TEXT: 3.5 SYSTEM COMPATIBLE
  LPJXX22
  world of Exodus
  Ne o e xo du s  C hr o nic le s :
  
  NeoExodus chronicles:
  world of exodus
  2
  UNIQUE ELEMENTS OF 
  NEOEXODUS
  FACTS ABOUT NEOEXODUS
  1:  NeoExodus is a world full of magic. NeoExodus is a 
  world that has advanced by mastery of arcane magic 
  which may be counterintuitive to the classic fantasy and 
  medieval times. Magic is very pervasive in the world of 
  NeoExodus from the instantaneous point-to-point travel 
  via the Nexus Gateway to sentient, free-willed arcane 
  constructs (called Arcane Intelligences). From arcane and 
  eldritch powered skyships and siege weaponry to even 
  commonplace magic casters using their skills to provide 
  many basic provisions and necessities to major cities and 
  even some small towns. The progressive nature of magic 
  has transformed the world so that it feels quite “modern”.
  2:  NeoExodus is a world built upon epic adventures, heroic 
  quests and valiant expeditions into the unknown. 
  Through the use of magical and non-magical means, 
  heroic adventurers can gain access to larger realms of 
  excitement and discoveries which in turn will introduce 
  them to new and interesting challenges to confront and 
  monsters to combat. From exotic locations to unusual 
  surroundings, the challenges of Exodus should pull 
  heroes across the lands of many nations and countries 
  to the entire world. Each area of Exodus is unique and 
  stunning from the tropical rain forest and jungle of the 
  Wyldlands of Bal to the frigid and dangerous peaks in the 
  mountains of Nas. Exodus is truly a world of invigorating 
  exploration and exhilarating action.
  3:  NeoExodus is setting of unified empires and nations 
  with their own sovereign rights, power and issues. While 
  each nation or empire - Arman Protectorate, Caneus 
  Empire, the Dominion and the Reis Confederacy - has 
  joined and believes in the unity of the Imperial Alliance, 
  old adversaries and bitter rivalries cause much turmoil in 
  this world. Many of these nations and empires have had 
  long term conflicts with each other that still influence the 
  decisions of the modern day. Other influence groups like 
  the Sanguine Covenant and Section Omega can be felt 
  in the backrooms and dark alleys of any of these nations 
  and empires. All of this in addition to such global threats 
  as the Janus Horde, the Quicksilver Virus pandemic and 
  even a criminal terrorist organization like the Folding 
  Circle threatens to destabilize this fragile peace.
  4:  NeoExodus is a world that is rarely at peace for long. 
  Throughout its troubled history, wars and murder were 
  never far away. NeoExodus is always on the brink of war 
  or conflict of some type. With so many different cultures 
  and races working together, there are issues that often will 
  be raised between them. These conflicts might be based 
  on nationality, religious beliefs or even racial issues and 
  these prejudices are deeply propagated in various arenas 
  of daily life. The formation of the Imperial Allience has 
  done much to help with the understanding of different 
  points of views and now individuals find ways to exist 
  and thrive in this world of Exodus.
  5:  NeoExodus mixes traditional fantasy, horror, magic, 
  modern politics and science fiction. NeoExodus is built 
  from a very distinctive nature and mind-set. The setting 
  of NeoExodus: A House Divided is a mixture of classic 
  fantasy, modern political conflict and intrigue with 
  neo-fantasy influences. The world of Exodus has some 
  degree of “moral flexibility” which makes people who 
  might be diametrically opposed, able to work with each 
  other for a greater cause - often for good and sometimes 
  evil. In this world, nothing is black or white but various 
  shades of grey - making nothing exactly what it seems 
  to be. While an individual might have the alignment of 
  chaotic evil, this does not mean they cannot be honorable 
  or even compassionate, if needed for a larger reason. And 
  vice versa.
  6:  NeoExodus is full of all new unique races. The nine new 
  races that are introduced in the setting of NeoExodus are 
  very unique in direct contrast to the standard fantasy 
  races individuals might be used to. Each race has a unique 
  and interesting creative background and design to them 
  that reflect the setting of NeoExodus: A House Divided 
  well. In NeoExodus players can choose to play Cavian, 
  Cynean, Dalrean, Enuka, Tiefling, Kalisan, Prymidian, 
  P’Tan or Sasori. Cavians are psionic humanoid rats who 
  have a hidden agenda. Cyneans are crystalline-skinned, 
  powerful arcane spell casters with a thrist for more arcane 
  knowledge. Dalreans are humanoid mobile plants with a 
  strong ecological connection to Exodus. Enuka are beast-
  like creatures that have evolved to adapt themselves to 
  various harsh environments. Tiefling, or gevet, claim 
  to be the first race to master magic in Exodus. Kalisans 
  are pale-white nomadic humanoid creatures native to 
  northern Exodus. Prymidians are crimson-skinned 
  humanoids who are masters of communication and 
  language. P’Tans are shadow-created feline humanoids 
  who were former slaves of the First Ones. Sasori are 
  humanoid scorpions that hold all the deepest and darkest 
  secrets of Exodus.
  7:  Exodus is a world built on conspiracies, deceptions 
  and intrigue. Empires and nations compete on many 
  levels—economic, political influence, territory, magical 
  power—each looking to maintain or improve its current 
  status by any means short of all-out war. Subversive 
  clandestine meetings, espionage, black market deals and 
  sabotage are all basic parts of doing business in Exodus. 
  Large numbers of organizations, nations and factions 
  maneuver or manipulate for their own benefit in the 
  rapidly changing political climate. Exodus teems with 
  conflict and intrigue.
  8:  Everything has a place in NeoExodus. If it exists in 
  the realm of classic or traditional fantasy settings of 
  Pathfinder, then it has a place in Exodus. A monster or 
  spell or magic item from the Pathfinder core rulebooks 
  might feature a manipulation or two to explain attitude, 
  
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  character and tone of Exodus, but otherwise everything 
  you want to include has a place somewhere in Exodus.
  HISTORY OF EXODUS
  Exodus boasts a long and turbulent history, from the rise of 
  the Kaga and the defeat of the First Ones, to the Twilight 
  War and the founding of the Imperial Alliance, to the 
  present crisis that threatens to tear that alliance apart.  Great 
  heroes and terrible villains drove its march, though even 
  in hindsight the two are not always easily separated; theirs 
  were the titanic passions, the deep loves and hates, the 
  burning obsessions and base treacheries, by which modern 
  Exodus was forged and tempered.
  THE REIGN OF THE FIRST ONES
  Before the dawn of recorded history, the humanoid races 
  labored under the domination of powerful beings known as 
  the First Ones.  More than two thousand years of shadowed 
  antiquity lie between the reign of the First Ones and the 
  modern age, but they remain bogeymen and nightmares to 
  the people of Exodus.
  Because the First Ones lived and ruled so many centuries 
  ago, historians have few concrete details about their reign.  
  Modern sages do not know if the First Ones were one race 
  or many, or even if they were humanoids whose immense 
  power and wickedness rendered them like unto gods - or 
  devils.  Only the half-mythic hates and fears of mankind 
  remain.
  THE KAGA AND THE ERA OF MAN
  Two thousand years ago, the greatest sages, strategists, 
  scientists and sorcerers laboring in the cruel service of 
  the First Ones concocted a plan so bold it would change 
  the world of Exodus forever.  This plan became the Kaga, 
  the collective sentience of the one hundred most brilliant 
  minds of an age, an artificial afterlife.  The Kaga became 
  a repository of all human knowledge - and the greatest 
  weapon against the monstrous First Ones.
  Soon after the Kaga’s formation, the huddled masses of 
  humanity rose up against their overlords.  With their greatest 
  minds united to direct them, the humanoid races overthrew 
  the reign of the First Ones in a series of apocalyptic battles.  
  No record remains of those primeval struggles, no clue as to 
  the eventual fate of the First Ones - only this: when the dust 
  cleared, the world of Exodus belonged to the humanoid 
  races.
  Rather than rule as a god-king, immortal and nigh-
  omniscient, the Kaga retreated into solitude and 
  contemplation.  For centuries, its wisdom remained hidden 
  from humanity as its component geniuses pooled their 
  minds to further hone their powers of reflection.  Even now, 
  with the Kaga once more accessible, sages are at a loss to 
  understand why this guiding light chose to shut itself off.
  While the Kaga withdrew, the surviving humans set about 
  rebuilding in the ashes of the civilization that had enslaved 
  them for countless centuries.  These early men were 
  primitive and barbaric; lacking the pre-human science of 
  the First Ones, they dwelt amidst ruined spires and huddled 
  beside still-latent sorceries, unaware of the powers almost 
  within their grasp.  In time, the ruins crumbled to dust, 
  the magic faded from time-worn artifacts, and the humans 
  moved from the decaying cities to the wilderness beyond.
  THE AGE OF MIND AND MAGIC
  While most of humanity descended into barbarism in the 
  early years after the fall of the First Ones, a few learned to 
  command the arcane sciences of their former masters.
  These arcanists became the first Sorcerer Kings of Abaddon. 
  There, they raised the first human civilization, binding to 
  their empowered wills hundreds of the savage humanoid 
  tribes.  They repaired the shattered cities of the First Ones 
  and raised new glories in their own name.
  Although they were not as monolithically wicked as 
  their former masters, the Sorcerer Kings soon acquired a 
  reputation for heartless tyranny.  Humans all, they drove 
  members of the other humanoid races into slavery or exile 
  and sought to bind the whole of Exodus under their power.
  Even as the Sorcerer Kings were rising in Abaddon, 
  however, another power had grown in the frigid hills of 
  Nas.  The Cavians, a race of ratlike humanoids, had taken a 
  very different path to power.  Rejecting the arcane sciences 
  that had once enslaved them, they focused entirely on 
  honing their own innate powers of the mind.  Through their 
  study and meditation, psionics entered the world of Exodus.
  Cavian and Sorcerer King soon came to blows - blows that 
  shook Exodus like nothing since the fall of the First Ones.  
  Titanic magical and psionic energies literally reshaped 
  whole sections of the landscape.
  When the dust faded, the Sorcerer Kings were a shadow 
  of their former power; of their hundreds, only a half dozen 
  survived, and those barely beyond the level of apprentices.  
  Most of the surviving legacy of the First Ones perished, for 
  good or ill.  Of the Cavians, however, even less seemed to 
  have survived - their race, once among the most populous 
  and powerful on Exodus, vanished completely from the 
  face of the planet.
  THE SEEDS OF NATIONHOOD
  The War of Mind and Magic, as the Cavian-Sorcerer King 
  conflict came to be known, shattered both belligerents’ 
  dreams of conquest.
  The barbaric tribes of humanity, long held back by the 
  supernatural might of civilization, surged into the power 
  vacuum with fire and the sword.  At the same time, the 
  long-silent Kaga, perhaps roused by the War of Mind and 
  Magic, again lent its timeless wisdom to mankind.
  
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  From the Kaga, barbarian chieftains learned the arts of 
  statecraft and barbarian shamans learned the arts of magic.  
  These young, virile peoples, held in check too long by 
  arcane powers, washed across the face of Exodus like a 
  tidal wave.  In short order, the servile peoples who had 
  labored for sorcerer and psion bent knee to warlords who 
  ruled by force and cunning.
  In the Cordel region, which had been one of the primary 
  battlegrounds of the War of Mind and Magic, the barbarian 
  chieftains and the descendents of the Sorcerer Kings 
  interbred.  In short order, both races were much altered; 
  the region’s tribes remained nomadic herders and raiders, 
  but their ruling caste became one of natural magicians who 
  blended sword, spell and stealth.
  In frigid Nas, abandoned seat of Cavian power, humanity 
  quickly replaced the rodentfolk civilization.  The hardy 
  people of Nas united under four clans calling themselves 
  Brauner, von Breit, Hanstrom and Olsson.  Already more 
  civilized than most of the suppressed humans of other 
  lands, they quickly accepted the wisdom of the Kaga and 
  carved out the beginnings of a feudal system that would 
  hold for centuries.
  In the Wyldlands of Bal, where neither of the great powers 
  of the last age had enjoyed success, humans fought 
  animalistic Enukas and brutish Orcs, matching savagery for 
  savagery.  Here, civilization rose for the first time, at least 
  since the fall of the First Ones, in the form of isolated city-
  states slaved to bloodthirsty gods.
  Abaddon remained the seat of the surviving Sorcerer Kings, 
  threatened only by scattered uprisings and raids from their 
  estranged kin in Cordel.  Though much reduced from their 
  greatest glories, the arcane scientists of Abaddon remained 
  the mightiest living creatures on Exodus, and for a time it 
  seemed, even with the opposition of the Kaga, that they 
  would regain their power.
  THE UNIFICATION OF THE DOMINION
  Even with the infusion of sorcerous blood into their ruling 
  caste, the nomadic tribes of Cordel found themselves at 
  a disadvantage against the better-organized baronies of 
  Nas and the spells and armies of Abaddon.  For centuries, 
  they had been at turns mercenaries for greater powers and 
  raiders pouring across their borders; now, they found their 
  own lands menaced.
  Individual khans found their hosts, while more than 
  adequate for striking at unsuspecting foes, too few and too 
  scattered to stand against a determined assault.  At best, 
  they could fade into the desert and avoid battle.  At worst, 
  they were caught and either killed or enslaved.
  The nomads might have been driven deep into the trackless 
  wilderness to perish, if not for the efforts of the first Khagan 
  of the Dominion.
  Ironically, the identity of that great chieftain has been lost 
  to the sands of time - if it was ever known at all.  The 
  nomads of Cordel had no written writing until more than 
  a century after their unification, and their neighbors knew 
  of the rising power only by rumor and hearsay.  With 
  conflicting oral traditions the only source of information 
  on the Khagan’s life, each tribe and faction of the modern 
  Dominion claims him as one of their own.
  The Khagan’s modus operandi did nothing to confirm his 
  identity.  In the years leading up to his reign, he traveled 
  among all the tribes of Cordel as a landless warrior.  During 
  this period, he was often called the Desert Shade because of 
  his habit of appearing seemingly from the very sands and 
  vanishing in the night after a battle.
  The one-day Khagan’s tactics were as unusual as his 
  solitary lifestyle.  While many Khans of the Cordel tribes 
  could use magic and some had become quite powerful, few 
  had learned how to use it effectively.  The “Desert Shade” 
  blended matters magical and military to set up seemingly 
  invincible ambushes, even when he and his allies of the day 
  were outnumbered ten-to-one.
  The future Khagan also broke with the tradition of Cordel’s 
  humanoid tribes by having extensive dealings with the 
  region’s large Sasori enclave.  While Dominion legends 
  have him anticipating the plans of his enemies by his rare 
  genius or, in some tales, by the gift of prophecy, most 
  scholars agree that his extraordinary intelligence network 
  owed much to the Sasori, who served him loyally in return 
  for the first peace they had had with humans since their 
  mutual enslavement under the First Ones.
  The barons of Nas and the Sorcerer Kings of Abaddon 
  loathed the “Desert Shade”.  They called him the King 
  of Lies for the rumors he spread about them to rally his 
  people; displaying uncanny knowledge of their movements 
  and their most embarrassing secrets, he called himself 
  the King of Truths.  They called him the Human Sasori, 
  hoping to play on age-old racial hatreds; he embraced the 
  name, saying he was a friend of the desert, not any one 
  of its peoples.  They threatened to wipe out any tribe that 
  sheltered him; he taught the tribes to wipe out their armies 
  instead.
  After over a decade of such wanderings, the “Desert Shade” 
  revealed his then-hidden city of Qijom, a capital he had 
  reared in secret with the profits from his mercenary work.  
  He called for a council of the khans and proclaimed himself 
  Khagan - Khan among Khans.  None dared contradict 
  him, for he swiftly proved he was the warrior who had, 
  acknowledged or not, led them all to the only victories they 
  had known in a generation.
  Just as the enigmatic Khagan eschewed any personal name 
  for himself, so it was with his newly unified nation.  He 
  called the federation of desert tribes and desert sorcerers 
  simply the Dominion, refusing even the regional name of 
  Cordel.
  In the next five decades of the Khagan’s life, his people 
  defeated a half-dozen armies from Abaddon and as many 
  
