E is for-

Elves. Elves are the only sentient race that is native to my Garnia campaign world. Elves invented the magic gates by which they visited other worlds and other races migrated to theirs. The Elves are naturally Good in the same way that, say, Orcs are inherently Evil. The Elves used to have a continent spanning culture and lived in peace with the various immigrant races and each other. Unfortunately for the Elven race, and every other race present on their world, the greater forces of Evil also invented magical gate technology and used it to invade the Good world of the Elves. They sent in their specially bred troops, the Goblinoid races, the Trolls, and especially the Orcs. They weathered all of these threats with various degrees of success. The threat they couldn't handle was the arrival of Man. When Humans originally arrived on the Elven world, the Elves did not notice. When the Elves finally did notice the Humans, who had arrived in a barren steppe, they were cautious and observed them for over a century before arriving at a decision as to their nature and what to do. Unfortunately for the Elves, the Humans were not alignment bound and came from a warrior culture. The magic imbued world made the Humans mighty sorcerers as well. Humans bred quickly and kept bringing in more of their kind through the gate they controlled. The forces of Evil also brought more Humans to the world. Border clashes with the Humans, whom the Elves were attempting to keep bottled up in the northern steppes, eventually sparked off a full scale nearly genocidal war in which the Elven race was soundly defeated. The Elves lost for a multitude of reasons, the hardiness and adaptability of Human kind* and the fact that they were fighting off major offensives by the forces of Evil on other fronts simultaneously being prime among them. The Elves of the Garnia campaign setting are a largely defeated people, ruling themselves only in places where refugees fled during the great invasion of the people of Ailill**.

E is also for EBay. Ebay is the beast that eats my money and feeds my OSR habit. Over the last four months or so, I have bought rules sets that I either lost long ago or never had; I have quadrupled (at least) the number of miniatures I have, both old school and newish, even WotC plastics. My natural desire to hoard cool stuff is defeating my aesthetic desire to have a less cluttered house. I am not a nomad anymore, so I don't really need to keep my stuff to a minimum, but still.

E is for Eirik the red. Not only is Eirik the red a viking, which totally kicks ass, but he is probably the last real, old school viking. He got banned from Norway for being a viking bad-ass, so he moved to Iceland, where the old school vikings went to escape Norway's suppression of their bad-assery, and then got kicked out of there for being too hardcore too. Did he let getting kicked out of everywhere stop him? Hel no! He discovered a new land and set himself up as chief of state, then advertised for more settlers. His son Leif gets more attention for sailing a little further west and discovering north America, but he was more of the new breed of Northman; a Christian and a trader. Eirik held on to his heathenry.

E is for Evil. Evil is a real invasive force in my world of Garnia, not just a moral decision. My cosmology is based on Good planes and Evil planes with one balanced neutral plane between them. Evil wages ceaseless war to exterminate Good and vice versa. Evil is winning.

E is for Epic. Epic poems in particular. Epic poetry forms the heroic basis that I use as a framework for building off of. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, the Tain. These are our roots, they tell us what a hero is and what adventures are.

That's all for today, sorry to cut it short but I have work to do today and my eldest daughter is being inducted into French Honor Society tonight, so I need to have everything done and be ready to go before the induction ceremony and dinner.

*Rules-wise this world was built using AD&D 1st edition rules, pre UA; therefore Humans get all the real advantages level and class wise.

**Ailill being the name of the first High-King of the pan-Celtic peoples of the northern steppes. From him was descended the first Garnian royal dynasty.