Revision as of 03:52, 13 April 2014

Lemuria: The Dying Kingdom

In the distant past, during a time which occult scholars who study the forgotten history of mankind call the late Valdorian and Atlantean Ages, Lemuria was a powerful kingdom. In its cities, magnificent palaces sprawled across vast estates and magically-powered ornithopters soared between sparkling adamantine towers. Beyond its shores, pisciremes prowled the ocean depths protecting its merchant fleets, and at the far reaches of the kingdom, quattropedes patrolled the borders and repelled all invaders. Few could challenge Lemuria’s power — even proud Atlantis found the task of conquering it daunting. Th is was Lemuria’s golden age. Since then the kingdom has been a long time dying.

65,000 TO 36,694 BC: In A Time Before History

The Turakian Age came to a fiery end with the fall of the Undying Lord Takofanes. The epic battle against the immortal evil left the world in ruins — continents torn asunder, seas roiled with unending storms, fires crackling across the heavens — and from this wreckage arose new lands, new forms of life. One of the new races that survived was a reptilian race of shape-changers that in later millennia men would know as the Lemurians.

In the aftermath of these cataclysms, when the turmoil ended and civilization once again flourished, mankind ruled a world he had once had to share with Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs. One of his kingdoms, the Empire of Valdoria, lent its name to the age. Mankind’s dominance and xenophobia during the Valdorian Age forced the Lemurians to conceal themselves. They assumed the shape of men and women and hid among mankind, dwelling in isolation from others of their own species.

But late in the Valdorian Age, one of these ur-Lemurians, the sorcerer Faltrah Lem, made a discovery that would set the future course of his race and lead to the founding of Lemuria.

37,566 BC: The Discovery Of Ignaetium

In a place beyond the edge of civilization, in a tower where cold winds moaned and the stark white ice rose like jagged-peaked mountains, Faltrah Lem worked in his arcane laboratory. He performed a simple preparatory task, hammering and chipping coal into smaller pieces for the brass brazier he used to heat his alchemical fluids. Sparkling on the surface of the broken pieces of coal were slender chips of some crystalline substance. The chips were dull orange, yellow, or blue in color and seemingly unremarkable. He paid these impurities no mind — he had much more important sorcerous matters to consider.

Faltrah Lem scraped the broken coal into his brazier and set it alight. But rather than glowing dimly with a ruddy light, a fire exploded from the brazier and raged in a whooshing pillar, the color of which changed freely and quickly, fl ashing from cool blue to blood red to hot white and back again. In the depths of this fire, Faltrah Lem could see with his sorcerous sight an elemental lurking. It was a brutish, primeval consciousness far less intelligent and cunning than the fire elementals he summoned from the Scorched Lands — and, he quickly realized, one far easier to manipulate toward his own ends.

In the preceding millennia magic had been at lower ebb than in Turakian times (though neither Faltrah Lem nor anyone else realized that). Sorcerers had to rely on other-dimensional beings for their powers. At that moment Faltrah Lem was one of the first to witness the rise of magic in the world — one of the first to receive concrete proof that magic was increasing in power. He gathered a handful of coal and scrutinized the multicolored chips more closely. Somehow lurking in the crystal was the spirit of fire. Faltrah Lem named this new substance ignaetium.

37,523 BC: Lemuria's Founding

Faltrah Lem stood at the bow of the ship. With a hand shielding his eyes from the Sun, he studied the long line of mountainous islands that rose just over the horizon. A new magic fueled the bronze hulled ship that plowed through the tranquil blue waters of the Shining Sea. Wheel-like paddles filled the crisp salty air with a rhythmic thumping, and smoke rose from copper stacks that towered above the ship, taller than any masts. Below the copper stacks burned arcane furnaces where ignaetium powered the paddles that propelled the ship. Gathered behind Faltrah Lem were his fellow Lemurians — his sorcerous peers and their bodyguards of able-bodied warriors.

For over forty years Faltrah Lem had studied the properties of ignaetium, and during his studies he had gathered a cabal of other Lemurian sorcerers. Together they explored the possibilities of this new substance, and as they experimented, they debated their future course. Eventually they decided to seize the land from where ignaetium came and establish a kingdom, one that would in turn become an empire when it conquered the world. Th e first step was conquering the sparsely populated archipelago and subjugating the primitive humans who resided there.

Standing amidships, Faltrah Lem gathered his sorcerous cabal around him. First they raised the spirits of the water, and roaring waves crashed on the rocky beaches of the islands, sweeping away the huts of the inhabitants. Th en the sorcerers raised the spirits of the wind, and howling gales blew before them, heralding their coming. Finally the ship made landfall and Lemurian warriors poured over the side.

In seven days they conquered the archipelago, rounding up the natives to work as slaves in the ignaetium mines. On the eighth day Faltrah Lem crowned himself king and named his new kingdom Lemuria.

37,018 BC: The New Gods

The Priest-King Faltrah Lem lay on his death bed, his new priesthood attending him. He instructed the priests on the proper rites to perform over his body when he was dead.

In recent decades Faltrah Lem had left the study of the arcane to his fellow sorcerers and turned his attention to the study of the gods. Lemurians had spent millennia isolated from each other, lurking among humanity, and they held few beliefs in common. But they all still believed in their old gods — ancient monstrous beings of inchoate evil called the Rastrinfhar, meaning in their ancient tongue “The Bleak Ones.”

Faltrah Lem wished to create a cult of worship around himself, but these ancient deities failed to serve his purpose. Th e Bleak Ones were grim gods who cared nothing for mortals and their desires. They laid rightful claim to the Lemurians because the spark for the Lemurians’ life had come from their divine essence — the cold fire that served as the stuff for a Lemurian’s soul that had seeped down from the heavens in the days when the world convulsed in the aftermath of the Turakian Age — but the only reward the Bleak Ones gave for faithful service was oblivion after death.

Faltrah Lem gave his new kingdom new gods to worship. He gave his people gods of smoke and fire, crystal and lightning. He made these new gods the bringers of gifts to the Lemurians, the source of ignaetium and the more recently discovered mystical substances of corusqua, crystallos, and fulminor. Faltrah Lem made himself the most holy of the gods’ servants, crowning himself the Priest-King and ensuring that future generations would venerate his memory and worship him and his descendants as nearly divine.

The new gods were false — pure fabrications created by Faltrah Lem — and he swore his new priesthood to secrecy. Faltrah Lem taught his priests how to draw voices from the fires of ignaetium and to pull ghostly faces from the smoke of fulminor, and how to make these phantasms speak the words of the so-called divine. In short, he showed them how to deceive the faithful. Faltrah Lem’s peers, those sorcerers who had helped him study ignaetium and first conquer the islands, knew these gods as fabrications — but none of them were willing to challenge the Priest-King, for he was the discoverer of ignaetium and founder of the kingdom — and among the warriors and other Lemurians newly come to the kingdom to join with their kin, the new gods found fervent worshippers.

