History of the Dwarven Halls

"Through your stone we draw near to heaven itself. To you we sing, and while Allfather gives us life, We will sing.”

— A Eulogy for Khizan, 322 AA Anonymous

Khizan and the Ancient Realm

The oldest, largest and greatest Hall of the Dwarves, Khizan was founded countless thousands of years ago, by legend Asulf himself. Khizan was the capital of the Dwarven Realm of old, with halls stretching from the Frostpeaks of the Nevarine Peninsula to the Spine Mountains of the east. No one knows how the Dwarves first came to the continent, even the Halfling traditions record them as coming up from the ground itself. The Dwarves insist they were forged by the very hand of The Allfather himself as his chosen people. Nevertheless, the myriad halls of the Dwarves were controlled directly by their High King. Their greatest asset was the Forge of the Allfather, an incredibly powerful machine that refined metal to such a degree that it could slice clean through forged steel as if it was paper. It was said that the Allfather himself spoke through the Forge, and all Dwarves who used it attested to feeling his divine presence.
Yet, even this great realm would not last, as the Halls of the West would be abandoned, and the Halls of the North would be conquered by the Dark Elves. Pressure by Elf and Human states forced the smaller halls and outposts to be abandoned or conquered, and many migrated to other Halls for protection. As more Halls fell through the centuries, more and more Dwarves came to Khizan, causing the city to be massively overpopulated. The Jarls grew ever more desperate to rule over millions and millions of Dwarves in a city scarcely built for their number, and many poorer Dwarves were forced to live on the outskirts of the city, away from the stone that sheltered them. By the 4th century AA, the population of Khizan and its environs had grown to over 4 million, a majority outside the city itself, the Dwarves of the remaining halls crowding the city even further. The situation had grown untenable, and the Dwarves of Khizan struggled in poverty, many fighting for essentials such as shelter, food and water.
The last straw broke the back of the city when in 290 AA, an army of the Lordship of Erebelle surrounded the city. Unless the city was to pay tribute to the Forge Lord himself, they threatened to attack the Dwarves living unprotected outside the mountain. With little choice, Jarl Erik surrendered, and Khizan became a client state of the Eternal Lords. This decision angered the people greatly, as the last Hall had fallen to the control of the Elves who had destroyed their Realm. As the Elves settled into the city, the first non-Dwarves to live there since time immemorial, the extremist organization known as the Blackguard also caught on like wildfire among the many disenfranchised, impoverished Dwarves.

Destruction of Khizan

Matters culminated in the assasination of Jarl Erik and the ascension of his Blackguard nephew Hodur to the throne after the beginning of the Great War in 311 AA. With the Elven forces tied up fighting in the colonies or against Human realms, Khizan expelled the Elves and declared independence. Knowing that the Eternal Lords would not hesitate to retaliate, they sent every able bodied man and woman to war. It was a costly, arduous process that bankrupted the city, exhausted the mountain’s remaining ores, and sent the Forge of the Allfather running day and night, but nearly a million Dwarves went to war, making their way to meet the human forces by 314 AA at the Gates of Fire. It was a long and bloody campaign, as Dwarven forces enacted brutal reprisals on Elves they came across in their journey west, causing outrage in the Lordships.
From the Dwarven perspective, it was their force of arms that shielded the realms of humanity from the Eternal Lords at that battle, and many perished against the forces of a god-king herself come to fight. Yet, once that pyrrhic victory was achieved, and peace was joined after the mysterious destruction of the Elf city of Cahadell, the Dwarves were left out of the treaty. In their eyes, humanity had protected themselves and nothing more, leaving anger at their former allies.
The Dwarven army was unable to march across the Eternal Lords lands now that their forces were arrayed at the borders, and though some tried to break through, they were left stranded in human lands. Many took to a wandering life, unable to return to their homeland yet refusing to settle in the human cities. Khizan was now left almost defenseless, with few fighting men and women to defend themselves from the retaliation of the Eternal Lords. When the armies of the Lordships marched to do battle, they found no force arrayed against them in the field. All the Dwarves that could went into the mountain and sealed the city.
Those Dwarves that remained fled, some were slain by the advance forces of the Eternal Lords while others managed to make it to the relatively safer territories of the human realms. Khizan prepared itself for a long siege, woth food provided by their underground crops such as mushrooms and water by the subterranean river that flowed in the city. A magical barrier constructed by Asulf himself, or so the legends said, shielded the mountain from barrages of siege equipment and magic.
The Eternal Lords would not be patient. The revolt of Khizan had blemished their control over their Lordships, and by most estimations, they were incensed that they would challenge their rule. The outcry against Dwarven pillages against Elven settlements in the war and the destruction of Cahadell also pressed them to work quickly. So through the course of four fateful days in 315 AA, barely a month after the destruction of Cahadell, the Eternal Lords, seen together for the first time in many years, gathered before the city. The armies withdrew when they arrived, and the Dwarves within celebrated, thinking that they had won. This would not be the case.
On the 17th of Fall, 321, the Dwarves of Khizan woke to the city shaking as alarms went off at the disintegration of the protective barrier. It would be mere minutes until an immense burning light sundered the very mountain itself, releasing rock and fire to rain down upon the subterranean city. Those Dwarves who stared at the light and lived found themselves blinded, and they were counted among the lucky. Far more perished, with the day’s end leaving a hundred thousand Dwarves dead by falling rocks, scorched by the light or simply evaporated. Only their silhouettes remained, stained on the stone of their ancestors.
The Jarl and the Blackguard leadership were killed, and it fell to the government officials left to organize a hasty surrender, lest the blast occur again and wipe out those who survived. The price of mercy was that all the Dwarves remaining in all the Lordships were exiled, and those Blackguard remaining would be given up. Few had survived the blast, and fewer still survived the delivery to Elven forces by panicked citizens. By the end of 321, all of the Dwarves in Khizan and the Eternal Lordships were forced at swordpoint west, piling up in refugee camps at the borders of the Free Cities and the Marches. Many Dwarves who were forced to leave shaved their beards and renounced their ancestral family, calling themselves ‘Khizansguard’ in honor of the fallen city. It was the end of the last Dwarven Realm, and now the Dwarves were a people without a place to call home. The one mystery that remained was the Forge of the Allfather. When the Eternal Lords went to claim it for their own, it had vanished entirely. Interrogation of the remaining Dwarves proved fruitless, as it seemed to have disappeared the day that the city surrendered.

