Lost Knowledge - Beneterra's History (Promptober 2025 #20)

Past and Future in One

How do we even know what knowledge we've lost over the past several millennia? The characters in my Fellport game have a vague idea of recent history, but some of the deep, dark secrets and stories elude nearly everyone living in Beneterra today. Even the stories and myths that nearly everyone knows have been altered after the centuries of telling and retelling.

Let's talk about a few major things from Beneterra's distant past.

Beneterra's Creation

During the party's time in Krugheim, capital city of the dwarven Clan Stormhammer, they found a pillar that flashed random colors with no discernible pattern. An artist colony grew in the cave around the pillar, and dwarven scientists set up a lab to study it.

And of course, the party went up and licked it. The party's psionic tried to gather psychic echoes from the pillar using Psionic Investigation and rolled a natural 20.

He had a vision of a massive dragon flying across the universe (more about Ti'an the Celestial Dragon in the forthcoming Promptober post about Colossal Beasts), creating children and life forms of various types and watching them die, weeping comets and pushing onward. Finally the celestial dragon grew tired and curled up to rest, orbiting a warm yellow sun. It slept its way to death, and orbiting debris accreted to the dragon's body, forming the world of Beneterra.

The party theorizes that the pillar must be a fragment of the celestial dragon. And they may just be correct.

The Razing Of The Plains

The original surface of Beneterra had many more trees than today. Elves tell stories of the lands north of the Alfinwald rapidly changing from forest to the Okulari plains that exist there today, dating from around four thousand years ago. Different families emphasize different causes for the deforestation. Some cite natural calamities of various sorts, but many blame human ambition and industry. This timeframe equates to the beginning of the Wondrous Age when men built great flying ships and teleported across the entire world for entertainment and leisure.

The Arcane Night

The Wondrous Age soared to incredible heights, but humans always wanted more and more power, magical and otherwise. Everything started breaking down and collapsing. Two thousand years ago the sky turned black, and the stars hid their faces. Beasts and demons wandered the land, slaughtering anyone living. Humanity huddled in caves, hunting for food and artifacts in the open during the black day and staying close by their fires in the even blacker night.

Despite being called the Arcane Night, the darkness lasted for over a century, warping nature and spawning odd creatures that still exist today. Mankind eventually emerged from the caves and resettled the land. The Ionian story of Mithras chronicles the emergence of people from underground in mythical form, though Mithras actually existed if the shrine at his tomb can be believed. A thousand years of petty wars raged across the lands before 

Ionia Ascendant

Most of the world around the Medimare reckons time using the Ionian calendar. Currently, it's Anno 799. More accurately, the year is Anno Urbis Conditae (AUC) 799, or "from the founding of the city". Even that isn't completely accurate, since the city existed long before the Ionian Empire rededicated it when ascending to power, but scholars saw the rededication as a firmly-anchored point in time, so that's when the currently accepted calendar began. The myth of the Lupercal makes a lovely story about fratricide and founding a capital city, but the details are somewhat altered from reality.

One problem with humans is they don't look beyond the beginning. The calendar began about 800 years ago, so most people train themselves that 800 years encompasses all of history. They don't think about negative years, or Whatever Came Before. To them it's a chaotic jumble of death and disorder, and not worth thinking about. But the elves remember. The dwarves who taught humans to survive the Arcane Night have ancient stories of mining tunnels during the Wondrous Age, preparing for the inevitable fall.

NOTE: Most humans on this side of the Sea of Sorrows know at least a little history from the past 800 years, but that history was mainly written by Ionia. The empire had little incentive to maintain the histories of all the people they conquered, and the republic can't undo the empire's destruction of historical documents.

Part of the Promtober project for 2025.

Since this deals with Fellport's history, it's also listed in the Fellport Almanac as well.