History, Culture & the Nations Around the Dragon Isle
Melniboné's people speak of the Young Kingdoms with a certain condescension — the label they use for the human nations clustered around their own Dragon Isle. Beyond the mapped lands lie territories few humans have ever reached: the mysterious Unknown East, the hotter country west of Shazar, and the frozen and desert edges of the world to the north and south.
Time itself is said to move in repeating cycles, and the present age was ushered in by Elric's own. Before the Melnibonéans, the world belonged to the Doomed Folk, a people who came to hate the planet that bore them so much that they shattered it entirely, ending their own age and clearing the way for a new one. In the long, slow renewal that followed, several native non-human peoples arose — the immortal, Law-worshiping Older Ones, and the winged Myyrrhn, believed to be the oldest civilized race, evolved from savage beast-folk called clakars.
Into this recovering world came the alien ancestors of Melniboné, whose true origins are lost to legend. The Older Ones intermarried with them and passed down the twin runeswords Stormbringer and Mournblade, meant for the fiercest dragon princes yet to come. When the Older Ones fell in battle against the Dead Gods, Melniboné inherited the world outright — and turned away from the Balance it had once served, embracing Chaos and the patronage of Duke Arioch instead. What followed was ten thousand years of imperial dominance, the Bright Empire, which first devastated the early human nation of Quarzhasaat for daring to oppose it, and only gradually loosened its grip as magic itself began to fade and humanity's own Law-worshiping nations rose in its place. Lormyr broke free first, four hundred years before the saga's events, and other Young Kingdoms followed in the centuries after.
Though Melniboné no longer rules, ten thousand years of dominance still color how every nation sees itself and its neighbors. Freed from imperial oversight, the human kingdoms now squabble and compete along their own separate paths, developing at wildly different speeds — some, like Oin and Yu, remain undeveloped backwaters, while others, like the Isle of the Purple Towns, have grown genuinely prosperous. Elric's sack of Imrryr finally and permanently breaks Melniboné's hold over the world, though the Dragon Isle remains a lingering, uneasy shadow across Young Kingdoms affairs. The overall mood of the setting is one of expansion and discovery — new trade, new rivalries, and new adventure at every turn.
For centuries Melnibonéan sorcery effectively ran the world; as that influence has faded, most human nations have come to see magic itself as a corrupting, Melnibonéan vice, even as it's also broadly understood to be an expression of Chaos in the same way that budding science and technology represent the patient, orderly spirit of Law. Advances like steam power or gunpowder remain unknown, but Law's scholar-priests are edging closer to real breakthroughs, and simple mechanical conveniences — water-driven mills, clockwork, hand-cranked printing presses — are slowly spreading through the more developed nations, even if they're still a rarity. Wealthier kingdoms have access to glassblowing and fine metalworking, while poorer or more barbaric ones make do with bronze and iron. Shipbuilding lags furthest behind; nearly everyone still relies on oared galleys, with the Isle of the Purple Towns and Melniboné's own aging fleet the rare exceptions, and farming methods remain primitive enough that even a comparatively advanced nation like Vilmir is still ruining its own soil through crude slash-and-burn techniques.
Almost no Young Kingdom is large or resource-rich enough to stand entirely alone; most survive through trade with their neighbors, or through outright piracy, and constant raiding keeps populations thinner than they might otherwise be. Most nations mint their own coin, but by convention these are treated as interchangeable in value, with the common bronze coin (called simply a "bronze" in game terms) the standard unit everywhere. Melnibonéan coinage, when it turns up at all, tends to be viewed with suspicion by superstitious humans. Even in major cities, money changes hands less than one might expect — barter remains common, especially among rural folk — but a genuine merchant class has recently taken root and now thrives, carrying goods like fine Ilmioran leather or Meniian glassware far from their point of origin along established trade routes.
Common Tongue — a simplified descendant of Low Melnibonéan — is understood almost everywhere the old Bright Empire once ruled, though thick regional accents can make it a challenge even among fellow speakers. True Low Melnibonéan is a separate, harder language that must be learned deliberately, and High Speech (Old Melnibonéan), the formal and sorcerous tongue of the Empire, is rarer still, known to relatively few Melnibonéans themselves. Beyond Common Tongue, a scattering of other languages persist regionally: 'pande in the Unknown East; the unwritten, guttural Mong of the Weeping Waste; Opish, the old thieves' tongue that survives in legendary Quarzhasaat; Lesh, the desert nomads' own written language; the rarely-spoken classical tongue of Pan Tang; and Myyrrhn, a pictographic language nearly unpronounceable by anyone outside that winged race.
