Dungeons The Dragoning Redux: Ancient History Of The Wheel

The history of the Great Wheel is a great sprawling tapestry, embroidered in blood and steel and gold, stretching from the furthest reaches of the distant past to the current hour. Near-immortal wizard kings once shaped the Wheel to their will and made it a place of miraculous splendor. Today, men fight with sword and bolter in the ruins of ancient glory. However, the story of the current era cannot be told without a look to the deep past...

Primordial History and the Old Ones

Slann may or may
not be Old Ones.

They have been known by a thousand name by a thousand cultures which were but infants when the age of Gods came to an end. They've been called Precursors, Progenitor, Preservers, Syrne, The Ancients, The Endless. For simplicity sake we will call them The Old Ones. They emerged, the first race to progress in magic and technology enough to become part of the larger universe. They were almost immortal, patient and wise.  Or so the story goes. The Syrne were potent mages who routinely used the powers of the warp for a large variety of applications, constructing the Portal Relays.

But the Syrne were not alone in this young galaxy. While they may have been the first mortal race to ascend to such height, sentience had evolved elsewhere in the galaxy in a completely different form. Vast creatures of great power, with many souls, the Primordials (or Yozi) claimed this young galaxy and took offense at the Syrne’s preposterous idea of supremacy, for the Syrne were at that time still and nowhere near the peak of their power. Nevertheless, the Syrne found allies in the Primordial known as Autochthon, the great Maker (sometimes known as Primus). A thinker, a builder and peerless engineer, Autochthon had more in common with the ambitious and industrious Syrne than his destructive and abusive brethren. The war between the Old Ones and the Primordials was a long one, with both side unleashing powers which at the time were new to the nascent universe but in the end, the Syrne won against the legions of the Primordials: elementals, giants armed by a race of stunted elemental humanoids called Earthen. The Yozi were defeated, imprisoned and in some cases mutilated and altered, the mechanism of their existence laid bare for the young Syrne, which led them to become the mighty Old Ones of legends.

The Deliberative

You could also call them 'Orokin' and it would
still work because of how cliché 'precursors' are.

Mighty in power and unchallenged, the Old Ones ruled all of creation, for a time, even if that time was eons. The greatest of the Old Ones were God-Kings who ruled entire crystal spheres, warriors leading armies pushing back creatures of primordial darkness and scientists and mages who controlled existence on a level unmatched even to this day. Countless races were created in this era to serve the Old Ones. The Dragons were forged from the essence of an elemental Primordial known as Gaia, while countless mortal races were designed to populate the Great Wheel. Some say the oldest deities in the cosmos were creations of the Old Ones or members of that race which ascended to a level of power to transcend mortality. No one knows for certain.

Progenitor Races

How did the great wheel develop so many forms of life...and why do so many share an eerie similarity between each others despite being light years apart? The Old Ones did it, of course! This is the current, leading theory on the origin of so many vaguely-similar life forms across the galaxy. The Old Ones created and uplifted many life forms, that much is known but some believe that beside the ancestors of all Elvenoid (The Eldarin) and Orkoids (The Krork) there were other progenitor races such as the Aeree (ancestors of Avian sapients), Sarrukh (ancestors of reptilian Sapients) or even the potential ancestors of Humans the Archaen.

The War In Heaven

The War In Heaven....pretty much unchanged.

Eventually, a great conflict later known to the Eldarin as the War in Heaven arose between the C'tan, immensely powerful, incorporeal beings composed of pure energy who existed solely in the material universe, and the Old Ones. At that point, the Old Ones had grown somewhat complacent and some say, weak. The Old Ones, physically weak and few in number, uplifted the Eldarin to serve as their soldiers. In response, the C'tan enslaved the Modrons, almost elemental creatures of pure order, bonding them within geometrical armored shells of a living metal called necrodermis. The C'tan directed the Modrons into Great Marches of all intelligent life. In response to this threat, the Old Ones created the Orks (or rather their ancestors, the Krork) to wage what would seem like an eternal war. How the war ended isn't known. The Modrons were forced into stasis in Mechanus and other forgotten clockwork worlds. The C'tan were put into hibernation.

The Usurpation

The remaining Old Ones were not the same creatures as they had been before the War in Heaven. Some stories speak of a curse, one last act of vengeance from the defeated C’tan. Others say the curse was given to the Old Ones by the Primordials, having taken eons to mature. A third version of the story claim that the Primordials and C’Tan were, somehow, one and the same as a species. Whatever the case was, the remaining Old Ones were a dying, paranoid and misguided breed. The Dragons, greatest of the creations of the Old Ones, slew their masters and assumed their place as the rulers of the known universe, forming a Draconic Shogunate. The Old Ones were rendered completely extinct, the Portal Network shut down while the Webway began its long decay.

When the Old Ones were lost, their other creations were left to their own devices. The Orks immediately turned on themselves, the joy of combat all they desired in life. Some of the Eldarin escaped their Crystal Spheres and constructed giant worldships, Craftworlds, to sail through the astral sea. They repaired and opened many Portal Relays, and found the city of Sigil. The Lady of Pain was, even then, the ruler of the city, already sitting on the throne of blades before the Eldarin arrived. Scattered across the Great Wheel were the Hedron, ancient monoliths of great power designed to help bind the fabric of reality and ensure nothing from the Far Realms entered the galaxy. With most of the Old Ones presumed dead, these constructs begin shutting down, weakening the barrier, allowing something from the outside to slowly make it’s way toward the Great Wheel.