A People in Exile

Eventually the Dwarves that came to the human realms were at a precipice. They had, by and large, refused to convert to the worship of Gaea, and in the post-war environment of fear and resentment, many humans looked to the comforts of zealotry. The wandering Dwarves of the Khizan army were demanded to give up their weaponry, which caused several pitched skirmishes. Where once the Humans and Dwarves stood side by side to face off a living God, they now turned on each other.
The refugee camps did not fare much better, as many citizens blamed non-believers for such events as the Sanguine Curse in the Free Cities or The Divinate Famine of 325. When riots broke out against the Dwarves in the succeeding years, the Vox Prima, the many Senatrix of the Free Cities, and the Duchies of the Marches found a so-called compromise to prevent further bloodshed. The Dwarves were to be confined in Dwarf Quarters in the major cities, where they would be protected from the depredations of the citizenry. While on paper this would be positive for the Dwarves, in practice the Quarters were squalid, overpopulated and lacked basic necessities.
In time, some cities would place restrictions on the movement and employment of the Dwarves. While Dwarves had been well known for their smithing and mining experience, the idea that this was the sum of Dwarven skill was a poorly informed stereotype. Yet, due to fears of a ‘horde of Dwarves’ taking the jobs of Humans, they were often ‘encouraged’ to find places in the trades of smithing and mining, lest they go without any employment.
Today, in 395, the Dwarves are still an exiled people. Even those in the Snow Tribes Tribes of the North, who have lived independently for many centuries, hold onto the loss of their Halls. Those in Human lands remember their loss 74 years ago with great sorrow. Some have decided to settle permanently in the cities, converting to Gaeanism and assimilating into the culture of their new homes. Others remain embittered, and the ranks of the Blackguard swell. They have shifted from an extremist political movement to a transnational terrorist organization that attacked targets in Elven lands, but now Human as well, in revenge for their treatment since the war. Dwarvenkind stands on the precipice of change, but to what none know.

Halls of the West

Most of the Western Halls were abandoned millenia ago, but two remained by the time Humans and Elves dominated the continent. Val Doral, located north of the Elven city of Cahadell, and Taruhr, which was just south of the intersection of the Lowback and Green Mountain ranges. Taruhr was one of the more mercantile of the Dwarven Halls, trading with not only Humans but Elves as well in refined metals and other subterranean goods. They also possessed a genuine republic, the Jarl being overthrown by a revolt against corruption in 978 BA. The Moot was always an institution of Dwarven politics, but in Taruhr it became the sole governing body. Under the Moot’s rule, Taruhr became one of the wealthiest Halls outside of Khizan. They used this economic weight to stave off Elven invasion for centuries.
Matters were quite different in Val Doral. Resenting the slow but sure Elven strangulation of many Halls until Dwarves lost a war or were forced to leave for other Halls, Val Doral all but sealed their gates against Elven incursion and built up mighty arsenals. They had long possessed a forge similar to the Forge of the Allfather in Khizan, if lesser in power, and for centuries they continued their isolation from the world to build up arms and armors. They set their mages to develop formidable weapons of mass destruction and instituted strict military service for people of all ages. If Taruhr was a budding republic among the Dwarven people, Val Doral was an insular military junta that focused only on a future war with the Elves.

