The History of Azamar

Credit: OER Project Blog

Hello and welcome to my world building blog!

Today, I will be discussing the history of Azamar, based on Richard Baker's companion sourcebook to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: World Builder's Guidebook, published by TSR Ltd in 1996.

We found early on in our design that the kingdom of Azamar is a fairly new kingdom, which settled in the sub-arctic region of a world with a planetary temperature is much colder than Earth.  It settled there because of ancient ruins that promised "fantastic wealth, magic, and hidden danger."  We gone through the steps of building its government, they way people live and survive, and even their beliefs.

This week I want to focus on Azamar's history.  And, since they are a fairly new kingdom, I would imagine they hadn't had a rich ancient history.  The World Builder's Guidebook references that any given kingdom in a fantasy campaign setting would have 2 to 12 ancient periods.  It seems that twelve periods for a fairly new kingdom is too much, so I rolled on my random generator stopping on a result of three ancient periods.  Each ancient age is 500-1,000 years.  I've listed the results below:

Ancient Ages
1000 years, Natural Cataclysm
1000 years, Man-made Cataclysm
500 years, Natural Cataclysm

Wow... a few cataclysms hit Azamar pretty hard more than three thousand years ago.  It could be the somewhat normal world was turning cold, and the sorceresses thought they could help by casting their spells and rituals.  Something happened that went sideways, which led to a man-made disaster, one which not even the gods could help.  And then Azamar endured another 500 years of the growing cold.

Fascinating!

Imagine the settlers of Azamar building their civilization in a temperate region just before the world turned cold.  The ever growing arctic circle shrinking the tropical regions until they disappeared, becoming temperate zones.  Sorceresses united and priestesses pleaded with the gods to reverse this trend of cold without success.  The magic got away from them, worsening the temperatures and bringing even more blizzards and ice.

Moving on, the Guidebook tells us to use 4-16 middle periods of 50-100 years each.  Listed below is a sequence of twelve events over a period of 910 years.

Middle Periods
80 years, Succession War
60 years, Conquest War
50 years, Plague
90 years, Kingdom decline/fall
60 years, Rebellion
90 years, Revolution
90 years, Exploration/colonization
70 years, Revolution
70 years, Invasion
90 years, Invasion
60 years, Crusade War
100 years,  Religion, cult activity

At a look, Azamar has had a turbulent past with wars, revolutions, and invasions, among other events.  The one that is interesting to me, though, is the last 100 years: cult activity.  We had already established the ancient ruins near Azamar is occupied by a religious cult.  According to our generator, the occupation has been happening for the last 100 years.  It's amazing how things fall into place even though we're using a random generator.

The final phase of history are Recent Events, which there are 2 to 12 events of note, each about 1 to 6 years apart.  The events for Azamar are listed below:

Recent Events
6 years, Intrigue/scandal

Ten years ago, scandal rocked Azamar.  What kind of a scandal?  Was there a conspiracy within the Council of the Storm?  Perhaps one to dethrone Chieftess Yngvild Skoptidottir?  Maybe the Chieftess wasn't acting herself.  After all, this did happen 10 years ago, she was a lot younger then.

4 years, Feud/rivalry

Four years ago, a feud or rivalry took place.  Perhaps two noble families were almost on the brink of war, stopped by the Chieftess and her Council before it escalated.  What if wealthy merchant houses took to battle over rights on plundering the ruins?  It could be any reason.

Now that we have a board sense of history for Azamar, we could set adventures anywhere on the timeline.  We have almost 3,500 years to play with.  If we really wanted to, we could even run a time travel adventure covering some of the setting's more interesting time periods.

However, there is so much more we could cover in this blog using the World Builder's Guidebook by Richard Baker.  I've left so much information from the book behind.  We didn't cover the size and shape of the world, the amount of water covering the world, seismology and tectonics, landforms, terrain types, rivers, lakes, seas, the population, monsters, ecology, and so much more!  I think I'll let you discover those aspects on your own.

I did, however, have fun building the cold kingdom of Azamar, and I want to delve deeper into the ancient ruins, and perhaps come up with a campaign for our setting.

Next week, we'll get into Azamar's many adventures, both within the kingdom and the nearby ancient ruins.

I hope you enjoyed the read, and until next time, thanks for reading.