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  from Nas.  More, they pushed back into both neighboring 
  countries and seized two broad fertile belts outside their 
  desert homeland.  From the jaws of defeat, the ‘Desert 
  Shade’ had snatched victory after victory.
  His soldiery was matched only by his genius at scholarship 
  and statecraft.  Taking the throne of a race of barbaric 
  nomads, he left his people with their first written language, 
  their national identity, and the skeleton of the caste system 
  that holds to the modern era.  He reorganized the Khanate 
  into the modern Ibn Al’alim - the ruling mageocracy -, the 
  raiders into the Dammar, the shamans into the Khepri, and 
  the casteless workers and merchants into the Rafik.  He 
  also personally created and gave paramount importance to 
  the Sihr, the historians and scholars who implemented his 
  written language and plan for national literacy.
  Johan Darre, a bard from Nas permitted to witness the 
  council of Khans and the Khagan’s coronation, penned the 
  only surviving record of the event.  His tale, converted to the 
  Imperial dating structure, places the Khagan’s coronation at 
  837 BU.   Concluding his dramatic chronicle, the original 
  manuscript of which resides in the Caneus Royal Library 
  in Nyssa, Darre wrote of the Khagan: “He hides his face in 
  desert robes at all times, but he is known to all by his voice, 
  by his bearing, by his unmistakable presence.  He is the first 
  king of true men and his coming heralds a new age.”
  Darre’s prediction would prove entirely prescient.
  THE COMING OF THE ARMANS
  The rise of the Dominion weakened the already flagging 
  power of the Sorcerer Kings of Abaddon, but they retained 
  their hold over that region for another century.  It fell, not to 
  their rapidly civilizing western neighbors, but to an entirely 
  new set of barbarians to bring down the last remnants of the 
  ancient arcane empire.
  These were the Armans, a race of seafaring raiders from 
  the island of Ablis.  Though geographically remote from 
  the fledgling knights and barons of Nas, the Armans came 
  from similar stock - much taller and bulkier than the 
  other humans of Exodus, often fair-haired, always savage.  
  The Armans themselves denied this connection; living in 
  isolated and forbidding climes, they had never labored 
  under First One enslavement and believed themselves 
  uniquely free among all humanoids.
  They were also uniquely ferocious.  The few inhabitants of 
  Sametia, Bal and Abaddon who dwelt near the eastern coast 
  spoke of the Armans as demons in human form: fearless, 
  pitiless raiders before whom other barbarians seemed tame.  
  Even the Sorcerer Kings at the height of their power had 
  bought off the Armans rather than fighting them.
  In 752 BU, the Armans did more than raid mainland 
  Exodus.
  According to the sagas of the migrating Armans, their 
  journey began with a prophecy.  Grigori Vyskos, a shaman 
  of the Kryszkas clan, had visions of his people wiped 
  from Ablis by ‘fires that walked like the sea’ - but of 
  their descendents reigning in glory on the mainland.  The 
  former prediction terrified the thralls and womenfolk who 
  remained behind while the raiding bands sought plunder 
  among civilized lands, while the latter fired the imagination 
  of the thanes of those bands.
  The clan’s high thane, Vladimir Kryszkas, decided to 
  believe the shaman’s warning and his promise.  He rallied 
  his raiders to him, not to pillage and retreat to the sea 
  but to invade and hold.  In the first moon of 752 BU, he 
  led his horde to Sametia and overcame the enclaves of 
  plains tribesmen and the border outposts of the Sorcerer 
  Kings.  Traveling swiftly by boat, they sailed south from 
  this colony, sacked two northeastern cities of the Sorcerer 
  Kings and bound their arcane rulers with primitive, primal 
  shamanic magic.  After four moons, however, the rulers 
  of Abaddon rallied their legions and smashed the Arman 
  invaders back.  Vladimir was forced to fall back on his 
  conquests in Sametia; his people’s prospects of empire 
  looked bleak, and of survival little better.  Grigori Vyskos, 
  hailed as a visionary just months before, was now seen as 
  a fraud.  He was executed on midwinter’s day of 752 BU, 
  proclaiming to the last the truth of his visions.
  Events bore out the shaman’s prophecy.  Even as the Kryszkas 
  were hanging him for what they saw as condemning them 
  to annihilation, the island of Ablis erupted, its long-dormant 
  volcanoes belching lava onto the mountain pastures of the 
  Arman shepherds.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died in 
  the initial eruption; thousands more surely would have if 
  they had not been able to find new sources of food, for 
  their pastures were smoldering ash and their fishing holes 
  steaming ruin.  Skalds and shamans reminded their thanes 
  of the words of the Kryszkas prophet; if Grigori Vyskos’s 
  dreams of apocalypse had been true, why not his dreams 
  of empire?
  Eventually, five other Arman clans joined the migration: 
  the Babinovichs, the Ivanovenas, the Chapaevonas, the 
  Dyakonoviks and the Krestyanovskis.  They set out between 
  the last moon of 752 BU and the first of 744 BU, half-
  fleeing their increasingly volatile island home, half-seeking 
  the glories of the mainland.
  Swamped by multiple invasions from the Armans and 
  losing legions and lords in terrifying numbers, the Sorcerer 
  Kings abandoned first their press of the Kryszkas, then, in 
  743 BU, their entire coastline.
  Retreat proved a fatal mistake.  The Armans had previously 
  feared and respected the power of the Sorcerer Kings and 
  concentrated on subduing the disunited plains barbarians of 
  Sametia.  Now they scented weakness from the gilded halls 
  to the south - and like the lions the Sametians likened them 
  to, the Armans pounced on any sign of weakness.  One 
  sorcerous city after another fell to the invading barbarians.
  In 740 BU, the legion of the port city of Galeathan cast 
  their sorcerous monarch from the walls and opened the 
  gates; Vladimir Kryszkas, grown wiser since his mistaken 
  
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  execution of a prophet, took the city bloodlessly and kept 
  his horde from sacking it.  Soon, other cities followed 
  suit, welcoming the Armans as liberators from centuries of 
  sorcerous tyranny.
  By 737 BU, the six Arman hordes encircled the Sorcerer 
  Kings’ ancient capital of Mureath.  The siege outlasted the 
  year.  When the garrison sought to surrender, Xalthotan, 
  the High King of Abaddon, slew every last one with his 
  magic and staffed the walls with their animated corpses. 
  He and his colleagues waged titanic magical battles against 
  the Arman shamans, pitting ancient knowledge against 
  elemental power.  Even with their empire lost, the Sorcerer 
  Kings might have wiped out the Armans on that battlefield, 
  but the Kaga, long troubled by the legacy of the First Ones, 
  lent its immeasurable wisdom to the Arman shamans.
  The Kaga’s secrets, mated to the untamed power and 
  vastly superior numbers of the shamans, bought the Arman 
  warriors enough time to storm the walls, cut their way 
  through an army of undead and fouler deviltry, and break 
  the Sorcerer Kings’ power forever.  In 736 BU, Arman 
  barbarians raised the head of Xalthotan, the last Sorcerer 
  King, proclaiming their mastery of all Abaddon.
  THE FOUNDING OF THE CANEUS 
  EMPIRE
  While their distant, untamed cousins conquered Abaddon, 
  the people of Nas concerned themselves with advancing 
  their civilization.  Nowhere else on the continent had the 
  subtle influence of the Kaga spread further, and nowhere 
  had purely humanoid civilization, unencumbered with the 
  legacy of the First Ones, reached greater heights.
  With the rise of civilization, however, came new dangers.  
  Men whose ancestors had been chieftains now dreamed 
  themselves kings.  Men whose ancestors had fought at 
  the heads of burgeoning warrior-aristocrat hosts now 
  commanded armies of professional soldiers without ever 
  leaving their capitals.  Far from the increasingly gilded 
  cities of Nas’s powerful families, the ceaseless snows ran 
  red with the blood of knights, mercenaries and peasant 
  levies.  To the dukes and merchants who ruled in Nas, 
  sending a local knight to die alone on a hundred mercenary 
  swords became another play on a chess board.
  Not all of the minor nobles and commoners shared this 
  sentiment, however.  In 657 BU, during a particularly brutal 
  border contest between houses Brauner and Olsson, one 
  AKARMA
  AMNE ISA ZARA
  
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  of those minor nobles found his patience taxed beyond its 
  limits.
  Gregory, Baron Eland, came from a long line of warriors: 
  he traced his ancestry to sub-chiefs serving under the 
  Brauner warlords when they first swept over Nas in the 
  wake of the Cavian Empire.  In the last century, however, 
  his proud heritage had been repeatedly disgraced.  Because 
  the barony of Eland was on the contested border between 
  Brauner and Olsson territories, it was a battleground 
  whenever the two dukes went to war.
  In Gregory Eland’s great-grandfather’s time, the barony 
  was captured by Duke Olsson’s men; the Baron Eland 
  accepted his new allegiance philosophically and raised his 
  sons as loyal vassals of house Olsson.  Fifty years later, in 
  680 BU, Duke Olsson foisted a greater disgrace upon Eland 
  by selling the barony, along with several of its neighbors, 
  back to Duke Brauner in exchange for a temporary alliance 
  against raiders from the Dominion.  Thus, young Gregory 
  grew up in vassalage to the lord of his ancestors, raised by 
  parents and grandparents who had spent their whole lives 
  serving that lord’s hereditary foe.
  Because of this conflicted background, neither Brauner 
  nor Olsson placed much trust in the young Baron Eland.  
  When hostilities between the houses inevitably resumed, 
  Duke Reinhardt Brauner declined to give command of 
  the local army to Gregory; instead, he placed the baron 
  and his retinue under a mercenary commander, an Arman 
  raider called Ivan Harskolff.  Baron Eland and his knights, 
  along with the retinues of other local lords, were repeatedly 
  thrown into the heat of the fighting - against men of similar 
  background or against peasant levies - while the Duke’s 
  professional soldiers claimed the glory for one against-the-
  odds victory after another.
  Worse, at Duke Brauner’s orders, mercenary soldiers 
  quartered in the very castles of the local lords.  The 
  mercenaries showed no gratitude toward their unwilling 
  hosts.  They roistered, they depleted winter stores, they 
  chased serving wenches and beat servants.
  General Harskolff, who quartered at the castle of Ravenspont 
  south of Eland, did worse.  He took a fancy to Baron 
  Ravenspont’s daughter, Liesel - Gregory Eland’s betrothed 
  - and demanded she be given to him as a concubine; the 
  Armans of that time still practice concubinage.  When 
  Baron Ravenspont refused, Harskolff killed him on the spot 
  CHENOA GRYN
  DEMA-MA
  
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  and locked Liesel in his quarters.  His men also put to the 
  sword the Ravenspont bannermen in attendance.
  Gregory Eland’s younger brother, Chauncey, was a squire at 
  Ravenspont.  He broke away in the confusion and spurred 
  his horse to his brother’s lands, heedless of a crossbow 
  bolt lodged in his shoulder.  By the time he reached Eland 
  castle, Chauncey was feverish and nearly incoherent, but 
  he managed to gasp his story to his brother before he fell 
  unconscious.  Baron Eland immediately raised his own 
  knights and sent messengers to the surrounding baronies.  
  The resulting army, patterned after the older feudal hosts 
  of Nas’s past, descended on Ravenspont and assailed 
  the walls.  They found the mercenaries drunk on Baron 
  Ravenspont’s depleted wine cellars and slew them to a man; 
  Gregory Eland personally threw the outlander Harskolff 
  from the castle walls.  Of the Ravenspont family, none 
  survived, Liesel having taken her own life rather than be 
  subjected to Harskolff’s cruel affections.
  Gregory Eland’s wrath did not die with a single rapacious 
  mercenary, however.  He turned his host against the 
  remaining mercenaries, wiping them out before they could 
  reorganize.  This action did more than avenge the offenses 
  done the local folk, from serf to baron.  It branded them 
  traitors to Duke Brauner’s service - and so bound them to 
  Eland’s.
  Recognizing the sudden and inescapable bond between he 
  and his host, and that their only chance to survive lay in total 
  victory, Eland marched them northeast.  With Brauner’s 
  armies professional armies ringing the duchy’s borders 
  rather than holding its interior, Eland’s host reached the 
  gates of the duke’s capital, Nyssa, nearly unopposed.  In the 
  waning moon of 657 BU, Eland’s desperate band of knights 
  and men-at-arms stormed the city walls, overwhelmed the 
  duke’s retinue, and seized Nyssa.
  Eland spared Reinhardt Brauner, even allowed him to retain 
  his title - in exchange for an oath of fealty.  For a baron to 
  thus turn the tables on his lord was unheard of, but Brauner 
  could not do otherwise.
  Of course, once Gregory Eland had a duke for a vassal, he 
  ceased to be a mere baron.  In 656 BU, Brauner offered 
  to crown him King of Nas.  To the shock of his enemies 
  and retainers alike, Eland refused, saying he would not 
  squabble over a crown like the dukes had.  He would not 
  rule by taking the power of his rivals; he would restore the 
  feudal system of old.  Eland crowned himself, not King, 
  KARISSA
  FREJA ILYANOVKA
  
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  but Emperor, and he called his domain Caneus, the Old Nas 
  word for Union.
  The other dukes did not take kindly to this upstart ‘emperor’ 
  and his meteoric rise.  In short order, Eland smashed armies 
  from houses Olsson and Hanstrom.  Again, he spared the 
  dukes, taking from them only their autocratic power and an 
  oath of fealty.  Their knights and barons, reluctant to fight 
  a man they saw more as liberator than foeman, eagerly 
  pledged themselves to the renewed feudal order and the 
  young Caneus Empire.
  Ludwig von Breit, the last of the independent dukes, 
  grabbed territory from the defeated houses and incorporated 
  their mercenary armies into his own.  In 653 BU, von Breit’s 
  army, swollen by every imaginable type of mercenary, from 
  Sametian horse archers to skirmishers from Bal, met the 
  heavy cavalry of Emperor Eland at what historians would 
  later call the Battle of Caneus.
  Three times, Eland’s host charged the professional soldiers 
  of von Breit, and each time were repulsed.  With his 
  army reduced to nearly half its original size and night fast 
  approaching, the Emperor took up his war banner and led 
  a last, seemingly suicidal charge against the center of von 
  Breit’s army.  The knights finally broke through, splitting 
  the ducal forces.  More importantly, they reached the 
  caravan of treasures looted from Olsson and Hanstrom, 
  with which von Breit intended to pay his mercenaries.  
  Seeing their pay lost, most of those soldiers withdrew from 
  the battlefield, leaving the stunned, exhausted knights of 
  Caneus the victors.
  Gregory Eland was crowned emperor a second time 
  in Baron von Breit’s palace in Hadensburg in late 653 
  BU.  This time, his ascension was acknowledged by the 
  Dominion and the Arman clans - and presided over by a 
  country priest from a small Canean religious sect that had 
  already given him a greater gift than a crown, and was soon 
  to make itself felt with his descendents’ patronage.
  PROPHETS, PREACHERS AND 
  PRELATES
  The Sanguine Covenant had existed in isolated communities 
  in Nas for at least a few centuries before it exploded onto 
  the stage during the rise of the Caneus Empire.  It might 
  have remained a footnote in the history of Exodus, if not 
  for the two tragedies that instigated Gregory Eland’s rise to 
  power - the death of his betrothed, Liesel Ravenspont, and 
  the terrible injuries to his brother Chauncey.
  MILKA BRONISLAW
  OLEG ILYANOVIK
  
