This only heightened following the creation of a permanent and stable portal to the Feywild over a decade ago, a new group made up primarily of Earth Ashari has dedicated itself to the policing of fey and shadow spirits that have no business in this realm, and of prime humanoids who naively seek to plunder the other inner planes. They have been given the force of law by the Council of Tal'dorei to stop such endeavors.
Kaitiakè
Founding Date
Approximately 100bd
Type
Religious, Druidic Circle
Demonym
Ashari
Leader
Comments