Death by the Ballot Box

In 561 BA, the inevitable could no longer be delayed in Taruhr. The Moot long neglected the military and defenses of the Hall, and eventually the slow calculations of Celestial Lord Imizael showed fruit. The Hall did not fall by sword or magefire, but by words and coin. Over centuries, pro-Elven trading interests built up political power in the Hall, and eventually they won enough seats in the elections of that year to petition the Eternal Lordship for annexation. While heavily controversial, the vote passed by bare majority, and by a confirmatory referendum mired in accusations of fraud and corruption. The exclusion of lower class Dwarves from voting rights made it all the easier for the merchant elite to buy out the small electorate.
This would not be the end of the affair, however, as when Elven ambassadors arrived to claim the city, it was riven by riots and civil unrest. While the Dwarves in the Moot asked the Eternal Lord to maintain peace, Elven soldiers put down the riot violently, confiscating their weaponry and closely monitoring the forges. While unrest would remain for years, eventually an uneasy peace settled in as independently minded Dwarves steadily left the Hall for greener pastures. This would not prevent the expulsion of the remaining Dwarves of Taruhr a millenia later in 321 AA, when the Eternal Lords destroyed Khizan, however, and the Hall was left abandoned to this day.

The Blackguards

Val Doral saw the fate of Taruhr and decided on their course of action. Trade completely ceased with the surface, with Humans, Elves and even the other Dwarven Halls. It soon became known as the Hermit Hall to all, and many forgot it even existed. The Eternal Lords were content to ignore it, and left the city well alone. The only travel to or from the city was through the subterranean tunnels and from the elite military of the Hall, the Blackguards, who spied on the surface for any changes or preparations for war.
In 310 BA, this ended with the War of the Dead Emperor beginning. Most were skeptical of the chances of Tasmoros, Emperor of the Nevarine Empire, against the mighty Elven Lordships and their living gods, but when he proclaimed victory at Serin and destroyed the physical form of the Phoenix Lord Arianwyn Lord, heads turned. From almost all other quarters, Folk were frightened of what an Archlich and a massive army of the living and dead could accomplish, but Tasmoros found an ally in one place. Emissaries of Val Doral arrived at his camp and proposed an alliance. Tasmoros wished to conquer the Elves and kill their gods, and Val Doral wished the same. Though the Archlich was a Human supremacist, he still retained some pragmatism and agreed.
In the following days, Val Doralians emerged from the depths of the Green Mountains, having prepared for total war for centuries. An army near a hundred thousand strong spilled onto the surface, devastating Elven settlements everywhere they could find them. The elite of the Blackguard rode on swarms of small drakes, specially bred and broken by the mages of the Hall, raining death upon the forces of the Eternal Lordships. Every Elf that Val Doral’s military came across was slain or forced to flee, and even the ancient Elven city of Allesond was put to the torch. Val Doral’s military did not retreat back to the depths, however, and instead they occupied land and raised the banner of what they called the ‘New Dwarven Realm.’ Even the other Dwarven Halls encouraged Val Doral to make peace with favorable terms, but the Grand Marshal of the city claimed that only in death would their war end, their own or that of the Elven gods.
The Val Doralians met with the army of the living and dead at the shores of the Godslake, and went about discussing their plan to slay the Eternal Lords themselves. After lengthy discussions, Tasmoros tasked them with building a fleet to cross the lake so he could personally lead his army across. In the coming months, with the growing collapse of his Empire and the defeat at Hochfeld, Tasmoros was forced to retreat from his siege. The bulk of Val Doral’s forces remained to occupy their annexed territory, but the drake riders of the Blackguard were sent to aid the Archlich.
These Blackguards would be the last to remain loyal to Tasmoros, perishing in a futile last stand alongside their undead ally. With the war all but won, most coalition forces withdrew, but Val Doral refused to surrender. The exhausted armies of the Elves turned their attention to them, and after Arianwyn and Imizael joined battle, the Dwarven forces were thoroughly annihilated, almost to a man. Despite the arcane barrage the Eternal Lords unleashed, it took much longer for the armies to clear out every inch of the highly fortified hold. Laden with deadly traps including magically enhanced gas and mutated beasts unleashed on the Elves and packed close quarters fighting that the Dwarves excelled in, it was in 300 BA when the last denizens were killed. Some of the civilians of Val Doral managed to escape through secret tunnels, however, and a few of the Blackguard as well to spread their message of total war to the remaining Halls. Such was the end of the Western Halls of Dwarvenkind.