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  Chauncey Eland convalesced for over a year after the fall 
  of Ravenspont in 657 BU.  He barely survived at all, and 
  constantly struggled to breathe in the frigid air of Nas.  
  After his brother defeated Duke Brauner and proclaimed 
  himself Emperor, Chauncey was sent to the extreme north 
  of the new Caneus Empire, where the weather rapidly 
  warmed as it approached the Wyldlands of Bal.
  There, the invalid young noble entertained many shamans, 
  witch doctors and snake oil salesmen at his brother’s 
  expense, seeking a cure for his shattered body.
  At the same time, Lucius Horst, a priest of the Sanguine 
  Covenant, saw a vision of himself healing the emperor’s 
  young brother.  In his vision, he drew forth diseased blood 
  from Chauncey Eland’s body and cleansed it.  Then the 
  blood flowed from his hands and spread across the whole 
  of the Caneus Empire - the whole of Exodus! - like the life-
  giving blood of Tarac, the one god of the Covenant.
  Lucius, a poor country clergyman who held ceremonies in 
  a barn because his village lacked the resources to raise a 
  temple, made a pilgrimage of nearly five hundred miles to 
  reach the villa where his destined patient waited.  Because 
  he had no money for clothes, he was turned away at every 
  inn he passed, called beggar and worse; by rights, he should 
  have starved or died from exposure.  When he finally 
  reached Chauncey Eland’s villa, the guards turned him 
  away, again mistaking him for a beggar.  He waited outside 
  the villa for four days, ceasing his prayers only to sleep and 
  to politely request entry.  At last, one of the serving girls 
  took pity on the old cleric and brought him in through the 
  servant’s entrance.
  Once inside, Lucius immediately invited himself in to 
  Chauncey Eland’s presence.  The young noble, unlike his 
  guards, was willing to try anything to cure his ailment and 
  invited the priest forward.  Lucius offered up a prayer to 
  Tarac and laid his hands on the young noble’s - and, with 
  a last cough, Chauncey Eland rose from his bed, hale and 
  hearty as the day of his fateful ride from Ravenspont.
  Sponsored by the dramatically converted younger brother 
  of the emperor, Lucius’s story spread like wildfire through 
  the Caneus Empire.  In 654 BU, Emperor Gregory himself 
  called Lucius to the capital in Nyssa.  The emperor 
  thanked the priest for healing his brother and expressed 
  interest in learning more about Tarac’s teachings - but with 
  reservations.
  Gregory explained he was a less gentle soul than his 
  brother, and less trusting; he had seen the mystical powers 
  of the Kaga and read of the mental ones of the departed 
  Cavians.  Both could reputedly heal the sick and wounded 
  - but there was one miracle neither could achieve.  Gregory 
  begged Lucius, if it was within Tarac’s power, to restore life 
  to his betrothed, Liesel Ravenspont.
  Lucius, who had always taught that Tarac’s power was 
  bound only by his believers’ faith, was taken aback by this 
  request.  He had once revived a child who had drowned in 
  the lake near his home village, but that had been seconds 
  after the tragedy, not years.  No human cleric had ever 
  achieved a resurrection after such a span, and tales of the 
  dark priests of the First Ones doing so were surely just 
  legends.  Yet, he remembered the prophecy and knew he 
  must win the emperor over to the Sanguine Covenant.  He 
  swore to try.
  Gregory had meant this merely as a test of Lucius’s 
  sincerity, fully expecting an honest man to refuse.  When 
  Lucius seemed to think it possible, however, the emperor’s 
  whole demeanor changed.  He agreed to join the priest 
  in humble, silent prayer, lending his memory to guide 
  Lucius’s supplication.  He sent the rest of his court away 
  and sealed the throne room.
  An hour later, an exhausted priest and emperor emerged 
  from the throne room - in the company a dazed young 
  noblewoman with raven hair, whose last memory was of 
  taking her life before a mercenary could defile her.
  From that point on, Emperor Gregory and Empress Liesel 
  were converts to the Sanguine Covenant.
  By the time of Lucius’s death in 639 BU, he had gone 
  from the pastor of a tiny village sect to the prophet of 
  national religion.  A humble man, he declined the position 
  of Archprelate of Nyssa; only with duress did he accept 
  the lesser position of Imperial Confessor.  The explosive 
  growth of his church happened because of his works, but 
  not by his hand.
  The church continued to grow in the ensuing century, taking 
  on many of the modern, familiar forms.  The Sanguine 
  Cathedral in Nyssa was completed in 601 BU; the even 
  larger Caneus Cathedral rose in Hadensburg in 597 BU.
  However, despite imperial sanction and the tales of Lucius’s 
  miracles, the Sanguine Covenant remained a minority in 
  the Caneus Empire as late as 562 BU.  Much of the lesser 
  nobility and even more of the peasantry clove to their 
  old, pagan traditions.  The clerics of these gods might not 
  raise the dead, but they had healed and led their flocks 
  for centuries, and their power was still evident.  More, 
  after Lucius’s death, few Covenant prelates demonstrated 
  powers surpassing their pagan counterparts.  Were the 
  prophet’s achievements indicative of the strength of his one 
  god, the people wondered, or of his own holiness?
  Gregory Eland, his son Emperor Caspian Eland, and his 
  grandson Gregory II all left their pagan subjects in peace, 
  trusting to imperial-built cathedrals and the theological 
  arguments of the clergy to win people over to the Covenant.  
  That changed in 564 BU, when Vincent Eland, Gregory’s 
  great-grandson, took the throne.
  Emperor Vincent was Gregory II’s third son, an often ill 
  and always ill-tempered youth whose only peace, such as 
  it was, came from his devotion to the Covenant.  Since he 
  was third in line to inherit the throne, he became a Covenant 
  novice in 567 BU and was nearly ready to assume the duties 
  
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  of a junior prelate when his brothers, Chauncey and Lucius, 
  were killed during an expedition to the Wyldlands of Bal.
  Forced to abandon his religious studies and assume a 
  throne for which he was entirely unprepared, Vincent at 
  first listened to his advisors and made few decisions of his 
  own.  By 562 BU, however, Vincent became convinced 
  that his brothers’ deaths and his unwelcome rise were part 
  of a divine plan - that he was destined to purify the Caneus 
  Empire and bring it into proper devotion to the Sanguine 
  Covenant.
  The Archprelate of Nyssa at the time was also a third son of 
  a noble house: Maximilian Brauner, of the Elands’ former 
  liege family.  He warned the emperor against imposing the 
  church on his subjects, begging him not to stain the hands 
  of the servants of Tarac with forced conversions.  For the 
  moment, Vincent tolerated, but ignored, the archprelate.  
  He banned the practice of pagan religions and confiscated 
  the property of non-Covenant clergy.  Cynical members 
  of the court suggested it was the expense of his brothers’ 
  expedition to Bal, not the alleged meaning of their deaths, 
  that spurred the emperor on, but they were soon to discover 
  otherwise.
  For a few years, Vincent contented himself with his ban 
  on the pagans, in part because the inhabitants of Bal 
  had retaliated in force and he was occupied fighting the 
  northern savages.  In 559 BU, however, he returned to 
  Nyssa and began the next phase of his plan to convert his 
  empire - imprisoning the druids and pagan clerics, along 
  with any lords who sheltered them.  This drew outcries 
  from across the empire, nowhere less than from Archprelate 
  Maximilian. The archprelate threatened to declare the 
  emperor a heretic; the emperor, unphased, ordered the 
  archprelate arrested, accused him of diabolism, and had him 
  executed in the palace courtyard.
  The next three decades became a nightmare for the Caneus 
  Empire.  Vincent appointed a new archprelate from among 
  his loyal clerics - violating the precepts of the very church 
  he meant to spread.  His persecution of the pagans grew 
  more and more severe.  His efforts at forced conversion 
  were largely successful, as terrified commoners and knights 
  flocked to hastily raised churches to show their devotion, 
  but more and more of the clergy refused to participate.  
  The emperor sometimes ignored the ‘disloyal’ prelates and 
  sometimes executed them en masse to set an example.
  By 548 BU, Vincent was widely acknowledged as a 
  madman.  He rarely appeared in public, spending most of 
  his time shut up in his summer palace near the Dominion 
  border.  Duke Brauner, whose clerical brother was among 
  the first executed, Duke Hanstrom, who controlled the land 
  around the imperial summer palace, and the emperor’s 
  cousin Prince Albrecht Eland conspired to assassinate 
  him before he could do more damage.  Their plot was 
  discovered and all three men executed.  Almost universally 
  reviled, the mad emperor managed to hold power for 
  another twenty years.
  Finally, in 524 BU, another rebellion rose, this time backed 
  by Dukes von Breit and Olsson, by the displaced heirs of 
  Dukes Brauner and Hanstrom, whose lands and titles had 
  been confiscated, and by Hadensburg’s Archprelate Castor 
  Jung.  The archprelate, although an imperial appointee, was 
  horrified by what Vincent had done to his church.  A warrior-
  priest in his youth, Archprelate Jung had accompanied the 
  expedition to Bal and fought beside the emperor’s brothers.  
  Because they had fallen under his care, he saw the present 
  reign of terror as partly his fault.
  The ducal army, with Jung at its head, marched on 
  the poorly-defended summer palace before the emperor 
  realized he faced a rebellion.  Jung and a small group 
  of elite warriors entered the palace; none ever spoke of 
  what they saw within, but their haunted expressions spoke 
  volumes.  They found the emperor and ended his cruel reign 
  at sword’s point, emerging a full day after they entered the 
  palace.
  Archprelate Jung, realizing that the empire would descend 
  into anarchy and feuding baronies again without an Eland 
  emperor they could trust, decided to attempt to replicate the 
  feat of the priest Lucius.  Unlike Lucius, he had the mortal 
  remains of the unfortunate Prince Albrecht Eland, but those 
  remains had decayed far worse in twenty years of ill-use 
  than Empress Liesel’s would have in a few years safely 
  entombed.  Jung realized he might fail, or unleash a worse 
  horror on the empire, but he saw no choice.
  Jung’s gambit paid off better than he could have imagined; 
  he was able to restore Albrecht to life - and, swiftly, to the 
  vacant throne in Nyssa - and also, by duplicating Lucius’s 
  miracle of resurrection, to turn the people’s fear of the 
  Sanguine Covenant into faith.
  Nonetheless, the Covenant was forever changed by the 
  terrible reign of Vincent I and the reforms of Archprelate 
  Jung.  It remained an armed church, ever wary of heresy 
  that might plunge it back into darkness; it remained armed 
  against pagans and unbelievers as well, and though it no 
  longer persecuted them within the Caneus Empire, nor did 
  it look kindly on them in other lands.
  Within a hundred years, the Covenant would receive an 
  unprecedented opportunity to convert those lands.
  THE UNIFICATION OF THE ARMAN 
  PROTECTORATE
  Purely human civilization had come late to Abaddon - and 
  when Arman barbarians brought it with fire and the sword, 
  it was only loosely civilized.  Two centuries of ruling the 
  prosperous domain of the Sorcerer Kings changed the 
  continental Armans a great deal, however.
  By 500 BU, the Armans had settled completely into 
  civilized life.  The six clans that had brought the Sorcerer 
  Kings low ruled in their abandoned palaces as independent 
  princedoms.  Unlike their distant kin in Nas, the Armans 
  never possessed a true feudal structure.  The clan leaders 
  
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  became princes without ever surrendering any of their 
  autocratic power to a network of barons and knights.  If 
  they had flirted with the idea, the fall of the dukes of Nas to 
  a baron-cum-emperor surely laid the notion to rest.  Instead, 
  the strong mercenary culture that sent thousands of Armans 
  to fight wars for foreign lords also kept them busy in their 
  home princedoms.
  The Armans of 500 BU had difficulties of their own, 
  however.  The rich plunder they had taken from the 
  conquest of Abaddon had sustained them in splendor for 
  years; the wages of mercenary work in Nas flooded their 
  economy with big-spending warriors for years more.  Both 
  sources of wealth had run thin over the centuries.  The 
  raiding culture from their island days would not have paid 
  for their palaces; the pickings from the neighboring nomads 
  of Sametia and the Dominion hardly paid for the price of 
  expeditions to those lands.
  Of the Armans’ two neighbors, the Dominion was by far 
  the more prosperous.  The princely houses did not bother 
  organizing raids against the Cordel desert, but when their 
  warriors took it upon themselves to launch such attacks - 
  bringing back what wealth they could to fill Arman coffers 
  - the princes offered no complaint.
  Unfortunately for the Armans, the Dominion’s Khagan, 
  Faisel al Kasim, took a dimmer view of this privateering.  
  In 492 BU, he struck back.  Moving under the cover of a 
  magically-created sandstorm, his army traced the steps of 
  a particularly large raiding party to the lands of the Arman 
  Prince Sergei Babinovich.  The Dominion forces exploded 
  into Abaddon, firing fields and raising fortifications.  Prince 
  Babinovich raised his own army and rushed to meet the 
  “unprovoked invasion”.  It took the Armans months to 
  bring al Kasim’s swifter army to battle, and when they did, 
  their exhausted axemen and spearmen were mowed down 
  by well rested and magically supported cavalry.  Prince 
  Babinovich himself was captured and taken back to Qijom 
  as a prisoner, forcing his horrified daughter, Olga, to pay 
  a ruinous ransom to the Dominion.  Prince Babinovich 
  returned a broken man, half-mad with disgrace and despair.
  The other Arman rulers were shocked by their brother 
  price’s humiliation.  For hundreds of years, they had 
  considered themselves invincible; defeat at the hands of 
  the Dominion, who they considered the banished Sorcerer 
  Kings’ “little cousins”, was the most terrible disgrace 
  imaginable.
  The Arman princes lacked the insight to recognize their 
  limitations and reevaluate their relationship with the 
  Dominion.  At the same time, theirs was still too vigorous 
  a civilization to allow a single defeat to break them.  The 
  other five great houses concluded that the weakness was 
  limited to the Babinovich princedom.  Rather than retreat 
  and regroup, two other princes, Nicola Kryszkas and 
  Josef Chapaevonas, joined forces to retaliate against the 
  Dominion.  Their path took them through Babinovich lands, 
  where a rage-mad Princess Olga gladly pledged marriage 
  and aid to Nicola Kryszkas, the younger of the vengeance-
  minded princes.
  Thus, in 494 BU, the hosts of three Arman princedoms 
  joined forces to invade the Dominion.
  The Khagan was waiting for them.
  Al Kasim understood the Armans better than they 
  understood themselves.  They had become more citified 
  than civilized - no less warlike than their sea reaver 
  ancestors, but possessed of a sense of warfare entirely 
  based around capturing territory and holding key points.  
  In the Cordel desert, there were no key points and only a 
  handful of cities, but a great many mirages and tribes of 
  fierce nomads.  The Khagan again led his enemies a merry 
  chase, refusing to give them the pitched battle they dearly 
  desired.  His mages, rather than confronting the Arman 
  shamans openly, mazed them with endlessly shifting sands 
  and mirages.
  After four months in the desert, the Arman army had gone 
  from a gleaming host of professional soldiers to a ragtag 
  band of hired swords desperate for food, water, even shade.
  Still, the Khagan waited.
  Prince Chapaevonas, realizing the futility of the invasion, 
  advised a retreat.  Prince Kryszkas might have listened, but 
  his young wife would hear none of it.  Olga Babinovich 
  demanded vengeance for her father - at any cost.  Reluctantly, 
  her husband agreed.  After another month of sweltering in 
  the desert, Prince Chapaevonas despaired for his allies and 
  withdrew his forces to his own border, but the Kryszkas and 
  Babinovich armies remained.
  They would likely have died to the last man without ever 
  bringing the Dominion to battle, if they had not chanced 
  upon the cave of a Sanguine Covenant hermit.  Though the 
  old cleric seemed at least half mad, the Armans were by 
  now far further gone than that.  More, their culture had long 
  venerated wild holy men of a similar type.  The hermit told 
  Nicola and Olga that they were sure to perish in the desert, 
  because their sinful natures left them vulnerable to the 
  Khagan’s powers.  Only a man pure of heart, he explained, 
  could see the truth in all things.  The hermit promised that, 
  if they would embrace the Sanguine Covenant, the god 
  Tarac would show them the true path to victory and lead 
  them safely home; not only that, their sons would one day 
  rule all the Arman peoples.
  At first, the Arman rulers scoffed at this; they knew the 
  Sanguine Covenant from afar and despised it as a crutch 
  for the weak peoples of Nas.  Heedless of the hermit, they 
  plunged back into the desert - and found themselves back 
  at the cave the next day.  Five more times, they tried for the 
  Dominion capital of Qijom, and five more times they found 
  only the hermit.
  After the fifth time, they listened.
  
