Jistka Imperium
The Jistka Imperium was the first nation to rise in the Inner Sea region during the Age of Anguish, circa –4120 AR. It controlled or influenced all of northwestern Garund and even some of southwestern Avistan. The rise of Osirion, however, coincided with the decline of Jistka, as many of Jistka’s trading partners in the east opted for shorter trade routes with Osirion. Many of this empire’s contributions to history were lost to conquest, assimilation by the Osirians, and the relentless desert sands.
The technologically adept and ruthlessly expansionistic nation known as the Jistka Imperium was the first major human civilization to emerge after Earthfall and the subsequent ash-clouded Age of Darkness. Though it endured for a mere 700 years before its demise, the empire was highly influential in bringing humanity back to the surface of Golarion—albeit through conquest and dominion—and at its peak Jistka’s borders spanned from current-day southern Cheliax to eastern Rahadoum. The rise of Ancient Osirion eventually spelled the downfall of Jistka in –2764 AR, and since then the ancient kingdom’s ruins have remained largely unexplored, most having been destroyed by soldiers of Ancient Osirion or buried beneath the desert sands.
History Of Jistka
Though Jistka itself was highly advanced in the fields of sciences and civil ideologies, its history relied more on legend and hearsay than actual fact. All citizens—even scholars—used an ancient series of texts known as the Poleiheira to trace their heritage to a small group of primitive mythological hero-figures referred to as the Ancestors, who lived sometime in the late years of the Age of Darkness and up to the founding of the Jistka Imperium. In the times of the first Ancestors, humans had just begun to reemerge from their protective caves and subterranean dwellings to once again walk the ash-strewn lands of Golarion. During this bleak era, perpetual clouds of soot and dust still blanketed the sky, and only those tribes of humans dwelling near the equinox were able to stand the constant chill of a land without a reliable sun to provide light and heat.
Among these scattered tribes was that of the clever and ruthless hero Tiandra. She focused her squabbling and unorganized pastoral tribe and its immediately neighboring peoples on exacting revenge against a select Azlanti citadel that still stood on the nearby shores of the Arcadian Ocean in defiance of the chaos wrought by Earthfall. A scant few Azlanti remained in this crooked and swiftly decaying tower, having endured nearly a thousand years of darkness in their lonely fortress with little intrusion. Tiandra and her primitive tribe had seen the tower and thought to claim it, superstitiously thinking that whoever dwelled within it must have brought the plague that was Earthfall and its subsequent era of ash, and wanting that power for themselves.
The Azlanti survivors, starving and demoralized, put up only the most pathetic of a resistance, and were quickly slaughtered by the needlessly enraged Tiandra. She ordered her fellow tribespeople to gather what few remaining relics they could find in the citadel—including books, furniture, and whatever else they could carry off—burn the building down, and hide the commandeered artifacts in a cave complex sacred to the Ancestors, so they could study the power they had just inherited. However, the Ancestors were illiterate, and even the wisest among the tribespeople proved unequal to the task of interpreting the “magic scratches.” And so the writings and relics of Azlant were promptly forgotten, with generations passing before anyone would ever set their eyes on these pieces of the past again.
According to Jistkan hagiography, it was an inquisitive and strange young man named Arustun who, along with his older brother Ejanos, rediscovered the Azlanti treasures in the Cave of Tiandra in approximately –4160 AR. Ejanos initially snatched up the scrolls and opened their seals with the intention of using them for kindling, but Arustun knew these strange findings held too much importance to be burned as fuel, and so he contested his brother’s claim. A fight swiftly broke out between them, with Arustun inadvertently slaying his brother in his attempt to take the relics. With his elder’s death, however, Arustun suddenly gained the ability to understand the writings and gleaned more than he could possibly have imagined, quickly absorbing all there was to know from these sparse treasures of Azlanti lore while in the cave. Whether the source of his ability to interpret such texts was sheer acumen or the divine favor of some elder god that smiled upon the murderous brother, none can say, but when the young man brought his newfound knowledge back to his tribespeople, he also brought with him the gift of civilization. Arustun’s miraculous insight that turned the Azlanti scrawls into a readable text enabled Jistka to take the first steps out of subsistence in the dark and into the coming sunrise. But the fragments of knowledge were not enough to sate Arustun’s newfound hunger for enlightenment.
