This week being the first of our intermission between Chapters 1 and 2, I figured it would be a fun idea to dive into the histories of the world of “Beyond the Western Deep”. Nothing I’m going to say here will be required knowledge for upcoming BWD material – we just have a lot of history that we’ve been hashing out over the years and this seems a nice opportunity to tease a few fun events from the past.

HArkenloweGairFirstEra

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So, this week being the first post of its kind, I’ll drop a little bit of knowledge about “the beginning” – specifically, when history started being recorded in the comic world.

The first city to be “founded” was Gair, capital city of the Felis. Their founding scholars marked the occasion with the start of their first era, which they called The Era of Reason – named as such because the scholars believed that with the founding of their city, a focus on knowledge and understanding would elevate their kind above the others of the landscape. Yes, even back then they thought rather highly of themselves.

While each culture had their own method of dating (or lack thereof), the Felis started using a standard “Era:Year” system, so 1E:1 would be the first year of the first era. This system has since been adopted by the other cultures, save for hardcore traditionalists among the other races.

The Ermehn may not have had the more cultured civilization when they founded their original home city, H’arkenlowe, but they did have the virtue of being the second of all the races to establish a capital for their kind a mere nine years after Gair was founded. At this point in history there were no “kingdoms”, just city-states and wide swaths of unclaimed wildlands between them.

Enjoy the artwork, and remember if you have any more of your own to send in, you can send it our way at thewesterndeep (at) gmail (dot) com!