New Campaign

Gutral Mastekeena has long been in the business of building its empire.  One method of doing this has been to knock over the anthills surrounding it.  Every strong kingdom near Gutral Mastekeena has been attacked or laid waste just when they were on the cusp of greatness because Gutral Mastekeena never wanted to deal with a potential threat a decade or a century in the future.  There are no threats anywhere near Gutral Mastekeena or anywhere near it, nor have there ever has been in the last millennium.  The policy worked so well that it was instituted in the areas that Gutral Mastekeena wanted to expand into.  The empire would send forth money or an army to destabilize potential threats to the growth of the Empire is a century in the future.  The ruin that resulted meant that when the Empire was ready to absorb that region there was no resistance and the pieces would absorb faster.  Sometimes the rebuilding states would see the empire moving towards them and they would surrender to prevent what was clearly going to happen anyway.  Surrendered territory required less rebuilding and less military resources and so these conquests were valued over the traditional ones with war and destruction. 

The Emperor decided to test the best of the future candidates for the future king and sent agents out into the wilds to areas that the Empire would expand into in the next century, destabilized and knocked over the areas where resistance would be the greatest so as to test the next crop of King candidates. 

 

The Five Kingdoms 

There was once a kingdom in a secluded valley surrounded by semi-temperate forests.  The land received more rain than some areas due to a small mountain range and plenty of sunshine.  The area always had a lot going for it there were several non-human clans nearby, but the bulk of the population was human.  Because the humans dominated, the non-humans joined and were absorbed by the humans, but also because the humans tended to be just and fair peoples; prosperous people tend to be free with their wealth especially when it is the wealth of land and food.  The King had five children and all the children were kind and well respected through the land.  They knew that the favourite of the king would rule one day and the others would govern some of the lands around.  They accepted it because they knew that the favourite of the king would be based on what was best for the land and not on petty reasons.  The people knew this too.  The Kingdom suffered a great tragedy when the children were young; their mother fell ill of a strange wasting disease that had no cure.  Healers were summoned from all across the land and many of the neighbouring ones too and no cure was forthcoming, until a beautiful woman arrived from far away and claimed to know what was ailing her.  She told the king that his wife was possessed by sent by a jealous rival and the sorceress removed the grave enchantment.  The queen was freed, but the damage had been done and the queen was wasted and listless for the next few years until she died one Winter.  The king, who had been just up until this point grew wrathful that one of his vassals had sent this demon upon his wife.  The perpetrator was found, and a bloody war ended in the destruction of the family and the Vassal state.  When the queen died the people were saddened and the people were worried that grief would set back the recovery process.  They were relieved when in the Spring the King announced that he would marry again and was married to the woman that discovered the treachery to the kingdom, the sorceress.  Not long afterwards the new queen gave birth to the king’s last son.

As the child grew up, people remarked that the young Prince was not of the same cloth as the elder princes and princesses, he was willful and more destructive and had a greater temper, and yet the king seem to dote more strongly on him and grew withdrawn from his other children.  The other children grew to be strong and popular amongst the people, but still the king favoured his youngest, Damien.  By the time that the king had named Damien the heir to the kingdom he had grown out of his childish traits and grown into a man of great vileness.  His mother had not been idle as he grew up and had slighted his brothers and sisters to the king and he too began to see them as unholy offspring.  The people though were in great favour of the five children or the original Queen, but through the machinations by the Sorceress queen the siblings began to see the others as rivals of their own and when the King died, each of the siblings was blamed by the other as an assassin and the kingdom fell into a great civil war.  The enemies of the kingdom were many and they each rallied to the cause of one of the Princes.  The war lasted many years, but when the dust settled, the kingdom was destroyed and fragmented and its population dead or reduced to a fraction of where it was.