Early History

The original inhabitants of the Flanaess were the Flan tribesmen, hardy and tough nomads whose small, scattered groups made no major civilizing efforts. Some thousand years past, their lands were increasingly invaded by two groups of attackers: the Suel and the Oeridians.

The Suel fled from internecine strife within their own lands and the great Baklunish-Suloise Wars. They moved northeast across what is now the Sea of Dust, across the formidable Hellfurnaces and Crystalmist Mountains, and spread widely across the lands before them.

The Oeridians began their migrations north for similar reasons, fleeing the same war. Both Bakluni and Suel forces employed mercenaries, bandits, and any humanoids they could hire to swell their armies. Their undisciplined rabble were often only too happy to desert and attack the Oeridians, also forcing them eastward.

The Oeridians were fierce invaders. They drove everyone else, Flan and Suel, before them. Of all the invaders, they were most suc- cessful in establishing settled lands wherever they went, and any threat the Suel might have offered to their dominance was soon eliminated.

Suel mages brought down the terrible Invoked Devastation on the hapless Bakluni to the north, but the last act of the Bakluni archmages was a fitting reply. The storms of the Rain of Colorless Fire reduced the Suel lands to choking dust and ash. There were few Suel or Bakluni left to emi- grate after that. The Oeridians had the upper hand.

The fierce Oeridian tribes hardly had matters all their own way. For two centuries, they fought the Suel and the fragmented humanoids for pos- session of the central lands of the Flanaess. The Oeridians incurred the enmity of the Flannae and demihumans of the lands as well. The arro- gant Oeridians might have been overcome by this mix of forces, but for one thing: the Suel were far more unpleasant than the Oeridians were aggressive. The Suel invaders lied, cheated, stole, enslaved, pillaged, and killed out of hand. Over time, the Flannae and demi- humans allied with the Oeridians to drive the Suel to ever more distant fringes of the Flanaess: into the northeastern Barbarian lands and into the southern jungles of Amedio and Hepmona- land.

On the main continental land mass, the Suel retained a foothold only in the southwest and in the lands that would eventually belong to the Scarlet Brotherhood.

Approximately 700 years past, the strongest Oeridian tribe-the Aerdi-settled the rich ara- ble lands east of the great Nyr Dyv and there founded the Kingdom of Aerdy, eventually to be named the Great Kingdom. The Kingdom grew for well over a century, until it stretched from the Sunndi swamplands to the south to the south- western edge of the Griff Mountains to the north; while from the islands now held by the Sea Barons to the east (where the Aerdi mixed with Flan blood), the Great Kingdom stretched westward as far as the borders of modern-day Perrenland. When the Overking of this mighty empire declared universal peace on his ceremo- nial crowning in Rauxes, he must have thought his writ, and that of his descendants, would ex- tend across those many lands forever.