Finally Faltrah Lem died, once again repeating his instructions about his funerary arrangements to the priesthood, his last breath a rattling wheeze. The priests did as they were told. They embalmed the priest-king’s body with arcane fluids, distillations of corusqua and ignaetium dissolved in solution, and let the mingled smoke of fulminor and burning cedar dry the body’s skin to leathery toughness while preserving its appearance. The next day they led the procession to the newly constructed mausoleum, a ziggurat of gleaming brass that would serve future generations as a shrine where they could venerate the first Priest-King’s memory... and then the ancient, cast-off gods of the Lemurians let their curse fall upon the one who denied their claim on Lemuria and its nobility.

As the solemn procession wended its way from palace to mausoleum, the sky above Lemuria opened up. From out of the unnatural rent in the heavens reached a dark mass of clawed hands and barbed tentacles. They seized Faltrah Lem’s body and took it elsewhere, the sky closing behind them.

The Lemurians fell to their knees and trembled with fear. The message was clear — though the new gods might receive the Lemurians’ worship and prayers, the Bleak Ones still claimed the souls of departed Lemurians as their own.

So began the Lemurians’ obsession with immortality.

36,854 BC: A Spell Gone Awry

Andrith the Golden stood on a balcony overlooking the Plaza of Crystal Leaves, where crystallos was cultivated in the shapes of trees whose leaves tinkled quietly in the breeze. Assembled before him in the Plaza was the nobility of Lemuria; arrayed behind him on the balcony was the priesthood with Andrith’s father, the Priest-King Tyrann Lem, son of Faltrah Lem, in the place of honor. Andrith gave the sign for the slaves to feed the furnaces newly erected in subterranean chambers under the Plaza, and a brass horn called the slaves to their work. Arcane energies puff ed from the stacks that rose at the edges of the Plaza, and like a heavy fog gathered in the Plaza, engulfing the assembly.

Everyone in the Plaza of Crystal Leaves stood in hushed anticipation. Could this young sorcerer truly extend their lifespan — truly put off the Bleak Ones’ punishment, if not forever, then at least for several centuries, long enough to discover the secrets of immortality?

The Bleak Ones’ seizure of Faltrah Lem’s mummifi ed body had sent ripples of fear through the Lemurian nobility. Unlike the subjugated humans who served them, each Lemurian owed the debt of his soul to the ancient gods, and what punishment awaited them after death for forsaking the Bleak Ones was unknown. Did their souls simply disappear into oblivion as those of deceased Lemurians had for countless millennia? Or were they punished for the blasphemy of their new gods? Because the afterlife was so uncertain, the Lemurians obsessed over the secrets of immortality.

The first sorcerer to have any notable success was Faltrah Lem’s grandson, Andrith the Golden, but his arcane workings had an unintended side effect. By his father’s decree, Andrith performed a ritual over the gathered Lemurian nobles. He made no false promises. He only guaranteed his spell would extend the life of the Lemurians so they could number their years in centuries rather than decades and put off the punishment of the Bleak Ones for a short while longer. Andrith called it the first step to immortality. What he didn’t say, and didn’t know, was that the spell would strip the Lemurians of their shape-changing ability.

Over a century ago Faltrah Lem had decreed that the Lemurians must remain in human form. Soon after Lemuria’s founding rumors spread through the realms of man about a new kingdom possessing war machines that were nigh-unstoppable. Faltrah Lem believed if mankind also learned an inhuman race ruled Lemuria, the kingdom’s neighbors would unite against his people. Despite their power the Lemurians were few and a united mankind would prove too grave a threat for the young kingdom to overcome, so the Lemurians hid their true nature, as they always had, by masquerading as men and women. To the eyes of outsiders, Lemuria was simply one more human kingdom struggling for dominance in a war-torn and chaotic world. And thanks to Andrith’s spell, they would remain in human form forever more.

Andrith completed his ritual. For his success later generations revered his name as one of Lemuria’s greatest sorcerers. For his failure his own father crucified him on one of the trees in the Plaza of Crystal Leaves. The Priest-King ordered Andrith’s bones left on the tree to be engulfed into its trunk, so later generations could peer into the transparent crystal and see Andrith’s body preserved in the tree’s depths.

36,742 BC: War With The Empyreans

Despite centuries of sorcerous study, immortality eluded the Lemurians. But in their mad, desperate quest they discovered a race that seemed to know the answer to the riddle of immortality. These undying men and women were the Empyreans, cousins of humanity gifted with eternal life by the experiments of the mysterious Progenitors. The Lemurians were determined to have the secret of immortality from the Empyreans and declared war on them. They pursued the war with a will, but despite their magical might, the Lemurians were still mortal and the Empyreans far beyond mortal ken.

36,694 BC: “Deliver Our Foes”

A sorcerer whose name would later be expunged from the histories of the kingdom invented a weapon to bring low the Empyreans. It possessed power enough to boil the oceans, to bring the Moon down from the sky, to sink continents — all this and more the sorcerer promised the Priest-King. He gave it a simple name: Mandragalore. The word was a prayer to the Bleak Ones, those forsaken gods of the ancient Lemurians. In the old tongue it meant: “Deliver our foes.”

Perhaps the gods heard the prayer and decided to punish their scornful worshippers. Perhaps the sorcerer made some small but crucial error in his calculations and schematics. Perhaps the hated Empyreans learned of the Mandragalore and somehow sabotaged it. Or perhaps no mortal could safely wield the power of such a terrible weapon. For when it was at last turned on the Empyreans, when the Lemurians gathered to celebrate their imminent victory, energy exploded from the Mandragalore. A rippling wave of coruscating power leveled the capital city and outlying areas; the resulting shock waves cracked the island as if it had been struck by a titanic hammer flung from the heavens.

Lemuria, broken and burning, sank beneath the waves.

36,694 TO 32,000 BC: After The Fall

Over the next few months, all of Lemuria sank to the ocean’s bottom, the whole of the archipelag ofollowing the descent of its main island. During that time earthquakes shook the land incessantly and volcanoes arose, only to collapse in explosions of lava and ash mere days later — but despite these calamities the Lemurians who survived the Mandragalore worked day and night to preserve the remaining portions of their kingdom.

The sorcerers knew they did not possess the power to halt Lemuria’s descent, and they did not waste their precious time attempting to keep the islands above the waves. Instead they adapted their remaining habitations to life below the waters. They erected high-arching domes of crystallos and sealed the ignaetium mines. In the domes they placed arcane condensers, thick shafts of bronze that protruded from the dome into the ocean. Powered by arcane furnaces, the condensers sucked in water, boiled it, separated it into its elemental constituents ,and released the resulting oxygen into the dome to provide it with an atmosphere. This atmospherewas further supplemented by the fungus that grew in the cool ashes of ignaetium. This fungus also glowed with a dim rose and orange radiation, providinga source of light for the underwater land.