Fall of the Northern Halls

Long ago, the Halls of the North were some of the crown jewels in the Dwarven Realm. Thag Thorim, Nirlodahr, and Hemria were founded around ~2,800 BA along the Boreal Mountains of Boreius, and from there the Dwarves controlled the coastline of that northern continent along with influence over the Iceclaw Straits. The Dwarves of the North were an especially hardy people, living in the frigid climes that they did, but they were warmed by the hearths of their great halls. From there they build engineering marvels that only stories tell of now, and who knows what else they would have constructed given time. They utilized this through a form of artifice focused magic known as ‘Forgefire,’ which allowed them to create magically imbued items with far more skill and precision than other mages
This changed at around ~1,895 BA, when the Dark Elves sailed up the Red River to find safety from the Eternal Lords in Boreius. The landscape was inhospitable for most, and the Dark Elves yearned for a warmer home than the frozen wastelands of the continent. Their Lord, Aelgrim the Undying, who was not yet undead, decided that there was but one place they could find shelter from the cold winds of the north.
Thus began the War between the Dwarves and the Dark Elves. A few pitched battles upon the ice stained the snow blood red, but the real fighting began in the sieges of the three Halls. The Dwarves were not prepared for a long standoff, and had faced few wars in the north, and as such were unprepared to withstand the patient siege of the Dark Elves. They relied on fishing and whaling for their food along with trade with the Human realms, and within the recesses of their mountains, few food stores remained.
The fate of the Halls varied in the end. Thag Thorim went out in a blaze of glory before starvation could claim them, their warriors battling the Dark Elves in a final stand before being wiped out. Hesitant to see the fates of that Hall befall their own, the Dwarves of Nirlodahr and Hemria made a deal with the Dark Elves. They would leave the Halls to them, if their retreat was to be peaceful and unmolested by attacks. Lord Aelgrim agreed, and the Dwarves ripped everything useful off their Halls and left what little remained for the Dark Elves.

The Snow Tribes

Many of the Dwarves left for other Halls, going to the Spine Mountains or the Halls along the Green Mountains, but some refused, considering Boreius their home above all else. They settled along the frozen shores of the continent. They rebuked the traditional Dwarven way of living under stone in Halls, and instead took up life in small, decentralized villages that dotted the coastline. Known to other Dwarves as the ‘Snow Tribes,’ they subsist off whaling, fishing and fur trading with merchants passing through the Iceclaw Straits.
In order to defend themselves from encroachment by Dark Elven reavers and other dangers, The Snow Tribes have learned to utilize their Forgefire magic to a more efficient extent. Instead of being used to create many, relatively low powered, magical items for trade or military use, villages with Forgefire mages spend their entire lifetimes toiling at creating a ‘masterpiece,’ a singular magic item that carries with it the whole of their expertise and effort throughout the few centuries that the average Dwarf lives.
With these powerful magic items, Snow Tribes are able to defend their villages from any who seek to conquer or destroy them. These items are highly prized by outsiders due to their sheer potency and strength, but Snow Tribe Dwarves guard the secrets of Forgefire magic very closely. If any Forgefired items come into the hands of foreigners, the tribe sends forth its very best warriors to hunt it down, even if it means crossing thousands of miles or fighting through immense armies.

Halls of the East

The most densely populated region by Dwarves was always the Spine Mountains. Home to Khizan in the center, the Spine was in many ways the Dwarven homeland, with four other Halls dotting its mountains. In the north, a trio of Halls were ruled directly by the Jarl in Khizan for many centuries, Vogrim, Mirnulir, and Delvuhn. These Halls were the beating heart of the Dwarven Realm, producing much of the trade goods that fueled Khizan’s trade with other nations, along with having extensive subterranean crop reserves with which to feed their citizenry.

