PART 5 - The Races of Eradane

[The Hive Mind]

Of the heroes who stand against the Shadow, the humans have both the greatest challenges and the easiest paths. All of the once-human lands are now conquered, the playgrounds of orcs, legates, and collaborators. The Dorns in the north have paid for their history of resistance with near-annihilation and total subjugation. The Sarcosans in the south can blame many of their own kin for their fall, as many of that once-proud race have become servants of Shadow. The true Erenlanders, that recently born race of men that comes from the mixed blood of Dorns and Sarcosans, lack the cultural traditions and pride of their parent races, which is both a benefit and a liability.

While such challenges have crushed and defeated the human masses, they have strengthened and tempered the heroes among them. Dorns have begun to look once more to their Great Houses and to revive their warrior traditions. Sarcosan freeriders raid Shadow forces from the vast plains of southern Erenland while their urban kin use intrigue and stealth to maintain a quiet but deadly insurgent movement in the cities. Because so little is thought or expected of the Erenlanders, they have few restrictions on the ways in which they fight the Shadow. Lacking taboos and operating beneath their conquerers’ notice, they hone the best strategies and skills of their two parent races and adapt to an existence few others could stand.

Whereas the humans have a choice between occupation and defiance, freedom or slavery, the elder races have none. The Night Kings hunt the elves and dwarves because they know it is in their natures to resist the Shadow until the last of them falls. The elves boast the last stronghold of magic and peace in their vast forest of Erethor, a thing that the dark god cannot abide. The dwarves are at the edge of extinction, besieged by orcs in their mountain holdfasts and cut off from their allies and kin.

The halflings are a decimated people, equally prized as slaves for the legates or as a food source for the orcs. Then there are the gnomes, among the most heroic of all, who suffer bitter resentment from the other races while doing all they can to save them. They have won a measure of peace and freedom by aiding the minions of the Shadow as traders, merchants, and transporters of goods, but they work in secret to sabotage the war efforts of the Night Kings.