History & Recent Events

How to read this history

Sanctuary is old, and most of its past survives only as legend. The scholars of the east keep a calendar, the Anno Kehjistani reckoning (AK), counted from the vision of the prophet Akarat. For recent centuries they can give firm dates; for anything older, only guesses. What follows is history as an educated person might know it: confident about the last few generations, vague and mythic about all that came before. Treat the ancient parts as your character would, as stories that may or may not be exactly true.

The campaign opens in 1265 AK.

Ages of legend

The Sin War and the forgetting

In the deep past, long before any date the scholars can fix, tradition speaks of the Sin War, a struggle over the fate of humanity itself. Whatever the truth of it, the age that followed is remembered for a great forgetting: the higher powers of Heaven and Hell passed out of mortal memory, and the world settled into the shape it holds now. Almost nothing certain survives from before that time.

The Mage Clan Wars

Ages later, in the east, human sorcery reached its height under the great mage clans of Kehjistan. Pride and ambition set them against one another, and their war (fought close to fifteen centuries ago, in the years the scholars mark as -210 to -203 AK) shattered the clans, laid waste to much of Kehjistan, and taught the world to fear magic. That fear endures; it is much of why a spellcaster is still met with suspicion. In the aftermath the surviving clans renounced their darkest practices, and the age of the mages gave way to an age of faith.

The Horadrim and the sealing of the great evils

It was in the shadow of those wars that the Horadrim were formed: a secret order of mages drawn from the broken clans, sworn to hunt the three Prime Evils loose in the world and imprison them. Over the years that followed (the eastern records place the work between roughly 1009 and 1019 AK) they ran the Three to ground one by one and sealed each away, at terrible cost. When no ordinary vault would hold what they had caught, one of their number gave his life to become a living prison. Their task done, the order faded within a few generations from a living brotherhood into a legend. One of the vaults they left behind lies beneath a monastery in far-off Khanduras, and a town later grew up over it. Its name was Tristram.

Recent years

The fall of Tristram and King Leoric

Then, within living memory, disaster. A foreign lord named Leoric came to the poor farming country of Khanduras in the name of the eastern Zakarum faith and declared himself king, taking his seat at Tristram in the old monastery. For a time he seemed a decent ruler. Then he went mad. He declared war on the wealthier kingdom of Westmarch for reasons no one understood, sent his army to be slaughtered, and turned on his own people. He is dead now, by most accounts, and Tristram with him. Survivors speak of something that rose from beneath the cathedral, neither a man nor anything natural, and they are not inclined to call it a metaphor. This is the disaster the campaign is summoned to investigate.

Shadows over the east

Nor is Tristram the only place where things have gone wrong. Travelers carry uneasy rumors out of Kehjistan, where the holy city of Kurast, seat of the Zakarum faith, is said to be troubled at its very heart. Few in the west know more than that, and fewer still can say what it means.

The present day

It is 1265 AK. Leoric has fallen, Tristram is a ruin spoken of in hushed tones, and the Horadrim, thought long extinct, have reached out to a handful of unlikely souls. Your character is one of them. What lies beneath the ruined town, and what it has to do with the older darkness in this history, is what remains to be discovered.