Long time, no see. I would have love to keep up to the updates but the never ending March 2020 that was the last year put a halt to many projects and the current year I dedicated the Old World Army Challenge to an oldhammer 40k Iyanden army.
But here we are and we will try to organize this mess a little bit...
Getting the thesis viva and coming of the covid has derailed my Tilean campaign, but I will dedicate a series of post, to do a proper setup and organize the campaign. I am also working to give a tab for the main posts of the campaign or a permanent link somewhere up in the blog under the header.
Someone will probably remember that this blog started with a bunch of elfs and skavens with unfriendly intentions. The elfs running out of a skaven threat, trying to protect a wounded merchant and his important treasure from a bunch of assassins.
But why on the Old World did I placed this campaign on Tilea.
Well, the Old World, including the oldhammer lore, has a plenty of free space for the lore of a campaign. The elfs and dwarfs had some cities there, probably battered after the War of the Beard and the elf civil war. The humans came and started to settle the fields after the fall of the elf colonies.
The background of this campaign might be set up in the period slightly after the goblin wars of the dwarves. The old races have partly abandoned the lands to the humans. Maybe some of them were old slaves of the elfs, a common practice before the people of Naggaroth settled their differences with the rest of Ulthuan. After the two factions of the old elf people settled their differences, maybe the high elves were not so kind with this practice and many of the old slaves were the transferred to the status as “libertos” like in the Roman Empire and so on. Probably others are the landlords of the new human settlements of Tilea. The sky is the limit trying to define what made the tileans so independent as a society, impeding the feudal society like in the Empire, Estalia or Bretonnia and the room has always been pretty empty in this front to be honest, admitting plenty of new furniture in there.
The old elf cities are mostly abandoned ruins. Some of them may probably still be active, but merely a shadow of their glory. Accepting their actual decadent status and their populace mixed with other, “lesser” races, in this period of downfall and loss of the colonies farther from Ulthuan. Or at least this is how I envisioned the main city of my elf lore, the old port of Tor Nimtala (but for that matter, probably similar to other distant elf cities before been completely abandoned by the elfs).
There is also a second reason, the human society of Tilea also gives an interesting opportunity for collecting a small mercenary force/human militia. Based in medieval and renaissance Italy, this means that they may go without the usual empire or feudal fantasy french or english look. The period I chose as the setting for this campaign also allows me to experiment with an early medieval italian design instead of the later renaissance look of most of the tilean mercenary renditions in the past. But that will be covered in future entries, as our starting point is what happens with the elves of the tilean coast.
The history of Tor Nimtala
A small settlement in the northern coast of Tilea. A relic of an age when the dwarfs and elfs governed the land and the seas respectively. This small port was a feud of some naggarythean elf noblemen long before the civil war.
Their tall towers were once the symbol of the elf rule over the seas and the coasts. The docks and markets fleeting the dwarven metals and luxurious goods by the slave hands of the humans living in the nowadays Tilea. The unmatched power of the nagarythe lords and their pitty desires modelled every aspect of the city.
However, their decadent glory will not last forever.
Most of the nobility was sided with the house of Malekith in the times of its downfall trying to be the ruling Phoenix King. They pledged loyalty and schemed their role in the upcoming civil war.
Tor Nimtala troops exercise outside the city walls
Their plan was support Malekith and overthrow the loyalist nagarythean lords and their ship crews, then use the flotilla to harass the southern routes to Ulthuan. However, an unexpected move from lord Shyarthin the Exalted, a noble from Nagarythe, shattered the plan. Suspicious of the military activity of their brethen, he call his friend Bel-tebal of Tiranoc, who was conducting a campaign against the orcs in the lands of current Estalia. Bel-tebal came with his ships and knights to help the military exercise that the noblemen of the cities were conducting.
When the Sundering came, they were prepared and the battle was bloody. Street by street the elf fought, and the nagarythean lords that fought alongside prince Ythok under the banner of Malekith were repelled.
The peace was bitter, as the city has suffered from the war. The ships departed to Ulthuan, this time to aid king Caledor and hunt the rebels who were ravaging the homeland. However, there was no signs of prince Ythok and his dark elves nor in the city and the nearest seas.
The council of elven lords
The city was ruled by a temporary tetrarchy, under the rule of several nobles including Shyarthin of Nagarythe and Bel-tebal of Tiranoc, the saviours of the city.
Time passed but war was not forgotten. In a series of horrible events, the War of the Beard started. Some nobles in Tor Nimtala were suspicious that the dark elves were involved. Caledor II was not so tempered and diplomatic as Caledor. The long friendship with the dwarfs was shattered and Tor Nimtala knew again the bloodbath of the war. The armies clashed in the northern of current Tilea. Tor Nimtala was under siege several times, as well as some elven forts that were on the dwarf route to the city.
The other ruling members of the Tor Nimtala tetrarchy were slain in battle during the long and protracted conflict. But the fate of prince Shyarthin of Nagarythe was sealed when an army evacuating his family from the castle of Mindogol up in the dwarf road met the treacherous dark elves of prince Ythuk, ambushing them in the forests. They were waiting until the armies of Tor Nimtala were battered so he could try to re-conquer the port for himself.
For a second time, Bel-tebal came to aid his friend and their knights break the lines of the dark elves that had to flee for the coast. However, the noble family was in the brink of death, only their son survived, who became the protected of Bel-tebal.
A tired Bel-tebal assumed the single rule of Tor Nimtala. His friends slain, the alliance with the dwarfs shattered and an unsatisfying peace with them, and the city and the lands surrounding Tor Nimtala shattered.
After the death of Caledor II, the evacuation of most of the elf colonies started, and along the years the cities became merely ruins. Bel-tebal refused to give up after so much blood. He sent his children and the son of his friend back to Tiranoc however, so they can grow up in the main lands of Ulthuan. The bonds between the two families became more tight than before.
He didn’t know at that his line and the family of his old friend were destined to unite, and together rule the last days of what remained of the old glory of Tor Nimtala...
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