Lemuria spent several centuries recovering from the calamity of the Mandragalore, but eventually her people rebuilt and resettled their capital city, placing the largest and strongest dome over it to protect it from the sea. Then they retooled their war machines, engineering them to prowl on the surface, under the waves, and even through the earth. Though they still lacked the secret of immortality,they emerged from near extinction to once again rise to dominance in the world.

For a time they abandoned their war with the Empyreans. Though the Lemurians still hungered for immortality, the Priest-King commanded that Lemuria wait before attacking again. The kingdom had lost many of its best and brightest to the war. It had thrown incredible marvels against the walls of Arcadia — marvels no other human kingdom could have resisted. If they had turned these energies to the conquest of lesser races, Lemuria would rule the world. The Priest-King stated that first Lemuria should establish an empire, then besiege Arcadia’s walls with an army tens of millions strong. Though in later years some individuals and small groups defied his orders, most Lemurians obeyed the Priest-King.

Lemuria started by establishing small outposts on nearby coasts, then moved to conquer surrounding kingdoms. Some of these kingdoms came into the empire by truce, others by the sword... but no matter whether the victory was diplomatic or martial, they all served the Priest-King of Lemuria, who ruled them with an iron fist.

It was an empire that would span the millennia, its borders ever-increasing until finally it encountered another empire, one that rivaled Lemuria’s sorcerous might — the Dominion of Atlantis.

32,000 TO 30,600 BC: Enemies Of Atlantis

During the time later known as the AtlanteanAge, few nations could withstand the armies of Atlantis, let alone challenge them for dominance of the world — but one of the kingdoms that never bent the knee to immortal Vondarien, ruler of Atlantis, was Lemuria. In fact just the opposite was true, at least in the early years of the Atlantean Age: few were sure Atlantis would prove the superior kingdom.

Despite the ferocity of the battles fought between the two lands, Lemuria’s eventual defeat was undramatic — a slow and subtle decline noticed too late. Each decade one or two client states left the Lemurian Empire to join the Dominion. Sometimes the Lemurians took back these lands, at least in part, but usually they were unable to defeat the land’s army, supported as it was by its new found Atlantean allies. Aft er nearly a thousand years of conflict, Lemuria found itself driven back to its undersea lands, which remained unassailable because of their inimical environment and sorcerous defenses. But Atlantis found anotherway to strike at its enemy: it cut the Lemurians off economically, making it illegal for Lemurian pisciremesto dock in the ports of Atlantis or its allies.

It was a dark time for Lemuria. It was locked out of the world’s affairs, able to resort only to guerrilla raids and other small assaults to strike at its enemy. The once-proud Lemurian realm was now little more than a nuisance to the great empire Atlantis had become. But then the Priest-King received a visitor. An emissary came from Sharna-Gorak the Destroyer, formerly Dalsith the Orpha nbefore the Shining Darkness transformed him into a creature of monstrous aspect and granted him godlike power in return for his soul. This dark emissary called on the Priest-King of Lemuria in search of allies.

Sharna-Gorak’s rage, unbridled power, and thirst for vengeance would shape the future of the Earth. The Lemurians were his willing allies in this world-shattering conflict.

30,599 TO 30,598 BC: The Clockwork Engine

The war soon became an increasingly personal battle between the two nearly divine beings, Vondarien and Sharna-Gorak. It could only end in destruction — a destruction so great as to rival the cataclysm that ended the Turakian Age. Lemuria had little interest in losing not only the war but its very civilization, and the Priest-King began to prepare his people for the end. He did not intend to go morosely and resigned into oblivion — he planned for Lemuria to survive the coming furor.

He secretly called the cream of Lemurian nobility, both sorcerers and warriors, back to the capital city. In their place he sent those he deemed incompetent and his political rivals to take command of the Lemurian armies fighting with Sharna-Gorak and his allies. Then the Priest-King set the assembled sorcerers to the task of savin gLemuria. The result of their arcane studies was the Clockwork Engine.

The machine’s workings — its gigantic gears and rods, its vast springs, its engines that sparked the corusqua in its vats and drove the tidal mills —occupied a vast substratum directly below the capital city. Along the inner edge of the city’s crystallos dome ran three circular tracks. Protruding from the tracks were curving armatures topped by orbs of various materials that represented the movement of the universe through time: the innermost track represented the Sun and Moon, the middle one the planets, and the third the stars.

When the sorcerers first set the Clockwork Engine into motion, it mimicked the movements of the heavens — mimicked the passing of time itself. The armatures moved along the three concentric rings, and as they traveled around the rings, the armatures traced the path of the heavenly bodies they represented on the inside of the city’s dome, ascending and descending along the curve of the dome, and then disappearing below the surface entirely. When the final battle between Vondarien and Sharna-Gorak began and the Earth itself trembled seemingly fearful for its fate, the Priest-King of Lemuria stood before a vast control panel with a dizzying array of levers and dials. Feverishly he struggled to work the control panel — it seemed as if all the forces of nature resisted his efforts. Then, slowly but surely, the Clockwork Engine’s armatures slowed, almost grinding to halt... and with it, so did time for Lemuria and its inhabitants.

30,597 BC TO 10,000 BC: From Out Of The Ancient Past

The Clockwork Engine slowed time so that while ten thousand years passed in the outside world, only seconds passed for the Lemurians. While the Earth shattered around them, and then recovered from the Cataclysm, and civilizations arose once more, Lemuria and its inhabitants remained out of synch with time, temporal ghosts invulnerable to physical harm.

When they finally returned to the world, the Lemurians had not forgotten anything — neither their old vendettas against Atlantis and Arcadia ,nor their obsession with the secrets of immortality — but their numbers were decimated and this new world was unfamiliar to them. Despite their best efforts, they could find no evidence of Atlantis (now sunk beneath the waves like their ownland) or Arcadia (now removed to the icy wastes of Antarctica).

Instead of establishing an empire, an impossible task given their decimated population, the Lemurians attempted to secretly influence the societies around them. They infiltrated nascent cultures in what would later be known as Africa, India, and the Middle East, and eventually even ranged as far as Southeast Asia and South America. But two things stopped the Lemurians from exerting a greater influence.

First, soon after emerging from stasis, Lemurian agents in the surface world encountered wandering Empyreans. The immortal Empyreans quickly recognized the mechano-mysticism of the Lemurians and sought to limit the harm they could cause in the newborn world. The two races waged a war in the shadows, the battles often fought between their minions, servants, and disciples among mankind and only hazily recalled in the surviving legends of these early human cultures.

Second, Lemuria itself was paralyzed by a civil war that broke out between a cabal of sorcerers andthe Priest-King and his priests. The war eventually led to the creation of the Bronze King.

