The Ages of Norrath

The Nameless

Outside space and time, the old texts say, there is a being called only the Nameless, and it made everything that is, was and will be. From its mind came the universe, its suns and worlds, and a host of powerful but finite beings that mortals would call gods. In the 2002 roleplaying game’s telling, the Nameless forged law out of chaos, made the gods, and then stopped creating, leaving the gods to do the rest.

The Marking

There were no ages before the first. Norrath existed untouched, and time passed with nothing to notice it, until “the claw of Veeshan scraped across the world” in the Marking, dividing time from non-time and being from non-being.

The Age of Scale

Veeshan, the Crystalline Dragon, was the first god to find Norrath. She left her brood on the frozen continent of Velious and tore great wounds in the land with her claws to stake her claim, and so began the Age of Scale.

The Elder Age

Other gods noticed, and they were jealous. Brell Serilis quietly seeded the world’s depths with his own creatures, sealed his portal, and then talked Tunare, Prexus and Rallos Zek into a pact to divide the world and keep the Wurmqueen in check. From that pact came the dwarves, the kedge, the elves and the giants: the Elder Age. A second pact, with Bristlebane and Cazic-Thule, added gnomes, halflings, trolls and lizard men, and Rallos Zek’s ogres and orcs.

Curses and collapse

The ogres built an empire across much of Tunaria and then invaded the Plane of Earth itself. When the gods at last threw Rallos Zek back, they sealed the Planes of Power and cursed his children. The ogre empire collapsed, the giants’ lands froze, and the goblins’ curse was so complete that no record of it survives. What followed was the Age of Monuments.

Then the Marr twins made the barbarians, and the Age of Blood began. Solusek Ro burned the Elddar Forest into desert, opening the Lost Age. And humanity appeared, built the Combine Empire, and lost it almost as fast.

Enlightenment and turmoil

After the Combine, humans settled the plains of Karana. Antonius Bayle founded Qeynos in the west, Freeport grew rough and dangerous in the east, and the continent of Tunaria was renamed Antonica after one of their own. A frail scholar named Erud led a faction across the sea to Odus and built Erudin. This was the Age of Enlightenment.

Then some Erudites found necromancy. The civil war that followed was fought with magic, hundreds died, and the last battle blew a vast chasm into the earth. The heretics built Paineel inside it, and an uneasy fear has kept the peace ever since. That is the Age of Turmoil, the world you logged into in 1999.

The broken moon

Far down the ages, in EverQuest II’s The Wheel of Time, the ancient elf Aataltaal sits on the Thundering Steppes watching Luclin break apart overhead. He reflects that “for hundreds of years now” the disappearance of the gods had been called the Lost Age, a name given “by those who knew little to nothing of events during that time.”