The Corruption of Chaos

Prior to this, there had only been the Realm of Souls. However all the cosmos-shattering conflict which had occurred from the rise of the Old Ones to the Usurpation began to take its toll upon the Immaterium. Negative thoughts and ideas had a bad habit of sticking to together like space magic psychic bullshit being pulled together like atoms, slowly coalescing into increasingly complex singularities of pure spite and madness. These imbalances corrupted and twisted it with all the ill will, fears and general lack of common fucking decency that life now collectively experienced. This is what spawned the Gods of Chaos, living embodiment of all the nasty things that ever existed.

Ancient History and the Draconic Shogunate

An ancient, shiny dragon looking smug.

The first dragons were not natural creatures: they were the result of complex techno-arcane biological and spiritual manipulation. The ancient dragons (or Elder Dragons) were near-immortal creatures of vast power, a power which would only increase with age. Unfortunately, with the death of their Old Ones creator, the dragons were quickly met with the problem that they could not create more of their kind directly through such ancient science. They had to resort to naturally reproducing, which immediately began the dilution of their blood and power, which account for the variety in draconic shape, appearance and abilities in this day and age, from the noble and pure (but rare) gold dragons to the bizarre and degenerate Howling Dragon to even more obscure breed of dragons which exist only on a single world.

To fill their ranks and build an empire worthy of their might, the dragons began experimenting on various saurian life forms, leading to the creation of races such as the Kobold and Dragonborn, amongst others. These mortal races carry within them the gene of the dragons. The shogun of the dragons was Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon. Powerful, wise, noble and perhaps a tad bit too haughty, Bahamut held his rivals in check. That is until he was betrayed by a fellow warlord: Tiamat, the Five-Headed-Dragon. Tiamat waged war on Bahamut, nearly half of the living dragons siding with her. The two armies clashed, and on the slopes of Mount Celestia itself, Tiamat was struck down. But the Draconic empire was shattered. Several of the immortal Elder Dragons fled to Sigil.

The First Hive-Fleet

Omnomnom...

The arrival of the Great Devourer in the Great Wheel is quite ancient but only recently has it been understood. Where they came from, none can say, but these creatures infested every corner of the galaxy, falling upon the weakened Draconic Shogunate like hungry locust. Fortunately for the galaxy, this was a small hive fleet, seemingly only scouts and ill-prepared ones at that, but their impact upon the galaxy is one which is still felt today. Like a cancer, these organism would develop into the countless Aberrations. Separated from the hive mind, the confused aliens which had remained on countless worlds were forced to adapt. Some became lone predators, such as the dreaded Fenrisian Kraken, others reformed a primitive hive society, such as the weak Kruthik. Countless species of alien monstrosities can trace their ancestry to those early invaders of the Great Devourer. On the moon of Ymgarl, however, something different was biding its time… 

Formation of the Realm of Arkhosia

Using a forgotten Old Ones weapon known as the Sword of Creation, one dragon disrupted the hive mind of the alien invaders. This dragon then went and crowned herself the Scarlet Empress, forming her own empire of dragon blooded creatures. The Realm, while powerful, was a shadow of the Shogunate and a mere speck of dust compared to the Old Ones Deliberative. The Great Devourer had, in many ways, somewhat wiped the slate clean. For the first time in untold eons, the hand of the Old Ones was missing. The dragons were still around and the Realm was slowly and carefully building its power but nonetheless, this era was marked by the emergence of many new forms of life who began leaving their homeworlds and spreading across the Great Wheel.

Bael Turath and Asmodeus

Lord Douchebag McAsshole
the First! aka Asmodeus.

In those times a race of humanoids, possibly distant relatives to Humans, had developed into a small but extremely ambitious empire on the planet Korriban which started to clash with the much more powerful Realm. While genocide is never a good thing, one could argue that had everyone known what would happen next in their centuries of war then everyone involved would have rooted for the dragons and their servants to wipe these upstarts off the face of the galaxy.

The God-Kings and sorcerers nobles of that realm, Bael Turath, were powerful and dreamed of complete galactic conquest. Something which would obviously never happen. Inside their twisted minds, dark desires festered until they began to hear the call of a power which had been growing stronger and stronger with each century: the power of Chaos. The mightiest of Bael Turath's God-King slew his brother Ihys and took absolute control over their council, setting himself as the Lord of the Nine. His name was Asmodeus.

The war between Arkhosia and Bael Turath lasted centuries and had untold casualties on both side. In time, Bael Turath's tyrannical rulers lost more and more their grasp on their people until a single Crystal Sphere remained under their power, known as Baator. In the final days, Asmodeus chose to damn his entire people and utterly dedicate each and every single one of them to the power of Chaos but not before betraying Chaos itself by choosing to align with a renegade Chaos God known as Malal, god of trolling, backstabbing and general team-killing fuckery. It was thus that the Baatezu, or Devils, became creatures of (twisted) Order as one last middle finger to their benefactor, wielding the power of Chaos to enforce an iron rule, because Asmodeus is just that much of a dick.