Flight of Faldir

More distant than any other Hall, Faldir was nestled a good deal east of the Elven city of Mytelume, in the lands of Ellendia unlike all of the other Westerland Halls. Faldir had the most divergent traditions and customs of any of the other Halls, speaking a completely different dialect of Dwarven and worshiping another denomination of the Allfather religion. The Dwarves of Faldir believed that the Allfather had commanded them to spread his message to all the nations, and as such the Dwarves of Faldir settled often in the outskirts of their Hall and prostelyzed among other peoples as to the message of the Allfather. This drew much condemnation by the more orthodox Allfather worshippers in Khizan.
The Dwarves of Faldir also expressly rejected the authority of Khizan, and instead entrusted their rule directly to the priests of the Allfather. These among many other eccentricities made the Dwarves of Faldir few friends among their fellow Halls. They remained, however, for many years relatively untouched by foreign invasion. This was until the Dwarves of Faldir allowed their missionaries to spread their faith among the Elves.
This show of apparent disrespect of the divine authority of the Eternal Lords incensed the Phoenix Lord Arianwyn, who led an expedition within Anshara’s borders to invade Faldir in retaliation in 3 AA. This caused some uproar within Anshara, as the Gilded Lord Tanyth did not appreciate Arianwyn encroaching on her borders. With the Imperial Civil War raging and an air of indifference by the Jarl of Khizan for repudiating his authority, Faldir was left without allies and abandoned by their kin. Faced with little choice, the Dwarves of Faldir refused to either make war, surrender, or flee to another Hall.
With the armies of Arianwyn and Tanyth at a standstill following her entering the borders, this gave the Dwarves a window of opportunity. Assembling ships of wood and iron in their Halls, they fought their way through the Elven rearguard forces and set their boats upon the turbulent seas of the east. From there, almost the entirety of Faldir’s Dwarves set sail to parts unknown, most signs pointing to somewhere in the southeast. None have ever returned, so if they managed to find a new home or fell victim to the cyclones and sea monsters of that ocean is unknown.

The Goblin Invasion

The Dwarves of the three northeastern Halls remained for even further time, however, and were firmly under the control of Khizan’s Jarl. Here, the cross-hall Realm of the Dwarves still persisted, and millions of Dwarves remained strong and stalwart against the encroachment of foreign armies. It appeared for over six centuries that these last three Halls would not fall, and that the rapid decline of Dwarvenkind had ended. This lasted until 245 AA.
Rumors on the Great Steppe brought word to the Dwarves that a massive number of people were crossing the vast grasslands of the east, but they paid them little heed, figuring them for exaggerations. When the millions strong hosts of the Goblin Union and the Bagdud's Orcs arrived at the foothills of the Northern Spine Mountains, it was clear that no hyperbole was involved in the slightest. The Dwarves of Delvuhn were the first to face the new movement of peoples, and the first confrontation was tense.
It’s unknown who fired the first shot, but skirmishes began to increase in intensity. While most of the Orcs moved on to the west, where they would invade Human realms, the Goblins stayed in the region of the Northern Spine Mountains, and when fighting broke out, the Dwarves of Delvuhn sealed their gates and hoped that they would simply go away like so many other attackers had. The gates of the remaining Halls were fortified countless times over, with reinforced metal and arcane enchantments protecting them from all but the strongest attacks. It seemed as though the Goblins would be just another attacker that would be forced to move on.
This illusion would quickly dissipate when the Goblin forces unveiled their most powerful asset; gunpowder. Bringing to bear massive cannons operated by hundreds of goblins a piece, they hammered at the gates day and night, their alchemists working constantly to create more powder and their tinkers more shells. Eventually, the gates could not stand up to such an assault, for they were not built to withstand cannonfire, and crumbled.
The battles were bloody but short as the Goblin soldiers utilized blunderbusses and grapeshot cannons to clear out fortifications and massed formations within the Hall, and within months the Thegn of Delvuhn surrendered and brought his people in disgraced retreat to Khizan. This would not be the last Hall to fall, as the Union was never a state to leave a grudge unfinished. They required cities to house their massive population, and they took a liking to Delvuhn, renaming it Nagodh and the new capital of their nation.
In the following years, Goblin cannonry and firearms brought the Halls of Vogrim and Mirnulir to their knees, and an army from Khizan was routed in a devastating defeat at the Battle of the Spine’s Edge in 250 AA. With one remaining hall by 255, the Dwarves of Khizan were forced to almost bankrupt their nation to remodel their forces with reverse engineered firearms and cannonry to stave off further defeat. With the forging techniques and newly discovered reserves of saltpeter, Khizan won a victory at the Battle of Fire and Smoke in 258 AA, and after a period of intense skirmishes, a status quo peace treaty was signed in 265 AA. The Dwarves reeled from the loss of the three Halls, and having to deal with intense overpopulation issues in Khizan, but in the subsequent century, war would not break out between Goblins and Dwarves any further.