The Faranth

     In the Raker Mountains, far beneath a vast glacier of ice, lie the frozen remains of an eons-old civilization. Buried beneath hundreds of feet of solid ice, this last remnant of an ancient civilization has remained untouched since the time of it's habitation. As a group of adventurers who entered the area found out, life did still exist under the ice. They found a vast city buried under the ice, which was enormous by scale to anything now on the continent. Below you will find the results of their research.

     Thousands of years ago, when even the ancient races of the elves and dwarves were no more than petty tribes covering small pockets of the Flanaess, a considerable portion of the land was ruled by a powerful race of evil and grotesque, tentacled creatures known as the Faranth. How they got to Oerth, either by spell jamming ship, or from another plane is not known. The empire stretched across the entire northern continent from the Corusk Mountains to the Sea of Black Ice, and as far south as the Nyr Dyv, which was mostly steamy swampland at the time. Their cities were wondrous to behold, filled with gargantuan ziggurats and curiously shaped towers. Great roads of black basalt ran for hundreds of miles connecting their great cities. Many of the main routes around the north today are where the faranths' roads once existed. Great sky ships of the Faranth emperors once roamed the air.

     After a thousand years of enlightened rule a calamity struck. A great meteor fell from the sky and landed in the sea just off the coast  in what is now Grendep Bay. Huge clouds of vapors and dust filled the sky for years, nearly killing all life on Oerth, not to mention the Flanaess. The land grew colder as a great mountain of ice made its way across the continent. Even the highly intelligent and advanced Faranth could find no way to escape the destruction caused by the catastrophe. Their crops died and the Faranth began to starve. Their resources were used up trying to hold of the encroaching ice. The Faranth civilization fell into anarchy and chaos. The once proud civilization was now turned into a band of roaming tribes, each one stealing from another to survive. War and deprivation were the rule as the bands were forced into ever smaller areas by the growing ice, and the lack of resources.

     Not all the Faranth were subject to the famines and wars brought on by the disintegration of their empire. A member of the ruling class, a powerful sorcerer-priest, went into hiding with his followers. Hoping to stave off the total decay of civilization, the creature created a powerful magic item: the Slave Stone. Anyone who touched it became immutably loyal to the sorcerer-priest and the Faranth State. While the Slave Stone saved a small pocket of Faranth society from anarchy, it could not stop the physical destruction of the empire. The last emperor found a secluded valley in the Rakers and built a huge and beautiful city. He stored within it  all the history and art of the race. He also developed a ritual that would send the remaining populace (who had all touched the Slave Stone), into a magical hibernation, thus sleeping across the eons as the ice made its way across the landscape. With the last building stone in place the Emperor called upon the nameless Faranth God and invoked his magic.

     Now, thousands of years later the city has begun to thaw. Life has awakened from beneath the ice. Two Faranth escaped the ice and attacked a nearby Asylum bringing the humans to the Slave Stone, and using them to help thaw the ice. An adventuring party, who happened to be bringing a patient to the Asylum discovered what was going on and put a stop to the Faranth plan of recolonizing the continent.