The Gothic Earth TimelineThis timeline is out of character knowledge. Normal characters from Gothic Earth would not know about the Red Death nor the Qabals. We share it with the playerbase to give you context on how events happened in Gothic Earth's history.
Before the coming of the Red Death, magical energies permeated the world. Men and women who attuned themselves to these energies, either through study of the world around them or study of themselves, could tap into them. These people became known as wizards, sorcerers, wise women, shamans and priests. While some groups remained tribal, roaming their lands and following the animals that provided them with food, clothing and shelter, others settled in one place, farming the land and growing what they needed.
From the settlements of these agricultural people, cities arose, becoming great centers for trade with other cities as well as places to propitiate the gods who blessed (or cursed) their endeavors. Great cities such as Hamoukar and Susa arose in the fertile lands of Mesopotamia. In Egypt, the cities of Giza and Memphis, among others, prospered, drawing their life from the Nile.
Throughout the world, magic played a part in the lives of the people, whether simple magics to bring rain and make the lands and people fertile or more complex magics to increase the practitioner’s power or grant him eternal life.
The search for the latter type of magic led to the downfall of the mystic and magical energy that infused the world.
The End BeginsDuring the Third Dynasty in Egypt, around 2700 B.C.E., a priest named Imhotep crafted a series of rituals and spells into the tomb of Djoser, the current pharaoh, with the intent of warding Djoser’s spirit after his death. The nature of these spells was such that, rather than have the intended effect, they created an opening into another realm and “something” came through from that other place.
That something, later to be known as the Red Death, infused the magical energies of the world with its own corruption and began a process that would slowly eat away at the fabric of magic. So slowly as to be almost imperceptible, magic changed, becoming tainted with the evil of the Red Death. The repercussions of this change would affect every spellcaster from that time forward. Imhotep himself found himself inextricably linked to the entity his magics had given entry to.
A Time For WaitingDuring the centuries immediately following its arrival, the Red Death took note of its new surroundings. Even then, it was planting the seeds of a great plan to dominate the earth. Though the Red Death remained quiescent for more than a thousand years, its mere presence on Gothic Earth initiated a series of changes flowing out from one another as ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. The evil that was the Red Death latched onto the world’s magical energies, slowly corrupting them. First, powerful spells grew a little weaker, not always working as they should. Smaller spells sometimes failed entirely.
In Egypt, where the Red Death acquired its first servants, it was able to corrupt those spells that dealt most directly with life and death — or more specifically, life after death.
Imhotep’s spells and the spells of all who came after him tainted the preservative spells for the nobles of Egypt, ensuring that most of them did not pass into the Underworld with all the honors due them but remained, instead, as dreadful, undead mummies bound by the Red Death to prevent the curious from looking too closely into Egypt’s many secrets.
With these mummies, the Red Death’s legions of horror took form and would expand throughout the centuries as more and more types of undead came into existence.
In the meantime, the Red Death experimented with dabbling in human affairs from its vantage point as an interested observer.
By nudging the chaos factor here and skewing the magic probabilities there, the Red Death fostered discontent between the young, powerful nations of the world. Where the game died mysteriously, leaving a tribe of hunters on the verge of starvation, the settled community nearby experienced a bountiful harvest. It was a small matter for the hunters to see this as a sign that they should take what they needed, particular when their shamans and wise women had visions directing them to do so.
Small wars broke out between tribes, between ancient cities and between the beginnings of nations. The Red Death absorbed magical and death energies, and feasted where there was evil intent.
The Early QabalsBut where there was evil, there was also good. Priests, scholars, wise men and women, astrologers and shaman from the young cultures of the world recognized that things were not as they had been and that some new presence had entered the world. Careful to work in secret, lest they be censured by their peers and targeted by the evil thing whose existence they posited, these thinkers, some of whom were adepts or mystics, gathered together in small groups to share their ideas and to reinforce their observations.
One of their first realizations was the fact that they, themselves, could do little to stop the evil that had permeated their world. They did determine that the best they could do for future generations was to attempt to record the passage of this entity through the world, noting each event that seemed to have some connection with this monstrous being.