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  By now, al Kasim, judging his enemies thoroughly broken, 
  at last decided to put an end to the invasion.  His army crept 
  up on the Arman host in the night, planning on their waking 
  to the sight of his huge body of troops.  The Armans, he 
  judged, would be completely exhausted and willing to 
  bargain their lives for water, certainly unwilling to fight a 
  much larger force.
  Instead, he found a force of well-rested warriors, fed and 
  watered despite the total absence of any sustenance in that 
  part of the desert, wary and ready for battle.
  ARMAN PROTECTORATE
  Ruler: Tsarina Anayanka Kryszkas 
  Government: Hereditary Monarchy, ruled by the Kryszkas family.
  Cities: Mureath (M), Mavra (LT), Olesia (LT), Telek (ST), Tusya (LT)
  Population: The Protectorate is heavily populated, especially 
  along the northern and western borders. The population is mostly 
  human (80%). Cavians, prymidians and p’Tan form the rest of the 
  population.
  Location: Abaddon, southeast Exodus
  Law: The law in the Arman Protectorate is Neutral. The rich 
  and powerful generally get away with most crimes while the 
  freemen and the poor generally bear the brunt of the law. The 
  only predictable punishment is for those who sell the secrets – 
  willingly or not – of the ironforged warriors. The penalty is death. 
  The Forgers’ Guild employs many assaassins to keep its secrets.
  Alignment: The population of the Protectorate has strong 
  leanings toward a neutral alignment (NG, LN, N*, CN and NE)
  Religion: The Sanguine Covenant is the official religion of the 
  Protectorate. Other religions are tolerated as long as they have not 
  been declared heretical by the Covenant.
  Languages: Common is the language of the Arman Protectorate. 
  Ancient Arman and Sorcerous were dominant language in the 
  past. 
  Currency: Currency in the Protectorate is based on silver coins. Although standard-issued coins are available, the crown only 
  mints the following coins. Crescent (2sp), Raven (20sp), Eagle (100sp), Crown (250sp). 
  Military: The Protectorate has much fewer spell casters than most of its rivals. However, its military is strengthened by many 
  elite units such as the Peacekeepers, Artillerists, and its ironforged. The Protectorate is the only place on Exodus where 
  firearms are available.
  MUREATH, Capital of the protectorate 
  N metropolis
  Corruption: +2; Crime +4; Economy: +8; Law +5; Lore +6; Society +4
  Qualities  extensive road system, holy site, pious, prosperous, tourist attraction, well-defended
  Danger +10
  DEMOGRAPHICS
  Government autocracy
  Population  40,000 (30,000 humans; 5,000 cavian; 5,000 prymidian, 5,000 p’tan; 5,000 other)
  Notable NPCs
  Tsarina of the Arman Protectorate Anayanka Kryszkas (female Arman)
  Raina and Heir Blanca Kryszkas (female Arman)
  Grand Vizier Viktor Dyakonosky (male Arman)
   Prelate of Mureath Sergei Andranov (male Arman)
  MARKETPLACE
  Base Value 16,000 gp; Purchase Limit 100,000 gp; Spellcasting 9th
  Minor Items available; Medium Items 4d4; Major Items 3d4
  
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  Nicola had arrayed his troops in the crags around the 
  hermit’s cave, hiding his wife and a handpicked force of 
  elite warriors in the cave itself.  Al Kasim’s light cavalry 
  could not charge into the rocks without riding beneath the 
  spears of the entrenched Armans.  Rather than waste his 
  troops in a suicidal attack, the Khagan decided to flush his 
  enemies out by magic.  He and his sorcerous khans called 
  up a powerful sandstorm to blast the Armans from the 
  crags - and watched in horror as a thunderstorm, entirely 
  unnatural in the desert, overwhelmed their sorcery.
  The sand between the Dominion and Arman forces turned 
  to thick mud, trapping horses and camels and men used to 
  the shifting sands.  The red sand became red mud, like a sea 
  of blood - and gave the coming battle its name: the Battle 
  of the Rain of Blood.  At Nicola’s order, his men smeared 
  the mud on their shields and tabards in a crude pastiche of 
  the Sanguine Covenant’s blood drop symbol - and charged.
  Al Kasim was stunned by the reversal of the Armans’ 
  fortunes and the failure of his magic, but he was still a 
  cannier commander than his opponent.  His men dispersed 
  as best they could in the mud, drawing the Armans in so 
  their flanks could close on either side and surround them 
  entirely.  Whatever tactical advantage the infantry-trained 
  Armans had was lost as the battle became a chaotic melee, 
  speed, spell and wits against strength and newfound resolve.
  When night fell, it found over a thousand Armans dead 
  amidst four times their number of Dominion corpses, while 
  Prince and Khagan, exhausted by a personal duel that had 
  lasted for over an hour - such was the skill of both leaders 
  - watched the sun set over drawn blades.  The battle might 
  have continued into the night or dragged on to the next day, 
  inevitably ending with the Armans and many thousands 
  more of their enemies dead, but the force left in the cave, 
  accompanied by Princess Olga and the hermit himself, 
  emerged.  Heedless of the scattered melees still going on 
  around them, they marched to the two leaders.  At the 
  hermit’s urging, the Princess approached her husband and 
  her enemy.  She knelt in the mud at the feet of the shocked 
  Khagan and offered her forgiveness for the disgrace done 
  her family, asking that both armies go their separate ways 
  in exchange.
  Al Kasim, who had no desire to continue the costly battle, 
  agreed, asking only that they explain - Nicola how he had 
  provisioned his army, Olga her change of heart.  They 
  introduced him to the hermit, who answered for them both.
  The Arman army retreated from the Dominion, guided by 
  the very nomads they had come to fight.  Al Kasim returned 
  to Qijom, taking the anonymous hermit with him to teach 
  him the ways of the Sanguine Covenant.
  In the Arman princedoms, Josef Chapaevonas had told of 
  his allies’ mad quest for vengeance and how it had surely 
  led them to their deaths in the desert.  Because Nicola and 
  Olga left no heirs and few troops, Prince Chapaevonas 
  was able to occupy much of both their lands and quietly 
  sell off those regions too remote for his men to govern.  
  His motives may have been benign - surviving documents 
  indicate the regents left behind by his fellow rulers were 
  plotting to usurp the vacant thrones - but in practice he 
  effectively tripled his own holdings.  When, against all 
  odds, the surviving troops of Nicola and Olga emerged 
  from the Dominion with a tale of miracles and a foreign 
  god, Prince Chapaevonas declined to relinquish his pole 
  position among the Arman princes.
  Much of 493 BU was consumed by the civil war between 
  the two displaced Arman rulers and their former ally.  Their 
  tired and reduced army began partisan actions against the 
  occupying Chapaevonas troops.  Their uprising seemed 
  hopeless, since most of their former subjects clung to their 
  shamanic tradition and rejected the missionary faith of their 
  converted former rulers.
  In 492 BU, however, the Sanguine Covenant became the 
  most powerful ally the Babinovich-Kryszkas uprising could 
  have asked for.  The Archprelate of Nyssa declared the 
  uprising a holy war of believers against pagans, and though 
  the Caneus Empire itself did not become involved, several 
  dukes and hundreds of lesser nobles took up the banner.  To 
  the astonishment of Archprelate and Arman prince alike, 
  several khans of the Dominion also rallied to their cause, 
  their beliefs fired by the miracles at the Battle of the Rain 
  of Blood two years before.  As the hermit had predicted, the 
  believers of the Sanguine Covenant unlocked the Arman 
  throne for the dual line of Babinovich-Kryszkas.  491 BU 
  had barely dawned when Prince Chapaevonas surrendered 
  to Nicola Kryszkas coalition forces.
  The Canean-trained clergy who were Nicola’s closest 
  advisors recommended he follow Gregory Eland’s example 
  and spare his enemy’s life.  Nicola agreed, with the 
  condition that Josef Chapaevonas’s children be raised in 
  the Sanguine Covenant and his eldest daughter inherit his 
  lands and wed Nicola and Olga’s newborn son, Konstantin 
  Kryszkas.
  Compared to the marches and miracles marking his parents’ 
  rise to power, Konstantin’s was comparatively tame.  A 
  scholarly man heavily influenced by his mother, he was 
  only a passable prince but became one of the leading 
  layman in the Sanguine Covenant; much of the theology 
  taken for granted by the modern church, and almost all 
  of the Arman Rite’s unique rituals and customs, came 
  from his pen.  He married Katya Chapaevonas, a young 
  woman seven years his elder, and by all accounts had a 
  conventional if somewhat distant family life.
  His eldest son, Prince Alexei Kryszkas, was a more 
  significant secular figure.  His father’s princedom was 
  three times the size of its rivals’ and by far the dominant 
  Arman power in culture and economics.  Without ever 
  taking to the battlefield, Alexei maneuvered the Kryszkas 
  dynasty to even greater heights, culminating in 457 BU, 
  when he married Anastasia Ivanovenas, the daughter of 
  the second-most powerful Arman prince.  With four-fifths 
  of the Abaddon region directly or indirectly under his rule, 
  
  NeoExodus chronicles:
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  he proclaimed himself the Tsar of the Arman Protectorate, 
  a union of all the Arman princedoms.  Because of his 
  overwhelming power, the remaining princes could not 
  openly oppose his claim, and the Protectorate was born in 
  very nearly its modern form, tied together not by fealty, 
  necessity or force, but by the web of marriages between its 
  royal families.
  THE UNIFICATION OF THE REIS 
  CONFEDERACY
  While the Sanguine Covenant spread unity through southern 
  Exodus, another faith, equally sanguine, gripped the hearts 
  of the Wyldlands of Bal’s inhabitants - literally.
  The Brotherhood of Khayne was a savage sect for a savage 
  land.  Atop step pyramids dyed red by the blood of human 
  sacrifices, its adherents offered up gruesome offerings to 
  their god.  For centuries, the worship of Khayne was limited 
  CANEUS EMPIRE
  Ruler: Empress Cassandra Eland
  Government: Feudal Monarchy
  Cities: Nyssa (M), Amara (LT), Hadu (LT), Perahta (LT), 
  Solvig (LT) 
  Population: The Caneus Empire has one of the highest 
  population densities in all of Exodus. Humans (65%), 
  Cavians (15%), Cynean (10%), others (10%)
  Location: Nas, Western Exodus
  Law: The law in the Caneus Empire is left in the hands of 
  local nobles, making it extremely unevenly applied. It is 
  roughly Neutral overall.
  Alignment: The population of the Caneus Empire leans 
  towards lawful alignments (LG, LN*, LE).
  Religion: The Sanguine Covenant is the official religion 
  of the Caneus Empire. The Kaga’s faith is widespread 
  and greatly respected.
  Languages: Common is the language of the Caneus 
  Empire. 
  Currency: The monetary system of the Caneus Empire 
  is based on a mixture of copper and electrum pieces. 
  Canean coins include (but are not limited to) the Peasant (1cp), the Knight (10cp), the Duke (5cp), the King (5gp) and the 
  Imperial Crown (20gp).
  Military: The Caneus Empire boasts perhaps the most professional army on Exodus. Its ruling nobility spend their lives 
  preparing to defend their own lands and the Empire. Chief among them are the High Guard, master bodyguards and expert 
  warriors. 
  NYSSA, Capital of the caneus empire 
  LN metropolis
  Corruption: +4; Crime -3; Economy: +4; Law +10; Lore +7; Society +3
  Qualities  academic, holy site, insular, magically attuned, rumormongering citizens, superstitious
  Danger +10
  DEMOGRAPHICS
  Government overlord
  Population  75,000 (50,000 humans; 15,000 cavian; 5,000 cynean, 5,000 other)
  Notable NPCs
  Empress of the Caneus Empire Cassandra Eland (female Nasian)
  Imperial Executor, Princess Sienna Eland (female Nasian)
  Archprelate of the Sanguine Covenant Leonid Kaleri (male Arman)
  MARKETPLACE
  Base Value 19,200 gp; Purchase Limit 120,000 gp; Spellcasting 9th
  Minor Items available; Medium Items 4d4; Major Items 3d4
  