Along with help from his friend Venistos and his wife Mirnura, Arustun crafted a ship for himself and his favored companions to sail the Inner Sea, and for years he traveled from shore to shore in search of knowledge that would enhance what he had gleaned from Tiandra’s stolen Azlanti texts. From the shadowbound warrior-lords of ancient Nidal to the magnificent Sky Citadels of the dwarves, Arustun’s travels took him far across the lands of Avistan and Garund, and he recruited numerous allies in his quest for civilization. During this time, he recorded everything he saw and learned—as well as the legends of his people—in his extensive journals, tomes that would later be referred to collectively as the Poleiheira. After he had exhausted those lands around the Inner Sea, the talented hero even managed to learn some of the forgotten magic of the fallen Azlanti and Thassilonian wizards, and used the arcana to travel the planes, most notably that of the Eternal City of Axis. It was there that Arustun finalized his plans for the empire he had received visions of building. After his long odyssey he returned home in –4120 AR with scores of foreign associates and newfound allies in tow. He would name the capital of the Jistka Imperium after his beloved wife, who had remained at the site of his departure and helmed the construction of the city during his absence.
The tales of Arustun and his companions were known throughout Jistka thanks to the widely printed Poleiheira, and while most Jistkans regarded some of Arustun’s more fantastical stories as somewhat exaggerated, all cherished the books as the first heralds of civilization since the mysterious cataclysm that had brought on the Age of Darkness. The Poleiheira formed the basis for the early Jistkan government, an imperialistic monarchy focused primarily on expansion and technological advancement, heedless of the blood spilt in the process of such endeavors. The ruler of Jistka was called the inperantike—a title equivalent to emperor—with the first inperantike cited as being Arustun. Subsequent inperantikes were selected from among the most dignified Jistkan military officers or members of the magistrate, and the individual was ratified by the Honorat—the eldest and highest-ranking officials of the Imperium at the death of the previous incumbent.
Thanks largely to Arustun’s planar travels, Jistka was home to powerful, magic-wielding magistrates who made pacts with otherworldly allies (particularly genies) to guard the nation’s borders and spread its influence. The scriptures’ depictions of inevitables, the judge-servants of Axis, led to the development of Jistka’s infamous artificer caste. The artificers crafted increasingly elaborate mechanisms and golem guardians for the Jistka Imperium, using summoning magic to call forth elementals whose spirits they bound to their constructs.
During the middle period of the Jistka Imperium, Arustun these two factions—the magistrates and the artificers—constantly clashed and vied for power, with the former relying on political maneuvering and extraplanar allegiances to gain the upper hand, and the latter concentrating their efforts on the manufacture of golems and other highly advanced war machines. As the Jistka Imperium expanded, the magistrates firmly established their most prominent holdings in northern Garund, where genies were noticeably more prevalent, and they often put efreet and warlike shaitan at the command of their impressive armies of Jistkan legionnaires. Though many magistrates knew the risks involved with hiring such powerful outsiders to command their soldiers, few doubted their ability to control outsiders or heeded the warnings of their advisors, as the prospect of supremacy and domination blinded them to their own hazardous ventures. The artificers, on other hand, built the majority of their golemworks factories in the Jistkan territories of southern Avistan. An intricate caste system separated artificers into different levels of influence and importance. The worker-artificers made up the lowest class of miners, forgers, and other laborers, and these citizens typically held the least power. Priest-artificers were revered as much for their connections to the Outer Planes as for their prowess with divine magic, and they often practiced their prayers and miracles at vast temple-forges, where they would bless particularly powerful golems with powers granted by their mysterious gods. Judge-artificers commanded the legions of golem soldiers that served as northern Jistka’s armies, and it was they who first started using the Imperium’s legendary ivory batons to control the automaton troops. The distinct rift between the magistrates and artificers of Jistka had profound effects on the rest of the nation as well, as in its later years corruption became rampant in the upper echelons of Jistkan society, even as far up as the position of the inperantike itself. Though the inperantike was not formally determined via a hereditary line, rulers found it to their personal benefit to name their successor in a testament upon honorable retirement rather than letting others make the decision upon their death, and thus many children and kin found themselves thrust into the headship of Jistka by rulers who sought to keep their family in power. Political magnates and military victors married into an increasingly entangled web of genealogies, houses, and clans, generally called the “imperial houses.” Before long, forged testaments and assassins were the major tools of ascendancy utilized by would-be inperantikes—all of whom boasted real or faked connections to royal lineages as part of their justification for power. Scholars of the time warned their leaders that given such corruption and the rapid rate at which the empire was expanding, it could not possibly support its scattered and varied peoples for long. To make matters worse, signs of civilization to the east were sure to hinder Jistka’s economic arrangements with distant trading partners. None of the nation’s rulers were willing to halt or even slow their efforts, however, and with each passing decade the political structure of Jistka weakened as the empire spread itself thin.
