War Beckons...

In the mid-sixth century, Ivid V ascended the Malachite Throne. A series of subsequent unsuccessful skirmishes against Nyrond, the Iron League, and other adjoining states did not suggest to the distant Furyondians or Keolanders that the Great Kingdom offered much threat to anyone. But Nyrond knew better. Ivid V was a weak military strategist, but his diplomatic skills were considerable, and undoubtedly he had fiendish aid in drawing both the North and South Provinces and Medegia back under his influence and control. Nyrond saw, clearly, the Overking’s preparations for a great war against the western state. Yet, when the first blow came, it did not come from Rauxes. It came from Iuz; meddling fools managed to release the fiend from his imprisonment in Castle Greyhawk in 570 CY, only a year after the forces of good in Furyondy and Veluna celebrated the sack of the notorious Temple of Elemental Evil in the Gnarley Forest. Their celebrations would not last many years.

To the south, the existence of the highly secretive and paranoiac Scarlet Brotherhood was first confirmed by returning travelers in 573 CY. It seems incredible that this monastic sect of religious militarists could have escaped notice for so long, even given their isolation in the closed city of Kro Terlep and the remote plateau south of it. But while the secret of this land became more widely known, the existence of a veritable army of spies and assassins in the imperial courts of the Flanaess was not.

The marriage of the Prince of Furyondy to the daughter of the highest-ranking noble of Veluna promised to unite the states and help solve Furyondy’s internal squabbling. The Prince’s abduction, surely at the hands of Scarlet Brotherhood agents, destroyed those noble hopes. When the Provost of Veluna disappeared also, the forces of good were in some disarray. Yet no one suspected the Scarlet Brotherhood. Their red-robed emissaries had wormed their way into the good books of many rulers and nobles, beginning with the states of the Iron League. When rumors surfaced of their enslavement and martialling of armies of “savages” in Hepmonaland, men and women who should have known better dismissed such rumors. It was all too far away to be bothered with. Distant lands were not the object of their attentions. And such myopia cost the powerful states of the Flanaess very, very dear.