17,698 BC: The Bronze King

A sorcerer ordered the last descendent of Faltrah Lem, the current Priest-King Clymkris Lem, to join the rest of the priesthood in death. The execution took place in the new throne room. In this immense chamber, sitting on a throne of obsidian, was the gigantic construct of bronze and brass that would soon become Lemuria’s Bronze King. Screaming with fear, Clymkris Lem dangled in a harness above the headless construct, the top of itsneck open to reveal a cavity of bubbling green ooze inside its chest.

In the years before, civil war had broken out between the priesthood and a cabal of sorcerers. The magi had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the gods of Faltrah Lem were false, and these rebellious sorcerers blamed the calamities that had befallen Lemuria since its founding on the worship of these false gods. In the end the sorcerers won the civil war and implemented their plan to createa new king for Lemuria. No longer would Lemuria be a theocracy. Instead a magiconstruct of the sorcerers’ crafting would rule over the land. Coldly rational, the Bronze King could draw upon the collective knowledge of the Lemurians sacrificed to it whose memories were bound to its service.

Slaves worked the crane’s winch, lowering Clymkris Lem into the ooze. As his feet slipped into the bubbling stuff , he screamed in agony — hecould feel his f esh and bone disintegrating. Finally the ooze engulfed his whole body, burning everything away until only his brain remained. While his soul departed into the care of the Bleak Ones, his intellect was preserved in the heart of the BronzeKing along with the brains of the other executed priests and the allies of the Priest-King in the civil war. The enslaved brains provided the Bronze King with its intellect — its knowledge of Lemurian affairs and history, of war and strategy, of magic.

The sorcerers lowered the final piece of their construct into place, placing the Bronze King’s head on its neck. The head had three faces, one for each of its duties: the face of a tallar-falcon for magical matters; the face of a chala-lion for martial matters; and the face of a beatific child for civic matters. With a sharp grinding sound the head turned to show its beatific face. A hollow gurgling echoedfrom its chest cavity as its thoughts bubbled upfrom the minds preserved in the ooze. Plumes of smoke billowed from its nostrils and streamers slipped from between its lips as the smoke fromits arcane furnaces filled the pipes, like those of an organ, that served as its larynx. In a voice like rumbling thunder that shook the halls of the throne room, the Bronze King spoke its first words and commanded the assembled sorcerers to kneel.

10,000 BC TO 1800 AD: The Senility Of The Bronze King

For over seven thousand years, the Bronze King led the Lemurians with a firm hand, but as the years passed and the Age of Legends became the Classical Age, the world’s magic began to wane — and because of the decreasing magic, the Bronze King sank into senility.

It made pronouncements increasingly less often, and on those rare occasions when it spoke, it counseled an overly-cautious course for Lemuria. At the height of what the surface world called the Age of Reason, the Bronze King’s commands became entirely senseless. It was wont to recite children’s rhymes from the ancient past — songs remembered from Clymkris Lem’s childhood in the Atlantean Age — in a voice that sounded like a god’s.

With the decline of their leader, the Lemurians, already badly inbred, sank further into degeneracy and decadence. They only began to recover when an outsider came to rule over them.

1800 To The Present: The New King

Two hundred years ago Arvad the Empyrean gained the epithet Betrayer and departed his birthplace of Arcadia. He had attempted to seize the throne and failed. To him, if no one else, the situation was obvious. The king, his brother Hazor, was unfit to rule — or at least not so fit as Arvad himself .Arvad was superior in every way except in the love of the populace. And what matter that?

Arvad departed with a purpose and destination in mind. He would go to subterranean Lemuria, where the furnaces burned hot night and day, illuminating the caverns with blood red light. He would leave behind the paradisiacal gardens and plazas of Arcadia and descend into the underground pits of Lemuria.

He recognized the parallel between himself and the Satan of John Milton’s epic. He quipped to King Hazor as he stepped out of Arcadia: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.” But, he thought to himself, unlike Satan I will return... and when I do, I will rule both Heaven and Hell.

Arvad knew the Lemurians, long-standingenemies of his race, had created a weapon not even the mighty Empyreans could have withstood — the terrible Mandragalore. Arvad would forge the Lemurians’ hatred into a sharp blade, a sword worthy of battle with the Empyreans. Then hewould use the Mandragalore to force open the gates of Arcadia, batter his way through the protections of Master Builder Zadin. It would take time, perhaps even centuries, but as an immortal Arvad had time aplenty.

And so it came to pass. Arvad journeyed to Lemuria and set about making himself king.

1854 AD: The Bronze King Kneels

A loud wrenching noise filled the Hall of the Bronze King as the construct stood up for the first time in all the millennia of its existence. The long-dead sorcerers who built the Bronze King had designed it for movement, so that it might fight if battle ever reached Lemuria, but never in its existence had it risen from its throne.

Standing before the Bronze King, gasping with astonishment as their ruler rose from his throne ,were the assembled nobles of Lemuria. At their forefront was the Betrayer Arvad.

Arvad had promised the Lemurians the secret of immortality, which he claimed lay locked away in the Temple of Silence at the center of Arcadia... but only if the Lemurians named him their king. The Lemurian nobles would have dismissed the matter out of hand, but Khusor the Crooked, a young warrior of a prestigious House and respected by his peers, supported Arvad’s proposal. Heargued that Lemuria had sunk into degeneracy and decadence, and that Arvad’s proposal was the only chance they had of regaining their former might. Though his words bordered on treachery because they were contrary to the dictates of the Bronze King, Khusor found enough supporters to bring the issue before the ruler of the Lemurians.

The nobles who stood most vehemently against Arvad’s proposal had few worries. All of them knew of the Bronze King’s senility; they fully expected their ruler to speak some sing-song verse that they’d interpret as a refusal of Arvad’s proposal... and then they would drag the impertinent Empyrean to their labs for dissection and further study.

But after Arvad explained his proposal to the Bronze King, events took an unexpected turn. Rising to its full fifty-foot height, the Bronze King walked with gigantic strides to where Arvad stood, the ground trembling with each of the construct’s steps. All three of its faces speaking at once, the Bronze King proclaimed the worthiness of Arvad’s plans. Then it knelt on one knee and bowed to the Empyrean. Its head turning so each face could speak in turn, it swore fealty to the new ruler of the Lemurians, naming him King Arvad the First.

The assembled Lemurians stood shocked, but they quickly recovered their senses — they knew that those slow to swear fealty to the new king would be marked as potential traitors. Following the lead of the former ruler, they knelt to Arvad and swore him their allegiance. None of them knew Arvad had used the vast powers of his Empyrean mind to enslave the Bronze King to his will.

