Lore · Ages & Empires
The Iksar Empire
If you ever rolled an iksar, you remember being kill-on-sight in almost every city on Norrath. The iksar have never forgotten why they are alone.
The Age of the Snake
The iksar say that Cazic-Thule placed them on Kunark untold ages ago, scattered and unlearned. The serpent-like Shissar enslaved them, using them, in one sage’s telling, as workers and as food. From their capital of Chelsith, in what is now the Overthere, the Shissar studied dark rites that would later shape iksar thought.
Then the skies opened and the Green Mist came. The Shissar melted away screaming; the iksar were untouched. The iksar still mark that day by desecrating something the Shissar made.
Sources: Allakhazam: Shissar · Library of Erudin: Rise of the Iksar · Library of Erudin: Iksar
Tribes into an empire
Free, the iksar split into rival tribal states and fought one another across Kunark. Some shamans drew power from Cazic-Thule; others dug into the dark arts the Shissar left behind. It took one warrior-mage of the Kunzar tribe, Venril Sathir, armed with a stolen book of war and necromancy, to bring the tribes under a single banner, willingly or not.
Under Venril the iksar became the Sebilisian Empire, with its capital at Sebilis, shipyards at Viesar and Danak, and giant and froglok slaves raising monuments in its name. Its navy was said to be immune to piracy, and free to plunder whoever it liked.
Sources: Allakhazam: Venril Sathir · Library of Erudin: Sebilisian Empire
The dragons strike
The empire’s growth frightened the dragons of the Ring of Scale. When Trakanon and some younger dragons sank Emperor Rile Sathir’s ship in a conjured storm, the iksar and the dragons fought a war that lasted almost half a century. The Field of Bone, once fertile grassland in the empire’s heart, is that war’s scarred battlefield, and there Ganak, the last of the iksar emperors, killed the great dragon Jaled Dar.
By the time adventurers reached Kunark in 2000, the iksar were rebuilding in Cabilis among the ruins of their own past.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Ganak (Field of Bone) · Library of Erudin: Trakanon · Allakhazam: Rile Sathir
The plague that spoke
The in-game book Green Mist describes the moment of deliverance. A green cloud formed over the Overthere and came down “like a plague from the gods above.” A face of death took shape in its core, belonging to no god that either the iksar or the Shissar knew, and it spoke in unknown tongues. A 2006 developer post adds that the Greenmist is “an arcane force all its own”: it is not the Avatar of Fear, though gods can speak through it.
Survivors on the moon
The RPG sourcebook Luclin reveals that not every Shissar died. The writings of T’sharnell, first wizard of Emperor Ssraeshza’s court, describe a cure spell that only partly worked. It saved the survivors from the plague by carrying them to the moon of Luclin. There they raised a dome of magical force and drew all the air from the region except around their new temple, so the Greenmist could never reach them. Descendants of their iksar slaves still served them there, long after Norrath had decided the Shissar were a myth.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Rise of the Iksar Empire (Luclin RPG sourcebook — The Shissar)
How the iksar remember
The EverQuest II book Paying Homage to the Past ties iksar rites to their history. They mark the Green Mist by desecrating something the Shissar made. They honour those slain when Trakanon destroyed Sebilis with a funeral pyre. And they recall their later enslavement in Freeport, which ended when they helped the Overlord crush the Rallosians, by throwing his tools of oppression into the sea. An iksar race book adds that hatchlings rarely speak their first word before they begin training for the crusades, and that iksar wear armour to every social occasion.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Rise of the Iksar Empire (Paying Homage to the Past; DoNRaceBookIksar)
Where the sources disagree
- Shissar or Shissir: one in-game sage’s tale spells the snake people “Shissir.”
- How the Green Mist came is told differently by each side: the iksar call it sacred deliverance; the sage says the snake people angered their own gods.
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources linked under each chapter; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.