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  against the other priests and war leaders of Naphil who 
  hoped to displace them, until at last, in 369 BU, only one 
  remained: Ordoa, Darai’s son by one of his lesser wives. 
  Euhudi embraced Ordoa as the rightful heir and anointed 
  him king of Naphil on a thrown made from the bones of his 
  rivals - king in the name of Khayne, god of blood.
  The gambit paid off; Ordoa did not care what god ruled his 
  soul if he ruled the country, and Euhudi had so successfully 
  insinuated Brotherhood practice into the native cult of 
  Naphil that it hardly changed for the common citizens.  
  Again high priestess and lover of a powerful war leader, 
  Euhudi returned her gaze to neighboring lands.
  The city-states of Bal regularly sallied out to attack each 
  other; feuds older than the empires of the south, some older 
  than human civilization, locked them into an eternal cycle 
  of bloodshed.  When Naphil, ally to Baargon a few years 
  before, launched a massive attack on its neighbor in 366 
  BU, it caught few observers by surprise.  For the second 
  time, an army acting at high priestess Euhudi’s behest 
  approached Baargon, and for the second time faced the 
  shield wall of its temple guards and southern mercenaries.  
  During those years, one of the mercenaries, Lavrenty 
  Roskoff, had claimed the crown of Baargon.  It was Roskoff 
  who led the city’s defense against his former allies.
  Roskoff was a canny and charismatic fighter, but a 
  straightforward one compared to Darai of Naphil.  He 
  followed Darai’s plan of battle almost to the latter, trusting 
  his men’s plate armor and metal weapons to win through 
  even without the Naphil half-giants at their backs.
  His trust was misplaced.  Euhudi also remembered Darai’s 
  battle plan; she advised Ordoa to send a force of slave-
  soldiers at the center of the Baargon line and to sweep 
  his elite warriors around Roskoff’s left flank.  The Naphil 
  war leader followed her advice and executed the plan 
  flawlessly; his men folded up the troops waiting in ambush 
  and crashed into the Baargon left.  Much more massive 
  than the humans of Xehitoch, Naphil’s warriors smashed 
  through armor and shield wall alike.  Only a handful of 
  mercenaries and Baargon warriors escaped to the jungle, 
  and the city itself fell almost without resistance.
  Ordoa and Euhudi did not stop at Baargon.  Two more 
  city-states, including the latter’s native Xehitoch, fell to 
  their rapidly swelling host before the end of 365 BU; the 
  high priestess dedicated each to Khayne with thousands of 
  sacrifices.
  While the people of Bal were a fatalistic lot, accepting of 
  their bloodthirsty gods and the savage jungle surrounding 
  their cities, the sanguine excess of Euhudi’s cult shocked 
  even them.  Most of the eastern Wyldlands had fallen under 
  Brotherhood rule, and the feuding cities of the west looked 
  askance at this growing empire.  In 357 BU, in the city of 
  Reis, the leaders of free Bal met, along with ambassadors 
  from the increasingly concerned southern empires.  At 
  the urging of the Canean ambassador, they sent word of 
  the wicked Brotherhood cult to Nyssa and beseeched the 
  to the cannibal tribes of the deep jungle and the city-state of 
  Xehitoch in northeastern Bal; other sects, only slightly less 
  bloodthirsty but far less ambitious, ruled other walled cities 
  hidden in the jungle.
  In 382 BU, Euhudi, high priestess of Khayne, saw favorable 
  omens in the intestines of a sacrificial victim.  She believed, 
  perhaps rightly, that Khayne had chosen to spread his cult 
  across all of Bal, and that the city of Xehitoch was destined 
  to lead the way.  As Eukudi was both the spiritual leader of 
  Xehitoch and the concubine of its war leader, Prince Xoltec, 
  her words fired the city’s imagination.  Xoltec gathered an 
  army of warriors and blood mages, made pacts with the 
  Khayne-worshipping cannibal tribes, and set off to win 
  prisoners and glory.
  Xoltec and Euhudi’s army swept over several unsuspecting 
  neighbors before anyone realized the danger.  Finally, in 
  380 BU, the cities of Naphil and Baargon, alerted by their 
  allies among the Enuka beastmen, joined forces to bring the 
  Brotherhood army to battle.  Darai, war leader of Naphil, 
  commanded the coalition host.
  The armies met in a small clearing south of Baargon.  Darai 
  arrayed the core of his force - his personal retinue of Naphil 
  half-giants, the temple guards of the priest-king Baargon, 
  and two companies of Arman mercenaries - in the clearing, 
  keeping the rest of his army hidden to disguise its smaller 
  size.  Xoltec, whose forces had yet to know defeat, threw 
  the brunt of his force against this line, expecting it to fold as 
  others had.  The Baargon and Arman troops, formed into a 
  shield wall, held the line; the Naphil warriors struck over it 
  with their mighty warclubs.  At the same time, Darai sent an 
  Enuka scout to the rest of his force, which slipped through 
  the jungle and fell upon the Xehitoch army’s flanks.  The 
  Brotherhood fell back in disarray, thinking they were under 
  attack by a larger force when in fact they had the advantage 
  of numbers.  Prince Xoltec was slain and the priestess 
  Euhudi captured.
  In accordance with Wyldlands custom, the captured men of 
  Xehitoch were brought to the victors’ cities as sacrifices.  
  Euhudi, as a priestess, was safe from this fate and would 
  normally have been ransomed back to Xehitoch.  Rather 
  than return to a city she believed had failed her god, 
  however, she insinuated herself with the victorious Darai.  
  When his troops returned to Naphil, they took the high 
  priestess of Khayne with them.
  Euhudi became Darai’s mistress, then his queen, ruling 
  at his side in Naphil for the next decade.  She gradually 
  introduced elements of Brotherhood worship into the already 
  bloody practices of the Naphil priesthood, manipulating 
  their rituals to reflect the cult of her native city.
  In 371 BU, Darai died without a clear heir; Euhudi, his 
  queen, had never given him any children, and his offspring 
  by various lesser wives bickered amongst themselves.  
  Euhudi, still as beautiful and charismatic as the day she 
  entered Naphil, set herself up as regent and arbiter between 
  the warring heirs.  She played them against each other and 
  
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  DOMINION
  Ruler: Khagan Malik ibn Al’adim
  Government: Magocratic Monarchy, the ruling 
  khagan is backed and supported by the Council 
  of khans. 
  Cities: Qijom (M), Anidem (ST), Hasani (LT), 
  Iamar (LT), Qasim (LT), Saidah (LT), Zayna (LT)
  Population: The Dominion is heavily populated, 
  particularly in the north and east. The population 
  is mostly human (55%), tiefling (20%) and sasori 
  (20%). Cavians and Prymidians form the rest of 
  the population.
  Location: Cordel, southwestern mainland 
  Exodus
  Law: The law in the Dominion is applied to all 
  equally. The khans dispense justice fairly and 
  evenly. Overall, the law in the Dominion can be 
  considered Lawful Good.
  Alignment: The population of the Dominion 
  leans towards law and good (LG*, LN, NG). The 
  Tiefling tribes are highly isolationist and lean 
  towards evil (LE, NE*, CE).
  Religion: The populace worships the Sanguine 
  Covenant. The nobility may belong to other 
  faiths. The Tieflings worship the Great Tiefling, 
  but pay lip service to other deities.
  Languages: Common is the official language of the Dominion. Qijomi is the language of the original inhabitants of the 
  Cordelian Desert.
  Currency: The Dominion based its monetary system on the value of a single drink of water. Dominion coins are minted using 
  copper. A cup is worth 5cp, a Pint is worth 15cp and a Gallon is worth 45 cp. For any larger transaction, gems worth 5,500 
  gold pieces are used. However, standard imperial coins are becoming increasingly common in the markets of the Dominion 
  for their ease of counting.
  Military: The Dominion boasts the smallest army in all of Exodus. Nobles in the Dominion wield potent magical abilities. This 
  magical superiority makes the Dominion safe. Its soldiers are mostly light, mobile cavalry units with a number of specialists 
  such as heavy Sasori infantry, the Khalid Hadad (a secret order of mage killers) and Tiefling assassins. Specialist spellcasters, 
  known as Wyrdcasters, add to the Dominion’s magical arsenal.
  QIJOM, Capital of the caneus empire 
  LG metropolis
  Corruption: +5; Crime +0; Economy: +5; Law +6; Lore +5; Society +9
  Qualities  academic, insular, magically attuned, racially intolerant (Armans), superstitious, tourist attraction
  Danger +10; Disadvantages impoverished
  DEMOGRAPHICS
  Government magical, council
  Population  30,000 (15,000 humans; 5,000 tiefling; 5,000 sasori, 2,000 prymidian, 3,000 other)
  Notable NPCs
  Khagan Malik ibn Al’adim (male Cordelian)
  Sultan Nasser ibn Al’adim (male Cordelian)
  MARKETPLACE
  Base Value 8,000 gp; Purchase Limit 50,000 gp; Spellcasting 9th
  Minor Items 3d4; Medium Items 2d4; Major Items 1d4
  
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  archprelate to declare a crusade.  Meanwhile, the free 
  cities of Bal united under Prince Ataulpa Gazsi of Reis, 
  a legendary panther warrior, and prepared to hold off the 
  horde from the east.
  Learning of the free cities’ plea to the powerful Caneus 
  Empire, Euhudi urged her followers to strike immediately 
  at this newfound ‘Reis Confederacy.’  Brotherhood warriors 
  under Ordoa marched west in the thousands, their numbers 
  bolstered by the cannibal tribes who shared their bloody 
  god.
  Late in 357 BU, the armies met for the first time. 
  Recognizing that his men did not have scouts as capable as 
  their foes, Ataulpa Gazsi raised a swathe of jungle a mile 
  across and three miles wide.  Rivers flanked his position 
  and cliffs backed it.  The outnumbered Reis army could 
  not escape from this position - exactly as Ataulpa wanted 
  it.  A finish fighter, he knew the fearsome reputation of the 
  Brotherhood would send his men packing long before he 
  wanted to quit the field.  By forcing the eastern host into the 
  open and his own to stand and fight, he made it a contest of 
  wills and fighting skill rather than morale and stealth.
  The armies met exactly as Ataulpa intended.  Brotherhood 
  slave-soldiers charged across the river first, suffering 
  ruinous casualties from the short bows and javelins of the 
  Reis army.  By the time they reached Ataulpa’s lines, they 
  were almost completely wiped out; behind them, however, 
  came the shock troops of Euhudi’s cult, the half-giants of 
  Naphil and the high priestess’s towering consort.  This 
  block crashed against Ataulpa’s center while cannibal 
  savages harried his flanks.  Had the Reis army been able 
  to flee, they surely would have broken then, but, trapped 
  as they were, they had no choice but to fight and die with 
  their fearless prince.  Ataulpa’s panther warriors did not 
  fight like the Arman-taught heavy infantry of Baargon; 
  they danced about the slower Naphil elites, leaping on their 
  backs and slashing their tendons with sharp-edged war 
  clubs.  Ordoa fell, nearly covered with panther warriors; 
  his two sons, who would have inherited his power, were 
  slain almost at the same time, one cut down by Ataulpa’s 
  legendary dancing blade.  With the loss of their leader, 
  the Brotherhood horde panicked; the Naphil stood their 
  ground, dying to the last man over their ruler’s body, but the 
  cannibals and slave soldiers broke for the river.
  Euhudi realized Khayne’s temporal realm rested on the 
  outcome of the battle before her.  Since the river was 
  already red with blood, her sanguine sorcery was easily 
  able to control it, forming immense crimson elementals 
  that loomed over the battlefield.  They crashed like a wave 
  over her own allies and surged toward the Reis army - and 
  stopped.  Ataulpa’s mystics had yet to play their hand.  Wise 
  in the timeless secrets of the Kaga, these arcanists battled 
  the bloody priestess’s will.  The blood elementals sank back 
  into the river, dragging the screaming Brotherhood army 
  back to hell with them.
  Ataulpa’s army quickly conquered the cities of the east, 
  who welcomed the vanquisher of their cruel high priestess.  
  With his reputation secure, the whole of the east as well as 
  mighty Reis at his command, and the evident favor of the 
  immortal Kaga, Ataulpa became the first Imperator of the 
  Reis Confederacy in 356 BU.
  Scholars could only speculate on Euhudi’s fate, for the 
  high priestess of Khayne vanished after the Battle of the 
  River of the Dead.  Her cult went underground, spread by 
  madmen and cannibals throughout the Reis Confederacy 
  and eventually to more distant lands.  Ironically, the crusade 
  she feared never materialized; by the mid-300s, the Caneus 
  Empire had no time for religious warfare.  Its attentions 
  were fixed elsewhere…
  THE DAWN OF TOTAL WAR
  For centuries, each region of Exodus had played host to 
  civil wars and factional strife.  By 350 BU, however, four 
  great empires reigned in the Wyldlands of Bal, the ice 
  fields of Nas, the desert of Cordel and the hills of Abaddon. 
  Even before Bal was unified into the Reis Confederacy, 
  the southern powers, united by the Sanguine Covenant 
  but sharing little else, armed themselves for the first clash 
  of empires since the War of Mind and Magic more than a 
  thousand years before.
  Because the empires occupied the entirety of their native 
  regions, they naturally looked to Sametia, home to scattered 
  tribes of nomads and barbarians, as the logical place to 
  expand.  Sametia provided more fertile country than Cordel 
  or Nas, whose growing populations tested the limits of 
  their agriculture; the Arman Protectorate did not need more 
  farmland, but it did need more land, for the remaining 
  Arman seafarers had begun to abandon their increasingly 
  volcanic home island and were eager to carve out new 
  territories.  After the Reis Confederacy achieved union, it, 
  too, joined in jockeying over Sametia.  From 360 to 290 
  BU, dozens, if not hundreds, of skirmishes between the 
  empires and natives erupted on the plains of Sametia; these 
  were not wars of conquest, merely probes by each empire 
  to determine the will of its neighbors.
  In 289 BU, the Dominion escalated the conflict, not by an 
  act of war but by an astounding feat of magic.  Magical 
  theory advanced rapidly under the Dominion’s caste 
  system.  It had seemed to culminate in 322 BU with the 
  development of windsailing ships, elegant sloops designed 
  to cruise the skies like ordinary ships did the seas, but 
  Khan Ahmed Ibn Bury of the city of Anidem exceeded all 
  his rivals.  Combining the powers of more than a hundred 
  sorcerers and knowledge gleaned from study of the Kaga, 
  he raised his entire city into the sky, making it a floating, 
  nigh-impregnable fortress and base of power.
  The Arman Protectorate took note.  Tsar Vasiliy Kryszkas 
  demanded the Dominion surrender the secrets of this 
  incalculably valuable invention to its rivals; hoping to draw 
  support from the Caneus Empire, he included them in his 
  
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  plea.  When Khagan Malik Ibn Hassan declined the request, 
  Vasiliy declared war.
  Imperial war proved very different from factional strife.  
  Although it began in Sametia, the conflict soon spilled over 
  to the entire Dominion-Protectorate border.  Rather than 
  single armies assembled to fight either a one-day melee or 
  a siege, both sides fielded multiple armies that stretched 
  across many miles.  Old traditions of single combat, the 
  tactic of the massed charge, the very nature of military force 
  - all changed rapidly 
  When a Protectorate army reached Anidem in 288, it 
  unveiled its own innovations - extraordinary leaps in 
  technology.  Crude clockwork war engines bombarded 
  the floating city while balloons filled with lighter-than-air 
  gas lifted invading troops through a magical and mundane 
  barrage from Dominion windsailing vessels.  The attack was 
  IMPERIAL ALLIANCE
  Ruler: Secretary-General Njal Eland
  Government: Oligarchy of member states
  Cities: Aremyhk (LC)
  Population: The population of Koryth is composed of a mixture 
  of people from all across the Imperial Alliance. Exiles from Sametia 
  and p’tan have chosen the province as their new home. Humans 
  compose about half the population (50%), p’tan make up 20%, 
  kalisans 15%, and the other races compose the remaining 15% of 
  the population.
  Location: Koryth, central Exodus
  Law: The law in the Imperial Alliance is applied by its member 
  states. Koryth is Lawful Neutral.
  Alignment: The population of Koryth is neither good nor evil 
  (LN*, N, CN).
  Religion: The Sanguine Covenant is the official religion.
  Languages: Common is the language of the Imperial Alliance. 
  Currency: The Imperial Alliance has been trying to impose a 
  common monetary system upon its member nations. The most 
  common coin is the gold piece (worth 1gp). Copper (1/100gp), 
  silver (1/10gp), electrum (1/2 gp) and platinum pieces (10gp) are 
  minted and circulated.
  Military: The Imperial Janissaries and a small all-volunteer army defend the Imperial Alliance. An elite force of soldiers known 
  as Men-At-Arms serves as a police force and bodyguards who travel with dignitaries.
  AREMYhK, Capital of the Alliance 
  LN large city
  Corruption +4; Crime +5; Economy +6; Law -4; Lore +5; Society +1
  Qualities  academic, notorious, prosperous, rumormongering citizens, tourist attraction
  Danger +10
  DEMOGRAPHICS
  Government secret syndicate
  Population  20,000 (10,000 humans; 5,000 p’tan; 1,000 prymidian, 1,000 sasori, 3,000 other)
  Notable NPCs
  Chief Legate Njal Eland (male nasian)
  Senator Maksymilian Amyas (male human)
  Senator Tlotoxl (male khymerion)
  Director of Section Omega Niljon Taysnita (male cavian)
  MARKETPLACE
  Base Value 16,424 gp; Purchase Limit 112,500 gp; Spellcasting 8th
  Minor Items 4d4; Medium Items 3d4; Major Items 2d4
  
