Rugadhian History

Leabharchoimeád’s Introduction

It has come to my attention that a thorough overview of the Rugadhian historical accounts has not been pieced together since before the Desolation of Deep Home. As the head and only archivist of our great mountain, I Master Tadgh Leabharchoimeád¹ Éabha shall attempt to set down a general, chronological retelling of those events both mythological and historical whose occurrence leads to our people’s present state upon the mountain.

The Waking Floods

Miles beneath our modern home on the surface stood Aoire Sléibhe. Master Cruthman of the Goweh, Worker of heal and make. Alone he fought amidst the stone and magma of the mountain’s heart. His task the protection of the surface world from the vile horde’s that poured through the Goweh seeking egress to the surface through Aoire’s tunneled pasture. His first Master Work was to be the Rugadh Sliabh, built from Stone and Earth, we were a people versed in both. Bodies and hands made for bending mineral to our will, the first of our kind, sorrowfully, had little time to put towards such pursuits. From the mud and rocks of the forsaken tunnels crawled tens of thousands of abominations. Aoire Sléibhe had built the Rugadh as his vanguard, but in his molten eyes was the spark of creation, not destruction. Fifty legions of us he created, one thousand Rugadh to a legion, and in his grace he left us a people of craft, so to not lack a purpose when this fight was over.
The Waking Floods lasted some thousand years, and Aoire made it our mission as a people to protect Daurk Brionnaigh, first called Brionn na Aitvia². In the rocky depths we fought with all manner of monstrous creature in a darkness all encompassing. Hundreds of thousands of Tunnel Stalkers, Rock Worms, Demons, Goblins, and Trolls were slain over the centuries, and the ground of Deep Home was christened in rivers of monster ichor, blacker than obsidian and thicker than molten gold. Forty-nine wrathful floods of corrupt creatures, each lasting twenty years, with less than half a year rest between. It is the only time in our history any Rugadh has been named Master of a destructive pursuit, and there were many. Master Áed Laochra³, Master Cóem Laochra and Master Órlaith Laochra the most well known. Before the time of Master Cruthman these terrible warriors wielded great boulders as clubs and swung primitive slings with such immense strength the pebbles they threw could pierce Rugadhian Steel. It was with such a sling that Master Órlaith Laochra slew Dia na Péisteanna during the second flood. Hurling whole boulders in his great sling with a speed and accuracy that left the horrible worm a tattered mass of flesh and gore.
It was not till the twelfth flood that the first Cruthman began to work the ore of the mountain into tools and weapons. They powered simple forges with magma and began to equip their warriors with armaments quickly surpassing the harm wrought by simple stones. The hordes were now being pushed back with relative ease, no longer were the Master Laochra required, instead competent regiments of soldiers could now rebuff the unorganized mess that were the floods. Aoire was pleased, for now he had no need to destroy and rend. Instead he could support and heal his people. For ten floods the early Rugadhians began to claim their hope once again. More time could be spent on creative pursuits, the frame of Deep Home began to rise from Brionn na Aitvia. Across the continent Graskoroth boiled the ocean in anger. It was this catalyst of failure that brought Skoteinóti̱ta to the Goweh beneath Brionn na Aitvia and the floods of darkness began.
When the Lord of Darkness arrived our regiments of soldiers crumbled like spent charcoal before Meyda-work of which we had no defense. Even our recent discovery of Iron was little better than parchment before his mind piercing fear. Many of our own turned to Wraiths before our very eyes and swept across their fellow Rugadh’s ranks leaving a cold desolation in their wake. Aoire could no longer bring himself to use his gemstone eyes for war, and he wept at the loss of his creation. From his crystalline tears the Sochraide were born. The first women of the Rugadh, and powerful workers of Meyda. To the individual they could do little against a member of The Hebdomad, but together the Rugadh could once again rebuff the flood.
It took thirteen floods before the Lord of Darkness was beaten back and sought out easier prey. Before that glorious moment came however, Deep Home’s scaffolds were toppled, forges were thrown into the magma and after the wraiths and shadows of Skoteinótita faded back into the darkness the Rugadh were left in a pitiable victory. The Demon had raged through our ranks and Aoire once again, against his truest nature, joined us in the fight. This was our greatest failing. After the penultimate fight with the Lord of Darkness ended with his shadow’s terrified flight back into the Goweh, Aoire fell into a deep slumber and no Rugadh could wake him.
Five more floods came and went as our people scraped together the ashes of hope and splendor. Faltering for over a century to regain some semblance of the glory lost during the darkness. It was after the fifth of these floods that The Architect was born. Stepping out of the eye of Aoire Sléibhe a Rugadhian, fully formed, and divinely inspired to finish Deep Home. He referred to himself as The Architect never Providing any other name, and so that is what we called him.
The final nine floods could hardly be called as such. The name now used as a mere formality, the hordes coming from the Goweh as a trickle. A fainting, remnant gasp of an assault which the Rugadh all but ignored in favor of their fervent construction. When the last flood was wiped out Deep Home stood glittering in the dark of Brionn na Aitvia. In defiance of a thousand years of war and torment, The Architect and his people had built a place worthy of Aoire’s rest.