For centuries, these groups labored in secret to compose poems, oral catalogs and, later, written scrolls codifying their discoveries. Whether or not anyone would ever be powerful enough to confront this great force, they did not know. They did what they could and forced themselves to be content.
These early qabals had no names. Names, in that time, were power and having a name made it possible for someone to gain power over you. Those who fought the Red Death through the collection and study of information did so behind the curtain of anonymity, hoping thereby to prevent the Red Death from finding and controlling them.
The Ancient EmpiresFor more than two thousand years after its arrival on Gothic Earth, the Red Death watched and waited as cities grew into empires and empires rose and fell.
In Sumeria, a cup-bearer named Sargon rose in power until he overthrew the current rulers and forged his own empire around the year 2200 B.C.E. Sargon the Great, as he was called, ruled the kingdom of Akkad from the city of Agade, near the former capital of Kish. He was famous as a road builder, established a postal service, amassed a formidable number of clay tablets, which he stored in a library and ruled through governors he selected himself.
He tried to establish a dynasty, but his grandson was overthrown. Sargon’s empire disappeared after little more than 100 years.
After Sargon, Ur-Nammu revived the defunct Sumerian Empire. Under his rule, the first code of laws came into being. A century later, however, Sumer came under attack by the Elamites and Amorites, a tall folk who were formerly nomadic but who settled near the city of Ashur. The fallen Sumerians saw the collapse of their empire as a sign that the gods had abandoned them.
Some scholars see the movements of the Red Death in these events. Sargon’s library enabled qabalists to gain access to the knowledge contained in the clay tablets, while the roadways and posts enabled communication among scholars (as well as providing safe travel for merchants, soldiers and tax collectors).
The Sumerian code of laws went a long way toward establishing order in the land, providing a sense of security and safety to even the common folk. Because the Red Death works best where ignorance and fear dominate the populace, it provided a nudge here and a push there to various of its minions to topple these empires.
In the 1800s B.C.E., the Amorite King Hammurabi embarked on a path of conquest, forging his own empire ruled from the city of Babylon. Where he conquered, he established a set of laws, later known as the Code of Hammurabi, to ensure peace and justice throughout his lands, even though what was “just” for a poor man was often quite different from what was “just” for a noble or priest.
Like some of ancient history’s greatest kings, Hammurabi did his work under the patronage of the sun god, which he knew as Shamesh. Though the Kassites, a fierce mountain tribe who used horses as war mounts, invaded Babylon and greatly weakened the Babylonians, Hammurabi’s descendants continued to rule there until the Hittites sacked Babylon in the 1500s B.C.E. Here again, the passage of the Red Death can be traced, promoting unrest in civilizations that threaten to become centers of learning and repositories of arcane lore.
The same thing was happening in other parts of the world. The Minoan civilization in Crete dated back to 3000 B.C.E., becoming a showplace for gorgeous palaces and elaborate religious rituals. In 1700 B.C.E., a great disturbance, probably a powerful earthquake, toppled many cities in Crete. Though the cities were rebuilt, they would face more trials as nature seemed to take up arms against the island realm. A monumental volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera in 1650 B.C.E. created great tidal waves that destroyed much of Crete’s coastline. This eruption caused the sinking of the island of Atlantis, according to some scholars. The subsequent disturbances in temperature, rainfall and the harvests for several years thereafter cast great doubt in the minds of the people as to their priests’ ability to provide favorable growing conditions.
References in ancient scrolls from this time period to prophesies concerning mysterious visitors, red fogs and growing shadows hint at the presence of a sinister being during this time. Scholars familiar with the cryptic signatures left by the Red Death in the pages of history point to these prophecies as indications that the end of the Minoan Empire and the disappearance of Atlantis were, if not arranged, then urged onward by the plans of the Red Death.
In Greece, the Mycenae people moved into Greece and became the dominant culture. During this period, the Trojan War, later immortalized in Homer’s Iliad took place. In turn, the Mycenae Greeks fell to the Dorian invasion and Greece withdrew from the world.
