Return to the Egg

For some time I have had a small issue with one aspect of Terafa's lore - way back in the day I decided it would be cool to allow bugbears as a playable race, an option that one player in particular took advantage of for two notable PCs. Unfortunately, I have since rethought the role that I want bugbears to play in the setting, which meant that they didn't really fit in the desired role.

In the interim, WotC provided me with another small headache, but fortunately each of these problems can provide the answer to the other. Specifically, I have decided to recast those two PCs I mentioned above as dragonborn, and allow them to fill the slot now vacated by bugbears. Which is nice.

Anyway, moving on...

In addition to the legend of "The Curse of the Dragon's Gold" (which is told more about dragonborn than by them), the dragonborn have another significant legend that they tell: The Return to the Egg.

The dragonborn call themselves "The Last People", and maintain that they have existed on Terafa for some twelve thousand years. This places the origin of that people long before the Arrival of Man, before the genesis of the Elves... and indeed before the supposed creation of the world, which is reckoned to have occurred nearly six thousand years ago. (More specifically, 5780 years ago.)

In that time before time, the dragonborn established a great empire, Talkalasa, the Empire of the Seven Sins. Founded in the honour of the seven great progenitor dragons, Talkalasa was a proud, powerful, and utterly degenerate empire. All of Terafa fell under its sway.

But, as with all things that have a beginning, Talkalasa had an end. As Cavcari's Last Invocation began to unfold upon the empire, the greatest seers and sages of the dragonborn developed a plan, a way for their people to evade their end. And so, the boldest and best of the dragonborn were selected. The paragons of the dragonborn people would return to the egg, entering a strange kind of stasis, to rest for an age and half an age, and to emerge once the threat had passed. Their destiny was to reestablish the lost empire of Talkalasa.

Alas for the dragonborn, things did not work out as their sages had foreseen. Whether because the calculations were incorrect or because the eggs were disturbed, the dragonborn paragons slept too long, and emerged into a world utterly changed. No sign of the ancient borders of Talkalasa remain, and precious few other signs.

Worst of all, the dragonborn paragons were themselves diminished by their long sleep, their skills regressed to the most basic level. And they find themselves scattered across time, with some few emerging in the distant past, some a millennium ago, but more and more of them over the past century. Now, almost all dragonborn have emerged from their sleep, but they find themselves lost in a world changed. The dragonborn of this age, descendants of the earliest paragons to emerge, are a poor shadow of the old people, bereft of the great racial memory that made Talkalasa what it was.

And thus is born the great tragedy of the dragonborn, the last people of Terafa.