Deep Home

For three thousand years Deep Home not only stood, but grew. As the cavern it filled expanded, great stone pillars a hundred feet in diameter came to support the massive underground city. Winding between these trunk-like supports were the stone houses and buildings of Rugadhian society. Countless forges, homes, and fungus farms lit the city from within. All possible thorugh the discovery of Rugadhian Oil. The thick black substance kept the city alive, fueling the forges of Cruthmen who had no access to magma, lighting and heating homes, and cooking the fungus and root vegetables that grow far beneath the surface.
Magma forges though utilizing a near unlimited resource, were fickle and dangerous things. A Rugadh is capable of holding iron that glows red hot, but the Magma found in Brionn na Aitvia caused the demise of many a cruthmen before more stable forms of heat were discovered. Rugadhian Oil solved this problem neatly, it burned at extremely high temperatures and for a very long time in relation to its volume. The heat could be finely controlled, and was not as prone to over tempering metals.
Rugadhian Oil was hard to find however. Its abundant usage required the cavern to expand at an increasingly ravenous pace. While its consumption was rising, discovery dwindled. For a time some two centuries long the great Oil Reserves were parched, and armies of Oil Hunters dug miles into the mountain. Their were many Rugadh driven to near madness by an inability to forge, cook, or feel the heat of flame. Finally a group of Oil Hunters lead by Master Sealgola⁴ Darragh found the Titim Ola⁵. Here the obsidian fuel gushed forth, flooding the streets of Deep Home and a time known as the Aois Lasrach⁶ began.

Aois Lasrach

Now that Rugadhian Oil was in abundance, Deep Home could once again focus on perfecting craft. Few Oil Hunters were required as the Oil Reserves were filled to bursting for hundreds of years. The Architect and those structurally inclined continued to improve the city. Water, pumped from aquifers flowed to each district via gorgeous aqueducts. Several massive mining drills powered by Rugadhian Oil and Monster Stones expedited the process of expansion and ore acquirement, and most importantly, Rugadhian Steel’s creation process was discovered. The metal that holds our people’s namesake the continent over, first invented by The Architect himself. Its use of two extremely rare metals put a new fervor in the mining crews, as every cruthman worth his salt wanted to work the new material.
Soon the most key infrastructure had been replaced with Rugadhian Steel where possible, including the Mining Drills. With it we built a great temple around the sleeping form of Aoire, adorning it with the finest jewels we could mine and cut. Twenty six towers broken up by 300 foot walls each a host to crenelated battlements and sublevel curtain walls. Within a massive keep protects the slumbering Roeh, accessible only by crossing a moat of lava over a drawbridge of Rugadhian Steel. The courtyard between the keep and walls we filled with our Masterworks chosen by the Council of Peers designated by The Architect. It stood reflecting Deep Home’s light as The Architect’s own Masterwork, an homage to our Maker, and a befitting headstone. The efficiency of our society had more than tripled at this point, and our hubris had us in its vise.

