The Ages of Norrath

The Nameless

The old texts say that outside space and time there is a being called only the Nameless, and that it made everything that is, was and will be. From its mind came the universe, its suns and worlds, and a host of powerful but finite beings that mortals would call gods.

The 2002 EverQuest roleplaying game tells the same beginning a little differently: the Nameless forged law out of chaos, made the gods, and then stopped creating, leaving the gods to do the rest.

Sources: Library of Erudin: “The History of Norrath” (original EverQuest manual text) · Library of Erudin: EverQuest RPG Player’s Handbook: History of Norrath (2002) · Library of Erudin: The Nameless

Dragons, then pacts

The first god to find Norrath was Veeshan, the Crystalline Dragon. She left her brood on the frozen continent of Velious and tore great wounds in the land with her claws to stake her claim. That began the Age of Scale.

Other gods noticed, and they were jealous. Brell Serilis quietly seeded the world’s depths with his own creatures, sealed his portal, and then talked Tunare, Prexus and Rallos Zek into a pact to divide the world and keep the Wurmqueen in check. From that pact came the dwarves, the kedge, the elves and the giants: the Elder Age. A second pact, with Bristlebane and Cazic-Thule, added gnomes, halflings, trolls and lizard men, and Rallos Zek’s ogres and orcs.

Sources: Library of Erudin: “The History of Norrath” (original EverQuest manual text) · Library of Erudin: EverQuest RPG Player’s Handbook: History of Norrath (2002) · Library of Erudin: The Ages of Norrath

Curses and collapse

The ogres built an empire across much of Tunaria and then invaded the Plane of Earth itself. When the gods finally threw Rallos Zek back, they sealed the Planes of Power and cursed his children: the ogre empire collapsed, the giants’ lands froze, and the goblins’ curse was so complete that no record of it survives. The manual calls what followed the Age of Monuments.

Then the Marr twins made the barbarians (the Age of Blood), Solusek Ro burned the Elddar Forest into desert (the Lost Age), and humanity appeared, built the Combine Empire, and lost it almost as fast.

Sources: Library of Erudin: “The History of Norrath” (original EverQuest manual text) · Library of Erudin: EverQuest RPG Player’s Handbook: History of Norrath (2002) · Allakhazam: Combine Empire

Enlightenment and turmoil

After the Combine, humans settled the plains of Karana. Antonius Bayle founded Qeynos in the west, Freeport grew rough and dangerous in the east, and the continent of Tunaria was renamed Antonica after one of their own. A frail scholar named Erud led a faction across the sea to Odus and built Erudin: the Age of Enlightenment.

Then some Erudites found necromancy. The civil war that followed was fought with magic, hundreds died, and the last battle blew a vast chasm into the earth. The heretics built Paineel inside it, and an uneasy fear has kept the peace ever since. That is the Age of Turmoil, the world you logged into in 1999.

Sources: Library of Erudin: “The History of Norrath” (original EverQuest manual text) · Library of Erudin: EverQuest RPG Player’s Handbook: History of Norrath (2002) · Library of Erudin: The Ages of Norrath

The Marking

An EverQuest II book, The Age of Scale, says there were no ages before the Age of Scale. Norrath existed untouched, and time passed with nothing to notice it, until “the claw of Veeshan scraped across the world” in the Marking, which divided time from non-time and being from non-being.

Sources: Library of Erudin: Veeshan (The Age of Scale, House Item)

The Lost Age and the broken moon

EverQuest II’s The Wheel of Time looks back from the far end of the ages. The ancient elf Aataltaal, sitting on the Thundering Steppes, watches Luclin keep breaking apart overhead, and reflects that “for hundreds of years now” the disappearance of the gods had been called the Lost Age, a name given “by those who knew little to nothing of events during that time.”

Sources: Library of Erudin: Luclin (The Wheel of Time)