Nioa

The World's Cradle

Nioa is the name of an arid continent on the planet Holos and in the Material Plane. It is considered by many mortals to be the birthplace of the Elder Races and the cradle of civilization and the major religions of Holos.

History

The Mithril Era

In the early eons of the The Mithril Era, when the gods, titans, and other ancient things roamed above all else, Nioa was a lush land; an unending paradise. Such a garden attracted every god from every realm, apart from the elusive fey, who’s domain had long been the envy of the gods and unobtainable as the winds of time.
It began with a great conflict known today as the War of the Dawn. The War saw many battles between the Heavenly Council and the Unspoken, the dark deities whom sought to corrupt mortals and bring about the end of the Material Realm. Worst of these dark gods was Valdra, the Dread Dragoness, who rose from her slumber to wreck havoc on the young world. Many other gods and spirits joined the fray, but unable to kill Valdra, the gods forged the deity Oheilion. Oheilion did battle with the Dread Dragoness and from his wounds fathered the orcs and goblinoids. Oheilion befriended Kōs, a young god who was the son of Valdra and convinced him to help in the fight against his own mother. In a final battle, the Bloodied Lord buried Valdra beneath the Material Plane and sealed her deep within a series of stone labyrinths known today as the Underdark. For his effort, Kōs was able to escape the near destruction of dragon kind.
As Valdra was being buried, a group of dragons led by Kōs, the Coiled Serpent, fled the catastrophe through a gap in the earthen prison. They became known as the Noble Dragons, and vowed to turn away from evil. However, in refusing to bow to the Heavenly Council, they were banished along with their new god, Kōs.
However, Valdra wanted all of her children, not just those that betrayed her, to be free of this fate. Rather than resist being buried alive, she breathed forth the Heart Hearth with a gout of everflame, through which the Chromatic Dragons escaped. And so the lush paradise of Nioa was burned away until only that green land which could drink from the cool waters of the Niru River remained. Today, the Heart Hearth burns still somewhere in the Ghostdunes or the Marrow Desert. None know its location, though many theories exist.
I digress. The first mortal kingdom of the Mithril Age, and the one that went on to define life in Nioa for centuries, was that of Old Temekan. The first Temekanians were the first children of the gods, the aasimar. They ruled over the entirety of the continent, and built mighty cities of stone. They were intelligent, ambitious, and pious. As a result, the gods of the Heavenly Council would walk among them, giving gifts and advice the way a parent regards their virtuous child. They worked alongside sphinxes and lamias and the other Elder Races. But their greatest achievement came to be their downfall. For it was the work of two mages: Myurdin and Ozha-Ban that changed the world from a mithrilic paradise to the land we see today.
Yes, the goddess of magic herself was once a mortal Temekanian. Though little is known about her mortal life, she was clearly a witch of great renown, she was the first of her kind to unlock the secrets of the Script, the ebb and flow of phenomena that dictates the shape and times of the universe. She became incredibly powerful, so powerful in fact, that the gods began to fear her. With the help of her servants, the race she created known now as the kenku, the gods managed to lock her away but not before she cursed her children to speak only through mimicry and to walk as a mere mortal. Yet Myurdin knew the Script and through her divination, she realized another would release her from her prison. The gods of the Heavenly Council too, eventually learned of the Script through the Time Tablets of Balan. When she was freed during the Sundering Arcana freed, the gods grudgingly accepted her into the fold, allowing her to become the first and only mortal to ascend to a divine seat on the Heavenly Council.
The other great Temekanian, and the individual who spelled doom for his people was the great Ozha-Ban. In his youth, the Doom Lich lived life in obscurity, a minor prince in a great Temekanian court. According to legend, at the funeral of his brother in the magnificent Royal Chasms in the Valley of the Dead, when he stumbled upon the hidden workshop of Myurdin. Unlike the Sable Witch, who worked in secret, Ozha-Ban shared his newfound knowledge of the Script with the people of Temekan. He unlocked the secrets not only to mere revivification, but also to immortality. The people of Temekan became obsessed with it, and under Ozha-Ban’s leadership, after of course he killed the rest of his family, the land of Temekan cast off the worship of the Heavenly Council and devoted their bodies, minds, and spirits to the worship of their new god-king, Ozha-Ban, the Eternal.
Soon, Ozha-Ban became frustrated. He could do much, but not as much as Myurdin and many of the most tantalizing secrets of the world remained secure in the hands of the Heavenly Council. He began to conspire to gain dark allies, once disparate forces that had troubled the Heavenly Council here and there into a single unified entity that could defeat them.
Needless to say, the gods soon learned of this plan and proceeded to destroy the source of their power. Telerashi summoned all the power of the storms and sent wind, and sand, and rain down upon the Temekanians. Standing at the edge of the Mashiq, where the virtuous exiles of the Great House of Temekan lived., she washed away their mighty palaces, flooded the grand gardens, and smashed apart all of their treasures and magical tools. Even the mighty Ozha-Ban fell to Telerashi’s wrath. But Ozha-Ban’s powers now gave him reign over both life and undeath. He rose from the ashes of his people’s death and vowed to one day cast down the Heavenly Council whom had destroyed all that he loved.

