Long before the Montagnards arrived in Oceanyka, before even the first British colonists set foot on its shores, there was the Dow—a lost race of mountain-dwellers and subterranean engineers whose ruins stretch across the continent, from Victoria all the way up to Cape York. The Do-Kharak, as the Dow called their empire, once spanned the entire length of the Great Dividing Range and deep into the Underdown, the vast subterranean world beneath Oceanyka. At their peak, they commanded a network of fortress-cities, underground highways, and massive foundries, producing advanced weapons, machinery, and constructs.
Evidence suggests the Dow were masters of metallurgy, geology, and chemistry, capable of shaping the mountains themselves, turning their barren insides into lush gardens and enormous manufactories. Bronze and fire were, to them was as sacred as food and water. Prior to the arrival of the first Aboriginals tribes, they lived out a nomadic lifestyle, weathering out the Great Dividing Range's harsh winters and constantly on the edge. When the Aboriginal peoples settled in the Murray-Darling Basin and grew out what would later become the First Empire, it seems that they and the Dow came to an agreement: the former would be masters of the plains, the latter of the mountains, and the secrets of agriculture were revealed to the Dow people, adapted to lifeforms brought from the Underdown so that they could thrive in their mountain-hollows. According to Aboriginal folklore, the Dow were inept at magic and, as such, compensated with ingenuity, inventing a system of runecraft which, though more inflexible than traditional magic, could do more or less the same job. Because runecraft could only be applied on "dead" objects, its practical applications resembled more modern machines than regular sorcery. Runecraft is believed to be the direct predecessor of spell programming.
The Zermans, who have traditionally inhabited the Great Dividing Range's valleys and alpine forests, did not fare well with this arrangement, as their homelands lay in the overlap between the Aboriginal and Dow realms. In the ensuing power struggle, they were enslaved wholly by the Dow; their new lives were as industrial animals, with no other tasks than to be born, work and die for the Do-Kharak's needs.
Although economically powerful, the Do-Kharak were unprepared for the Ferozen Invasion. When the Ferozen armies marched upon the Great Dividing Range, the Do-Kharak closed its gates to the outside world, facing the enemy in the claustrophobic tunnels, highways and halls of the carved-out mountains. The Ferozen were successfully driven down into the forests, but not without enormous Dow casualties, owing to Ferozen ferocity and ironworked weaponry. Seeing their chance, the Zermans began a great war of annihilation, both to earn their freedom and to banish the Dow from the Earth as a whole.
As if this were not enough, the Zerman Revolt coincided with a strange phenomena; something came from beneath. Historians believe this was a mass migration of Underdown creatures into the proto-Bastions driven by environmental factors, while Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies believe it was an invasion by much more sinister creatures. Regardless, in Dow inscriptions this phenomenon is called the Darktide, and is their last historically recorded event. Over a period of a few years the Dow population, which had once numbered in the millions, was reduced to scattered bands of survivors driven deep into the Underdown, where the environment was sure to kill them. Those that escaped to the areas surrounding the southern Great Dividing Range were hunted down by the Ferozen invaders or the Zerman rebels.
Almost two millennia later the Montagnards began to occupy the Dow's ruins, seeing eerie cultural similarities between themselves and the Dow. They have spent over a century reclaiming their lost Bastions, re-establishing them as functional city-states and rediscovering many of the arts of mountain-living. Yet even today, most of the Underdown remains unexplored, and many Montagnards fear what might still lurk in its depths. Many of the Bastions' ancient passages leading downwards remain blocked off with boulders and bronze gates, all plastered with warnings.
For almost two millennia, the Dow have all but disappeared from Oceanyka. And yet, in the mid-1960s, strange reports from spelunker teams deep in the Underdown have emerged of creatures that fit the description of these ancient peoples, yet... uncanny, as if their form had been ravished by the Underdown. For now, these are just urban legends.