Mól

Mól is a culture, not a people. The Empire was predominantly hobgoblin and made up of many races besides, and when a thing is called Mól it means it belongs to that empire, not that it came of a Mól bloodline. A Mól sword, a Mól lock, a Mól ruin: all of it means of the Empire. There is no such person as a Mól.

It is said Moe. It has been seven hundred years and people still get that wrong.

What It Left

Gray stone with veins of ore running naturally through it, which is a strange thing to find and the single most repeated fact about the Empire in any account. It is still holding up Loshev’s town hall and its south bridge. It is in Haudh-Gwenn’s foundations, and Haudh-Gwenn’s aqueducts still run on it. It is the obelisk over a grave at Vigil, and the floor of a wealthy woman’s cellar. Kithul can hear something whispering in it.

Their metal was electrum, and not for show. It conducts magic, which is why it is woven as filigree through keep-stone and grave-stone alike, set into crowns and circlets and rings, and laid into the face of an anvil.

The building itself nobody has matched since. Map rooms holding permanent relief maps carved in stone, with sections that lift out and swap as the land changes. Doors on twelve-symbol combinations. Locks that carry a live charge and want a metal ring pushed into them as a sacrifice. Pillared halls, planar sigils, water that can be commanded from a basin, sewers that flush themselves. It is great architecture, and how any of it was made was forgotten long ago.

The Clans

The Empire ran on great clans, each with its trade and its blood. An Emperor always came from Clan Saytar, who were its rulers and its alchemists. Säv were the bugbear administrators who bred the Idirian horses and, it is said, truly ran the place with access rather than swords. Zarkhûn were the engineers and metallurgists who made the Wraithblade. The Muharib guarded the gateways between worlds.

There were nine. Older tellings count seven, an imperial clan and six pillars beneath it, which leaves out Darakûn and sets Nabrûl aside as never quite confirmed in that rank; but nine is the number the Empire actually ran on.

Each of the seven cursed keeps answers to one of those clans and holds its relic. That is the shape the whole of the present trouble turns on.

What It Made of People

The Peren were engineered. Bred to a purpose in an imperial program, refined across iterations that still have numbers attached to them, and held as slaves until they rose about seven hundred years ago and the Empire came apart. That is the account the Elder gives, and the one written into the histories the party has read.

It is not a universal account. The textbooks of Peredhel, whose people are Peren, do not record that the Peren were ever slaves of anyone. Leon said so plainly when the Elder’s version was put to him, and nobody in the room could answer it.

The deepest telling goes further back still, and holds that the goblin-kin themselves were one ancient regional stock that spent more than a thousand years being bred and refined by their own hand into hobgoblins, bugbears and the rest, with plain goblins as the material worked on. In that account the Peren were simply another run of the same program. How anyone came to know that was never written down.

The Sacrilege

Souls are meant to reach the inner planes at death and not before. Clan Saytar took the view that the journey could be hurried, and their laboratories set about accelerating souls into elemental form while their owners still lived. A cross-clan religious order opposed them and called it what it was.

That is the seed of the curses. It is why there is a keep under Haudh-Gwenn full of green sludge that used to be people, and it is why the overarching curse is called the Shattered Throne: rulers go mad, and the first to go was the last regent of House Säv. Seven hundred years later the land is still broken and still has no ruler.

The word Idir is ancient Mól. It means no crown.

The Elemental Nodes

The Empire’s scholars did not stop at the keeps. They went into the inner elemental planes, into what one account calls the very fabric of reality, and in the end they were drawing power directly out of those realms. The work left marks. The Elemental Nodes they made are still findable across Erôth, and some of them are still active.

What that cost is an open argument and not a settled one. Some scholars hold that the Mól inadvertently became the cause of the gods’ fading presence. Nobody has proved it. What is not in dispute is that the question is being asked in earnest and paid for: recent finds in Idir have set off something like a gold rush, with nations and faiths both funding the search for why the gods seem so much less present than the old stories have them.

The company is standing in the middle of that region while it happens.

Campaign Updates

Nothing about the Empire has changed. No keep has been broken. Clan Zarkhûn’s Wraithblade has been taken off a dead man in the street and shut away, the Ring of Säv is in Mikhail’s pocket unworn, and a crown of the Muharib sits on whichever of them is wearing it that season.

One clan is not gone. The Muharib were removed, or seceded, depending on who tells it, before the Empire fell, and that is how they lasted. They are in the mountains of Vala, they keep the old tenets, and they are actively taking back Mól work that left their hands at the fall. They have already raided for it. Torgun Kurvroc claims their descent and built his house into real Mól ruins.

The Empire’s own account of itself does not exist. What the party has instead is Telvanius’s thirty volumes, written by an enslaved Peren scholar in a flattering register that inverts into mockery once you know to look, with the Empire’s weaknesses coded underneath. No emperor is named in any of it. Not the last one. Not any of them.