The Palladian Era

From the ashes of Temekan rose dozens of new mortal kingdoms. The Chelmennians, the Qartagonians, the Dahenese, the Reshephi, the Akroh, the Tyranites, Qatanans, the Haddus, the Jeharoans, the Serabi, and the Kaneshites all warred with one another for supremacy of the continent during what is now called the 2nd Intermediate Period. Great heroes rose and fell and though it was a glorious time, it was a time of twilight. Eventually, the exiles of Temekan in Iskendra conquered or subdued all of them and gave their new empire the name Palladia. Thus began the second chapter of the history of Nioa—The Palladian Era.

For nearly a millennia, the Palladian Empire expanded their reach, conquering far off lands in Auloa, Iroa, and Hakoa. Up to sixty-five percent of the population was made up of conquered peoples who served as slaves building lavish palaces, temples, roads, public works projects, and plantations for their masters. The Palladians themselves were a ragged ethnicity of aasimar, elves, and their offspring. Some dwarves lived outside of bondage, but for the most part, the Divine races ruled above all others. The Palladians saw themselves as the heralds of a new age. They believed that if they could create a world in the image of the Celestial Realm, the gods would return to walk among them as they had in the age of the Temekanians. And though the works of the Palladians were truly magnificent and rivaled those of the Temekanians, their true nature was revealed with the Sundering Arcana.
With the birth of sorcery as more than speculation, the Palladians learned they could no longer control their subjects through brute force and the systemic control of knowledge. Indeed, many Palladians considered magic to be abhorrent to the nature of the cosmos itself, a perversion that needed to be stamped out. But as the elites tightened their grip, the new equalizer found its way faster into the hands of the oppressed and so began a series of devastating civil wars.
The first to rebel were the Qartagonian Dragonborn. Galvanized by the prophets called the Qosaari, the Qartagonians rose up against their captors. The Last of the Qosaari, a dragonborn named Rohan proclaimed all peoples who embraced the Way of the Dragon free and reignited the dragonborn’s faith in their long lost deity, Kōs. Rohan led his people to freedom establishing a new state, Qartago in opposition to the Palladians. The Palladians answered with force but in a stunning turn of events at the Battle of Iracleon, the Qartagonians defeated the much larger Palladian host. Though the prophet Rohan died at the battle, the dragonborn marched through the Marrow Desert, bent on razing the capital city of Iskendra. At the same time, Hakoan and Teroan humans, the youngest of the mortal races, began their migration from across the sea, further pressurizing the Palladian state until it exploded.
One by one, each province of the Palladians suffered some calamity and broke away until only the Kanesh peninsula remained. And in a desperate final bid, the decurions of Iskendra issued a new set of laws, based solely on the writings of the Heavenly Codex. This law reform eliminated most forms of legal discrimination based on race and eradicated the practice of legal slavery. The once oppressed peoples of Iskendra rallied together and held off the dragonborn rebels. A peace was finally agreed to, leaving the great city of the Palladian’s intact, though it’s kingdom had collapsed around it.

The Sundered Era

In the years since the Sundering and the Draconic Uprisings, the Qartagonians and their Emirates have emerged as the dominant power on the continent. At one point, the dragonborn controlled a vast territory from the haunted sands of the Ghostdunes to the Mashiqi shores of the Sea of Brass. However, within the last century, many Auloan adventurers trained by the violent cultures of the Sundered Era and thirsty for exotic lands and vast Palladian treasure have banded together and journeyed to Nioa. Led by three young nobles, these adventurers came to call themselves the Pilgrim peoples and waged a series of wars against the fractured Qartagonians. Eventually, the Holy City of Jeharoa fell to these crusaders and a new series of Auloa-styled city-states were established.
For the past century, the region of the Mashiq has been ravaged by war and set on edge thanks to religious tension and ethnic nationalism. Few know what is to come from this violence but all agree that the continent needs true heroes more than any other time in its long history. This is the world of Nioa that you enter. The remains of a grand continent-spaning empire, now ever on the brink. A new power rising from the ashes of their forgotten ancestors. And a ragged assortment of factions each vying for glory and fortune.