By the time Homer wrote his Iliad and Odyssey, immortalizing an age of Greek heroes and their god-influenced deeds, Greek civilization had taken another upswing, their culture heavily influencing those around them as the city states of Sparta, Athens, Ithaca, Syracuse and other polis prospered, fought wars with each other and developed separate identities.
Again, qabalists saw evidence of the Red Death’s movements in the slow progress of humanity. For every cultural leap forward, there was a war or a tyrant or a disaster to drag society backward. The Red Death used the critical removal of great leaders through assassination, accident, sickness or death in battle to manipulate the flow of history to its advantage. These researchers have also alleged that the Red Death, in some instances, substituted doppelgangers for particularly charismatic rulers or, sometimes, used possession on certain key individuals in order to make certain that people whose goals opposed his did not stay in power unmolested for long.
Some scholars see in Homer’s poems clear references to a powerful force working behind the scenes. The actions that the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey take often seem “out of character” and are attributed to the workings of various gods. Students of the Red Death’s activities see these attributions to deity-intervention as oblique references to the Red Death. Even Homer did not want to draw attention to his hidden messages from the wrong people.
In 335 B.C.E., a young Macedonian general named Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon, inherited his father’s position as ruler of Macedon and continued his father’s mission to build an empire. Alexander’s phenomenal success ushered in a Golden Age of culture throughout Persia, Egypt and Greece. Indeed, Alexander spread Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean region. His untimely death at the age of 32 raised many suspicions among qabalistic scholars that the Red Death had marked Alexander as an enemy. Indeed, there is some evidence that Alexander himself was a member of one of the qabals that pit themselves against the Red Death’s depredations.
By the 300s B.C.E., the Ptolemies had established their rule in Egypt, now one of three great monarchies established after the death of Alexander. Civilization flourished along the Mediterranean coastline; also, cities such as Athens, Persepolis, Susa, Babylon, Samarkand, Tyre and Alexandria became centers of learning and trade.
By this time, the Red Death’s presence had so tainted the earth’s magical energies that the practice of magic had nearly died out. Explorers and sailors brought back tales from far away of wizards, sorcerers and nature priests who kept the secrets of magic alive.
The DefianceIn the city of Alexandria, a group of scholars, sages, adepts and mystics formed a secret society to pool their resources and find a way to purge the world of the evil that had entered it so long ago. Calling themselves “The Defiance,” this qabal made use of the Great Library at Alexandria as their headquarters and as a giant reserve of knowledge. The rooms in the Great Library held the great works of the ages, manuscripts of some of the greatest minds, including Socrates, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Pythagoras and Euripides, among others. The library’s collection also included rare (even then) magical treatises and mystical writings by men and women of power.
Members of the Defiance met at regular intervals to share their information and collaborate in finding a way to defeat the Red Death, for some of them had given the great evil a name. Finally, after more than a century of meeting, the children and successors of the original members of the Defiance thought they had succeeded. They put together a great ritual that, had it worked, should have resulted in returning the creature known as the Red Death to the realm from which it came.
The enemy, however, was already in their midst even as they planned the ritual. Despite the wards and protections the Defiance had constructed about their meeting place within the Great Library, one of their number was, in fact, a servant of the Red Death. Some recent studies of the history of the Defiance suggest that a red widow, disguised as a mystic named Inclavia, had infiltrated the qabal. Working from within as one of the members of the Defiance, this creature served as a conduit for the perceptions of her master.
Just as the qabal began their banishing ritual, a minion of the Red Death, a respected Church leader named Cyril, who had made a pact with that entity, selling his soul for power and adulation, led a group of outraged people to the library. With cries of "heretic" and “blasphemer” on their lips, the crowd stormed the Great Library, broke in upon the ritual and dragged the participants into the streets. Many members were killed or badly injured by the attack. A few fled the city. One of their members, a woman named Hypatia, who was a distinguished scholar, mathematician, and philosopher, was brutally martyred for her beliefs.