The Desolation of Deep Home

No one ever recorded or remarked on who struck the Croí Sliabh⁷ first. Whenever the tale was recounted the immediate chaos that followed was always the focal point and remains so to this day. A great towering stone Nephesh pulled itself from the rocks surrounding the bore holes made by the mining drills and began destroying any and all Rugadhian infrastructure it came across. Its size rivaled the great shepherd Aoire Sléibhe himself and magma flowed from it in great, destructive falls.
Deep Home, though originally built to rebuff attackers in the final Floods, no longer hosted regiments of Rugadh warriors, iron palisades, or truly any form of siege, let alone from such a creature as the Soul of the mountain itself. Armaments had not been made by the Master Cruthmen for over a thousand years, and suddenly tools of destruction were needed once more.
It was under this duress that the first Master Leabharchoimeád was named. While the Oil Hunters used their mining equipment to slow the living mountains progress the scholars and book keepers were amassed and set about retrieving any and all old records for the purposes of armor and weaponry crafting. Even more crucially during this time: The binding of Leabhar na Sochraide⁸. Leabhar na Sochraide was the collected knowledge of Workings and Meyda-circles held within the minds of the first Sochraide. As any cataloger or archivist would know, the process of gathering information is prone to the revealing of the connections between elements, and up sprouts the new.
It took a decade for The Architect and (Sochraide name) to forge the hammer together. The first enchanted Rugadhian weapon, the joint creation of metal and Meyda never before seen by our kind. The Architect took the unnamed Warhammer and christened it Fathach Bristeoir in the Meyda that poured forth from the slain mountain. However, it was too late. The rubble of our once glorious city our sole reward.

An Timeacht⁹

It is often during times of war or siege, that the simple things one might miss, reward the greatest damages. A new strain of fungus had begun to grow unchecked in a small fungus farm. It was an experiment by a lone Rugadhian fungus farmer, and it is believed he may have been truly on to something if it hadn’t broken from its confines too early. This new mold, scattered through the cavern after Deep Home’s razing, began to spread uncontrollably. The Oil Reserves were empty or destroyed, and not enough flame could be garnered by the Sochraide to fend off the exponential growth. The Architect made a hasty decision to utilize the mining drills to escape to the surface, collapsing portions of the mountain behind them as they fled en mass.
It took several years to reach the surface of Brionn na Aitvia, the farther they found themselves from Deep Home, the more sparse Rugadhian Oil became. The lack of proper forges or fuel made for a rapidly diminishing fleet of mining drills, as many fell into disrepair or simply couldn’t be spared the crucial Oil. When the surface was finally reached, as I’m sure you have been told, a great mourning began, and did not end for several months. Our people find sorrow knocking at the door so seldom that to imagine a somber event of this scale is most difficult, but we must recognize what our ancestors believed was core to our existence was then lost in a manner now stamped official by the Day Star.
It should also be noted that up until this time our once great populace of fifty thousand had now diminished through our many hardships to a measly seven hundred. The corrupt hordes of the Waking Floods ate away at our numbers till little more than a dozen legions remained. Having no method of reproduction we remained stagnant in numbers until the Desolation of Deep Home in which our numbers were halved to six legions. The rest of our kind were lost to our fungal flight.

A Dry Spell

Now it behooves one to remember that even by this point in the middle portion of our history that no sentient beings had come to our mountain. The husbandry and agricultural ways of surface dwellers now long established had to be reinvented by our people through arduous trial and error. For every step of progress two stumbling blocks would rise to meet our inexperience. Amidst the struggle to survive a cultural depression rolled over the minds of our ancient founders, like a cloud around the peak of Daurk Brionnaigh no visible line could be seen through it. The pursuit of craft and progress halted completely whilst existence in general took precedence.
Despite its depressing coat, it cannot be honestly stated that no societal progress was made during the Dry Spell. It was during this time in which the Sochraide created An Lasc¹⁰. A great gathering of our Workers was held with the intention to redesign or reutilize the Oibrí¹¹. Initially it was believed they might remake it in such a fashion for the furthering of crop production, or weather control. Instead, a method, a ritual now dubbed An Lasc was discovered capable of altering the Oibrí completely from its destructive potential to a creative pursuit previously impossible. Now a Sochraide could permanently alter her Oibrí to create new Rugadh. The strengthened Soul it represented could be cultivated, split, and grown into a new child. Now the tens of thousands of us lost, though not replaced, could have their stories carried forward, for the very first time, by a second generation.
It was decided shortly after the first of the new generation were born that a proper record of Rugadhian generations should be kept and the An Ghinealais began. The first generation was dubbed the Bunús¹², and the new: Spréach¹³, so named for their rejuvenating impact on our psyche. The Spréach began to take to the new life, having no preconceptions they morphed to a agricultural surface life with ease. In our broken state they bent and discovered their own pursuits to perfect. Inventions like irrigation, wood working, and most importantly charcoal pushed the Bunús forward again, and encouraged Rugadhian society as a whole for the first time in decades.