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  repulsed, but several districts of Anidem collapsed back to 
  the ground, taking with them untold numbers of civilians.  
  The Dominion retaliated with ritual magic, cursing the 
  Protectorate countryside to endless night.  Crops withered, 
  animals shied and peasants cowered.  Tsar Vasiliy, unable 
  to break the curse or draw the Caneus Empire into the fight, 
  agreed to an uneasy peace.  The Khagan, satisfied that he 
  had humbled the invaders, lifted the curse.
  From 287 to 263, the empires restricted their jockeying 
  for position to Sametia, but the Reis Confederacy and the 
  Caneus Empire came to blows after a group of Covenant 
  missionaries were sacrificed in a Confederate city.  The 
  Canean knights launched the crusade Reis’s first imperator 
  had hoped for a century earlier, but it quickly became 
  apparent that their advantages - manpower, armor and 
  heavy cavalry - were useless in the sweltering jungles of 
  Bal.  Thousands of Canean knights died of jungle diseases 
  before ever engaging the armies of Reis.  Worse, they 
  brought the plague back with them, plunging the Sanguine 
  Covenant’s clergy into a constant battle against the disease.  
  Archprelate Karl Edegard proclaimed the disease divine 
  punishment for the empire’s overreach and cautioned 
  against further invasions.  Regardless of the spiritual 
  weight of his proclamation, its strategic worth soon became 
  apparent: Reis armies retaliated in 251 and again in 235, 
  but proved every bit as ill-equipped to fight in Nas as their 
  foes were in the Wyldlands.  Eventually, the two empires 
  declared the contested province of Koryth a neutral zone, in 
  which neither would enforce their rule without the other’s 
  consent.
  Despite the relatively brief wars of the century, all the 
  empires realized just how devastating they could be; tens of 
  thousands of soldiers and almost as many civilians perished 
  in the two wars - more than had perished in any of the 
  empires’ wars of unification.
  The battle to come, however, would make those wars mere 
  footnotes.
  THE DOMINION-PROTECTORATE 
  WARS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE 
  JANISSARIES
  Dimitri Dyakonoviks, the dashing, ambitious second son 
  of the prince of the last independent Arman princedom, 
  seduced Ilyana Kryszkas, the eldest daughter of the Tsar 
  of the Protectorate, in 203 BU.  Rather than allow the 
  disgrace to become public, Tsar Pieter Kryszkas gave his 
  consent to the match and the pair were swiftly wed.  Almost 
  immediately, Dimitri pressed his claim on his ancestral 
  lands, urging the Tsar to place him on the Dyakonoviks 
  throne in place of his father and brother.
  Prince Lavrenty Dyakonoviks, Dimitri’s father, panicked 
  when he heard of his ungrateful child’s demands.  Rather 
  than go to the Tsar, who had no intention of provoking 
  his ally, Lavrenty appealed to his western neighbors, the 
  Dominion, for military protection.
  Khagan Malik Ibn Hassan had done much to ease the 
  tensions between the two countries, and had even guested 
  at the Tsar’s palace a few years before.  Unfortunately, 
  he was nearly a hundred years old and on his deathbed, 
  and his grandson and heir, Ahmed, had been educated at 
  Anidem and hated the Armans for damaging the floating 
  city.  A Dominion army under the aspiring Khagan agreed 
  to the Dyakonoviks proposal and moved to defend the 
  princedom’s borders.
  To Tsar Pieter, this move seemed like an invasion of Arman 
  territory and a betrayal of the treaty he had contracted 
  with the Dominion.  An Arman army with the Tsar at its 
  head immediately marched to the Dominion-Protectorate 
  border, while a second, jointly led by Dimitri Dyakonoviks 
  and the Tsarevich Nicola, assembled at the edge of the 
  Dyakonoviks princedom.
  The resulting conflict, someday called the Lesser Dominion-
  Protectorate War, seemed anything but lesser at the time.
  The first volley was fired in 202 BU, when a freak 
  lightning storm swamped a company of the Protectorate’s 
  new clockwork juggernauts at the Dyakonoviks border. 
  Dimitri Dyakonoviks blamed the Dominion’s wyrdcasters, 
  or battle-mages, and ordered an attack on their lines.
  For the next twenty-six years, Dominion and Protectorate 
  smashed against each other, fighting over the Dyakonoviks 
  princedom, which was reduced nearly to slag by the 
  magical and mechanical forces unleashed upon it, over the 
  dangerous power of the city of Anidem, over the sacking of 
  Anidem a century before - ultimately, over the fact that not 
  fighting became inconceivable.
  Tsar Pieter fell in battle in 196 BU, his body turned to stone 
  by a wyrdcaster.  Ahmed Ibn Malik, now Khagan, had the 
  statue of the old warrior placed in his palace as a trophy.
  Tsar Nicola IV, hard-pressed by the more magically adept 
  Dominion and enraged by their treatment of his father, 
  instituted one of the most controversial military programs 
  in all Exodus by founding the Protectorate Peacekeepers.  
  An elite regiment formed from the finest Arman youth, 
  the Peacekeepers were unlike any soldiers seen before; 
  they were identified as children and recruited into a secret 
  training facility in the heart of the Protectorate, where 
  grueling mental and physical tests honed them into living 
  weapons.  More shockingly, their numbers included both 
  men and women, and their service was for life - this was 
  a force not recruited to win one war, but bred to win all 
  wars.  Many of the Arman nobles were horrified, and the 
  Sanguine Covenant, more powerful in the Protectorate than 
  anywhere else on Exodus, condemned the project, saying it 
  was inhuman, worthy of the diabolical First Ones.  Many of 
  the critics, both secular and religious, disappeared without 
  a trace.
  One, however, the Tsar dared not remove from service: 
  General Alexei Brushkov, the foremost warrior and field 
  commander of the Protectorate.  Where all other Arman 
  
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  commanders failed, Brushkov won battle after battle.  
  However, he became increasingly frustrated with the war, 
  lamenting the gloriless, impersonal slaughter over which he 
  presided so masterfully.  Brushkov longed for bygone days 
  when, at least in his view, honor and courage won battles, 
  not numbers.
  In 184 BU, Brushkov, disgusted by the ugly rumors about 
  the Peacekeeper project and its vanishing critics, tendered 
  his resignation.  The entire Protectorate was horrified to see 
  the general depart, taking with him two dozen of his most 
  accomplished lieutenants.  They vanished into the Sametian 
  wilderness ahead of the inevitable demands for their return 
  - or their heads.  The shaken Protectorate was forced to sue 
  for peace with the Dominion, conceding large tracts of rich 
  farmland, including most of the contested Ivanovenas and 
  Dyakonoviks territories.
  The departed officers knew nothing of this, however.  They 
  disappeared into the sparsely populated wilderness of 
  Koryth, in the contested lands between the Caneus Empire 
  and the Reis Confederacy.  In 182 BU, Brushkov, always 
  an introspective man, founded the Janissaries - an order of 
  warrior-ascetics dedicated to no king or country, serving 
  only their code of honor and their consciences.
  JANUS HORDE
  Ruler: Warrior-Queen Thais of the steppe
  Government:  Many Tribal Chieftains, no unified government
  Cities:  Sanat (LT), Eimhin (ST), Jarlath (ST), Morolt (ST) 
  Population: Low, scattered and mostly human (55%). Dalreans 
  are common in the east (35%). Calibans form a third group (15%).
  Location: Sametia, eastern Exodus
  Law: The law in the Janus Horde is Neutral Evil. Those who do not 
  recognize the Horde’s supremacy are on the harsh end of the law.
  Alignment: The population of the horde leans towards chaos (N, 
  CG, CN*, CE)
  Religion: Paganism and the Cult of the Dragon are the two 
  most recognized religion in the Horde. The Sanguine Covenant 
  is persecuted as an imposition of civilization. The Lawbringer’s 
  worship is expanding.
  Languages: Common is spoken throughout Sametia.
  Currency: The Janus Horde does not mint any coin. They take any 
  foreign coin at the official value.
  Military: The Horde’s armies are composed mostly of mounted 
  archers with powerful berserker infantry, although in reality only a 
  large caste of warriors takes part in battle. Elite among the horde 
  are the ruthless Fists of the Dragon, warriors dedicated to hunting 
  and slaying the greatest beasts in the world.
  SANAT, Capital of the Alliance 
  NE large town
  Corruption +5; Crime +4; Economy -4; Law -6; Lore +1; Society -4
  Qualities  anarchy, insular, notorious, racially intolerant (civilized people)
  Danger +30
  DEMOGRAPHICS
  Government anarchy
  Population  4,500 (3,000 humans; 500 calibans; 500 p’tans and 500 other)
  Notable NPCs
  Headtaker General O’Bredj The Merciless (male caliban)
  MARKETPLACE
  Base Value 2,600 gp; Purchase Limit 15,000 gp; Spellcasting 5th
  Minor Items 3d4; Medium Items 2d4; Major Items 1d4
  
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  Brushkov hoped, by attracting the greatest military minds 
  of all four empires, to bring an end to the excess of imperial 
  wars and return Exodus to an age when knights and barons 
  settled their disputes with honor rather than slaving for a 
  distant master.  Brushkov adapted much of the Janissary 
  philosophy from that of Caneus’s Emperor Gregory Eland, 
  a man he greatly respected, but the modern Caneus Empire 
  looked on the Janissaries with no more favor than the other 
  imperial powers.
  The Janissaries might have remained an unusual footnote 
  in Exodus history, a curious movement that rose and fell 
  with the charisma and drive of their first grandmaster, had 
  they not chosen to settle in Koryth, and more specifically 
  in the ruined fortress of Aremyhk.  For centuries, the 
  ancient citadel, dating back at least to the Cavian Empire, 
  had lain empty, because the locals considered it haunted 
  by the spirits of its former inhabitants.  On some level, 
  they may have been correct; in the depths of Aremyhk, the 
  Janissaries discovered mental remnants from the Age of 
  Mind and Magic - and, either by their own mental devotions 
  or by some imponderable alien whim, learned to master 
  those remnants.  To their incredible martial disciplines, the 
  Janissaries added mental powers not seen on Exodus for a 
  thousand years.
  Psionics or no, the wider world was not ready for the 
  Janissaries’ ideas, and their order remained obscure - a 
  whispered threat to the great empires, a secret hope to many 
  of their subjects.
  THE TWILIGHT WAR
  While Alexei Brushkov was founding his mystical order, 
  other Armans commanders, and their foes in the Dominion, 
  were pushing their respective rulers to resume hostilities.
  Tsar Nikola IV died in 158 BU, passing imperial power to 
  the line of his sister Ilyana and her husband, Dimitri, whose 
  ambitions had sparked the first war major war between 
  the Protectorate and the Dominion.  Ilyana reigned until 
  her death in 145 BU, after which her son took the throne 
  as Tsar Georgy II.  Georgy II was the first Arman Tsar 
  to launch an extensive program of civil modernization to 
  match the country’s military expansion.  He laid a network 
  of ‘gearlines,’ vast clockworks that propelled trams of men 
  and material across the Protectorate, and sponsored the 
  construction of a massive imperial university in Mureath.  
  While these civil works projects became the marvels of 
  Exodus, they brought home to the Dominion how dangerous 
  the Protectorate was becoming, and how completely it had 
  recovered from the previous war.
  In 119 BU, the Dominion ambassador to the Reis 
  Confederacy was murdered.  Blame fell on a member 
  of the Protectorate Ambassador’s staff; the Protectorate 
  refused to surrender an Arman citizen to the notably harsh 
  justice of the Confederacy, promising instead to try the 
  suspected assassin in an Arman court.  Neither Dominion 
  nor Confederacy considered this an acceptable solution; 
  on the eve of the suspect’s extradition, Imperatrix Chanui 
  of the Reis Confederacy gave the Dominion permission 
  to perform an extradition of its own.  Dominion and 
  Confederate troops took the Arman embassy by storm and 
  dragged the suspected assassin from his countrymen.
  The Protectorate immediately launched a protest, warning 
  that if their man was not released immediately, they would 
  consider it an act of war by both countries.  Imperatrix 
  Chanui complied - sending every part of the Arman captive 
  to the Tsar, in five separate caravans.  With the fifth, she 
  attached a letter, informing the Tsar that he could make no 
  demands of her country, and that crimes committed there 
  would be dealt with in the Confederacy’s way.
  In 118 BU, the Arman Protectorate declared war on the 
  Reis Confederacy.  Nineteen days after the declaration 
  reached Reis, the Dominion launched an attack on the now 
  weakened Arman flank, catching the Protectorate as it was 
  moving troops toward Sametia and the Confederate border.
  Because the Reis Confederacy was hundreds of miles of 
  Sametian wilderness from the Protectorate, Tsar Georgy 
  focused on the more immediate foe.  The first two decades 
  of what became the longest war in Exodus’s human era 
  were thus considered the Second, or Greater, Dominion-
  Protectorate War.  As with its predecessor, this conflict 
  proved indecisive, a seemingly endless grapple of Arman 
  warcraft and artifice against Dominion mobility and magic.
  In 83 BU, however, the Reis Confederacy joined the fray 
  in earnest, formally annexing the Sametian colonies of 
  the Protectorate - and stationing “peacekeeping forces” in 
  the Dominion’s colonies.  Neither of the southern powers 
  could afford to send significant forces to protect their 
  holdings in the contested lands, but in 82 BU, the Caneus 
  Empire, concerned that the Confederacy was becoming too 
  powerful to contain in the Wyldlands and would spill into 
  the Koryth neutral zone, engaged the Reis army in Sametia.  
  The Confederacy responded by declaring war on the 
  Caneans; in 80 BU, pressured by the need for aid against 
  the Protectorate and their inability to hold their Sametian 
  colonies, the Dominion also declared against the Caneans.
  This marked the beginning of the conflict Exodus would 
  know as the Twilight War.  None of the four great empires 
  would emerge unscathed, and none would truly emerge 
  victorious.
  At its peak around 50 BU, the Twilight War claimed more 
  than ten thousand soldiers’ lives each day.  It seemed as 
  if each day introduced new and more horrible ways to 
  die.  The Confederacy introduced war beasts of fearsome 
  and unnatural aspect, twisted aberrations created by ritual 
  magic; the Caneans countered by literally burying the 
  monsters in their dead troops until knights could reach the 
  pinned creatures and put them down.  The Protectorate 
  fielded clockwork juggernauts that crushed whole divisions 
  under their gear-like wheels; the Dominion superheated the 
  juggernauts with fire magic, cooking their hundred-man 
  crews and exploding them into the surrounding units.  
  Many dangers of modern Exodus emerged from the fires of 
  