It wasn’t until –3470 AR with the emergence of Ancient Osirion to the east that the rulers of Jistka realized they may have overestimated their own nation’s importance. The imperium’s genies began to betray the Jistkans both of their own accord and after being enslaved by Ancient Osirion’s necromancers, the Usij. At this point, both the artificers and the magistrates of Jistka knew it was time to put aside their petty squabbling and act. The talented engineers and binders of the golemworks consulted their priest-artificers, who made pacts with the rulers of the evil Outer Planes to bolster their legions of golems. By infusing the constructs with fiend-tainted compounds and fueling them with the spirits of daemons, devils, and demons, the artificers were able to make semi-intelligent behemoth golems that could stand against Ancient Osirion’s divs and necromantic elemental outsiders. Meanwhile, the magistrates built towering fortresses along their borders, including wonders such as the Jaizun Citadel, to focus the powers of their elementalists and their extraplanar allies, and crafted potent items such as the rings of the weary sky to control wild elementals.
These developments came too late, however. When the Pharaoh of Forgotten Plagues and his cruel necromantic advisors captured a particularly powerful efreeti commander from the armies of Jistka in –3064 AR, they turned the outsider into a terrifying undead ghul and made him the carrier of a disease called the Night Plague. This deadly affliction specifically affected only the members of Jistka’s widespread and convoluted royal houses, and when the enslaved genie traitor beset these nobles with the plague, it was only a matter of time before their previous feuds reemerged amid the resulting chaos. These feuds were further fueled by the plague’s revelations about which self-proclaimed royal houses were legitimate and which were frauds. Over the next 3 centuries, the winnowing of the Jistkans’ most able rulers eroded further into infighting and then all-out succession wars, which finally spelled that empire’s ultimate doom. The rulers of Ancient Osirion—with the help of their new allies among the Tekritanin League—either absorbed or obliterated the Garundi holdings of Jistka, and those scattered peoples who did not submit to their new rulers’ whims either perished or fled, leaving their once-powerful Imperium in shambles and its treasures and lore lost to history. JISTKA TODAY Little remains of the sprawling Jistka Imperium, its cities either having been burned to rubble by legions of Ancient Osirian and Tekritanin soldiers or buried beneath the history-erasing sands of the Rahadoumi desert. The conquerors who spelled the end for Jistka cared little for the failing empire they absorbed, destroying countless acres of farmlands and settlements in their efforts to wipe the empire from the history books. Ancient Osirion’s devastating touch can still be seen in the landscapes even today—the Path of Salt on Rahadoum’s northern shores still proves infertile thousands of years after its razing, and the once-mighty Jaizun Citadel (now known as the Citadel of the Weary Sky) is little more than a crater after Ahriman, the Lord of Divs himself, snuffed the tower from existence.