Geography

Kanesh

Kanesh, sometimes called the Kanesh Peninsula or the Hand of Kanesh, is a landmass that comprises the southernmost portion of the Nioan continent. Jutting into the Sea of Brass, the peninsula is made up of rocky highlands and deep river valleys, with the land meeting the sea as a coastal plain. Inland, shady forests of warm conifers and cedar trees makes up orchards and forested pasture. The rocky terrain creates difficulty for growing anything inland other than grapes and olives, which make up a large percent of the Kaneshite diet. On the coast, the summers are warm and the winters mild, though the further one treks inland, the higher elevation causes long hot summers and cold, rainy winters which replenishes the rocky landscape’s aquifers.

The Mashiq

The Mashiq, sometimes known as the Sunrise Coast, is a region of south-central Nioa. The Sea of Brass forms the southern border. From there, the land transitions into coastal plains full of lush farmland before rising into hilly low mountains. Much of the Mashiq is at a high elevation and its northern border is formed by the Blinding Cliffs, a series of escarpments that lead down into the Marrow Desert. The landscape itself has been eroded and changed over the centuries both from natural as well as divine forces. Steep hills trap moisture rising up from the south, causing some valleys to be fertile and some to be barren badlands. This disparity has led to the Mashiq being a high fragmented region with many resources and communities trapped by the land around them.

The Shanindar

Shanindar is best characterized by its hilly countryside. Basins dot the landscape and act as hubs of civilization in the rugged hill country. Much of the country is dry scrubland and hills, with certain parts featuring vast steppe plains, dune-covered desert, and even snowy mountains.

The Marrow Desert

The Nakhae, or Marrow Desert, is the largest explored desert in the world. It separates centers of cultivation and civilization—the coastal plains of the Mashiq and the lush riverine tropics of the Niru Valley. It is filled with massive sand dunes, quicksand lakes, and gypsum salt beds.

The Niru Valley

The most fertile land in all of Nioa, the Niru River Valley hugs the edges of the Niru River for which it is named like a cloak made of green velvet. The Valley begins in the Upper Cataracts of the Shanindar and terminates in the Niru Delta and filled with lush vegetation, animals and irrigated fields

The Ghostdunes

Once the homelands of the Great House of Temekan, the Ghostdune Desert were blighted by the gods for the sins of Pharaoh Ozha-Ban. Today, the region is covered in dark sand, blasted craters, and ruins riddled with magical fallout and vengeful spirits.

Maps

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  Nioa: Textured Map (2022)

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  Nioa (map)

  A map of the continent of Nioa in 362 SE

Mashiqi peoples of the Mithril Era Akroh—Demonscar Valley Chelmennians—Lower Shanindar Dahenese—Bashari Timberlands Haddus—Blinding Cliffs & Marrow Desert Jeharoans—Migdal Plain Kaneshites—Kanesh Peninsula Qatanans—Demonscar Valley Reshephi—Upper Poppy River Valley Saggasu—Hill country Serabi—Lower Poppy River Valley Tarakid—Gennesaret Tyranites—Tyria

Alternative Name(s)

The Cradle of Mortality

Type

Continent

Location under

Holos

Included Locations

• Kanesh
• Marrow Desert
• Shanindar (region)

Included Organizations

• Kōsism

Related Ethnicities

• Marrowmen
• Shanindar (ethnicity)

Contested By

• County of Boshra
• Imperium of Iskendra
• Kingdom of Jeharoa
• Principality of Alameen
• Province of Tyria
• Qartagonian Emirates
• Shanindar Empire

Inhabiting Species

• Ankheg
• Behir
• Dewback
• Eblis
• Gryphon
• Harpy
• Jackalwere
• Thri-kreen
• Wyvern

Related Plots

• Orphean League Season 5

Related Professions

• Anurehsaaq

Related Materials

• Dragonsbreath Steel

Related Historical Events

• 1 S.E.
  The Qartagonian Conquests