The Architect’s Apprentices

This resurgence of the Rugadhian mental state brought The Architect out of a depressive retirement. The aid of the new generation inspired The Architect to take a novel approach, the first Architect Apprentices were appointed and progress surged forward. Those taught by The Architect quickly became capable of levels of craft that would normally take several centuries.
It is still with a deep shame that the Bunús remember many of their generation clamoring to find a place among The Architect’s blessed. The first plagiarized Rugadhian work appeared and set our culture into a panic. People were so desperate for The Architect’s gift that their purpose was being subverted by covetous thoughts.
The Architect solved the problem temporarily first, introducing cruthmen to the idea of Meyda-marks, and Soul Seals inspired by elements of the Workings by Sochraide. Then The Architect created the Aimsitheoir Anam¹⁴, 14 medallions who’s faces reflect the image of the Soul of their wearer. Now the positions were limited, and once finalized, Rugadhian society fell back into step with itself. The Architect’s decision was final, and even such gifts as his could not drive a Rugadh to the act of murder.

Outsiders Arrive

After near a century on the surface our people encountered other sentient life for the first time. Today we involve ourselves with many of our fellow surface dwellers, but before our modern era the concept of “others” was a theoretical likelihood, but unconfirmed for several millennia. The Biaban were our first confirmation of the sprawling world that fell from the peak that was our mountain, they are often seen to this very day as they make their pilgrimages to the peak for a long departed deity. The relations formed with the Biaban nomads quickly realized a gap in societal progress the size of the oceans between the Rugadh and all the rest of our Attovian neighbors.
The Architect in particular had countless meetings with the pilgrims, to an extent extreme enough that they requested leave to complete their pilgrimage. Thankfully two of the Architect Apprentices attending the meeting were Master Leabharchoimeáds and bound two books on world history outlines based on the conversations. It was sorrowful to the Rugadh that the outside world had experienced horrors similar and beyond the great floods of the Bunús. More so that despite such tragedies wars continued to wage. It seemed the other races with time, found destruction where it must be excavated.
When the tired pilgrims returned, The Council of Elders had been formed by The Architect, hand selected by him and his apprentices from among the most well respected Bunús. The Architect charged the council with self perpetuating itself, and that it was their responsibility to minimize internal damage to the Rugadh, who now had named their surface home, Daurk Brionnaigh, after the near black soil and stone composing it. Now the questions would be asked by The Council of Elders who offered their forging prowess to the Biaban, and further. If the Biaban would hock our craft, we would heavily discount it to them. Thus began our rapid insertion into large scale politics.