  NeoExodus chronicles:
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  the Twilight War, including magically engineered monsters, 
  spells and weapons.
  As the Janissaries’ founder, Alexei Brushkov, had feared, 
  total war had robbed the battlefield of all its redeeming 
  qualities, leaving only a slaughterhouse, and the slaughter 
  went on longer than even he had imagined possible.
  UNIFICATION
  After a century of intermittent warfare and another in which 
  it was almost constant, the nations of Exodus were much 
  fallen from their heights.
  In 15 BU, the Arman Protectorate and the Dominion, the 
  original belligerents, signed a peace treaty and stood down 
  their armies.  Tsar Dimitri Kryszkas II and Khagan Rashid 
  Ibn Fasan met on the oft-contested floating city of Anidem 
  to sign the treaty that would remove their exhausted 
  nations from the Twilight War.  Nonetheless, both countries 
  remained on a war footing, defending their northern 
  borders against Canean and Reis aggression; nor were these 
  precautions wasted.
  The Caneus Empire and the Reis Confederacy came later 
  to the war and boasted larger populations than their rivals; 
  they pressed on where the Dominion and the Protectorate 
  faltered.
  In 5 BU, a massive Reis army of men and warbeasts 
  crossed into the Koryth neutral zone: a hundred thousand 
  soldiers armed with Arman steel from an earlier alliance 
  and ten thousand monsters of various stripes, backed by the 
  ritual blood magic so feared in other realms.  The Caneus 
  Empire’s main army was in Sametia harrying the eastern 
  front, so only forty thousand warriors, almost half knights 
  of the local baronies, could meet the Confederate Army. 
  Both sides were well past calling for surrenders; they would 
  fight to the finish, the Caneans to slow down the invasion, 
  the Confederates to press it quickly into the heartland of 
  Nas.
  At least, that was their intention.
  The armies met in the shadow of the fortress Aremyhk - 
  and from that looming, pre-human citadel, the Janissaries 
  emerged.
  The Caneans at first took these men for reinforcements and 
  welcomed them - but the Janissaries, though far more hailed 
  from Nas than the Wyldlands of Bal, had not emerged from 
  their citadel to take sides.  They arrayed for battle outside 
  their citadel, perhaps a thousand men against forty times 
  their number on one side and a hundred times on the other.
  When the dust cleared, hardly a Janissary had fallen, and 
  both defender and invader were in full retreat.  Magic, both 
  from the Covenant priests in the Caneus army and the blood 
  mages of the Reis army, fizzled, stopped by the Janissaries’ 
  unrivalled mental powers.  Grandmaster Randal Yearby, 
  Brushkov’s chosen successor, delivered an ultimatum to 
  the commanders of the forces his had vanquished: instruct 
  their rulers to stop the Twilight War, or the Janissaries 
  would stop it for them.  Having just watched the psionic 
  warrior-ascetics break two armies, the commanders were 
  quite receptive.
  The armies withdrew from the Koryth neutral zone, each 
  taking a single Janissary to present the peace proposal.  In 
  Nyssa, Empress Constance Eland, acting as regent for her 
  young son Desmond because the emperor had fallen in 
  battle with the Dominion two years earlier, wanted nothing 
  of the enforced peace; the dukes, wiser in the ways of war 
  and realizing how close they had come to disaster, advised 
  her to play along with the Janissaries at least as long as it 
  served the empire’s purpose.  In Reis, Imperator Chaqua 
  Gazsi proved more receptive, for, while he did not know 
  the state of his enemies, he knew many of the city-states 
  of the Confederacy had been nearly depopulated by losing 
  generations of their young men.  Showing such weakness 
  to the Wyldlands invited savages and worse to wipe out the 
  northern civilization entirely.
  The four rulers of the major empires traveled to Koryth, 
  accompanied by small retinues for their security; at the 
  Janissaries’ invitation, the leaders of dozens of independent 
  principalities, tribes, duchies and city-states joined the 
  mighty rulers.  In 4 BU, all signed the Treaty of Aremyhk, 
  formally ending the Twilight War.
  This accomplished the Janissaries goal, but with such 
  a collection of notables all frightened and sick of the 
  seemingly endless war, a greater achievement appeared 
  possible.
  Grandmaster Yearby faced a momentous decision.  The 
  Janissaries had been founded to fight against the rise of 
  monolithic governments, to agitate for a return to simpler, 
  less centralized times.  Yearby knew, however, that the 
  great lords would never accept such a proposal, and that, 
  for all the power the Janissaries had shown at the Battle 
  of Aremyhk, they could not forcibly dismantle the four 
  empires.  Yearby saw a way to put an end to the age of total 
  war between nations - but to do so, he would have to push 
  for the opposite of his mentor’s vision.
  Yearby decided to try.
  He called on the assembled dignitaries to go beyond a 
  single treaty.  He asked them to forge an alliance capable 
  of preventing another war as devastating as the Twilight 
  War, reminding them that their countries could not survive 
  another such conflict.
  Thus began the negotiations to found the Imperial Alliance 
  of Exodus.  From 4 BU to the Alliance’s inauguration in 1 
  AU (After Unification), monarchs, statesmen and soldiers 
  debated, worried and planned.  Each empire tried to get 
  the most favorable arrangement from the structure of the 
  Imperial Alliance.  The Caneus Empire sought the rule of 
  a majority, trusting its larger population, its rivals pushed 
  for a system in which each great power had a single 
  
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  representative, and the minor powers agitated for their own 
  seats on the proposed Imperial Senate.
  At last, the Imperial Alliance took on its familiar, modern 
  form: an inner council consisting of the senior legates from 
  the four imperial families, the greater Imperial Senate 
  consisting of forty legates - one from each of the major 
  noble houses -, and a series of Imperial Assemblies to 
  put the senate’s recommendations into law within each 
  region, subject to the approval of the local monarch.  The 
  Grandmaster of the Janissaries reported directly to the inner 
  council and put his order at the Imperial Senate’s disposal, 
  granting its suggestions force as well as respect.  At the 
  insistence of the southern empires, the Sanguine Covenant 
  was recognized as the official religion of the Imperial 
  Alliance.  All nations within the alliance, from the most 
  powerful to the weakest, agreed to treat an attack on one 
  of their number as an attack on all.  All agreed to permit 
  the Janissaries unrestricted passage through their lands, 
  to discontinue the use of forbidden magic, to negotiate 
  through the Imperial Senate grievances that would have led 
  to war without its moderating influence.
  In 1 AU, the Imperial Senate held its first session, blessed 
  by the archprelates of Nyssa, Qijom and Mureath and 
  watched over by the rulers of four empires.
  Exodus seemed poised to enter a period of unprecedented 
  peace and prosperity.
  THE MODERN ERA
  For fifty years, the peaceful era promised by the Imperial 
  Alliance seemed at hand.  The Alliance enfolded nearly 
  the entire continent, excepting only the deepest wilderness, 
  and within its rapidly growing power structure, empires 
  and minor nations negotiated their dealings in fairness and 
  prosperity.
  The early years After Unification were not without 
  difficulties - the Imperial Alliance simply faced those 
  difficulties and overcame them.
  For centuries, the Brotherhood of Khayne had lurked 
  in the depths of the Wyldlands of Bal and whispered 
  its dark doctrines amongst the decadent, thrill-seeking 
  children of the aristocracy.  With the Imperial Alliance’s 
  formal imposition of the Sanguine Covenant, however, 
  the Brotherhood found many more adherents: enemies of 
  the organized faith of Exodus who would turn to any cult, 
  however bizarre or depraved, that would fight back against 
  the Covenant.  In 12 AU, the first of what would become 
  an ongoing series of terrorist attacks against Covenant 
  churches leveled the west wing of the Sanguine Cathedral 
  in Nyssa, killing the city’s archprelate and hundreds of 
  worshippers.  Because of the peculiar form of ritual magic 
  used to effect this tragedy, Covenant investigators were able 
  to trace it to the Brotherhood of Khayne.  Prior to the attack, 
  the Covenant had reluctantly tolerated the existence of the 
  old pagan religions; afterwards, it became increasingly 
  militant, forming new orders such as the Purifiers, holy 
  assassins, to hunt down and destroy enemies of the faith.
  Chief among the dangers facing the united Exodus were 
  the Locari.  In 19 AU, the Arman Protectorate launched 
  an expedition to its ancestral homeland of Ablis.  There 
  they found, not the remnants of their ancient seafaring 
  civilization, but a strange and alien environment.  When 
  the expedition landed its flying ship, they were attacked 
  by frighteningly intelligent, man-sized insects: the Locari.  
  Only four men of the fifty-man expedition survived to 
  bring news of the strange menace back to Exodus.  Worse, 
  three of those men died upon their return when Locari 
  eggs hatched within them, releasing ravenous larva.  The 
  Imperial Alliance declared Ablis a forbidden zone; the 
  Confederate and Protectorate navies blockaded the island 
  under Janissary command, and, at least for the moment, 
  constrained the Locari.  An actual expedition to root the 
  menace out was ruled too dangerous, however.
  In 31 AU, another shock rocked Exodus - not a new menace, 
  but the return of an old one.  The Cavians, long thought 
  annihilated in the War of Mind and Magic, returned to 
  Exodus.  The ratlike humanoids returned subtly; for nearly 
  a decade, their presence remained a whispered rumor.  In 38 
  AU, the Janissary Kasim Dammar made contact with what 
  he described as a “severed Cavian”, an outcast from the 
  race’s psionic hive mind.  Kasim’s discovery paved the way 
  for Exodus’s re-integration of the Cavian race.  By 50 AU, 
  Cavians moved about openly in the major cities of Exodus, 
  particularly in Koryth and Nas were they had once ruled.  
  However, neither the severed Cavians nor the members of 
  their racial mind shed any light on where they had spent the 
  last millennium, or how their race had undergone such a 
  radical and, to most other races, disturbing transformation.
  In 36 AU, the nomad clans of Sametia sought representation 
  in the Imperial Alliance.  This would have represented the 
  first major addition to the Alliance since its inception - 
  had their application been accepted.  When the vote was 
  put before the Imperial Senate, it fell far short of the 
  required two-thirds majority.  The senators, many of whose 
  countries had a vested interest in keeping Sametia open for 
  colonization, rejected the proposal out of hand, declaring 
  the clan leadership insufficiently organized to maintain 
  an Imperial Assembly.  The angry clans began launching 
  raids against their neighbors and even imperiling the Locari 
  blockade.  Janissaries were sent to pacify the situation; the 
  presence of the psychic agents cowed the clan leadership, 
  and they stopped raiding.  In return for peace, the Senate 
  successfully lobbied the offended countries to free any 
  captured nomads.  This compromise would come back to 
  haunt the Imperial Alliance in future years.
  For the fledgling Imperial Alliance, these difficulties 
  seemed like opportunities, and the Alliance seemed to meet 
  each one in turn.  Unfortunately, the peace it maintained 
  would soon prove more fragile than the Imperial Senate 
  wanted to believe.
  
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  THE ALLIANCE’S FIRST TRUE TEST
  The peace established by the Imperial Alliance could 
  not last forever.  In 44 AU, tensions again flared along 
  the Dominion-Protectorate border.  On the Arman side, 
  several prominent members of the watchmaker’s guild - 
  the engineers of the country’s mighty clockwork devices 
  - were assassinated; the same fate befell a group of magical 
  scholars in the Dominion.
  For the first time in half a century, troops massed at the 
  contested border, close enough to eye each other across the 
  invisible line between nations - and for a single mistake to 
  reignite the flames of war.
  The Imperial Alliance immediately sent Janissaries to 
  investigate and mediate the matter; they were to meet 
  with representatives of the Dominion and Protectorate 
  governments in the floating city of Anidem, hoping to call 
  to mind the last treaty signed there.  Unfortunately, the 
  pair of Janissaries dispatched to the task died when their 
  windsailing vessel crashed en route to Anidem; further 
  investigation reveal signs of sabotage.
  Tsar Ivan Kryszkas III immediately, and perhaps sensibly, 
  blamed the Dominion: the Janissaries died on a Dominion 
  ship, traveling to a Dominion city, within Dominion 
  borders.  The Tsar’s words might have swayed the Imperial 
  Alliance’s opinion, had he not chosen to back them with 
  immediate force.  Without waiting for the Imperial Senate, 
  the Arman Protectorate launched what it called a punitive 
  action against its neighbor.
  The Khagan, Yusef Ibn Al’alim, had planned on repulsing 
  an Arman attack since the first tensions a year earlier. 
  Drawing a large fleet of Protectorate flyers in as far as 
  Anidem, he let the city’s massive magical cannon pound 
  them while his swifter windsailing ships cut off their retreat.  
  The Fourth Battle of Anidem ended with a total Dominion 
  victory, but the war continued; even as the Protectorate air 
  forces crumpled, their ground troops broke through the 
  Dominion line and surged into the Cordel desert.
  For nearly a year, the war escalated too swiftly for the 
  shocked Imperial Senate to stop it.  Partisans of the 
  Dominion and the Protectorate insisted the Senate refrain 
  from intervening for one belligerent or the other; with no 
  clear indication of who was in the wrong, they were able 
  to paralyze the Alliance’s actions.  Rather than a taskforce 
  of Canean and Reis troops under Janissary command, the 
  Senate at last dispatched another Janissary, Jakatka Bisir, to 
  investigate his brothers’ deaths.
  Bisir was a new breed of Janissary, as much detective 
  as warrior or peacekeeper.  Rather than announcing his 
  presence in the region, he moved in disguise through 
  battlefields and ballrooms, unearthing buried secrets with 
  his telepathic abilities.  In 47 AU, his subtle methods paid 
  off and he returned to the Senate.  Following a closed 
  session of the Senate’s inner circle and a swift, apparently 
  decisive message to the Tsar and the Khagan, the Third 
  Protectorate-Dominion War ended as quickly as it began.  
  Bisir was lauded for his craft and heroism - but neither he 
  nor the Senate nor the belligerents revealed so much as a 
  hint of the contents of his report.
  In light of his success, Jakatka Bisir became the template 
  for the modern Janissary: secretive, observant and efficient.  
  He trained dozens, if not hundreds, of Tyros, or apprentice 
  Janissaries, in his methods.  In 59 AU, the Imperial Senate 
  voted to elevate him to Left Master of Janissaries, second 
  only to the Grandmaster.  However, he disappeared from 
  Aremyhk immediately before his investiture, apparently 
  leaving the order for reasons unknown.
  As disappointed as the Senate must have been, graver 
  matters soon occupied their attention.
  THE QUICKSLAVERS, THE PROPHET, 
  THE LAWGIVER AND THE HORDE
  In 61 AU, a meteor crashed into the island of Unthara.  
  Most of the Imperial Alliance considered it a destructive but 
  ultimately unimportant astronomical event, but in the Reis 
  Confederacy, it was met with horror.  Imperatrix Sepatha 
  Gazsi’s most trusted advisor, Arianna, who men called the 
  Bronze Sage, had predicted the meteor’s fall - and that it 
  would unleash a monstrous plague upon Exodus.
  More to appease the Confederate leadership than out of any 
  real concern, the Imperial Alliance dispatched a Janissary 
  to Unthara.  The Senate expected to lay the Imperatrix’s 
  fears to rest; they ended up confirming them.  The Janissary 
  discovered that the people of Unthara had become infected 
  by an ooze-like, quicksilver substance, a sort of alien 
  parasite that used their bodies as hosts and controlled 
  their minds.  Infection by the parasite proved incurable 
  and inevitably fatal, and turned the victim into a breeding 
  ground for even more of the organism.  Worse, the entity 
  or entities - the Janissary could not determine whether 
  they were fragments of one being or separate individuals 
  - seemed to act at the direction of some malevolent will.
  The Imperial Alliance set up a quarantine fleet similar to that 
  around Ablis, fearing an outbreak of these “quickslavers” 
  could destroy all humanoid life on mainland Exodus; 
  Unthara’s were fishing communities, though, and some 
  in the Senate feared one or more quickslavers had already 
  slipped through their net.
  The Reis Confederacy’s troubles did not end with the 
  arrival of the quickslavers; the Bronze Sage, her powers 
  newly proven, also prophesied that the Imperatrix’s 
  newborn daughter, Lolani, would bring about the end of the 
  Confederacy.  With customary fatalism, the people of Reis 
  accepted the albino child as their future ruler, even as they 
  hated and feared her for what they saw as their inevitable 
  destruction.
  While the Reis Confederacy prepared for its end, another 
  nation was being born.  The tribes of Sametia, infuriated 
  by the blind eye the Imperial Alliance turned to their 
  
