A wagon
train of human and halfling colonists first arrived on this stretch of coast
over 900 years ago. What they found was savage warring clans of goblins,
trapped in a death spiral of blood feuds and petty tribal disputes. The
colonists civilized the war loving natives. They subdued their fishing camps
along the coast, then, first in wood and later, after a wave of dwarven
immigration, in stone, they began to build the great city of Albasa. The Wooden
Palace, its spires adorned with carvings of local flora and fauna, still stands
amongst the new skyscrapers of Uptown as a testament to the craftsmanship of
the early colonists. Today it’s a tourist attraction and a monument to the power
of civilization to tame even the wildest of places. The city itself was named
after the goblin word for the fragrant variety of green onions that grow in the
surrounding swamps and Albasa is still referred to on occasion as ‘the onion
city’.
The city was eventually co-opted into becoming part of the vast Kalhom Empire. Majority human, Kalhom stood against the wild tribal lands of the goblins to its south and the large elven empire of Mixa to its north. Albasa began as a backwater of the empire but as its port grew so did its importance. It was the Sirin, however, that would make it one of the most powerful cities in the known world.
Despite knowing about the Sirin (the giant birds who nest on the mountain ridges to the north of the city), superstitions prevented the goblins from ever taming and riding these magnificent creatures. The colonists of the new city had no such qualms. They took the skies and in doing so the accelerated trade and their ability to wage war, Albasa became a cultural and financial powerhouse of the empire.
The Sirin were originally charmed into allowing human riders with the aid of magic. When, nearly 400 years ago the Tharn Plague came it nearly ended the age of the Sirin. From what the history books tell us the Tharn Plague seemed to feed off and be attracted to magic. Named after the northern lands of Tharn, home to a little understood race of sentient insects, it is now thought unlikely the disease actually originated there. Millions died and in its wake magic was banned or tightly controlled everywhere across the known world. Luckily, after some years of trial and error, and with the advantage of already having tamed birds to guide their young hatchlings, the people of Albasa learnt to tame the birds without resorting to the kind of charm magic they used in years gone by. Dominance of the air, lead to dominance of the land and it wasn’t long before Albasa became the most powerful city in Kalhom.
124 years ago a politician from Albasa, by then the capital of Kalhom rose to power – Calum Hoxha. He was a dictator and warmonger driven by a desire for fame and conquest. Under the Hoxha regime Modella (a religion followed by the humans and halflings) became the official religion and other species such as orcs, dwarves, elves and the native goblins were relegated to becoming second class citizens. He was ruthless both to his own people and to his enemies. At first, under Hoxha the Kalhom Empire thrived, experiencing an unrivaled economic boom as Hoxha began manufacturing arms and ammo on mass. He trained the Charn (enormous Sirin birds that can be ridden by humans) to drop explosive charges and plowed vast amounts of money into scientific research. Then 97 years ago he used a skirmish on the northern border to take Kalhom into a war with Mixa. In the three years of the war millions died – both soldiers and civilians. The war was primarily fought on horseback and by infantry units using rifles and other primitive fire arms. This combined with the new power of the Sirin’s bombing campaigns meant it was the most vicious and deadly conflict the world had ever seen. Towards the end of the war the Hoxha regime began making great scientific advances like creating more effective bullet proof vests and growing giant vegetables. But it wasn’t enough to turn the tide of the war and when the smoke cleared the elven empire of Mixa was victorious. The elven generals decided the best way to stop the threat of the Kalhom Empire from rising up again was to break it up into three separate city states, roughly divided according to differences in regional cultures, these were – New Pompa, Donanna and Albasa. The new states became democracies – each citizen who owned property voted to elect a mayor who would run not just the city but the wider state.
At the end of the war Hoxha was caught and hung on the gallows in Mareston, a neighborhood of Albasa. The gallows and the death penalty are still used today. The scientific advances that Kalhom experienced towards the end of the war that created cars, trains, machine guns and advanced forms of body armor have never been able to be replicated by scientists since. One sad example of this is that there’s a laboratory in Edgebury that maintains some of the giant vegetables originally created by the Hoxha regime with the aim of feeding their troops. They have been unable to create any new giant plants and have no idea how the scientists achieved it even after studying them. All they can do is act as custodians of these previous advances without the talent to progress them in any way.
This is believed to be because most of the scientists who worked for the Hoxha regime were rounded up at the end of the war and either imprisoned and taken back to the Mixa Empire or executed for war crimes.
Even nearly a century later the democratic reforms imposed on the new state of Albasa by the Mixa Empire are fragile and under threat by an newly emergent fascist movement, with groups like the political party ‘The New Command’ growing in popularity. Mixa is currently dealing with a threat from the northern land of Tharn and while there are still tensions between Mixa and the new city states of New Pompa, Donanna and Albasa no one believes the empire has the resources to fight a war on two fronts and the new city states aren’t powerful enough to oppose the empire individually.