1939 AD: In League With The Axis

In a small reception room illuminated with a blue-white light emitted from globes of corusqua that hung from the ceiling, Arvad sat at a long table of ebony decorated with inset ivory. To his left and right, sitting in the chairs nearest him, were the members of his cabinet. Directly opposite Arvad sat Oberfurhrer Gunter Gottschalk, SS colonel and member of the RSvKg; to his left and right were Gottschalk’s officers and the U-boat captain, Friedrich Jaeger.

For a moment Arvad studied the haughty surfaced wellers in their primitive wool uniforms with gaudy decorations on their chest. Then he took up the quill and signed the parchment before him, allying Lemuria with the Reich. The agreemen tgranted Lemuria the coasts of Eastern Africa and the Persian Gulf, and all of India. It also arranged for an exchange of emissaries — who, in truth, would serve as both hostages and spies. Several Nazis, including Oberfurher Gottschalk, would remain in Lemuria to study mechano-mysticism, while a small group of Lemurians would journey to Berlin to study the science and industrial factories of the Reich.

Arvad had spent almost a century attempting to revitalize Lemuria. Not only had its magical knowledge become a shadow of its former self— most importantly to Arvad, no sorcerer still alive understood the workings of the Mandragalore — but Arvad had failed at every turn to pull the Lemurian nobility from its lethargy. After long consultations with the Bronze King and a carefulstudying of the kingdom’s long history, Arvad decided what Lemuria needed was a war.

When reports arrived that a primitive human ship was prowling the area, passing through the underwater depths in a search grid in an obvious effort to find Lemuria, Arvad ordered the ship’s crew brought to him. Oberfurher Gottschalk explained current affairs and proposed the two `nations become allies. Arvad had found his war.

Pisciremes set sail en masse from Lemuria and surfaced at strategic ports on the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. From their decks ornithopters took to the air, and from their bowels hordes of Mole-Men under the command of Lemurian nobles made landfall. For the first time since the Atlantean Age, Lemuria announced its presence to the surface world. Although many mundane historians would later claim Lemurian technology was the result of Nazi super-science, a few with deeper knowledge of history — scholars who studied the forgotten ages of mankind — realized Lemuria had somehow survived the changes and upheavals of countless millennia. Her ancient people had returned to the world, still harboring imperial ambitions.

1971 AD: The Lunar-Kinesis Projector

At the end of World War II, Lemurian forces retreated to their undersea domes. Though the Axis had lost the war, Arvad still achieved his primary goal: the Lemurian nobility had begun to regain its martial spirit. Arvad knew that to keep that spirit high, he had to continue to keep his subjects busy. When he received news that Lemurian sorcerers had located a device from Lemuria’s past, he immediately set his Warlord to the task of securing the ancient super-weapon.

Called the Lunal-Kinesis Projector, the verytop of the immense weapon had stood off the coastof Derbent, a city on the Caspian Sea, for time immemorial. It was corroded beyond recognition and eroded after millennia; the locals considered it nothing more than an unusual rocky outcropping, a part of the seascape they’d known since childhood... just as their parents, grandparents, and the generations before them had. In truth it was a Lemurian machine designed to move the Moon(and thus affect the world’s oceans by disrupting the natural movements of the tides) — sorcerers had built it millennia ago in one of Lemuria’s many attempts to defeat the Empyreans.

The problem with securing the immovable weapon was that Lemuria’s main strength lay in its naval power, and the land bound by the Caspian Sea was inaccessible to Lemurian pisciremes. None of the commanders wanted to confront the Soviet military without naval support, so they decided to dig a tunnel from the Indian Ocean, under Iran, that would allow the pisciremes to move unseen into the waters of the Caspian. It was a monumental task, but not an insurmountable one — the Earth’s crust was already shot-through with tunnels and caverns, and it was only a matter of connecting these so they led where the Lemurians wanted to go.

Upon hearing this plan Arvad knew the effort was likely not worth the outcome. The sorcerers predicted digging the tunnel would require at least a decade, and as far as Arvad could tell, the Lunal-Kinesis Projector was unlikely to help him conquer Arcadia unless the sorcerers could redesign the weapon to pull the Moon from the heavens and put it on a collision course for Arcadia. But Arvad also knew the effort would keep his subjects engaged in the task of restoring Lemuria to greatness, so he gave his approval.

In the fall of 1971, the Lemurian military once again moved en masse against a surface world enemy, its pisciremes breaching off the coast of Derbent and its infantry moving to secure the city. Soon after, sorcerers began to test the Lunal-Kinesis Projector to make sure it was still operational.

When reports of events in Derbent began to trickle into Moscow, the Soviets lowered a iron clad veil of secrecy over the area, forcibly relocating all foreigners and noisily threatening retaliation if they caught Western spy planes violating their airspace. They did not want Western powers to know they faced an unknown enemy with an unknown purpose, who may or may not possess superior might to the Soviet military. Though Western intelligence agencies noted the massive troop movements to the area and were able to report on some of the fighting, few in the West knew what was going on. (Even today most of the information about the Lemurian attack at Derbent is unknown, and those who doknow consider it a conspiracy theory — just one more instance of a Soviet cover-up, perhaps an effort to hide a military coup attempt from Western eyes.)

The situation became even more grave several days later when NASA astronomers noted, much to their shock, that the Moon had shift edits course and position. This caused catastrophic f ooding and weather phenomena, and most analysts quickly tied together the two events. The Soviet government refused all offers of assistance and still wouldn’t tell the world what was going on. The situation soon caused a flare-up in already tense international relations, and the President even assembled a strike team of American superheroes with the intention of having them violate Soviet airspace in a desperate attempt to stop whatever villain was causing the catastrophe.

In the end the Soviet Union didn’t need the help. The Soviet Army, with the assistance of the People’s Legion, forced the Lemurian invaders to retreat and took back the city of Derbent. But aft erthe bloody battle, the rocky outcropping so familiarto the Derbentans was gone. Th e Lemurians,seeing the end to their occupation and discoveringthe Lunal-Kinesis Projector still functioned,disassembled the super-weapon and took it backto Lemuria for further study. Arvad and his commandersdeclared the military excursion to seizethe weapon a success.

Lemuria Today

Lemuria has experienced a steady decline since the end of the Atlantean Age. Over the course of forty thousand years (although ten thousand of those passed in the blink of an eye), it has lost its empire, its martial spirit, and its magical knowledge. Perhaps most disturbing to the Lemurians, at least to those who rouse themselves from apathy long enough to consider the matter, is its lost arcane lore. With the coming of King Arvad, the Lemurians have learned more and more of the outside world, and they have recognized that the nature of magic has changed — its power has grown stronger, though in diff erent shapes and ways than when their empire was at its height. Th e Lemurians have a detailed written history dating back to the days of Faltrah Lem and know more than most about the nature of the world’s magic. But what they do not understand is why Lemurian magic has remained stagnant while magic elsewhere has grown more powerful. Arvad’s reversed this decline to some extent, but all he’s really done is motivate the Lemurians to repair ancient devices and build new ones following instructions written down millennia ago.