The Defiance had fallen, its members either dead or fled, broken in body and spirit. The subsequent destruction of the Great Library, along with most of its books and scrolls, erased most of the information about the Red Death so laboriously gathered over centuries by scholars, adepts, mystics and others dedicated to the eradication of evil.
The Red Death's Shadow GrowsAfter the disappearance of the knowledge contained in the Great Library, few people had the resources to oppose the plans of the Red Death. By the beginning of the 6th century, the Red Death’s influence spread throughout Europe and into Asia and the Orient. The American continents and the islands of the Pacific remained, as yet, free of the Red Death’s control. But since those who could protect the world from the Red Death had suffered an almost irreparable defeat, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the Red Death would exercise control over the entire world.
With the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and the rise of the barbarian tribes throughout Europe, the era known as the Dark Ages of Western civilization began. Much learning, including any knowledge of the Red Death, was forever lost in the ruins of looted and burned cities.
Elsewhere in the world, other civilizations prospered. In the Americas, the Mayan culture took the form of numerous city-states ruled by a hierarchy of priests. In Africa, the kingdom of Ghana arose around the trans-Saharan camel trade routes.
The surviving members of the Defiance fled to other centers of learning, or else sought refuge in places as far away from civilization as possible. Some traveled to the ends of the earth, seeking anonymity as a sort of protection from the Red Death that had marked them for destruction. Others hid themselves in the emerging monastic orders. From the ashes of the Defiance grew other orders, studying in secret to preserve what little magic they remembered and make certain that the Red Death did not corrupt everything utterly. Some of these small groups vanished after a short time; others fell to corruption. A few survived, however, managing to pass along their knowledge to succeeding generations of members.
Whether they remember their original goals or whether they have fallen utterly under the control of the Red Death or whether they simply forgot what their purpose used to be, all present day qabals trace their beginnings back to the Defiance.
Out of the StoneThough the Red Death held sway throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Empire remained relatively free of the Red Death’s dominion. In Europe, many of the qabals (or shadow orders, as they were called for existing in evil’s shadow) fell to the corruption that surrounded them. Though many of the Goths and Celts showed a high degree of “civilization,” albeit one dependent on tribes rather than cities and oral rather than written traditions, other groups were little more than marauders and bandits, looting and pillaging the remnants of earlier civilizations.
In the midst of such chaos and lawlessness, however, a few lights of goodness and knowledge continued to shine. Monasteries kept alive not only the written culture of the world through these dark centuries, they also preserved what few pieces of secret lore remained. Both monasteries and convents also served as hiding places for some of the new qabals. Other qabals sought shelter within pagan communities in Ireland and Scandinavia, while communities of scholars in the Middle East gave succor to their own wise men and women.
Many of the illuminated manuscripts of Europe’s monastic period contained coded rituals and information about the Red Death encoded in the illuminated designs and flourishes.
In the middle of the 6th century, a king named Arthur arose in England, uniting the warring Briton nobles to defend England against the Saxon and Scandinavian invaders. Under Arthur, learning flourished once more, civilization began to reassert its order throughout the weary British Isles, and the seeds of knighthood and chivalry took root, to blossom in later centuries.
Most importantly, within the heart of Camelot, Arthur’s great castle, a strong and powerful qabal grew, ready to take up the mantle of the Defiance. This qabal, which called itself the Stone, had as its leader none other than the legendary adept now known as Merlin, though his real name remains a mystery.
Joining together with other adepts in Europe, Arabia and the Middle East and Northern Africa, Merlin established a network of connection among the qabals that stood against the Red Death. Calling themselves the White Wizards, they opposed the fallen, corrupted qabals. Using their magic to communicate with one another, the White Wizards were able to identify and destroy many of the minions of the Red Death as well as put an end to some of the corrupt qabals.
Under Merlin’s leadership, until his mysterious disappearance, the Stone and the White Wizards made great inroads in their task of spreading the light to places sunk in shadow by the Red Death. To some extent, they succeeded. If nothing else, they ensured that the world did not fall at that time to the plottings of the Red Death.