Many of the ruins that did remain in the wake of Jistka’s collapse were used by the Ancient Osirians to build their own metropolises, which would later become Rahadoumi holdings millennia afterward. In southern Avistan, the towering golemworks and forge-cities steadily crumbled as their artificer masters abandoned the structures, and a series of violent earthquakes near the end of the imperium’s demise buried many Jistkan temple-foundries beneath tons of dirt and rock. Some conspiracy-minded scholars speculate that the fiend-tainted golems constructed in the later years of the Jistka Imperium may possess some link to the rise of infernal rule in modern-day Cheliax, but most researchers dismiss the idea as preposterous, citing a distinct lack of evidence.
The Chelish cities of Corentyn and Westcrown both sport several pieces of Jistkan architecture in some of their buildings, and in 4589 the Hellknights reorganized their ranks after the legions of Jistka. For the most part, however, this ancient empire has had little influence on the nations of the Inner Sea today, and its touch can only be felt clearly when one delves in the buried ruins of its cities, where ancient golems still protect lost treasures for masters who have long since perished.
Among these scattered tribes was that of the clever and ruthless hero Tiandra. She focused her squabbling and unorganized pastoral tribe and its immediately neighboring peoples on exacting revenge against a select Azlanti citadel that still stood on the nearby shores of the Arcadian Ocean in defiance of the chaos wrought by Earthfall. A scant few Azlanti remained in this crooked and swiftly decaying tower, having endured nearly a thousand years of darkness in their lonely fortress with little intrusion. Tiandra and her primitive tribe had seen the tower and thought to claim it, superstitiously thinking that whoever dwelled within it must have brought the plague that was Earthfall and its subsequent era of ash, and wanting that power for themselves.
The Azlanti survivors, starving and demoralized, put up only the most pathetic of a resistance, and were quickly slaughtered by the needlessly enraged Tiandra. She ordered her fellow tribespeople to gather what few remaining relics they could find in the citadel—including books, furniture, and whatever else they could carry off—burn the building down, and hide the commandeered artifacts in a cave complex sacred to the Ancestors, so they could study the power they had just inherited. However, the Ancestors were illiterate, and even the wisest among the tribespeople proved unequal to the task of interpreting the “magic scratches.” And so the writings and relics of Azlant were promptly forgotten, with generations passing before anyone would ever set their eyes on these pieces of the past again.
According to Jistkan hagiography, it was an inquisitive and strange young man named Arustun who, along with his older brother Ejanos, rediscovered the Azlanti treasures in the Cave of Tiandra in approximately –4160 AR. Ejanos initially snatched up the scrolls and opened their seals with the intention of using them for kindling, but Arustun knew these strange findings held too much importance to be burned as fuel, and so he contested his brother’s claim. A fight swiftly broke out between them, with Arustun inadvertently slaying his brother in his attempt to take the relics. With his elder’s death, however, Arustun suddenly gained the ability to understand the writings and gleaned more than he could possibly have imagined, quickly absorbing all there was to know from these sparse treasures of Azlanti lore while in the cave. Whether the source of his ability to interpret such texts was sheer acumen or the divine favor of some elder god that smiled upon the murderous brother, none can say, but when the young man brought his newfound knowledge back to his tribespeople, he also brought with him the gift of civilization. Arustun’s miraculous insight that turned the Azlanti scrawls into a readable text enabled Jistka to take the first steps out of subsistence in the dark and into the coming sunrise. But the fragments of knowledge were not enough to sate Arustun’s newfound hunger for enlightenment.
Along with help from his friend Venistos and his wife Mirnura, Arustun crafted a ship for himself and his favored companions to sail the Inner Sea, and for years he traveled from shore to shore in search of knowledge that would enhance what he had gleaned from Tiandra’s stolen Azlanti texts. From the shadowbound warrior-lords of ancient Nidal to the magnificent Sky Citadels of the dwarves, Arustun’s travels took him far across the lands of Avistan and Garund, and he recruited numerous allies in his quest for civilization. During this time, he recorded everything he saw and learned—as well as the legends of his people—in his extensive journals, tomes that would later be referred to collectively as the Poleiheira. After he had exhausted those lands around the Inner Sea, the talented hero even managed to learn some of the forgotten magic of the fallen Azlanti and Thassilonian wizards, and used the arcana to travel the planes, most notably that of the Eternal City of Axis. It was there that Arustun finalized his plans for the empire he had received visions of building. After his long odyssey he returned home in –4120 AR with scores of foreign associates and newfound allies in tow. He would name the capital of the Jistka Imperium after his beloved wife, who had remained at the site of his departure and helmed the construction of the city during his absence.
