Alstarin

It is a time of struggle and strife, of heroes and villains, of kings and tyrants and consuls, of warriors, mages, and thieves together conspiring or as companions. It is a time of great and terrible war, and good and intriguing peace. It is a time of empires and republics as they rise and fall like grains of sand against the palms of one's hand. It is a time of trial and error, the stage is set for a battle of good and of evil.   It is a world of seafaring companions, knights in shining armor, barbarians clad in chain mail and furs riding on great beasts, of wandering nomads carrying ancient knowledge. It is a world of mountains that kiss the skies to the north, to the rolling sands of the south, to the jungles beyond even that, the great Divide along the east, and the Great Western Ocean where peoples' of the sea once hailed from. It is a world of men of all walks of life, of elves bound by honor and jungle, of dwarves longing for their home which was stolen from them centuries back, and of even more exotic races and creatures beyond the known world. It is a world where might, magic, and mischief converge into one domain--the realm of Alstarin.   Four generations has past since the coming of Theseus and his Companions, who had arrived with their families and their clans. They had been immortalized by the Sandborn as the Amil Amurru-Tamtu, or the Men of the Western Sea. Although it has also been streamlined to the common usage of the "Sea People". Currently, they have been broken and enslaved by the Herringways, a powerful dynasty which had united the city states of the Alstarin Vale into an empire. For generations, the Herringways kept the descendants of the Sea Peoples as serfs, levied off to fight in their wars as mercenary soldiers, held tightly on a leash.   Although as of late, things begin to feel... different. The Sea Peoples, now calling themselves "Eprots" after their supposed island home to the west, begin to grow in number along the Herringway's home of the Cape. For every one Alstarin living in the Cape, there were three Eprot serfs that were his neighbors. Mumbles and whispers grow of independence, freedom, and fulfillment of the prophecy given to them by Theseus, who is now worshiped in secret as a god, that they will, "find a home where the sun is born, and from there their destiny shall be carved by blood and bronze." For now, there are only rumors dismissed by the average Alstarin lord, loyal to his High King.   Currently, to the north, the mountain-filled land of Jorsenheim, a renowned shield-maiden by the name of Lailja the She-Wolf, has assembled a host of 50,000 warriors, vowing revenge on the Herringways who murdered her husband and raped her body. Her violater, the prince Richard Herringway, is busy attending a wedding to his brother, prince Harold, to an important alliance with an Alstarin state to the south called Summerfell. He has dispatched the Eprots Gnaeus Antigonus Artimious and Marcus Ostius Parmenion, with a force of 10,000 men, to deal with the She-Wolf.