Bone2pick
Minority of One
Campaign Lore
The Land of Faerûn
From the bitter, windswept steppes of the Endless Waste to the storm-lashed cliffs of the Sword Coast stretches a wide, wild land of shining kingdoms and primal wilderness. Faerûn is only one continent of the world known as Toril. Other lands lie in distant corners of the world, but Faerûn is the center of it all, the crossroads and crux upon which all else turns. Dozens of nations, hundreds of city-states, and countless tribes, villages, and settlements dot its expanse.
The continent of Fearûn measures more than thirty-five hundred miles from east to west and and twenty-five hundred from north to south. It includes sun-blasted deserts, vast forest deeps, forbidding mountains, and gleaming inland seas. Across this vast expanse travel minstrels and peddlers, caravan merchants and guards, soldiers, sailors, and steel-hearted adventurers carrying tales of strange, glorious, faraway places. Good maps and clear trails can take even an inexperienced youth with dreams of glory far across Faerûn. Thousands of restless, young would-be heroes from backcountry farmsteads and sleepy villages arrive in Waterdeep and the other great cities every year in search of wealth and renown.
Known roads may be less traveled, but they are not necessarily safe. Fell magic, deadly monsters, and cruel local rulers are all perils that you face when you fare abroad in Faerûn. Away from the main roads and the great cities, the countryside is far wilder than the city folk remember. Even farms and free holds within a day's walk of Waterdeep itself may fall prey to monsters, and no place in Faerûn is safe from the sudden wrath of a dragon.
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3rd Edition
The Dalelands
The Dales are broad forest vales with rolling farmlands, linked by narrow trade roads running through beautiful woods. Blessed with fertile soil and a temperate climate (aside from the extremely harsh winters), the Dales are the breadbasket of the Heartlands. The Dales independent spirit and age-old alliance with the elves of Cormanthor have made them the historic birthplace or favored home of many of Faerûn's greatest heroes.
Eleven separate dales exist today, each with its own territory, government (or lack of it), militia, trading pacts, ambitions, and character. Archendale and Harrowdale value trade over all else. Tasseldale values industry and craftsmanship. Daggerdale stands alone against a powerful enemy, while Scardale struggles to recover its independence after years of occupation. Meanwhile, the other Dales respect the old Dales Compact and prefer to be left alone.
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3rd Edition
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The Dales Compact
The Dales were once deep woods hunted only lightly by the dragons, for these creatures preferred to make meals of ogres, deer, bears, and rothé available in the open Stonelands to the west. As the worms declined and elven might grew, the elven Realms of Cormanthry flourished.
Humans hailing from lands today known as Chondath and Impiltur settled the edges of that great forest. These migrations attracted folk from other regions of Faerûn: exiles, fugitives from justice, and adventurers who saw a land of bright promise. Scattered human farmsteads and hamlets began to appear at the fringes of Cormanthor around -200 DR. Elven defenses hampered woodcutting, so human settlements were scattered and isolated instead of sprawling across wide-open farmland, as they did in the lands that would become Cormyr to the west and Sembia to the South.
Forseeing the eventual doom of his people if they tried to fight off increasingly numerous human settlers, the elven coronal Eltargrim arranged the Dales Compact between the elves of the forest empire of Cormanthyr and the humans who would become known as Dalesfolk. Human and elven wizards together raised the Standing Stone in the center of Cormanthor as a symbol of unity between the two races. In return for promising not to cut deeper into the Cormanthor forest, the ancestors of the current Dalesfolk were allowed to settle around the forest's edges or in places where the great trees did not grow.
While the early Dales struggled to survive, the elves of Cormanthor grew strong and confident. In 220 DR, the elven coronal allowed humans to enter his kingdom. In 261 DR, he made the fateful decision to welcome them into its very heart, transforming the elven city then known as Cormanthor into the open city of Myth Drannor. All races were welcome in Myth Drannor, which enjoyed a golden age that lasted five centuries. Myth Drannor reached heights of arts, crafting, and culture unsurpassed since, and the city brought human, halfling, dwarven, and gnome trade, travel, and settlement to the Dragon Reach lands.
Myth Drannor's rise allowed the Dales to survive their troubled infancy. The city's fall in 714 DR gave the Dales the chance to flourish in ways that would have been impossible if elven might had remained intact. Few survivors of Myth Drannor's collapse escaped the demons, devils, and dragons that flocked to the ruins, but these survivors took the scraps of their wealth, magic, and learning to the nearby dales.
Although the Compact stands no more, most of the Dales still abide by its terms. Tradition has replaced elven might as the principal motivation for adhering to the Compact, but for now it is sufficient to preserve Cormanthor's borders as they stand.
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3rd Edition
The Dales Council
Each year at Midwinter, every dale sends a delegate to a selected Dalelands town for the Dales Council. Delegates debate issues affecting all the dales, such as maintenance of trade routes, defense pacts against Zhent or Sembian aggression, border squabbles between neighboring Dales, and matters relating to the great forest of Cormanthor.
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3rd Edition