The tales of Arustun and his companions were known throughout Jistka thanks to the widely printed Poleiheira, and while most Jistkans regarded some of Arustun’s more fantastical stories as somewhat exaggerated, all cherished the books as the first heralds of civilization since the mysterious cataclysm that had brought on the Age of Darkness. The Poleiheira formed the basis for the early Jistkan government, an imperialistic monarchy focused primarily on expansion and technological advancement, heedless of the blood spilt in the process of such endeavors. The ruler of Jistka was called the inperantike—a title equivalent to emperor—with the first inperantike cited as being Arustun. Subsequent inperantikes were selected from among the most dignified Jistkan military officers or members of the magistrate, and the individual was ratified by the Honorat—the eldest and highest-ranking officials of the Imperium at the death of the previous incumbent.
Thanks largely to Arustun’s planar travels, Jistka was home to powerful, magic-wielding magistrates who made pacts with otherworldly allies (particularly genies) to guard the nation’s borders and spread its influence. The scriptures’ depictions of inevitables, the judge-servants of Axis, led to the development of Jistka’s infamous artificer caste. The artificers crafted increasingly elaborate mechanisms and golem guardians for the Jistka Imperium, using summoning magic to call forth elementals whose spirits they bound to their constructs.
During the middle period of the Jistka Imperium, Arustun these two factions—the magistrates and the artificers—constantly clashed and vied for power, with the former relying on political maneuvering and extraplanar allegiances to gain the upper hand, and the latter concentrating their efforts on the manufacture of golems and other highly advanced war machines. As the Jistka Imperium expanded, the magistrates firmly established their most prominent holdings in northern Garund, where genies were noticeably more prevalent, and they often put efreet and warlike shaitan at the command of their impressive armies of Jistkan legionnaires. Though many magistrates knew the risks involved with hiring such powerful outsiders to command their soldiers, few doubted their ability to control outsiders or heeded the warnings of their advisors, as the prospect of supremacy and domination blinded them to their own hazardous ventures. The artificers, on other hand, built the majority of their golemworks factories in the Jistkan territories of southern Avistan. An intricate caste system separated artificers into different levels of influence and importance. The worker-artificers made up the lowest class of miners, forgers, and other laborers, and these citizens typically held the least power. Priest-artificers were revered as much for their connections to the Outer Planes as for their prowess with divine magic, and they often practiced their prayers and miracles at vast temple-forges, where they would bless particularly powerful golems with powers granted by their mysterious gods. Judge-artificers commanded the legions of golem soldiers that served as northern Jistka’s armies, and it was they who first started using the Imperium’s legendary ivory batons to control the automaton troops. The distinct rift between the magistrates and artificers of Jistka had profound effects on the rest of the nation as well, as in its later years corruption became rampant in the upper echelons of Jistkan society, even as far up as the position of the inperantike itself. Though the inperantike was not formally determined via a hereditary line, rulers found it to their personal benefit to name their successor in a testament upon honorable retirement rather than letting others make the decision upon their death, and thus many children and kin found themselves thrust into the headship of Jistka by rulers who sought to keep their family in power. Political magnates and military victors married into an increasingly entangled web of genealogies, houses, and clans, generally called the “imperial houses.” Before long, forged testaments and assassins were the major tools of ascendancy utilized by would-be inperantikes—all of whom boasted real or faked connections to royal lineages as part of their justification for power. Scholars of the time warned their leaders that given such corruption and the rapid rate at which the empire was expanding, it could not possibly support its scattered and varied peoples for long. To make matters worse, signs of civilization to the east were sure to hinder Jistka’s economic arrangements with distant trading partners. None of the nation’s rulers were willing to halt or even slow their efforts, however, and with each passing decade the political structure of Jistka weakened as the empire spread itself thin.
