The Duxies of Despar and Wasfal (ca. 4,500 - 5,400 I.D.)

Following the creation of the Duxy of Flasten, the Mar turned much of their attention to the fierce and forbidding Dead Swamps - a region that would earn its name over the course of three millennia. Expeditions and colonists from every duxy entered the dense swamps. Some even managed to establish outposts for a year or more at a time before abruptly vanishing - sometimes without even leaving a survivor to tell stories of the packs of damnens that had wiped them out.

Weard Delling Despar never intended to fight on the damnens' terms, however. He raised an army of wizards and mundanes - nearly 20,000 in all - and orchestrated an elaborate military campaign to drive out the damnens and capture the Dead Swamps. A brilliant strategist, Weard Despar achieved his objective and held the region against the damnens and any other Drakes for twelve years, founding the Duxy of Despar and becoming its first dux.

The damnens bided their time, competing with the kobolds to the east for resources. Forty years later, mere months after Dux Despar had died of simple old age - a rare and celebrated cause of death, among Mar - the damnens hatched a counter-strategy. They invaded the Duxy of Despar from the east, wiping out more than enough towns to attract the attention of Dux Despar's successor. While the Despar army marched against the damnens in the east, a much larger army of damnens snuck into the duxy along the southern coast and laid swift siege to Despar Palus. Deprived of most of its army, the duxy capital fell in a matter of weeks.

The damnens carried off the survivors to serve purposes that have become stories by which Mar frighten their children. The Mar army returned to find their homes in ruins and their families gone. By most accounts, Despar's army scattered within days - some fanning out to search for survivors, some attempting to rebuild the fallen city, some marching into the swamps in search of damnens upon which to avenge themselves, and some accepting defeat and fleeing to one of the other duxies. The damnens were equal to this new threat, however, and the Duxy of Despar - which had only stood for half a century - ceased to be.

While the Dead Swamps would remain unconquered by the Mar for the rest of Marrishland's history, the Duxy of Pidel expanded northeast along the coast of the subcontinent. The settlements in these new lands faced constant attacks by kobolds that claimed the coastal lands as their own, as well as the occasional predations of damnens that sometimes ventured beyond the denser swamps to hunt.

After five full centuries of sometimes sporadic and often endemic warfare between the kobolds and the Mar on the coast, the Duxy of Pidel had nearly tripled its size. More surprisingly, they enountered something the Mar had stopped hoping to find centuries ago - signs of another Mar civilization nestled in the foothills of Huinsy. In later centuries, this would be called the Duxy of Wasfal.

Little is known about the origins of the Wasfal Mar. Some scholars believe they were the descendants of the Liter Asper Alliance who had survived the Marrishland Massacre by fleeing into Huinsy. Others suggest they were simply the scions of generations of mapmakers who had travelled far to the east. Still others claim these were new Mar - born of the union of the remnants of Fygaen civilization and the wints of the Hundred Tribes.

Whatever their heritage, what the Wasfal Mar lacked in civil structure and magical knowledge, they made up for in the wealth of the resource-rich civilizations far to the east. The Duxy of Pidel soon established strong diplomatic ties with these Mar, establishing an overland trade route to ferry goods from Wasfal to the resource-poor duxies in the west. Within a hundred years, the Duxy of Pidel possessed more wealth than all the other duxies combined.

For centuries, the other duxies tried to compete. The Duxy of Flasten spent two centuries engaged in a dozen wars with kobold tribes in an ultimately fruitless attempt to expand its territory eastward across the swamps between the duxy and Wasfal.

The Duxies of Gunne and Domus explored the possibility of using the Rubus Amnus to transport goods to Wasfal via canoes, but both eventually abandoned the project. It is said that between Drake ambushes, the natural perils surrounding the Rubus Amnus east of the Duxy of Flasten, and no small amount of Mar sabotage, not one expedition in twenty reached Wasfal and returned.

The Duxies of Skrem and Piljerka built a small fleet of coast-hugging ships to transport goods from the east. Many Mar sea captains made their fortunes on these expeditions, but as these ships could not make the entire trip without pulling into harbor along the way, and as the Duxy of Pidel controlled all the ports along their route, these voyages only served to further expand the wealth and power of Pidel Palus.

When the other duxies learned the Duxess of Pidel was funding privateers to maintain her duxy's monopoly on trade goods from the east, mere envy became true war.

(Contributed by Weard Gilda Kronas)

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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