The last truly impressive feat of Lemurian mechano-mystical engineering was the creation of Shirak the Destructor several thousand years ago — and even this, though impressive in a brutish way, is a pale shadow of such devices as the Bronze King, the Clockwork Engine, and the Mandragalore. When a Lemurian sorcerer considers the matter honestly, he realizes Shirak is little more than over-sized golem (although he would never admit that to an outsider). The Bronze King is an artificially created intellect; the Clockwork Engine can manipulate time itself, and the Mandragalore can conceivably destroy entire continents, maybe the entire world — but the wrecking power of the Destructor doesn’t extend beyond its gigantic fists and the range of its blazing eye-beams. Compared to the magnificent accomplishments of ancient Lemurian sorcerers, Shirak seems shabby indeed.

However, despite the antiquity of these devices, Lemuria is still a power to be reckoned with. If Arvad ever achieves his goal of reactivating the Mandragalore, he will possess one of the most powerful weapons to ever exist in all the ages of the world.

Geography

Modern Lemuria consists of four domed locations and a seemingly endless warren of underground tunnels on a craggy shelf midway down a deep sea trench. Th e trench is located in the Indian Ocean approximately equidistant between the small island nations of Seychelles and Maldives. Over four thousand fathoms deep, the Lemurian trench is currently uncharted and unexplored. Lemuria itself is a little under two thousand fathoms (3.6 kilometers) below the surface of the ocean, and though the four domes glow with a faint light from their illuminated interiors, the chthonic depths of the ocean quickly squelch the illumination and the light is only visible once a person is almost on top of the domes themselves.

Outside of the domes the area is entirely inimical to human life. No normal human can survive the depths without a great deal of protection, and even most submarines can’t go that deep — for example, even the impressive UNTIL submersible, the Aegir, can only reach depths of 650 meters before being crushed by the high pressure. Furthermore, no sensory or detection devices utilized by the outside world (even most, if not all, of the ones used by superhumans) can penetrate such stygian depths.

All of this has kept the surface world from discovering the exact location of Lemuria. Even if an organization like UNTIL uncovered Lemuria’s location, mounting an attack on the Lemurians would require building a fleet of highly-specialized and very expensive submarines.

The Domes

Nestled in rocky crags are the four domes of mystically-hardened crystallos that make up modern Lemuria. The domes are geodesic, twenty feet thick, and of a milky white color. Once Lemuria occupied many other domes, all clustered in the same general area, but over the millennia some of these were crushed by the ocean depths as the shift ing continents carried Lemuria deeper below the waves, while others were simply abandoned by the dwindling population. Arvad has dispatched sorcerers to investigate the feasibility of making the abandoned domes habitable, but for the time being he has no use for them and they remain empty. The largest of the domes, where the Lemurians live, is ten miles across and a mile high at its highest point — this dome is simply referred to as Lemuria. The other three are smaller and serve specific functions in Lemurian society. One is a port for the Lemurian’s fleet of pisciremes and is a mile across; it’s called the Dock. Similar in size to the Dock, the second dome is a farm where Mole-Men cultivate and gather food for their masters; it’s called the Pasturage. The third dome, two miles in diameter, is the King’s Preserve, where Lemurians can hunt the magiconstructs that are the place’s fauna.

The Dock

Th is dome serves as a port for pisciremes, a dry dock for building new pisciremes or repairing old ones, and provides the sole means of access to Lemuria from the outside world. Halfway up the outside of the dome are 200 ports (though the entire Lemurian fleet is only fifty pisciremes). Each port consists of an extensible boarding tube that attaches to the starboard side of a piscireme and leads to an airlock for entering and exiting the dome. Arranged in a circle at the top of the dome are fi ve large portals, each closed by planes of crystallos that iris open and closed, which allow the Lemurians to bring pisciremes (or similarly large objects) inside the dome.

The inside of the dome from fifty feet above the ground to the very top is crowded with large ramps, walkways, and risers; large cables and chains attached to pulleys and winches stretch from top to bottom, left to right. Golems perform the heavy lifting in the docks, and when not in use they stand motionless on square platforms located throughout the levels of the dome. On the ground level are the workshops and foundries where the Lemurians oversee Mole-Men manufacturing their engines of war. Although an ingenious system of vents and locks allows smoke to escape from the dome, the whole place is murky and gloomy with gusts and whirls of ash-laden smoke rising from the stacks on the ground.

The Connecting Tunnels

At the outer edge of the dome just underground — almost deep enough to insult a Lemurian’s dignity by treating him as a Mole-Man traveling the subterranean depths — is the tunnel that runs from the Dock to Lemuria. Slender tubes of transparent crystallos run along either side of the tunnel, bolted to the stone walls with brackets, and inside the tubes is sparking corusqua. A platform decorated at its front and back with the head of a demonic ram provides transportation to and from Lemuria. Lightning discharges from the tubes of corusqua on either side of the tunnel cause the platform to hover above the ground and provide its motive force. Th e platform can reach a top speed of a hundred miles per hour, but usually travels at half that; it’s 9 meters long and 6 meters wide (30 feet x 20 feet). At 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter, the tunnel has plenty of room for both the platform and ornithopters flying between domes. (Similar tunnels connect all the domes of Lemuria.)

Lemuria Proper

The inside of the largest dome holds an ancient and glorious city, a testament to the former greatness of Lemuria. The city consists of majestic palaces of bronze and stone standing on large estates filled with cultivated gardens and statuary of marble, bronze, or adamantine. From the center of each estate, towering above the sprawling palace, rises a tower of silvery adamantine which serves as landing deck for the ornithopters that provide transportation from one side of the city to the other. Here and there stand ziggurats — meeting halls, temples, shrines. Running between estates are broad plazas and boulevards cobbled with blocks of gleaming crystallos, oft entimes colored sapphire, ruby, or emerald. Filling these wide open spaces are fountains that gurgle with sparkling waters or roar with fires that flow like liquid.

The architecture of the place is alien to human eyes. Its closest cousin would be a combination of Baroque and Art Deco. Numerous onion-like domes top the palaces, and between the domes are flat stretches of roof decorated with mosaics of intricate geometric patterns. The stone used in construction, typically marble or limestone, is always adorned with bas reliefs showing demonic faces, elemental beings, and similar subjects. The palaces’ outside walls are frequently sheathed in bronze, brass, and copper plating, and these are fluted with shallow runnels or molded with narrow streamers that gracefully run the plating’s length.

The interior of the dome glows with a soft rose, orange, and purple light as if existing in a perpetual twilight. Its illumination comes from long gardens of a fungus that grows in the ashes of inert ignaetium, and gutters of viscous purple slime, the byproduct of fermented corusqua, that line the place’s streets.

