Shapers' War

Shapers' War
Chronology
Next	The Retribution
Historical Information
Began	Less than 80 years before Campaign Four
Ended	70 years before Campaign Four
Location	Aramán
Outcome	Defeat and death of the Shapers
Combatants
The Shapers Allied celestials Allied mortals Halovar family Tachonis family
Mortals Orcs Lloy family Cormoray family Einfasen family Royce family

The Shapers' War was a successful revolution against the Shapers that ended 70 years before the events of Campaign Four.

Events

The gods who shaped the peoples of Aramán into various species, like elves and orcs, allowed very little change.

The orcs chafed against the evil god of suffering who had shaped them, Azgra the Conqueror, using his own teachings to rise up against him. Many leaders (such as Odrun) became revolutionary figures; the ancient Lloy smiths native to Dol-Makjar crafted the first of the Pariah Blades to wield against him. The other six Shapers came to the defense of their divine peer, which caused some of their own followers to conclude that the gods they were worshiping cared more for their own than their creations. This led to the terrible Shapers' War, during which the gods of Aramán were defeated and destroyed one by one.

During the conflict, the night angel who shepherded elven souls through the afterlife was destroyed, and Sylandri's forces crafted an artifact called the Stone of Nightsong to continue fulfilling that role. Sylandri was the last of the Shapers to be slain, and Vaelus witnessed her death. Where Sylandri fell, darkness descended and the trees were fossilized and shattered, and so the area came to be called the Wastes.

Consequences

The death of the gods had significant consequences. Magic ceased to function as it had before, and became wild and unpredictable. Any teleportation farther than Misty Step (30 feet) became risky. And the gods no longer sent the souls of the dead to various afterlives. After the Shapers were slain, celestials became dangerously feral—one on the loose could pose a threat to an entire region—until they all but disappeared from the world. One was kept captive by House Halovar, the priests of the Obridimian Empire.

Seventy years after the death of the gods, people had by and large moved on, but as people sought power and truth from other sources, other forces had rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the gods' absence. There were plenty of warlocks. Druidism had seen a huge resurgence; reincarnation had become more important in light of the lack of afterlives. Clerics and other divine classes, no longer able to connect to a personalized deity, attempted to form direct connections to divine domains, but it didn't work the same: there were none of the god's petty grievances, but also no personalized embrace, and one might not find as much comfort in a depersonalized concept in trying times. With no clean answers, there was strife and conflict regarding who could be trusted.