Mól great clans

The Empire held countless clans through its rise, its rule and its collapse. The great clans were the few that actually ran it, and a clan was never only a bloodline: people married into one, were adopted into one, or were taken into one for service done well enough to earn it. To call a clan hobgoblin or bugbear by blood names the family at its center and not everyone who stood under its name.

Nine are named. Saytar was the Emperor’s own, and every Emperor came out of it. Säv were the regents. Zarkhûn were the engineers and the metallurgists. The Muharib guarded the gates between worlds. Twbykh, Khazûn, Barzûl and Darakûn stand beside them and are named as often. Nabrûl, Varag by blood, is named far less often than the other eight, and still more often than the dozens of clans below all nine.

The whole roll came out of one book. Mikhail broke the cipher on a green volume of the Mól Encyclopædia and sat up the rest of the night over it with Elliot, and it was Elliot who worked out what nine clans had to do with seven keeps. No keep would be Saytar’s, he reasoned, because Saytar ruled, and it made no sense for the ruling clan to hold one seat out of seven; and Nabrûl was named too seldom in the volume to be a likely candidate for another. That left seven keeps for the seven clans between them, each keep holding its own clan’s relic.

It has held up as the keeps have been found. The circlet carried out of the Twisted Grove is the Crown of Echoing Steel and it is Muharib work; the hooked sword out of Wraithblade Keep is Zarkhûn’s; the Ring of Säv is Säv’s. Before any of that the clans had been nations in their own right, which is why one keep reads nothing like the next.

Campaign Updates

None of the seven keeps has been broken, and of the nine clans one is still standing. The Muharib came out of the Empire before the fall, which is how they outlasted it, and they are in the mountains of Vala taking Mól work back by force. Zarkhûn’s blood was still keeping that clan’s war forge seven centuries after there was a clan to keep it for. Säv was erased thoroughly enough that people are still hunting whatever is left of it.

Twbykh, Khazûn and Darakûn are names and nothing more. No keep, no relic and no member of any of the three has come to hand, and what they did for the Empire was never discovered.