Heat rises up from the ground in Lemuria, generated by the arcane furnaces below the surface. The temperature ranges between 21 and 27 degrees Celsius (70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit).

General Features

Serveral features of Lemuria proper stand out among the general splendor.

The Palaces

The palaces — one for each House of Lemuria (see below) — are vast and consist mostly of large, mostly empty rooms. A Lemurian noble considers a six by six meter room with a nine-meter tall ceiling (20 x 20 feet, with a 30 foot ceiling) just barely large enough for a small sitting room containing two or three chairs clustered together, each with a small table. Any more furniture is claustrophobic and gauche, too similar to how a Mole-Man lives to be respectable.

Crystal globes filled with agitated corusqua light the rooms. The light is typically a glaring blue-white, but some more audacious and daring Houses use globes of colored crystal to create illumination of diff erent shades. The floors are stone or tiled, and never carpeted. The walls are either ornamented stone or metal. No part of a wall is left unadorned; it’s all covered with demonic shapes in interlocking, stomach-churning patterns that can occupy a person’s eye indefi nitely as he tries to find the beginning or end of the pattern. The ceilings are decorated with gemstone or colored crystallos mosaics that show scenes from the House’s past.

Most palaces are only one story, plus subterranean levels and secret servant passages for Mole- Man servants. (It’s an offense punishable by death for a Mole-Man to travel hallways intended for the palace’s residents and guests.) Once Lemurians used human slaves captured from subjugated kingdoms as household servants, but those days are long passed — now they must make do with clumsy Mole-Men who look very out of place in their livery. At isolated locations on the estate are numerous three- or four-story towers that serve as workshops for the House’s sorcerers. Some of these towers have stood locked since the earliest days of the Age of Legends, the contents of their labs and storerooms left untouched since their last occupant died millennia ago.

At the kingdom’s height there were sixty noble Houses of Lemuria, each of whom maintained a palace in the capital city. Now there are only twelve Houses, each with barely enough members to fill half a palace, so much of the capital consists of abandoned palaces and estates. Arvad’s own Mole- Men servants keep the uninhabited palaces from falling into disrepair and prevent their estates from becoming overgrown — but despite this, walking the boulevards of Lemuria is like making one’s way through the ghost of a city.

Ornithopter Ports

Ornithopters are the primary means of transport in the city, and though streets connect all the locations, only a noble taking an idle stroll uses them. (It’s illegal for Mole-Men to travel the streets of Lemuria, and they only do so when a Lemurian noble uses them to carry something to a palace and accompanies them; for other purposes, the Mole- Men must descend into the underground pits and travel the tunnels.) Each palace has a single port tower of adamantine, two hundred feet high, where ornithopters land.

A port is narrow, six meters (twenty feet) in diameter, from base to top. A lift operated by a large magiconstruct — a golem with only a torso who resides in a subterranean chamber and uses his large arms and hands pulls a chain to raise or lower the lift — carries nobles from the surface to a round platform, fifty feet in diameter, at the very top of the tower. Decorating the edge of the platform are large demonic faces made from gleaming silver and bronze; the faces are in the shape of whatever magical creature or demon serves as the Lemurian House’s patron and allow easy identification of which port belongs to which House.

Ziggurats

Ziggurats — stair-stepped metal pyramids ranging from fi ft y to a hundred feet tall — stand at various locations in Lemuria. Most of these are temples and shrines to the gods of Faltrah Lem built according to the occult geometries he dictated to his priesthood long ago. Since the crowning of the Bronze King, they have stood abandoned. Faltrah Lem gave the Lemurians four gods, one for each of the alchemical marvels that form the backbone of Lemurian mechano-mysticism: Nolor-Khan, Dweller in Smoke; Rareesha the Scorched Goddess; Manteen, Lord of the Shard; and Og-Slyntal, the Voice of Lightning. Though speaking their names is forbidden by dictate of the Bronze King, all Lemurians know of the four gods and their purpose.

The Pasturage

The ground inside this dome is uneven and swampy. Trees grow everywhere, rising crookedly from the dirty waters, and the whole place is filled with strange fungi and mosses. The condensers not only release oxygen into the dome, but also a fine spray of desalinated water, so a damp, humid mist always envelopes the place. Furnaces below the surface keep the temperature of the place between 32 and 38 degrees Celsius (90 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit).

The sole purpose of this dome is to provide sustenance for Lemuria’s nobility. It’s a pasturage for large slugs, with the secondary purpose of growing fungus, molds, and lichens. The main staple of the Lemurian diet is ten species of slug, from the footlong kreely that Lemurians serve raw, to the miniscule slemthi which they dry over burning coals until they’re crunchy. They also consume over a hundred types of fungus (ranging from large mushrooms, the flesh of which has the texture of meat; to spherical pustules, which have a surprisingly delicate flavor), five types of moss (from a long-bladed green one used in salads; to a fuzzy red one used as a spice), and several types of lichen. For fertilizer the Lemurians use the bodies of dead Mole-Men; one area of the Pasturage is always covered with shallowly-dug mass graves. During the day thirteen Mole-Men, one from each noble House and one from Arvad’s palace, can be found in the Pasturage foraging for food.

The King’s Preserve

The interior of this dome contains trees and undergrowth made from bronze and brass. Wandering through the dome are all sorts of wildlife now extinct in the surface world — but each of them, from the lowly snik-rat to the fearsome chala-lion, is a magiconstruct. Generations of Lemurian nobility have used this dome as a hunting preserve. Armed with specially adapted coruscators which, rather than unleashing a lethal blast of lightning, fire a beam that freezes a magiconstruct in its tracks, the nobles wander through the forest of artificial trees in groups of three or four. They use packs of Mole-Men as their hounds to chase down large game and flush smaller animals. During times of war the Lemurians “capture” the larger magiconstructs, especially the chala-lions, and use them in battle, so in a way the King’s Preserve also serves as an armory. In ancient times, the Lemurians would release human prisoners into the King’s Preserve and hunt them down; Arvad has done this several times during his reign, much to the delight of his subjects.

Bellow Lemuria

Each palace has a spiral stairway that leads into the depths below Lemuria, and in some of the plazas throughout the city circular plates are set in the ground. When activated by touching a sequence of stones around its rim, a plate rises from the ground to reveal a spiral stairway going down.

The first underground level below Lemuria contains the gears and machines that operate the Clockwork Engine. Next comes a level filled with arcane furnaces where burning ignaetium supplies power to the city above. Then, at a depth where no Lemurian noble has gone in many millennia, are the mines and Mole-Men communities.

Countless miles of tunnels stretch in a bewildering tangle below the domes of Lemuria, and in this labyrinth of underground passages and caverns live the Mole-Men. Th e tunnels, which are usually no more than two meters (six feet) high and wide, began as simple ignaetium mines, but over the course of forty thousand years they’ve become far more complex. Th ey include living spaces called warrens and even farms for the tubers Mole-Men eat.