Each nation write-up below follows the same basic shorthand: its current ruler, dominant race, spoken language, typical (not exhaustive) occupations, dominant religion, favored weapons and armor, cultural skills every child there is expected to pick up, and notable possessions common to its people — though owning any of these isn't automatic just because a character hails from that nation.
Young Kingdoms sailors recognize five principal islands: three are major maritime powers, one is home to a scattering of primitive tribes, and the last belongs to the mysteries of Law.
A little-known island lost in the steaming waters of the Boiling Sea, marked by nothing but a single strange palace of towers and domes, commanded by the great Champion of Law, Myshella. What fills its many chambers and corridors is known to almost no one.
The Melnibonéan archipelago holds three small islets alongside Melniboné itself, though only the main island remains inhabited, its single city Imrryr — the Dreaming City — rising above caverns where dragons still slumber. Life there is warm, humid, and rarely harsh; beyond Imrryr's glittering towers the rest of the island has largely gone back to wilderness, tended only by the occasional drugged slave sent to harvest opium and other plants.
Melnibonéans, ten times outnumbered by the slaves who serve them, are tall, slender, catlike, and largely without curiosity or vitality — content, after millennia of imperial rule, to drift through drug-hazed memories of past glory rather than engage with a world that now largely gets by without them. Outside visitors are tightly restricted to a small section of the city and see almost nothing of what Melniboné still considers its rightful due. Landing on the island at all is notoriously difficult, guarded as it is by treacherous reefs and currents.
Pan Tang isn't native to this world at all — a thousand years ago, magic tore open a rift to the brutal plane of the Mabden, and the people swept through it found themselves stranded on a bleak, storm-battered island of black rock and fused glass. Its people, the Pan Tangians, worship Chaos zealously and consider themselves heirs to Melnibonéan sorcery, though the rest of humanity sees them chiefly as sadistic pirates and fanatics. Their single city, Hwamgaarl, is infamous for the twisted stone statues dotting its walls and rooftops — the transformed and still-suffering remains of those who once angered the Theocrat. The current Theocrat, Jagreen Lern, forbids outside visitors almost entirely, leaving the rest of the Young Kingdoms to know the island mostly through rumor.
Named for the distinctive purple stone its buildings are built from, this island nation broke free of Melnibonéan rule some four hundred years ago and has since become the Young Kingdoms' foremost trading power, its long-bearded, leather-clad sailors turning up in every port worth sailing to. A shifting balance of power between old nobility and a newer, wealthy merchant class keeps island politics lively, and its markets are famous for stocking practically anything a buyer could want. Menii serves as the modern capital, while the older nobility prefers the quieter northern city of Kariss.
Once home to the people of R'lin K'ren A'a, who fled here ten thousand years ago before dying out entirely, and later to the infamous wizard Cran Liret, the Thief of Spells, whose stolen magic is said to still linger in strange devices buried beneath the soil. Today the island is inhabited by the Krettii, a tribe of bestial demi-humans who migrated from the edges of the Silent Land within living memory.
The first successful revolt against Melnibonéan rule began here, and the continent remains richer and more densely settled than its northern counterpart, its landscape still dotted with the ruined towers and villas of the old Bright Empire.
Once part of the old Lormyrian empire, Argimiliar retains traces of that heritage in its architecture and chivalric traditions. Cattle-wealthy nobles rule the rural south from great communal villas, while richer, more decadent merchant-nobles dominate the coast; under the shallow, image-conscious King Jiku, much of that coastal nobility drifts toward the pleasures of Chaos worship.
A harsh, snow-covered land of bare moorland at the world's very edge, home to loosely-federated tribes of chariot-riding raiders who take no prisoners and abandon their old and weak to the elements. Living so close to the world's rim has made Dorelites fiercely superstitious and deeply fearful of Chaos.