Plagues and New MonstersIn 542, a plague that began in northern Africa was carried by shipboard rats to Constantinople. From there, the plague spread quickly throughout Europe, halving the population. Scholars of the supernatural indicate that the plague coincides with the first appearance of lycanthropes, and that many of the plague rats were, in fact, wererats created by the Red Death for this express purpose. While other shapechangers existed in some cultures, many of these, such as werebears, were beneficial members of their tribal society.
Some metaphysicians who studied the growth of evil suggested that the Red Death had decided that the time was right to introduce new monsters to the world. Wererats were but the first of many to follow.
The Holy Roman EmpireIn 800, Pope Leo III crowned the warrior-king of the Franks as emperor of a new, “holy” Roman Empire. One of Charlemagne’s first actions, as a new convert to the Christian religion, was to declare Christianity the official religion of the new empire.
Many of the qabals that fought the Red Death saw this event as a victory for the forces of good and light. A unified empire would make sharing resources and information easier and would unite church and government into one governing body that would bring justice and order to a beleaguered Europe.
Ironically, the forces of the Red Death saw this as a victory as well, since a unified church and state would make it easier for a tyrant to gain control of many resources at once.
Those who were not Christians but who yet fought the Red Death grew fearful that this move portended distress for them. Pagans in northern Europe as well as Islamic and Jewish scholars in Africa and the Middle East realized that the Holy Roman Empire, in adopting Christianity as the one, true faith, had opened up a rift between themselves and other religions.
In 867, a great schism divided the Christian church into two parts, one ruled from Rome and the other from Constantinople (formerly Byzantium). A further division, this time on the political front, took place upon Constantine’s death in 870. His three sons divided Europe among them, creating artificial political borders and introducing an element of divisive nationalism that made it harder for qabals to work within each other.
For the forces of good, the overall result of the formation of the Holy Roman Empire was less than perfect. Persecutions of non-Christians divided qabals along religious lines, making the sharing of information about the Red Death more difficult than before. In addition, a good number of men and women who had grown in their magical powers were captured and put to death by church zealots who labeled them heretics and witches.
The forces of the Red Death, however, did not claim as much of a victory as they would have liked. They had hoped to utilize a unified Empire as a means of disseminating their evil and corruption. They did not perceive that the qabals had grown strong and quick to identify minions of the Red Death. Even divided, the forces of good provided a surprising amount of resistance to the evil horde.
The Erosion of the StoneThe Red Death’s counterattack began slowly. More and more hideous creatures appeared in the world. The dead walked, things that had no right to be crawled up from the depths of the earth and descended from the heights. Whether created for specific purposes — and many of these creatures were sent to destroy some highly placed member of the Stone or one of the White Wizards — these beings of darkness remained on after their tasks were done, waiting for other prey to find them.
Hounded by many authorities, pursued by foul monsters, destroyed from within by their own connections with the world’s tainted magic, the members of the Stone and other qabals fell by the wayside. Some individuals died gruesome deaths; others disappeared. Still others simply left the fight, broken-hearted and weary of the constant struggle.
Soon no qabal trusted anyone outside its own membership. The Red Death had succeeded in dividing its foe. The Crusades would deal them a near-fatal blow.
Crusades of DeathBeginning with the 11th century, a series of Crusades, or Holy Wars, sent armies of knights and untold foot soldiers away from their homes in Europe on a quest to free the Holy Land, and specifically, the city of Jerusalem, from its Moslem rulers in the name of Christianity. Though the crusaders believed they were doing the work of God, the destruction they wrought was incalculable. The Saracen armies, as well, fought for their idea of religious truth. Both sides suffered and died, and their homelands were the worse for their loss.
As one Crusade followed another, the object of the crusaders' quest grew more vague. Unable to reach the Holy Land, the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, sacked the city of Constantinople and initiated a process that would end in the demise of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders returned, rich with plunder. Some did not return at all, but hideous creatures that assumed the forms of these unfortunate knights returned in their place. Thus, the Red Death placed spies — doppelgangers and rakshasas — in the heart of Europe, seeded among the nobles.