Society

Lemurian society consists of two groups: the Lemurian nobles and the Mole-Men. These two populations live very different lives. Lemurian nobles devote themselves entirely to whatever pursuit they choose — sorcery or warfare. Mole-Men only stop toiling to eat and sleep. In normal human terms, the Mole-Men are an urban underclass taken to the Nth degree, their living conditions terrible enough to shock even the most jaded person.

To a Lemurian, a Mole-Man is not a sentient being. He is a thing, a golem of flesh and blood, and possesses much less value than a magiconstruct (after all, a Mole-Man is ugly and not the creation of Lemurian sorcery). Any behavior that hints of a Mole-Man’s conduct, even minor things such as traveling underground, is below a Lemurian noble — he would rather die than act in such a way.

The Nobles

In modern Lemuria, there are a little under a thousand nobles in twelve Houses. For game purposes, a noble falls into one of three categories: warrior, sorcerer, or decadent. The warrior dedicates his life to studying the arts of war — though Lemuria is best known for its wizardry, its martial traditions after millennia of conflict are extensive and well-developed. The sorcerer dedicates his life to the study of sorcery, especially the properties of the four elemental substances that are the backbone of Lemurian alchemy and mechano-mysticism. The decadent spends his life in idle pleasures while waiting for the day when the Bleak Ones consign his soul to oblivion. There are approximately five hundred warriors, a hundred and fifty sorcerers, and three hundred and fifty decadents in modern Lemuria. The Lemurian birthrate is unnaturally low (ancient histories show it was once much higher) — a woman gives birth to one, maybe two children over three centuries of life, and many women never give birth at all — so the Lemurians population is unlikely to increase any time soon.

A Lemurian resembles a human. Leanly muscled with narrow waists and broad shoulders, males stand between 6’0” and 6’3” tall; women are of the same height and usually slender. Both genders typically have black hair, but it’s sometimes a dark chestnut or a rusty red color. Lemurians have skin that’s pale, almost ghostly white; their complexions are pristine.

Nothing in a Lemurian’s outward appearance indicates that he’s not human. In general Lemurians are more beautiful/handsome than humans, though not unnaturally so, and there’s usually a saturnine cast to their features. But even a simple medical exam tells another tale. Their temperature usually runs between 38 and 43 Celsius (100 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit), and their heart rate is ten to fifteen beats per minute faster than a human’s.

The Lemurians speak a guttural language, with hard Ks and Hs pronounced at the back of the throat, and rolling, growling Rs. Since the earliest part of the twentieth century, Arvad has commanded his subjects to learn English; the average Lemurian speaks it with a distinct accent that seems strange even to cosmopolitan humans who have traveled widely.

Lemurians have alien minds very different than those of humans, therefore psychics might have a hard time when dealing with intruding upon them.

Lemurian Warriors

In the terminology of surface world militaries, each Lemurian warrior is an officer. In large-scale assaults, his function is either to command hordes of Mole-Men or to pilot one of the Lemurian war machines. Despite this the Lemurian martial tradition demands a warrior be skilled in personal combat, so each warrior trains daily with his weapons: the ignaetior, a long-bladed sword-like weapon, and the coruscator, a short-bladed dirklike weapon (see Lemurian Equipment, below)

Th ere are only three ranks among Lemurian warriors: captain, who either commands Mole-Man infantry (typically from the back of a Gullopsteed) or pilots an ornithopter; commander, who either leads a group of captains or commands a piscireme; and warlord, who commands the entire Lemurian military and answers to King Arvad.

Over the years the warriors have developed bellascra, a unique martial art for use with their weapons. While some of the maneuvers like lunge and slash are straightforward, others involve specialized blows with Lemurian weapons. For instance, the disarm involves using a coruscator to deliver a shock to the opponent’s hand that paralyzes the muscles long enough for a rapid, ripostelike follow-up strike to knock the weapon away. The thrust does increased damage by heating the blade of the ignaetior to infernally hot tempertures. The dodge benefit is due as much to the small amount of dark smoke released from the ignaetior, which obscures the wielder’s position, as any evasive movement on the character’s part.

Lemurian Sorcerers

The Lemurian sorcerer is one of the most respected members of his society and the repository for the ancient lore of his people. Sorcerers are divided into two types: true sorcerers and sorcerer-scientists.

The vast majority of Lemurian sorcerers, 96 altogether, are true sorcerers. These can cast Thaumaturgy spells like their surface world counterparts but this is but a shadow of the power Lemurian sorcerers of the Atlantean Age possessed. There have been five sorcerers in the last century with power that even approaches that of their ancestors. One of those is the exile Zorran the Artificer, described on page 220 of Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks. Another is Besheeva the Veiled, an ancient crone who lies on her deathbed. The other three — Unctor the Black-Handed, Petrys Baz, and Jalra the Scold — work on various tasks Arvad has assigned to them.

Note: Oddly enough Atlantean Era Lemurian sorcerers were Ritual Mages, not High Mages.

Sorcerer-scientists possess no personal magical abilities. They are in truth scholars who have dedicated their lives to the study of the elemental substances that are the basis for Lemurian alchemy and mechano-mysticism. Just like their true sorcerer peers, they can create and repair Lemurian equipment, and because of this, they perform a valuable function in society. Most Lemurians treat sorcerer-scientists with respect (some true sorcerers view them with contempt), but their numbers are few simply because it’s frustrating to study magic for a lifetime and never gain the ability to use it fully. The most notable of the sorcerer-scientists is Baelrath the Blasphemer.

Decadent Lemurians

The decadents are a group that sprang up near the end of the Age Of Legends. Their numbers grew larger and larger until finally Arvad arrived. Consumed by apathy because of Lemuria’s long history of failure and all-too-apparent decline in both world affairs and sorcery, the decadents have chosen to live in dreams of Lemuria’s past glories. Their sole contribution to Lemurian knowledge is the creation of two drugs: the Kiss of Sleeping Excitement and the Comforts of Days Fargone. The Kiss is a distillate of corusqua sublimated through the smoke of the narcolepy, a narcotic grown in the Pasturage. The Kiss raises the user’s heart rate while allowing him to drowse, thus providing a false sense of an exciting life without any urge to rise from bed. The Comforts is a mix of fulminor and poppies grown in gardens fertilized with ignaetium ash. It draws upon the memories of the user and induces hallucinations of a nostalgic golden age. The visions are, of course, false and everything is much better than it ever truly was.

The decadents contribute nothing at all to society. Arvad has consulted extensively with the Bronze King and his cabinet on how to pull them from their lethargy. Some of the king’s actions have worked — without a doubt involving the Lemurians in World War II significantly increased the warrior population — but he will not rest until no decadents remain.