Introduction to History & Cultures
- Subject
- The record itself — how it is dated, who kept it, and the places it describes
- Covers
- The reckoning, two events the whole continent remembers, and the regions
This section is the one that explains the rest. It holds how Aropria counts its years, who wrote down what is in these pages, the handful of events everybody's account agrees happened, and the regions and places the other sections keep referring to.
How the record is dated, and how far back it goes
Dating and Records is the page to read first: the calendar, the reckoning, and the dates that survive. It is also honest about how few of them do. The further back an account reaches, the thinner it gets, and there is a point past which the record stops being a record and becomes somebody's guess about a time nobody wrote down.
Two of the things that did survive are here. The fall of the Empire of Iron is the event the continent's reckoning is counted from. The Great Literary Purge is why so much else did not survive — a deliberate destruction of written material, and the reason a documentary horizon exists at all.
Who wrote this down
The Chroniclers are the people whose work these pages are assembled from. It is worth knowing them, because they do not all agree, and because several of them had reasons to describe a thing the way they did.
Where a page sets an account apart and names who is speaking, that is deliberate. Those passages are somebody's testimony rather than the record's own voice, and some of them are wrong. A chronicler standing in a ruin guessing at who built it is not the same claim as a reference article stating who did.
Regions
The continent's broad country: Anock, Durann, Thelinis, Misku'un, the Wildlands, the Lonely Fjords, the Thundering Sands, Lake Kea, Zingare and the Swirl. Anything with a name but not an article of its own is in the gazetteer — the rivers, ranges and landmarks that come up often enough to need looking up.
Places worth their own page
Rikjosom and Besok are cities. Qala di Ciel and Wayat'ujan are somewhere stranger than that. The Library of Kaas and the Congruence Academies are institutions with addresses. The Vellidan is where the continent's medicine comes from. And Hope's Reach is the newest settlement on the continent, two years old on Karg's north-east frontier.