A Run on Cruthmen

The first crafts made by a Rugadhian for a group external to our society was a set of simple square metal plates to be used by the Nomads of the Twilight Desert who the Biaban were returning to. The information garnered by the Elders in return for such a simple set of objects was an invaluable trade. The next time we saw strangers was several decades after that first encounter, but they were not Biaban. A small group of Drakonos climbed our mountain in search of ornate weaponry for their Divine Star and Moon-touched members. Though primitive, the diagrams and sketches brought felt worthy of the Brunús Master Cruthmen.
We practiced hospitality in the short days it required our Masters to fulfill the requests. The Drakonos offered us a substantial pile of Clochhachta¹⁵ which apparently the rest of Attovia had been using as a universal currency for some time already. Many of our older machines had been powered by Clochhachta in conjunction with Rugadhian Oil. Of the supply we had gathered from the Waking Floods a pittance had been brought to the surface. Our final Mining Drills lay dormant for fear of their need in an emergency. The substantial sum received in the trade put our worries to rest, and by the Drakonos’ ecstatic acceptance we assumed they would be returning long before we could burn through the Meyda held in these stones.
What we had not anticipated, was the relative speed information could propagate in an era pushing Meyda-work in all its forms forward at an alarming rate. It took less than five years before several different cultures, and city states were sending representatives requesting large, complex orders in return for increasingly ludicrous amounts of Clochhachta. The Master Cruthmen were overwhelmed by the quantity of product desired. Incapable of rushing for the sake of time, we began to rack up a social deficit in our contracts, as their fulfillment began to slow as our society in its entirety could not keep up with the demand.

The Architect’s Gamble

The final known act of The Architect took place in 2739 AoV. He gathered his current twelve apprentices, and proclaimed that they would make the mountain a forge unto its own. No one but his apprentices presumably, knew what he meant, but no one could even imagine this was the end of The Architect’s reality, and his descent into myth. Though many believe his work continues, for how could the mountain be maintained for so many years, it is widely agreed that his body was the last to rest beneath the stones where he was first born from the eye of Aoire.
Over the next century apprentices came and went, informing us on the progress within the bowels of Darkmount, as we had come to call the mountain itself for consistency with our fellow surface citizens. On occasion the apprentices would rally several Master Cruthmen to work on projects of a complexity requiring dizzying blueprints, and months of Rugadhian work. No one could push the skills of our people like The Architect. When each project was finished it was taken through the mouth of the mountain we called Doras Dodhéanta¹⁶ never to be seen again.
The Doras Dodhéanta was converted towards the final stretch of the projects completion. What was a gaping hole reminding all who passed of our long lost civilization, became a piece of proper infrastructure. The larger opening supported and closed off with Rugadhian Steel beams, a small door carved next to it, and a strange slab of stone peering out of the larger opening above broad square vessels hewn directly from the mountains rock.

The Age of the Craft Mind Begins

It was not till Master Apprentice Aoibheann gathered the whole of our small civilization to watch the first craft fall from the newly named Béal Brionnaigh into one of the stone bins. It was Rugadhian Steel runes inset on an iron plate that read simply: “The Craft Mind breathes, our struggle is conquered”. This single sentence plagued the daily life of our people until the other eleven apprentices resurfaced and came to teach our people how we might use the mountain to mimic our craft in accurate abundance. To this day The Masterworks surround a glass case where any Rugadh can marvel at the Craft Mind’s first work. Still it’s accuracy in reproducing The Architect’s touch of creation is uncanny, and was all the convincing we required.
It took time for the first Scríobs to become competent enough with the mountain’s runic system to be free of the Apprentices oversight, but suddenly the orders that harried us, became simple matters. Those who were less drawn to the way of Cruthmen could try their hand at being Scríobs and a new avenue of societal contribution blossomed. Now the number of orders we could fulfill increased by a factor of a thousand at least, a single Master Cruthmen and their Scríob could handle a bulk order alone, and more specific requests could receive the time and care they deserved.

Footnotes

1. Bookkeeper, responsible for the cataloging, organizing, and writing of Rugadhian history, technology, and culture. ↩

2. The Womb of Attovia ↩

3. Warrior, or Violent Hero ↩

4. Hunter of Oil, specifically the job title of the Ancient Rugadh who sought Rugadhian Oil to light the forges of deep home. A combination of Selgoir (Hunter) and Ola (Oil) ↩

5. Oil Fall, describing the relative geysers of Rugadhian Oil found at this time. ↩

6. Age of Flame ↩

7. The heart of the mountain, a massive glowing stone deep at the base of Darkmount ↩

8. The Book of Sochraide ↩

9. The Departure ↩

10. The Switch ↩

11. A kind of “organ” within female Rugadhian’s that is believed to be the source of their Meyda-work capabilities ↩

12. Origin ↩

13. Spark ↩

14. Soul Finder ↩

15. Stone of Power ↩

16. Impossible Door ↩