A small but surprisingly rich nation wedged between Lormyr and Argimiliar, known for its bountiful fisheries, orchards, and the most densely packed cities in the south. Filkharians take pride in food and fashion alike, and their fussy young King Jerned's changing whims regularly reshape what the whole country considers stylish.
The first Young Kingdom to break free of Melnibonéan rule, four hundred years before the saga, and still the dominant power of the south. A once-mighty empire that expanded under Queen Eloarde and her Champion, Earl Aubec of Malador — the first Champion of Law ever to carve new land out of raw Chaos — before settling into a long, comfortable republic and, more recently, a peaceable, plump monarchy under King Fadan. Lormyrians are generally friendly and superstitious, proud of their rivers, farms, and chivalric traditions.
Two separate but closely linked nations, among the poorest and least developed in the south, sharing the seedy shared capital of Dhoz-Kam. Their people are superstitious, clannish, and deeply fearful of the demons they believe haunt the humid jungles at their borders — jungles that, in truth, mostly hide ordinary predators rather than anything supernatural.
The easternmost Young Kingdom, a land of rough hills and dark pine forest given to fierce storms and clan rivalry. A once-dominant worship of the Elemental Rulers has given way, in the last century, to a rapidly spreading and increasingly powerful Chaos church, mirrored in the tyranny of its current ruler, King Marvos — bitterly nicknamed "the Blood-Thirsty" by his own oppressed people.
A place of pilgrimage for worshipers of Chaos, said to lie somewhere east of Pikarayd, though its exact site is unmarked on any map and found only by those drawn there by something more instinctive than direction. Rumor holds it to be a nightmare of gleaming black stone, or the resting place of a dead god still whispering prophecy — nobody who could confirm either account with certainty has ever come forward to do so.
Less densely settled and poorer than the south, this was the old heartland of the Beast-Folk's Dharzi Empire, and scattered ruins of both that empire and the Bright Empire still turn up here for those who know where to look.
A young, energetic land of independent city-states bound loosely together under a council of hereditary senators, its wide grasslands rich with cattle and its people known for fine leatherwork and an open-minded, creative streak. Feuds between rival merchant families are common, but the union between Ilmiora's cities has never yet broken into outright civil war.
The City of Beggars, once part of Vilmir until plague drove its people out and beggar hordes claimed the abandoned ruins for their own. Filthy, disease-ridden, and feared throughout the Young Kingdoms, Nadsokor sends its people out to beg and steal across the world before returning home with their takings, and stands as a kind of grim mirror-image to peaceful Tanelorn.
A squat, brutish, and widely shunned people said to be devolved descendants of the ancient Doomed Folk, ruling the small kingdom of Org from within the sinister, half-sentient Forest of Troos — a place of swollen blossoms and stirring, unwholesome trees that few outsiders are brave enough to enter, whatever herbs and magical plants might be hidden there.
A vast waste of sand and dry riverbeds, created two thousand years ago when a sorcerer's badly-aimed spell — meant for an invading Melnibonéan army — instead drowned the once-lush Quarzhasaatim Empire in dunes. Only the legendary capital, Quarzhasaat itself, survived, isolated ever since. The desert's Nomad Nations are tall, courageous wanderers with no gods of their own, seeking enlightenment instead through meditation, and gathering once a year at the Silver Flower Oasis. Tanelorn and the melancholy fallen god Mordaga are both said to make their homes somewhere among these sands as well.
The Eternal City appears, when it appears at all, somewhere upon the shifting sands of the Sighing Desert — though it exists in every world in one form or another, its true location a secret carried in the heart of anyone who genuinely seeks peace over self-importance rather than a place found on any map. Neither Law nor Chaos may enter its low walls without the consent of its inhabitants, and Chaos would gladly see it destroyed if it could. Tanelorn is a haven built by refugees from the world's cruelty, and it fills those who find true rest there with a quiet strength drawn from the Balance itself. Notably, Elric is the one wanderer who famously cannot find peace within it.
A once-forested plain now largely cleared and farmed to exhaustion by centuries of slash-and-burn agriculture, its poisoned mines and eroding soil leaving most peasants starved and too worn down to rebel against a nobility that lives comparatively well on state-sanctioned piracy. As the most devoutly Lawful of the Young Kingdoms, Vilmir is also its most technologically advanced, with water-driven mills and even clockwork guardians at its temples — though conformity is prized over individuality, and the ever-present threat of the Inquisition keeps most citizens deliberately, grimly unremarkable.
