Profiles in History: The Brotherhood of Shapers
Last summer, after a mighty storm, the citizens of Cavendo found themselves hosts to a group of Humans who had been shipwrecked during the night. These were the Brotherhood of Shapers, a tribe of master crafters who had been wandering the seas of Auberean in a salvaged Empyrean vessel, camping here and there to mine and work, and departing again at the first sign of Olthoi, for about five generations. At the time, we were at a loss to explain where they had lived before that; but after the Wandering Folk set up camp south of Arwic, we were forced to conclude that the Shapers had also been living a nomadic life, one jump ahead of Olthoi and other local fauna, somewhere on land. It is interesting to note that they were not only all Humans, they were all Aluvians, as their names and their physiognomy make clear.
Within hours they had discovered our portal network and dispersed to the three capital towns of Cragstone, Ikeras, and Linvak Tukal and to the secondary cities of Hakata and Ondekodo; though their main research-and-development headquarters appears still to be in Cavendo, as you will see.
The Shapers seized on the inefficient and rarely-used workshops in these towns, retooled them, and gave them new power sources, making them so effective that no one would ever want to craft out in the wilds again. They quickly discovered rich sources of the coal necessary to most crafting recipes and of the rare materials Flawless Pyreal, Gathered Deruwood, and Imbued Obsidian, and set up vendors to sell these materials in the crafting centers. They also taught us new mining, surveying, and toolmaking techniques that far surpassed what we had been able to do in the way of resource-gathering in earlier days. Before the Shapers, a skilled miner could process a single packload of trait in a day; if he wanted more, he must loot salvageable items from his kills and hope that they were pure enough for his purposes. Now a skilled miner can go into the field again and again, his capacity limited only by his patience, for he can stack all the trait he can gather into a single purified lump.
More revolutionary even than that, however, were the crafting techniques the Shapers taught us. As always, long practice is required and perfection is not achieved overnight, but a skilled weapon- or armorcrafter can make a piece to order, in the strength and style requested by the customer, and in most cases surpass anything that can be looted from kills. Even more astonishing, if a hunter finds on a kill a piece of armor or weaponry that is itself inferior, but carries a desirable spell, a Spellbinder can pull the spell bodily from the looted piece, embodying it in a Totem that the user can apply to a crafted piece.
In the following months the Brotherhood of Shapers, acknowledging that their own numbers were too few to accomplish all the projects they had planned, enlisted the aid of the people of Dereth in building shops in the crafting center towns. Donations of both gold and building materials were accepted by the local Architect, and when enough materials were received, a shop would open, staffed by the local townspeople, to sell trait, weapons, armor, and other items on consignment. All of this has been accomplished in less than a year.
And at some point during that year, in the high councils of the Kingdoms whose minutes are not available to public record, the decision was reached to make an extraordinary request of the Brotherhood.
Even before the beginning of the Golden Age, our ancestors had learned enough from Asheron's teaching and from experimentation to build portal networks to specification; in the years after Martine opened the portals to Arramora, the servants of Queen Elysa built new portals between town and town, housing them in neat earth-sheltered stone structures, and even moved some portals from the outskirts (e.g., the Yaraq-to-Samsur portal, far out on a road toward the Inner Sea) to central locations for easier access. When our ancestors retreated to the Shelters, they took this knowledge with them and preserved it. Early explorers of the generation before our own, before they perished, set up the beautifully organized town gateway and regional ringway systems we have today. In recent memory our scientists have added new portals to the ringways, generally to allow peace-loving folk to avoid Kingdom-conflict areas.
But we cannot build a portal to a place unless we know its coordinates. Thus, we were unable to reach Arramora and build portals to its various regions until we found a back door to it in the depths of the Chaos Forge. We still cannot build portals to the Halaetan Islands, once the homeland of the Viamontians, because we have lost their coordinates. Late in the Golden Age our ancestors began the reconquest of Knorr, but the coordinates were lost in the Devastation and none of us knew how to regain them.
But the Shapers, before the destruction of their ancient ship, had been there.
Representatives of the Order of Dereth and the Shadow Kingdom therefore approached the Brotherhood of Shapers and commissioned a portal to Knorr. The Brotherhood's most skilled cartographer, Waltraud, set up shop near Cavendo (a further hint that their main R-and-D facility is there) and his staff began work on a large portal platform, sunk in a pit just off the road toward Rithwic. Order and Shadow warriors guard the rim of the pit, keeping off stray Lashers and idle sightseers.
At this point, several matters invite consideration.
The immediate question is, why are Order and Shadow participating in this project, but not Dominion? Is this a reflection of some current interKingdom diplomatic disagreement, above and beyond the ongoing general capture-the-flag wargames of the Kingdoms' warriors? Can there be a secret understanding between Isin Dule and Nalicana, to which young Thromer is not admitted? Or could it be simply that the Virindi said, "We live in portalspace, we can go wherever we like; why bother building portals?" We may never know.
Another interesting point is that the Knorr portal is sunk in a pit. Why? Is it to protect it against possible assault? Will a fortress later be built around and over it? Or is it perhaps a reconstruction of an earlier portal, buried in Cavendo's drifting sands over the last five hundred years, and recently excavated? The stone- and brickwork supporting the portal is obviously new. But tumbled blocks of stone lie around it on all sides. (And note that the return portal from Knorr to Dereth, deep within the Skyport Concourse and not built by the Brotherhood, returns the traveler to that same spot.)
A third interesting point is that, while all the original Shapers were Aluvian Humans, and Master Waltraud is clearly one of these, the Shapers working under him include Humans, Tonk, and Lugians. It appears there is a training workshop somewhere (also in Cavendo?), but that the Shapers are not advertising openly for apprentices. Their numbers, after all, are few and they are spread thin; they do not want to be swamped by a wave of applicants. Perhaps one day Billy Mountain, Confluxus, Jorgen, Momm, or Yukiko Suzuki will feel a tap upon his shoulder and turn to see a grizzled old Aluvian who says to him softly, "Would you like to go back to school?"
In the meantime, we have access to Knorr. The portal drops us at the foot of the ramp to the Skyport, which houses a Lifestone and portals to other parts of Knorr, though access to these is not easily achieved. We have taken a second step in our journey to reclaim our world: but we must walk warily.
