Gucharian

Gucharia was a powerful nation south of the Cyrdian Empire, and a long-time rival of its predecessor, the kingdom of Ospia. These two nations had fought on multiple occasions, though neither had ever fully managed to subdue the other. The events that would lead to Gucharia's downfall started long before the new Empire was founded, when the future emperor Cyrdin found himself a high-ranking military officer and advisor to the king. Using his influence, he expanded Ospia's development of magic, focusing specifically on conjuration and transmutation: subjects that had gone largely underutilized by the military. At the time, both nations made extensive use of the simple and potent schools of evocation and abjuration, but Cyrdin's research brought about ways to use magic in the military that were never before seen, at least in the region.

When war inevitably broke out between Cyrdin's new empire and Gucharia, Cyrdia had the military advantage, due mostly to its use of construct soldiers, something that had previously been considered too expensive to be worth it. Gucharia's military had no experience facing such a force, but refused to adapt their tactics. Believing Cyrdia's use of constructs to be a distraction at worst, they stubbornly kept their traditional tactics in play. In the end, this would cost them the war. The Gucharians' hatred for Ospians led them to keep bitterly fighting until their population was a fraction of what it once was. Ospians then moved into the newly vacated land, leaving the Gucharians a minority in their own home.

Gucharians held a centuries-long grudge against the Cyrdian Empire, and clung to their traditions and customs as a way to retain what was left of their culture. They often had small, subtle communities in Cyrdian cities, where they kept to themselves. They rarely married outsiders, and tried to disuade other Cyrdians from intruding into their spaces.

When the Great Cataclysm came, Gucharian culture, like most other surface cultures, was lost, as surviving humans in the Darklands assimilated into new groups.