Eight Plagues of Dovria

The Eight Plagues of Dovria is the legend of the fall of the Dovrian Empire in the early years of the Age of Anxiety. It ascribes the circumstances of the empire's dissolution to the influence of the eight Demon Lords of The Abyss as they emerged in the Material Plane via the Smouldering Rift.

Summary

The Dovrian Empire was the first great mortal civilization, situated in what is today southern and western Dreibach. An earthquake during the early years of the Age of Anxiety is said to have opened the Smouldering Rift at the southern end of its territory, creating a portal to The Abyss. Each of the eight Demon lords of the Abyss sent a different plague onto the land, resulting in the destruction of the kingdom in war, famine, and disease.
The first plague was the Plague of Exclusion, brought on by Yeenoghu. Tribalist attitudes strengthened throughout the kingdom, and nations that had once existed peacefully alongside each other began to mistrust each other. In the second plague, the Plague of Delusion, illusions spun by Lolth turned into paranoid conspiracy theories that furthered the divides between communities. The third plague, the Plague of Division, saw the influence of the Demogorgon split each of these already-divided communities in half through arbitrary ideological conflicts.
By the fourth plague (the Plague of Opportunism), a series of droughts and volcanic eruptions caused famines across the Empire. Weakened social ties and dire conditions led to a widespread rise of thieves, con artists, and cult leaders who tricked the populace into giving up what little resources they had, hoarding a significant portion of what was available while others starved. These opportunists are said to have been under the influence of Camazotz. This furthered the mistrust, and the corruption and inequality led to the Plague of Discord, influenced by Alquam. No attempt to find common ground or re-forge relationships between groups to survive the famine seemed to be successful, and the governing bodies of the Empire dissolved due to irreconcilable difficulties and an inability to solve any of Dovria's problems. Tensions rose until the sudden appearance of Orcus in the sky, carrying a scepter and a dark bell. When he struck the bell, the sixth plague (the Plague of Annihilation) plunged the empire into total civil war.
The war lasted for years, far beyond what the people should have been able to endure. The end only came when Akyishigal brought about the seventh plague, and locusts and other scavenging pests swept the lands clean in the Plague of Consumption. The few remaining survivors of the once-great civilization found themselves reduced to a life of grim subsistence: hunting, scavenging, and often stealing from each other to survive. One by one, though, each remaining band of survivors succumbed to the eighth and final plague: Zuggtmoy's devastating Plague of Rot. A disease swept through the populace that killed most people quickly, painfully, and horribly; a few seemed to survive, but were driven mad by years of nightmares and hallucinations until they died as well.

Historical Basis

The few surviving records of the downfall of the Dovrian Empire loosely follow the structure of the story of the Eight Plagues. A civil war, divided along both national and ideological lines, destroyed the civilization as it struggled to cope with the widespread natural disasters of the age. However, sages are divided on how much of the story of the plagues is literal, and how much is a metaphor crafted after the fact as a cautionary tale or to discourage the influence of demons.
The two strongest pieces of evidence for the story of the eight plagues relate to their beginning and their end. The Smouldering Rift, at the southern edge of the Verlorenwode, is an extremely dangerous locus of demonic energy, frequented by abyssal cultists and avoided by nearly everyone else. The wide woods to the north, the Verlorenwode, are infamously infested with demons, malevolent undead, awakened plants, and other strange phenomena thought to be the direct and indirect results of the Rift's influence. The ghosts of those who die there frequently remain hostile and tied to the land (seemingly for centuries), and several species of plant life have developed a malevolent sentience and even an obligate carnivorous diet.
The eighth plague and its purported "visions of the End" align with descriptions of the hallucinations common in the secondary phase of Zuggtmoyfan Wasting Disease. Scholars believe that a widespread outbreak of the disease wiped out the last remaining vestiges of the Empire in approximately the Y500s Age of Anxiety.

Variations & Mutation

It is unclear in most tellings what the Plague of Camazotz is supposed to be. The phrase is often used as a euphemism for Vampirism, and some versions of the story of the myth specifically describe the opportunists of the fourth plague as vampires. Others use the term "vampire" in a more metaphorical sense, instead describing mortals who posed as religious leaders, Archdruid or others who could offer relief from the famine for a fee. In most older retellings, the implications could be read either way.
Somewhat less commonly, other plagues are described as explicitly being the birth of a type of malevolent creature. The most common among these are harpies as the Plague of Alquam and phase spiders as the Plague of Lolth. Though Gnoll are more closely associated with Yeenoghu, the nature of the Plague of Exclusion leads to many old Human stories that describe this as the origin of the evil Orokhim clans. A few Orokh stories, particularly common among the Pack of the Black Claw and the Murder of the Mudbanks, use the Eight Plagues (most particularly the Plague of Exclusion and the Plague of Division) as either a metaphor for or an origin story of the divisions between the orokh and Nuél-orokh clans. Unlike early Gnomish and Dovrash records of the era written in clay, the woven records of the Orokhimshe have not survived, so the historical basis of any of the Eight Plagues affecting the orokhim is impossible to verify.
One of the books of the Sarastran Enchiridion is a retelling of the Eight Plagues of Dovria that explicitly describes each plague as the result of a failure to follow one of the steps of the Righteous Path. The final Plague of Rot is framed as the inevitable consequence for all those who fall from the Righteous Path; instead of visions of the end of time, they are driven mad by seeing the righteous succeed and pass into the heavens above them.

In Literature

The oldest and most well-known record of the Eight Plagues of Dovria is in the Xhaosankant, discovered in the early Y1000s ITG. The bulk of the recovered tablets from this set are dedicated to the most comprehensive accounting of the Eight Plagues yet found. They have been translated and re-compiled many times across the ages.