Karameikos - Vaults of Pandius

The History of KarameikosTHE TIME BEFORE THECATACLYSMIn the millennia before the Great Rain ofFire, the land today known as Karameikos satnear the pre-cataclysmic North Pole, in a coldand inhospitable land 1 . Some sparseremnants of the Brutemen race still dwelledin this northern land, where the expansionof human civilization had pushed them inthe course of the last thousands years 2 ; theircountry was only travelled, from time totime, by the occasional Oltec or Azcanpioneer, or by Blackmoorian explorers. Thetrue masters of this region were the frostgiants, who lived here in great number, anda few dragons – of which the redYealeletherveri (active around BC 5000) isremembered as one of the most powerfuland fearsome wyrms of history 3 .1TheHISTORYofThis article uses the version of Mystara’s history according towhich the Known World (Ethengar, in particular) was the NorthPole before the Great Rain of Fire (BC 3000); after the cataclysm,Blackmoor becomes the North Pole and the elven homeland ofEvergrun the South Pole. This version is found in mostsupplements of the Gazetteer series, as well as in the “Timeline ofHistory” featured in the Dungeon Master’s Sourcebook part of theHollow World campaign set; the latter’s poster Outer-World,Precataclysmic Map features instead a differently-rotated globe(with the Known World at about 30°N latitude), and is not used asa source for this article.2Brutemen, also called Neanderthals or Cavemen in the D&DBasic Set and Rules Cyclopedia, go extinct in the outer worldaround BC 10,000 (see Hollow World campaign set) and arepreserved by the Immortals in the Hollow World; however, someremnants of their race may well survive to these days, as they arefeatured in some of the adventure modules (like B5: Horror on theHill).3The tale of Yealeletherveri is told in the Son of Dawn novel (setaround AC 1010), where it is narrated by an ancient female bluedragon living in the Altan Tepes mountains, Blethinferelth;according to the story, Yealeletherveri had his lair in the AltanTepes mountains when the Blackmoor civilization was still young.I’ve further expanded the setting of Yealeletherveri’s andby Simone Neri (Zendrolion)The Great Rain of Fire changed all this,pushing the Known World from the arcticlatitude into the temperate one. Glaciersbegan to melt, frost giants started a retreattoward the highest mountains of the newarctic lands, and the country was slowlycarpeted with forests, springs, and rivers. Inthis age, the land known today asKarameikos did not border the Sea ofDread; now-submerged lands extendedmany miles to the south, well beyond thepresent day archipelagos of Ierendi andMinrothad.RISE AND FALL OF THETAYMORAN CIVILIZATIONThe first people to set foot in postcataclysmicKarameikos were humans fromcentral Brun; they crossed modern Darokinand arrived in BC 2500 from the north intothe southern Known World. They were theTaymora, who rapidly built an agriculturalcivilization of bronze-age city-states, mostlylocated along the southern coast of theKnown World (many miles south of modernKarameikos), and of which little is knowntoday 4 .Blethinferelth’s stories in my MGAZ1: The Central Altan Tepes atThe Vaults of Pandius.4The Taymora were first introduced in PC3: The Sea People,according to which they “moved south” and arrived in the “fertileplains surrounding the southern sea”, where they “establishedsettlements along the cliffs and on the plains”. From sparseelements found in the adventure “Voyage to the Bottom of theSea” (included within PC3), we may argue that - at least at thebeginning - the Taymora were a bronze-age civilization with a lovefor pastoral life. Likely they had not an empire, as canon sources37THRESHOLD: The Mystara Magazine Issue #1