A rain-soaked, misty plateau east of Vilmir, green and boggy where the Sighing Desert is dry, home to nomadic barbarian tribes who ride from birth almost, track and shoot with real skill, and gather periodically before scattering again along their ritual paths. Deeply suspicious of outsiders, some among them believe their own homeland is the only real world, and that Chaos itself waits just beyond the mists.
A raw, thinly-populated land beyond the chill waters of the Pale Sea, much of its far north still unexplored, with unknown hotter country further west and, eventually, frozen tundra and ice to the far north.
The most powerful nation of the Western Continent, ruled by the fierce King Sarosto but quietly steered from behind the throne by Pan Tangian advisors and the Church of Chaos. Its warrior caste ranks above nobility and priesthood alike, and violence is treated almost as a national pastime — piracy and border raids against Tarkesh and Jharkor are constant, and battle scars are worn as marks of pride rather than shame.
A powerful naval and merchant nation of provinces held by lesser nobles under a single crown, its people famously secretive and superstitious about magic, which most still regard as unnatural. Jharkorians make notably good spies, scholars, and assassins, and their capital, Dhakos, is known for the many spires crowning its old quarter.
A permanently fog-wreathed borderland between Shazar and the Silent Land, its bottomless black mud and moss-draped dead trees home to serpents, swamp bears, and biting insects. Legend holds the marshes were raised ten thousand years ago by the Silent Land's own inhabitants, as a barrier against Melnibonéan expansion.
High rocky aeries in the northern mountains, home to the proud, dignified winged Myyrrhn — the oldest civilized people of the Young Kingdoms, evolved long ago from savage beast-creatures known as clakars. Living entirely on hunted game and gathered plants, without agriculture or much interest in outside commerce, Myyrrhn society is quiet, self-sufficient, and largely content to be left alone; complex aerial ceremonies honor Lassa, their patron goddess of the air.
A hidden city older even than Melniboné, carved entirely from the living rock of a deep fissure in the western mountains, unknown to most of the Young Kingdoms and avoided by the few who live nearby, who consider its chasm the mouth of hell itself. Its black-skinned, handsome inhabitants — remnants of a race older than Melniboné, and still loyal to the Balance — slumber for ages at a time, served by slaves who wake only when summoned, and are said to have quietly aided Melniboné in ancient days.
Lush southern plains famous above all for their horses, said to be the finest in the Young Kingdoms, and for the skilled, daring riders who breed and ride them. The treacherous coastal reef known as the Serpent's Teeth claims ships every year, drawn there by merchants risking the crossing for Shazarian horseflesh.
A land split between itself: a hard, mountainous north living by hunting, fishing, and raiding, and a gentler, wealthier south of farms and plains, each side privately contemptuous of the other. The young, insecure King Yaris rules more through bluster than confidence, and simmering north-south rivalry occasionally spills over into open border skirmishes.
Home to the last true remnants of the ancient Doomed Folk, older even than Melniboné or the Elemental Wars that shaped the modern world, dwelling unseen in lightless warrens beneath a range of black mountains. Almost nothing is reliably known about them; adventurers who enter the Silent Land essentially never return to tell of it, and Melniboné itself never attempted to conquer this place even at the height of its power.
An unmapped, jungle-covered landmass beyond the Boiling Sea, rumored to be inhabited by savages some whisper aren't entirely human. Elric visits briefly during his year of wandering, discovering the ancient, long-abandoned city of R'lin K'ren A'a — for a time believing its people to be Melniboné's true ancestors — as well as the fierce, murderous olab, a race possibly interbred with proto-Melnibonéans and driven from their original territory by something even fiercer still.
Lands east of the Sighing Desert, once a Melnibonéan province but cut off from the rest of the Young Kingdoms for nearly a thousand years, long enough for wholly separate nations and cultures to take root there — among them golden Eshmir (home of the hero Moonglum's boisterous city of Elwher), the Chaos warrior-priests of Phum, Okara, and Changshai. These make up what the game calls the Unknown Kingdoms, the subject of their own dedicated skill.