Nianze Myths

This is a series of a story-like history for Nianze. It’s meant to be written from the viewpoint of Yurin’s history books. Therefore nothing of this must be true. It’s only the common knowledge on the advanced level. Please read this text as it’s a story and imagine that this is a fact book and remember that your character¹ may not know everything I write here, but mostly this is the common view and this is what the skilled or school-trained person in Yurin knows. But know that a very selected few actually go to school in this world to, so most have a little wicked view of the history and therefore you can, as an example, twist this text and remove some elements if you want to play a character who you don’t imagine to have been around scholars or been to a school of any kind.

This is the rewrite with some changes. In the end I’ll put a link to the other rewrites. If you want to compare the two different versions you’ll have to do it on your own though. Also note that I’ve changed some facts because I liked it better this way and to better suit other stuff I’ve come up with for my world.

Comments are most welcome as usual.

The Prehistoric Ages

Chapter Four – The Stray Age

This age is also called “The Age of Heroes”, but it’s mostly fairy tales and legends of different kind. But some also call this age for “The Dark Dawn of Men”, and dark was it indeed. With Yurin scarred and severely wounded, the planet crumbled in pain. The skies were dark and glowing and fragments from the shattered planet sometimes rained down, destroying and killing even more. Lesser Demons and their spawns were still straying around the planet trying to kill everything. Some of the Demians² still hunted them, while the Angels themselves had since long escaped from what they thought were a lost planet. Many animals, creatures and some of the races that still lived on were made extinct due to the meteor showers and the earthquakes, not to mention when the earth cracked open throwing up melted stone that destroyed even the mightiest of things. Needless to say, the planet was in great despair and chaos.

This is when heroes started to emerge. The Demians had suffered great losses in the end of the war but now the biggest threats had disappeared. Some of the bravest humans that had survived the havoc started to fight alongside with the Demians trying to cleanse the planet from the Demonic Abominations and make the planet a better place to live. In the beginning, it was only a few humans that tried to rid the planet of the abominations and monsters while most of the humans mostly ran around confused and unknowing about how to survive. When the most dangerous monsters had been eliminated and most Demons had gone into hiding, some of the humans tried to gather the other humans and find them to safer places to live on. In small groups they wandered over the planet that had begun to calm itself down, trying their best to survive. But everywhere they went they just saw big indomitable mountains or strange watery plains³, impossible to cross over them.

The Return of the Gods

It was during this time the Gods finally returned to Yurin, and showed themselves again. During the Demonic Wars they had been very passive, mostly watching what was going on on the planet, unable or unwilling to help in the struggles of the planet. Because of this the Demians and humans had never seen the Gods before and didn’t know who or what they were, so when three glowing giants just emerged out of nowhere in front of them they believed that the Demons had returned from Hell. They tried desperately to fight them only to discover that it was futile. Everyone was filled with despair and started to think that this was the end when the Gods finally spoke in chorus. They calmed down the humans and said to them that they had saved the planet from destruction. As their gratitude for this, the planet was now theirs to rule on one condition, that they were able to gather all humans left on the planet so the Gods could chose mediums among the humans to mediate their wishes for the planet.

But this task wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The humans were scattered all over the planet and nobody even knew how many of them there were left in the world in all the Chaos. The Gods said that if the humans were to inherit the planet they must do this task on their own, no matter how hard or how long the task took. If they wanted to inherit the right to rule the planet, they needed to complete the mission and prove that humanity had the right to it. So the mission started. All who had seen the Gods split into even smaller groups to gather all humans in the place all humans knew the best; where it all had begun, where The Demonic Nursery once had been. Where the nursery were nobody knows nor does anyone know any more, only that it lies somewhere on the Norrath Pace.

The Mission

There are a great many stories about how the humans were gathered. But some of them are clearly just tales, and others are most likely exaggerated stories which are impossible to determine what is true and what is not. One thing that the stories have in common though is that it took several years, maybe even decades to gather everyone. The world was still a pretty big place and nobody had any good means how to travel around quickly either. But this was the dawn of men, where the humans actually saw the world for the first time, and all its wonders. And a lot was seen during these ages, a lot of our legends and the human knowledge of the world is based on what happened during this age. This is when the very foundation of being human was drafted.

It was now many cultures also started forming, how customs and other cultural bases were created and how some believes and superstitions arose. What also started at this time were cults, humans who somehow became obsessed with demons and other strange devious creatures and started to worship them as Gods, which directly made them to Forsaken. The Forsaken gained knowledge, power and strange abilities from their Gods and used them to try to dominate and obstruct the will of the Gods. Many of those who tried to gather the humans had to fight these God Forsaken humans. Many were killed but the influences of the Demons are not that easily quelled and many of them fled. They would become a big problem later and some of their descendants are still a threat even today.⁴

When all humans finally had gathered the Gods appeared before them again. Everyone was filled with amazement and awe as they appeared in their purest form, surrounding the humans with their aura and shadowing them with their great gigantic forms. They complemented the human on their success to gather everyone; they had indeed proven their worth to inherit the planet. But before the planet was theirs they once again had to prove themselves. Their next task was to find the most powerful and greatest of them all, to find their future leaders. They told the humans that to prove to them that they were powerful enough to lead the humans they had to travel far over the world and find a sign of some sort, which would tell them where to settle. There would not be one sign, there would be many, and the journey was as important as the sign. The ones who would prove themselves to be worthy of leading mankind would also be the ones rewarded by the Gods, and mankind would inherit the planet as their own to rule.

When the Gods disappeared a great number of conflicts arose quickly. Who was the most powerful and greatest of them all? Who would lead who to where, and why should that person lead when some where perfectly capable to take care of themselves? The skies were clearing up and the monsters had almost disappeared from the planet, so why should they even bother to listen to those big Demons that tried to control them? This ended up with all humans going everywhere in every direction trying to survive on their own, completely neglecting the Gods and those who wanted to believe that the Gods would help and protect them. The few who where left with this belief, both humans as well as Demians, then decided to go hunting but this time they would go hunting humans and try to force them believe that this was the only way for the race to survive.

What follows and how it was done have a great many versions that are much disputed and with tales and legends to compete with too. During this period they also met the elves and discovered many creatures that had survived that they knew nothing about. But what happens next belongs into another age by itself, the new age; The Founding of the Nations.

Previous Chapter

Chapter One – The Creation
Chapter Two – The Bygone Ages
Chapter Three – The Demonic Age

Following Chapters

Chapter Five – The Founding of the Nations
Chapter Six – The Age of War
Chapter Seven – The Fire Wars

1. If you are a player ↩

2. The name the humans gave the Demi-Humans ↩

3. Oceans, which didn’t exist during the Demonic Ages ↩

4. To read more about the legends from this Age, see ‘The Age of Heroes’, ‘The Dawn of Men’, ‘Legends from the Stray Age’ ↩