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  plight, had grown in numbers and power all during the 
  Twilight War, honing their fighting skills as mercenaries 
  and partisans.  Rebuffed from ‘civilized’ Exodus, they 
  embraced their barbarism and united under a code of 
  untrammeled might and savagery.  Calling themselves the 
  Janus Horde, they fought amongst themselves for position 
  - but fought all others for vengeance.  Thais, a warrior-
  queen of the steppe who traced her ancestry to Orcs, giants 
  and stranger, stronger beasts, proved herself the most 
  brutal and powerful of all.  In 69 AU, she defeated Jangai 
  Zhar, the first warchief to attempt to unite the Horde, and 
  declared herself master of all Sametia.  Under her banner 
  and iron fist, the Janus Horde began coordinated raids on its 
  neighbors, growing in force with every victory.
  Sametia also played host to the first appearance of the 
  enigmatic man called Lawgiver.  Starting in 70 AU, he 
  appeared as a simple beggar in the colonies of the great 
  empires, but where he passed, the sick were cured, the 
  lame healed, and the weak given strange and terrible 
  powers.  The Lawgiver bore the Lazarus Brand, a power 
  hitherto unknown on Exodus - a power even the wisdom 
  of the Kaga could not explain.  Simply by his presence, he 
  spread his strange gift.  When the Imperial Senate sought 
  to question him, he vanished beyond even the Janissaries’ 
  investigative abilities, only to appear in the cities of the 
  great empires as inexplicably as he disappeared.
  The Janissaries did lay one mystery bare, however.  In 
  79 AU, one of their number infiltrated Unthara, now 
  completely the domain of the quickslavers, and came face 
  to face with the alien plague’s master: Xon, a necromancer 
  of surpassing power.  Xon first appeared in the Reis 
  Confederacy during the Twilight War.  For a time, he had 
  served the Imperators, but even those wielders of ritual 
  blood magic blanched at his dark arcana and put him to 
  death - or so they thought.  His reemergence centuries after 
  his apparent demise, with a menace even greater than his 
  magical abilities at his command, should have united the 
  great empires like nothing in a century.
  The empires, however, were preoccupied with a different 
  sort of union.
  THE GREAT HOUSES UNITED
  Even after a century of relative peace under the Imperial 
  Alliance, the great powers of Exodus had shied away from 
  the one move that would completely shift their balance of 
  power: a marriage between the direct lines of two imperial 
  houses.
  The Caneus Empire and the Dominion had come closest 
  in 26 AU, when Erwin Eland, a senator and cousin of 
  the emperor, married Nadja Ibn Al’alim, daughter of the 
  khagan.  This was a match of two young nobles distant from 
  the throne, however; more than a dozen claimants would 
  have had to perish before they and their children would 
  have stood to inherit either throne.  Instead, their son, Njal 
  Eland, became the chief legate of the Imperial Senate and 
  left the politics of both his homelands.
  Beginning in 80 AU, a match far closer to the heights of 
  power appeared possible.  Bial, Mercy, Cassandra and 
  Sienna, the four children of Canean Emperor Desmond 
  Eland, were all educated at the famed Sihr Academy in 
  the Dominion capital, Qijom.  During their stay, all four 
  became extremely close to the young heir to the Khaganate, 
  Malik Ibn Al’alim.
  Prince Bial and Prince Malik, of an age and with similar 
  interests, hunted, wrestled and sparred like brothers, 
  becoming far closer than Malik was with his own brother, 
  the cunning, scholarly Nasser.
  The Canean Princesses Mercy and Cassandra took an even 
  greater interest in the Dominion’s heir.  Mercy, closer to 
  Malik’s own age and ranked among Exodus’s greatest 
  beauties, quickly won his affections when she arrived in 
  Qijom in 82 AU.  The two were as inseparable as decorum 
  allowed, spending almost all their spare moments together. 
  Unfortunately, when Mercy’s sister Cassandra joined her 
  two years later, the younger Eland princess also fell madly 
  in love with Malik.  A bright girl groomed to become the 
  executor of the Caneus Empire’s branch of the Imperial 
  Assembly, Cassandra soon lost interest in her study of 
  statecraft, becoming more and more obsessed with winning 
  the future Khagan away from her sister.  Malik and 
  Mercy dismissed Cassandra’s obsession as a girlish fancy, 
  harmless and passing.
  Whether they realized it or not, they would one day have 
  cause to regret this assessment.
  In 84 AU, Prince Bial returned to the Caneus Empire 
  to begin the trials that would prove him worthy of the 
  throne of Gregory Eland.  The trials had been ceremonial 
  for centuries, but Bial insisted on fulfilling their original 
  intent: a test of cunning and martial skill that would prove 
  a candidate’s worth… or kill him.  Since most of Nas 
  had been explored in the hundreds of years of Canean 
  civilization, Bial decided to take his trial in the Wyldlands 
  of Bal, instead.  The Reis Confederacy granted special 
  permission to its neighbor’s heir.  In 85 AU, after only 
  a few months at the palace he intended to one day rule, 
  the Canean heir arrived in the city of Reis to begin his 
  preparations.
  He soon found himself distracted by another heir. 
  Unfamiliar with the customs of the Confederacy, Bial 
  presented himself not just to Imperatrix Sepatha Gazsi but 
  to her daughter, the accursed, albino Lolani.  Because of the 
  dire prophecy hovering over her, Lolani was all but ignored 
  by her own family and subjects; a foreign prince addressing 
  her directly shocked her.  Bial became the first, and perhaps 
  only, friend Lolani had ever had.  A loner and a survivor by 
  nature, she nonetheless clung to the foreign prince like a 
  lifeline, delighted with the attention.
  By 86 AU, when Bial began his trials, his parents fully 
  expected to preside over two imperial weddings in the 
  near future - Bial’s to Lolani and Mercy’s to Malik.  Had 
  both gone forward, the Caneus Empire’s imperial family 
  
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  would have ruled three fifths of Exodus.  Already the 
  staunchest supporter of the Imperial Alliance, the empire 
  might have easily and bloodlessly achieved rule over the 
  entire continent.  Only the Arman Protectorate, increasingly 
  isolated from and hostile toward the rest of Exodus, 
  would remain independent, and even the stubborn Armans 
  could not resist forever.  Already, the newly crowned 
  Tsarina Anayanka was said to harbor feelings for Nasser 
  Ibn Al’alim; though a union between two such cunning 
  politicians would have threatened many powers, many 
  others hoped it would end the hostility between Dominion 
  and Protectorate.  Besides, the Protectorate faced its own 
  difficulties in the form of the increasingly powerful Janus 
  Horde.  The other members of the Imperial Alliance, 
  recalling the Armans’ belligerency and obstinacy; and, 
  perhaps, dreaming of a union that would leave the Armans 
  on the outside looking in; proved slow to render aid.
  Dreams of greatness and contentment proved premature.  
  Bial Eland was terribly injured during his trials, mauled 
  almost to death by one of the beasts of the Wyldlands.  
  Worse, he fell into a feverish state from which the clerics 
  of the Sanguine Covenant could not rouse him.  Suspicion 
  fell on the Reis Confederacy, which the Covenant believed 
  harbored many Brotherhood of Khayne cultists.
  Before the Caneus Empire could even begin to seek a cure 
  or vengeance for its heir, an assassin struck at Emperor 
  Desmond and Empress Abigail Eland.  The attacker wielded 
  a strange dark power, entirely unknown in modern Exodus. 
  Even the Kaga could not or would not explain what black 
  art stole the lives of the Canean ruler and his wife.  With the 
  emperor dead and Bial indefinitely invalided, the Imperial 
  Assembly for the Caneus Empire declared Mercy the new 
  Empress in 87 AU.
  Almost immediately after Mercy was crowned, Bial’s fever 
  subsided; he awoke to find his parents dead, his throne 
  occupied and his beloved Lolani’s country suspected of 
  the deviltry that had struck him down.  Some men might 
  have risen in rebellion, but Bial appeared content with his 
  lot, concerned only with easing the tensions between the 
  Caneus Empire and the Reis Confederacy.
  Nonetheless, the murder of the Canean rulers ended, at least 
  for a time, any possibility of imperial marriages.  Though 
  separation pained them more than either cared to admit, 
  Mercy and Malik pushed back the announcement of their 
  betrothal, and Bial and Lolani were unable to even meet.  
  The official period of mourning had hardly ended when 
  Malik, too, lost his father and gained an unwanted throne.  
  In 89 AU, Lolani also ascended to the leadership of the Reis 
  Confederacy; the four empires had completely passed to a 
  new generation.
  As the Bronze Sage of the Confederacy had predicted, their 
  reign would not be peaceful.
  COLLAPSE OF UNION
  In 90 AU, Canean Empress Mercy was found dead in 
  her chambers in the Gregorian Palace in Nyssa.  Since 
  the empress was only twenty-seven years old, Caneus’s 
  Imperial Assembly immediately suspected foul play.  Their 
  investigation confirmed what they had initially feared: 
  Mercy died from poison.
  Suspicion fell on her brother, Bial, who had left Nyssa 
  the night before Mercy was found dead, his motives 
  unknown.  With Bial suspected of Mercy’s murder and 
  out of the capital, the Imperial Assembly swiftly moved to 
  place Princess Cassandra on the throne.  The new empress 
  was crowned almost immediately, a necessary precaution 
  against possible partisans of her traitorous brother, and 
  her youngest sister, Princess Sienna, took her place as the 
  empire’s executor.  Empress Cassandra vowed to make 
  her brother’s punishment her first priority, but after only a 
  week, Bial had vanished.
  When news of Mercy’s death reached the Dominion, 
  Khagan Malik fell into a nearly suicidal depression, at 
  turns cursing himself for allowing statecraft to keep him 
  from his beloved, then cursing himself again for thinking of 
  abandoning duty even for her sake.  Only focusing on his 
  rage at her killer kept him remotely sane, kept him alive.  
  He could not help but wonder at the apparent guilt of Bial, 
  a man he had respected and called brother, and laid plans 
  to travel to the Caneus Empire to investigate for himself.  
  Leaving the Dominion in the hands of his brother, Nasser, 
  Malik boarded his windsailing ship and winged his way 
  north.
  The Khagan’s retinue arrived in Nyssa in time for a 
  new crisis: without warning, the Reis Confederacy had 
  withdrawn its ambassadors to the Caneus Empire.  Empress 
  Cassandra blamed this hostile act on Bial, as well, accusing 
  Imperatrix Lolani of sheltering her brother and severing 
  ties for his sake.  Before Malik could investigate these or 
  the earlier claims, his retinue was pounced upon by a party 
  of assassins on the very streets of Nyssa; Malik was badly 
  injured and a dozen of his men slain.
  In the Dominion, meanwhile, Nasser possessed far more 
  information than his brother - and moved to act on it.  He 
  understood that Cassandra had framed Bial for Mercy’s 
  murder, and that nothing short of bloodshed could resolve 
  the schism in the Caneus Empire’s royal house.  Bloodshed, 
  he suspected, would come from the Reis/Canean border, 
  long a source of conflict, now exacerbated by Bial’s 
  appealing to Lolani for aid.  Contacting his rival and lover 
  the Tsarina Anayanka of the Arman Protectorate, Nasser 
  put forth a proposal for a new power group, a new Imperial 
  Alliance.  This one, they agreed, would not be bound by 
  ideology or sentiment; it would operate with the ruthless 
  efficiency they both prized.  They formed a new power 
  block, the Exemplars.
  Malik returned to the Dominion from his disastrous visit 
  to the Caneus Empire; he found his brother aware of his 
  
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  misfortune - which roused his suspicions, for he had just 
  seen ample evidence of the heights of dynastic rivalry - but 
  willing to turn the Dominion’s rule back to its Khagan.  
  Malik immediately put the cities and tribes on the Canean 
  border on high alert and began marshalling his troops, for 
  he feared the chaos of his northern neighbor would spill 
  over into his homeland.  At Nasser’s urging, additional 
  forces massed at the edge of Sametia, overlooking both the 
  Janus Horde and the Arman Protectorate.
  Unbeknownst to the Imperial Alliance, a terrible epidemic 
  had struck the Janus Horde: somehow, perhaps aided by 
  the dark powers of their master, Xon, the quickslavers had 
  crossed ocean, blockade and continent to infect the one 
  region outside the alliance’s control.  Warlord Thais, fearing 
  her entire homeland would succumb to the quickslavers and 
  unable to fight the subtle foe in the midst of her people, 
  redoubled her attacks on the Arman Protectorate, driving 
  a wedge deep into the Protectorate’s center.  Only the 
  Dominion troops menacing the Horde’s flank prevented it 
  from further breakouts.
  Rumors of a man capable of exorcising the quickslavers 
  rekindled the Horde’s hopes.  The man called Lawgiver 
  had returned to Sametia after a long sojourn through other 
  lands, bringing with him Lazarus Brands - and, apparently, 
  the ability to cure the quickslaver infection.  Thais ordered 
  the Lawgiver brought before her, but her greatest trackers 
  proved insufficient for the task; as always, the Lawgiver 
  came and went as he pleased, leaving behind him Hordefolk 
  free of the quickslavers… and, as always, the powerful, 
  enigmatic Lazarus Brands.
  The Imperial Alliance, seeing the tensions between its 
  member states rising and its outside foes growing in 
  power, reached an unprecedented conclusion.  A two-thirds 
  majority of the Imperial Senate voted to impose martial law, 
  encouraging the kingdoms and empires to withdraw to their 
  borders and sending Janissaries and Imperial Men-at-Arms 
  to restore order.  To the Senate’s horror, this suggestion was 
  refused by all four empires, each believing the Senate a tool 
  of their enemies.  To the horror of the four great monarchs, 
  the Senate was not dissuaded; Janissaries departed from 
  Aremyhk despite the closed borders refusal, and Men-at-
  Arms massed in Koryth to enforce the Senate’s desperate 
  bid for restored order.
  EXODUS TODAY
  It is now 91 AU.
  Modern Exodus is as uncertain and troubled a land as it 
  has ever been.  The great empires have all withdrawn from 
  the Imperial Alliance and many appear on the brink of war. 
  The Alliance itself seems poised to become a conquering 
  power, forcing its member nations back into the fold by any 
  means necessary.  Several of the great houses, particular 
  the Caneus Empire’s House Eland, are in total disarray; 
  even as national wars brew, civil ones threaten to cut the 
  belligerents to pieces.
  External threats, including the quickslavers, the Janus 
  Horde and the Locari could wipe out humanoid life 
  entirely, provided internal corruption does not do for it 
  first.  Enigmatic Cyneans, Prymidians and Cavians seem to 
  inhabit every city and province, their motives and resources 
  unknown.  Worst of all, the shadow of a greater evil than 
  any of these, an ancient power long thought banished, 
  spreads across the land like a cancer.
  More than ever, the world of Exodus needs heroes…
  EXODUS
  CENTER OF THE MULTIVERSE
  Diameter: x1; Mass: x1; Gravity: x1
  Atmosphere: Standard; Orbit: 1 year
  Inhabitiants: Cavian, Cynean, Dalrean, Enuka,  
  Tiefling, Humans, Kalisan, Prymidian, P’Tan, Sasori
  Important Locations: Aremyhk, Cordel Desert, 
  Nexus Point Zero, Nyssa, Unthara
  Resources: Fertile lands and seas, widely varying 
  life forms and enviroments
  Known for its planetary and intradimensional 
  conduit the the Nexus Gateway, the world of 
  Exodus is known to many as the “Gateway to the 
  Multiverse”. The world of Exodus has a long and 
  conflicted history that has only added to the world 
  intrigue and importance. Many various humanoid 
  lifeforms from Cavian to Human to Prymidian call 
  this planet home, with it variety thousand different 
  types of unique flora and fauna just adding more to 
  the diversity of Exodus. Unlike many other worlds, 
  Exodus has a become a great hub of commerce 
  and trade, plus a center of knowledge due to the 
  Kaga and import knowledge axises like the Infinite 
  Library.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Pathfinder/1st Edition/3rd Party/Louis Porter Jr. Design/LPJXX22 - World of NeoExodus v2.pdf