The forces that opposed the Red Death, the qabals of resistance to the growing evil in the world, were fractured and unable to present a unified front. They could do nothing to prevent the slaughter of the Crusades and the enmity between Moslem and Jew and between Moslem and Christian that would continue to haunt the future. Once again the plans of the Red Death bore bloody fruit.
The Great DestructionIn the mid 1300s, one of the greatest disasters in European history occurred. Traveling from the eastern lands, from Asia and the southern Russia, the Black Plague swept across Europe and the British Isles. Once again, many of those who died were members of shadow orders opposed to the Red Death. Fully one third of the population of Europe perished in agony.
Though the disease itself was a natural byproduct of the Oriental rat flea, carried to Europe by rats from merchant ships, the processes whereby flea-infested rats found their way on board ships bound for Constantinople and other ports with access to European trade routes was, in part, orchestrated by servants of the Red Death.
The Rise of the PhoenixThough the Red Death seemed to make great inroads in western Europe, every action eventually produces a reaction. In the 14th century, a qabal arose in Italy made up of brilliant minds, wise mystics, philosophers, scientists, artists and other men and women of good will and great talent. Calling themselves the Phoenix, after the mythological bird of perpetual death and resurrection, this qabal spearheaded advances in the arts and fledgling sciences.
Many historians fluent in the secret history of Gothic Earth credit the Phoenix for being the catalyst from which the movement known as the Renaissance sprang.
A few scholars of forbidden lore indicate that the Phoenix owed its sudden genesis to a minion of the Red Death, a lord who repented of his actions and foreswore his former master in the interests of rescuing humanity from the destruction that loomed in its future.
The RenaissanceThe Catholic world had just recovered from the Great Schism that pit the French against the rest of Catholic Europe and resulted in a period of nearly 40 years in which two popes reigned, one in Avignon, France, and the other in Rome. In England, the warring houses of York and Lancaster began a long struggle known as the War of the Roses that would last through the latter half of the 15th century and result in a victory for the Lancastrian house of Tudor. In the Middle East, Timur (or Tamarlane), who had led the Mongol hordes across Persia and Turkey, died in 1405 before trying to conquer China. This left room for the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and for the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.
In China, the Ming dynasty continued its rule, while the Ashikara Shogunate rose to power in Japan. In Central America, the Aztecs established the grand city of Tenochtitlan, while in South America, the Incan Empire continued to evolve.
Against this world backdrop, the Renaissance blossomed like a brilliant flower in a tumultuous garden of growth and riotous upswelling. Some of the most talented individuals came together in Florence, Italy as well as in other Italian city-states in an outpouring of culture and celebration of human nature such as had not been seen since the Golden Age of Greece.
Indeed, the Renaissance brought about a rebirth of interest in classical knowledge and art and, with the renewal of classicism came the opportunity to study once again forgotten works of ancient philosophers. Thus, many members of the Phoenix were able to obtain manuscripts from the classical period that re-acquainted them with knowledge about the Red Death that had long been consigned to the ashes of antiquity.
Many believe that great men like Leonardo da Vinci, the architect Brunelleschi, the painters Piero della Francesca, Raphael and Michelangelo were all members of the Phoenix at one time or another. Some even believe that Savanarola, the preacher and religious purist was, though misguided, a fervent warrior against the Red Death, despite his aversion to secular art and literature. Other scholars have offered evidence that the political genius Niccolo Machiavelli had fallen under the influence of the Red Death; some even contend that a creature masquerading as Niccolo Machiavelli was responsible for the actions of that individual, actions that led to the eventual downfall of the Phoenix.
The 15th century also brought about the rise of the Red Death’s most powerful servants. Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia in life, met his death and arose as a powerful vampire, the lord of all the vampires of Eastern Europe and a bitter enemy of the forces of enlightenment and goodness.
The timeline of the Gothic Earth setting goes on up until the 1890s, but this chronology has reached our threshold of 1650 C.E. No characters from Gothic Earth on our server can be from a later time period.
More detailed historical information on specific eras and civilizations can be found in our Gothic Earth PC Information Thread.Source: D20 Masque of the Red Death