It wasn’t until –3470 AR with the emergence of Ancient Osirion to the east that the rulers of Jistka realized they may have overestimated their own nation’s importance. The imperium’s genies began to betray the Jistkans both of their own accord and after being enslaved by Ancient Osirion’s necromancers, the Usij. At this point, both the artificers and the magistrates of Jistka knew it was time to put aside their petty squabbling and act. The talented engineers and binders of the golemworks consulted their priest-artificers, who made pacts with the rulers of the evil Outer Planes to bolster their legions of golems. By infusing the constructs with fiend-tainted compounds and fueling them with the spirits of daemons, devils, and demons, the artificers were able to make semi-intelligent behemoth golems that could stand against Ancient Osirion’s divs and necromantic elemental outsiders. Meanwhile, the magistrates built towering fortresses along their borders, including wonders such as the Jaizun Citadel, to focus the powers of their elementalists and their extraplanar allies, and crafted potent items such as the rings of the weary sky to control wild elementals.
These developments came too late, however. When the Pharaoh of Forgotten Plagues and his cruel necromantic advisors captured a particularly powerful efreeti commander from the armies of Jistka in –3064 AR, they turned the outsider into a terrifying undead ghul and made him the carrier of a disease called the Night Plague. This deadly affliction specifically affected only the members of Jistka’s widespread and convoluted royal houses, and when the enslaved genie traitor beset these nobles with the plague, it was only a matter of time before their previous feuds reemerged amid the resulting chaos. These feuds were further fueled by the plague’s revelations about which self-proclaimed royal houses were legitimate and which were frauds. Over the next 3 centuries, the winnowing of the Jistkans’ most able rulers eroded further into infighting and then all-out succession wars, which finally spelled that empire’s ultimate doom. The rulers of Ancient Osirion—with the help of their new allies among the Tekritanin League—either absorbed or obliterated the Garundi holdings of Jistka, and those scattered peoples who did not submit to their new rulers’ whims either perished or fled, leaving their once-powerful Imperium in shambles and its treasures and lore lost to history. JISTKA TODAY Little remains of the sprawling Jistka Imperium, its cities either having been burned to rubble by legions of Ancient Osirian and Tekritanin soldiers or buried beneath the history-erasing sands of the Rahadoumi desert. The conquerors who spelled the end for Jistka cared little for the failing empire they absorbed, destroying countless acres of farmlands and settlements in their efforts to wipe the empire from the history books. Ancient Osirion’s devastating touch can still be seen in the landscapes even today—the Path of Salt on Rahadoum’s northern shores still proves infertile thousands of years after its razing, and the once-mighty Jaizun Citadel (now known as the Citadel of the Weary Sky) is little more than a crater after Ahriman, the Lord of Divs himself, snuffed the tower from existence.
Many of the ruins that did remain in the wake of Jistka’s collapse were used by the Ancient Osirians to build their own metropolises, which would later become Rahadoumi holdings millennia afterward. In southern Avistan, the towering golemworks and forge-cities steadily crumbled as their artificer masters abandoned the structures, and a series of violent earthquakes near the end of the imperium’s demise buried many Jistkan temple-foundries beneath tons of dirt and rock. Some conspiracy-minded scholars speculate that the fiend-tainted golems constructed in the later years of the Jistka Imperium may possess some link to the rise of infernal rule in modern-day Cheliax, but most researchers dismiss the idea as preposterous, citing a distinct lack of evidence.
The Chelish cities of Corentyn and Westcrown both sport several pieces of Jistkan architecture in some of their buildings, and in 4589 the Hellknights reorganized their ranks after the legions of Jistka. For the most part, however, this ancient empire has had little influence on the nations of the Inner Sea today, and its touch can only be felt clearly when one delves in the buried ruins of its cities, where ancient golems still protect lost treasures for masters who have long since perished.
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