The Unhumanoid Wars
Summary
The Unhumanoid War, sometimes referred to as the Great Hunt, was a conflict between elves and many "savage" humanoid ancestries that spanned multiple crystal spheres of the Prime Material plane between the 10th and 11th centuries DR. It established the hegemony of elves and The Elven Armada as the uncontested dominant power of the known spheres for the next 400 years.History
The "savage" humanoid ancestries such as bugbears, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, ogres, and orcs, who the elves collectively called "unhumanoids"; had a long history of space exploration, flying aboard spelljammers powered by shamans. Never united under a single banner, they frequently fought each other and any other spacefaring ancestry in isolated assaults and raids. Despite the lack of coordination, the sheer number of attackers involved in those raids resulted in the devastation of entire areas inhabited by dwarves, humans, and elves, despite their best efforts to defend their homelands.After a long time of deliberation within the Council of Admirals of the Elven Imperial Fleet, it was decided that an all-out war against all ancestries deemed as unhumanoid was the only answer to end the raids permanently. This decision upheld a long-standing tradition held by the elven fleets to oppose any forces across the spheres that posed an imminent danger to elvenkind.
The first major battle was in Greyspace; a massive offensive by the elven fleets that left the opposing humanoid forces scattered and broken. This type of aggressive maneuver defined the early stages of the war, which lasted for nearly a decade and wiped out about half of the orcish fleet.
The destruction of the humanoid fleets wrought by the elves as the war progressed was near total. It resulted in the extinction of many spelljammer classes such as the kobold angelship; the goblin porcupine, which once numbered in the thousands; the orc scorpion; and the massive ogre mammoth. The few ships of those classes that survived the war were not in service of the humanoid fleets, being employed either as human trade vessels and pirate ships, or mind flayer slave carriers.
The elven forces continued pursuing the unhumanoid ancestries as they fled and sought aid from their surface-dwelling counterparts. Violent surface bombardments from the elven ships provoked the ire of powerful groundling wizards and clerics, eventually drawing the attention of deities themselves. At that point, the elven forces retreated and adopted a more restrained policy of limited ground attacks.
In the late stages of the war, the elven forces developed a method to destroy entire planets. The only known instance in which this power was used was on the world of Borka in Greyspace. On 201 CY (approximately 981 DR), the small planet, then a stronghold of orcs, goblinoids, and other ancestries, was completely destroyed by the elves. The exact method was unknown, but it combined exceptional amounts of arcane and divine magic and was said to have counted with direct assistance by the Seldarine. This event was never repeated, as the elven fleet in Greyspace was completely destroyed by a series of accidents and attacks by other surviving humanoid fleets.
The escalation in destructive power was also present in the unhumanoid side of the conflict. Orc shamans created massive abominations known as witchlight marauders that were intended as first-strike weapons that could lay waste to entire elven worlds. They were exterminated before they could be deployed, as the elven forces quickly proceeded to destroy them as soon as their existence was discovered.
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