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Delvers is a game of fun and fantasy; heroic combats, spooky ruins, character interplay, and above all, excitement. 'Elatta' is a Delvers campaign setting aimed at creating an environment of haunting settings, heroic quests and dangerous magics in which umpires can set their own adventures.
In Elatta, ancient wars have left a legacy of haunted deserts - or rich green landscapes flowing over old stones and broken ruins. Ancient tombs and strongholds are filled with sinister spirits and horrific constructs that survive to awaken and prey upon unsuspecting innocents. No landscape is free of hidden, crumbling walls; every forest path is forever watched by granite faces carved into the rocks. It is a world where magic sweeps its currents through the landscape all around, changing with the seasons and with the waning of the moons.
In ages past - at least a thousand years ago - the island of Elatta was home to the Hiilaetian empire. Imperial ships plied the waters and sailed to far distant shores - armies conquered and legends were born. Hiilaetu expanded outward into the islands and even the shores of distant continents to discover a world of savage mystery. To the far west lay jungle kingdoms rich with gold and home to fanatical sects of warriors. To the east - countless islands, each home to strange customs and refined philosophies. The empire brought back the best of what it found - and sadly, it also retained the worst.
The Imperium was an age of endlessly refined ritual and culture - and as time wore on, the rituals became more important that the people caught within them. Military duties were placed in the hands of barbarian mercenaries to free the nobility for their endless vendettas, assassinations, and duels - to free the Imperial court for its dances and its satins, its lace and its debauchery. The common people grew indolent on the tribute showered from abroad. Finally, as administration was placed into the hands of freed slaves and foreign hirelings, the Imperium became ripe to fall.
Court intrigues led to civil war - the 'mage wars', where each noble family tried to carve its own tiny empire using new-found magic as their weapons of choice. Weakened, the empire left itself open to invasion from the outside world.
The Fall of the empire took one long and bloody century. While a shrunken court upheld the ancient rituals, barbarian 'Patricians' divided the empire amongst themselves. Western fleets invaded and conquered half of the Elattan isle, only to be met by pirate alliances come to loot the fabulous wealth of the Imperial cities and settle the unfarmed land.
Finally, the empire was gone - all save a tiny principality still strutting with ancient and unwarranted grandeur. Elatta itself had become home to five kingdoms, each dynamic, warlike and innovative. They took the basis of imperial science, its traditions of swordsmanship and magic and blended them with the cultures of their far flung homes. To the north lay Akomar, the realm of the pirate kings. To the south, the Kingdom of Tsu with its crisp art and polished philosophies. The Tiger kings of Gesht ruled a strip of the western coast, the black-skinned warriors slowly mingling with the paler native breeds. The east coast and the central lands were the domain of the Celenian dynasty - hard fighting southerners with rigid codes of honour and war.
The warlike kingdoms were engaged in continuous war for the next two hundred years, fortunes waxing and waning with the passing of the years. The stalemate remained in force until the Hiilaetian emperor Roskeld the 19th ascended to the shrunken 'Imperial' throne.
Insane and brilliant, tall, slim and commanding, Roskeld combined the cruel sophistication of his Hiilaetian mother with the drive and ambition of a Celenian father. Kindling an alliance between Celenia and the pirate kings, he orchestrated the conquest of the entire Elattan isle. Is so doing, he founded a new school of magic - the school of two-sided mirrors - which dredged ancient magic spells up from Hiilaetu's past.
With a renewed empire in place, Roskeld suddenly faced a rebellion from the Imperial Sorcerer-general, the custodian of the School of two-sided mirrors. A civil war split the new-formed nation, and in his madness, Roskeld opened a fissure into another world, there to summon allied to win back his crumbling throne.
Demons from an alternative world poured through the fissure into Elatta, unleashing plagues, earthquakes a devastating storms. In a single night, the great cities of Elatta were destroyed, the populaces slain or scattered to the winds. Where the demons settled, the lands themselves began to change, warping horribly into the semblance of the creature's alien home; the earth itself became poisoned, and plants and animals mutated into horrific forms. Those humans caught inside demonic terrain became twisted fiends - slaves to the demons and helplessly insane.
In a massive battle about the imperial capital, the combined armies of Elatta met to drive the demons back. The fissure between worlds was banished by the combined efforts of Elatta's sorcerers - but at the cost of the lives of all the continents great captains, great sorcerers, and almost all of her fighting men.
The threat of the demonscape had been destroyed - but Elattan civilization was at an end. Of the island's cities, not a single one remained. The towns had been plague struck and mutated - the lands and weather patterns drastically changed. The few survivors flung themselves into the task of simply learning to survive; courtiers became nomads, and soldiers hunted food. National and racial boundaries disappeared and scattered tiny communities settled amidst the ruins of a broken world.
And then came three hundred years of peace.