The Roerbach Incident

The Roerbach Incident was a political incident in the early years of the Assembly. The chief participants were Selestei and Flandre, with some involvement by the Fractured Cities. There was a noticeable absence of involvement from the Boslavian Hegemony (ancestor to the Principality of Shaster) and, argue some scholars, from common sense.

As Dr. Jones notes in his article on Iurezza (not to be confused with Dr. Jones's article on Iurezza), the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns began life as a Flandrean contingency plan on the west coast of Iurezza. Its intent was to give the political leaders of the area a forum where they could mediate their disagreements without escalating to war. However, this vision failed to anticipate King Doric Foeslayer of Selestei. On his first visit to the Assembly in AES 25, King Doric challenged three different Sovereigns to wrestling matches and generally raised havoc in the hall. Then he jovially threatened to leave and return with an army.

High Exarch Kantamon, who had created the Assembly and was now faced with a threat to its legacy, knew he had to remove the boisterous Sovereign as a threat in whatever manner he could. Initially he attempted to goad King Doric into irritating Sornhandr, King Eternal, but—and this is where I suspect someone has tampered with the historical record—contemporary accounts indicate that King Doric charmed the old lich and the two of them went out drinking without King Doric succumbing to the curse of the electric undead.

His first plan having failed, High Exarch Kantamon received an unexpected blessing in the form of Zor Olo cracking and a large portion of the ocean vanishing within eyeshot of the Assembly hall. Drawing from legends of the Ultimate Dragonopolis, Kantamon procured some falsified maps of the Roerbach region of southern Iurezza. He then gave an exhortation to the Assembly that there were dragons nesting in southern Iurezza, and that they had struck at the moon. He put special emphasis on how dangerous they were, and how brave the warriors challenging them would have to be. King Doric, of course, immediately volunteered his armies.

While the Selesteine dragon-hunting fleet sailed south, High Exarch Kantamon sailed east. He traveled to the Fractured Cities and murdered a succession of Hierarchs in bloodmoots by dropping anvils on their heads, then forged a coalition of Fractured Cities militaries to invade Selestei. By the time they succeeded, of course, the coalition had already broken into no less than eleven factions, but as Selestei was bearing the cost of their infighting, Kantamon's objective had already been achieved. It would be centuries before either Selestei or the surrounding region recovered.

King Doric, meanwhile, failed to find any dragons, and moreover was misled by false maps. The Selesteine expedition, increasingly frustrated by the lack of dragons to slay, slaughtered their way through eight hundred miles of untamed wilderness before crossing the Skeptical Channel into the Careless Continent. Their sudden appearance there disrupted a delicate peace sixty years in the making, throwing the entire continent back into infighting.

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Most Honored Pierce Milton