The dawn has risen upon a new world - a world unlike that you may know. Shattered by a catastrophic impact not long after the extinction of the great thunder-lizards, Earth is not as it should be. This impact, a star falling to earth, changed not only the shape of all the lands, but also their contents. This star bore strange lights and queer crystals, changing and warping the planet on which mankind slowly arose. Continents were broken, minds shattered, even animals and plants twisted and changed. It is a strange world now - one in many ways hostile to humanity - but in the end, it is your world still.
You stand forward as one of the leaders of a growing empire of men. No longer mere tribes, nor polises, far greater than humble city-states; the mechanisms of nations in truth, of crowns and kingships and bureaucracy and the force of arms - all these things have been manifested upon the world. In fire and blood and bronze have the states of the world been forged, some using peace and the strength of their industries to grow and expand, others conquering at the point of the sword. No longer do men live in kindreds and humble hovels. Great cities of stone, populated by thousands, teem at strategic rivermouths, sprawling across fecund plains and in the passages of glowering mountain ranges. It is a time of instability, but also a strange promise. Man has come into his own, and his threat is no longer the dark things of the world, nor the brutes of the field, but his fellow humans of flesha and bone and arcane might. Will you lead your people to greatness in this new age of war, conflict, and competition, or falter and be forgotten by the histories? Come, and tell the tale of the Strength of Empires.
Straits of the Whitehills
12th of Longnight, Year 495 of the Common Era
"Signal the second to break off pursuit. We won't catch them, not unless the Father sends us the swiftest wind I've ever seen. And that would founder the Murmur, which would be a tragedy itself."
The stern sea-captain spoke brusquely, but his eyes were glad even as the ensign hurried off to run up the colors. A half dozen ships, captured or sinking, out of the ten that had come against Rivermouth. Their colors were unfamiliar, but raiders were raiders the world over. They might have made off with some loot from the shoreline, but it would be some time before they thought to engage in such foolhardy behavior again.
It had not been an engagement without loss. Despite her larger size, the Murmur of Depths had been holed in multiple places by ramming actions from the swift raiding vessels, and was being towed back upriver behind two of her sisters, deck bestrewn in corpses. Fortunately whatever the raiders had hit first had been less well defended, and so the raiders had been languid in their passage, and inclined to flee.
A new danger for the Hierarchy though. Captain Galesworn gazed after the retreating sails, sure he would see them again one day.
Coastal Raiders!
Mysterious ships bearing unfamiliar colors have struck both the Arameri Dominion and the Stalheim Hierarchy, making off with significant loot, though much of their force was destroyed by a skirmish off the coast of the Hierarchy with a Stalheimadrin naval squadron. One Farm in the Myth Allanor Agricultural District has been sacked, and an Elven Peasant carried off into bondage. An Irrigated Farm in Rivermouth has also been sacked.
Tribute Collection Rebellion!
A small military force from the Midnight Empire has been ambushed by Saladonian rebels near the mountains of the Spine, and destroyed. Emissaries to the city itself have returned with only words of defiance in their ears, and the rumble of war drums echoes in the hills and broken lands the black-skinned warriors of the Birthright call home.
Heaven's Bounty!
Great storms wrack the southlands, bringing much needed rains that cause a flourishing of both grassland and forest. In the north, unseasonably warm winter winds have led to less harsh snow-seasons, a time of plenty for all to enjoy in. All settlements produce 3 Bonus Food for the next four years.