Lore · Cities & Peoples
Crushbone & the Faydark Orcs
Nearly every elf, gnome and dwarf of 1999 got their first levels killing Crushbone orcs. The orcs tell the story very differently.
The walking trees
The Crushbone shamans say the forest once covered all of Faydwer and was guarded by walking trees. When the orcs, ogres and trolls arrived and began felling trees and building keeps, the trees rose up and drove them back, then raised a steep mountain range to cut them off from the woods to the north.
One forest becomes two
Centuries later the Crushbone clan decided to head north for more room and more prey, and talked other clans into joining them. They hacked straight north through the forest where it was thinnest and reached the northern shore before the trees could stop them. And so one forest became two.
A home with walls
The other clans settled on the coast, but Crushbone would not be cowed by trees twice. Its leader killed whoever objected too loudly and led the clan into the woods. After weeks of slaughter, scouts found a broad hill inside a shallow bowl, with a natural wall around it and a river running through. That would be home. The wood elves’ Shadow-Wood Keep stood just to the north, so the orcs marched that same night, took it by surprise and burned it.
Inside the walls
Crushbone became a walled complex carved from the mountains off the cliffs of the Greater Faydark, a granite castle at its centre and lookouts posted for elf armies. The name means the clan, the city and the keep at once. Canals divide the city into seven districts. Around the grounds stand a refinery, a tannery, metalworking shops and other workshops that process the ore mined from the hills, and the mine feeds their dreaded war wagons. Crushbone Citadel, home of Emperor Crush and his three wardens, has three towers, each three storeys tall and joined at the top floor by bridges. The orcs carry off elf and dwarf children to raise as slaves and miners, and keep a temple to Bertoxxulous with a blood-filled Bleeding Stone Altar.
Emperor Crush and the dark elves
Crushbone had recently signed a treaty with the Teir’Dal of Neriak. A sealed letter to King Naythox Thex records that Emperor Crush agreed to aid Neriak’s wars in return for the Indigo Brotherhood’s help against the Deathfist orcs. In EverQuest II an orc named Vergeth Jawcrush writes a frantic journal accusing the Teir’Dal ambassador D’Vinn of whispering in Emperor Crush’s ear, and a later book of decrees is signed “Emperor D’Vinn.”
War in Faydark
Norrath’s newspapers covered the orcs’ great sortie. While the elves trained troops to send to Antonica against the dark elves, the orcs, believing Crushbone was the target, attacked first. Neriak’s Signal gloated that the elves’ war preparations were “convincingly destroyed.” The troll-written Foreign Quarterly put it more simply: “Dey comes out of da Crushplace an kills da happy elfs.”
Where the sources disagree
An EverQuest in-game book, “The Founding of Crushbone,” tells a different origin: freed orc slaves left homeless after betraying someone named Dagnor. Another, “The Story of Edril,” says the elven hero Edril was involved in Crushbone’s founding. The RPG legend above mentions neither.
Sources
[1] Library of Erudin: Crushbone (Realms of Norrath: Forests of Faydark) · [2] Library of Erudin: Clan Crushbone (War in Faydark!; Orcs Kill Elfs!; Sealed Letter To King Naythox Thex)
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources listed on this page; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.