Based on the world of Grandilar, setting of the game Dragonstorm, by Susan Van Camp, published by Black Dragon Press. Concepts used by permission.

 

Preface

Somewhere I got it into my head that a sufficiently talented fantasy writer shouldn’t need an expository preface to enable his readers to make sense of his story. It was a silly idea, and I have no idea where it came from; Tolkein felt that LoTR needed an expository preface, and while I am seldom accused of having great wisdom, I certainly know better that to attack the credentials of JRRT.

This story stands pretty well on its own, but it was originally written for an audience that was already familiar with the setting. As I am now attempting to broaden that audience a bit, some sort of introduction seems necessary.

I first encountered Susan Van Camp’s “Dragonstorm” game sometime in 1996, in the form of a bright orange card box with a roaring green dragon on the front. The back of the box described a card based role playing game (still a pretty unusual concept several years later) in which players became shapeshifting freedom fighters (Dwarven Gargoyles, Elven Unicorns, Human Dragons and Werewolves) in a world controlled by evil necromancers. I was intrigued. I was also broke, and in the game store for a specific item I had saved for (the identity of which has been lost to time). I sadly put the box back on the shelf.

A year and a change in financial circumstances later, I finally bought one of those little orange boxes. The cards were beautiful, the game mechanics were decent, if a bit simple for my rather masochistic tastes, and the setting…

I fell head over heels in love with the world. It was a beautiful and magical place in which the bad guys had WON. The player characters had amazing gifts with which to fight their soul-eating enemies, but those very gifts also made them targets. And on top of that, since the enemy was in control, the common people believed that the shapeshifters were WORSE than the necromancers were. Because the shapeshifters supposedly controlled the huge magical “dragon” storms that shredded the landscape and caused horrible mutations in anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in one. Of course, there was always a chance that someone who had a bit of dragon’s blood in them might find themselves changed into a shapeshifter by the storm, and since dragons had ruled the world for thousands of years, and could shapeshift, and… Let’s just say that EVERYONE had a drop or two of dragon’s blood. Things could get complicated.

As I said, dragons had ruled the world for thousands of years; some two hundred years before my story starts, that changed. During a draconic religious festival in which all of the most powerful dragons were in deep trance states (The Day of the Dead, or “Death Day”), a coalition of draconic enemies attacked and killed the sleeping dragons and stole their power, releasing enormous amounts of toxic magical “warp” into the world in the process. The triumphant coalition then dissolved into a back stabbing brawl, but the damage was done. The ancient dragons were dead, and the warp using necromancers were in control.

Sue calls the world “Grandilar” and has given most of the traditional fantasy races a bit of a twist. Grandilar’s orcs are gray-skinned gypsies who revere dragons, worship their ancestors, and enjoy causing trouble, but are not fundamentally malevolent. Dwarves have a predilection for stone and metal work, but have been so scattered by wars with dragons, necromancers, and each other that they have no culture of their own. Elves are long lived and magical, and their heritage is in the forests, but only the dark skinned Ebony elves have maintained their original culture. The fair-skinned Farillan elves have been assimilated into the general mortal polyglot culture, and the warped (and often green skinned) Haskalads are both the leaders and the primary victims of the necromantic regime. Humans, as usual, are a little bit of everything. And that is only the major races; there are the wakana man-wolves, werewolves who sacrificed the power to shift shape to warp magic; the vermite rat people; deer- and goat- and sheep- headed Vorn, who tend to eat their enemies; the Tigreans (anthropomorphic tigers); the Das Karr (anthropomorphic foxes, occasionally with wings); ghosts of every size and temperament; the list goes on.

And then there is the matter of religion… The dragons never seemed to feel a need for religion, but the mortals in their service chose to worship an earth goddess named Elethay. When the necromancers came to power, they invented an alternative goddess named Jikadell, and it seems likely that after a couple of hundred years of insincere worship, there just might be a person behind the name after all. And then there is Valaria, the raven haired barbarian werewolf who, five hundred years before my story starts, jumped into the middle of a bonfire and predicted a day when the dragons would be brought low, and evil beyond imagining would walk the world. When she stepped out of the fire, Valaria found that her hair had turned permanently red. She soon learned that there was no way to avoid the coming cataclysm, and started training people to survive and fight back in a world that the dragons no longer ruled. Valaria died before the Deathday massacre, but her legacy lives on in the “Valarian Champions”, one of the few forces for good in the otherwise bleak landscape of Grandilar.

And having said that, on with the story.

Paul Haynie
December 4, 2002