Drack

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The Drack were an indigenous people who lived for some 2,000 years on the southern-side of the Erum Range. The Drack are notable for their early development of high technology, and for rendering a large chunk of the Greater Continent uninhabitable (though the Marcons typically get blamed for that).

Location

Though the Dracks' original country never actually moved, it did change in topography rather significantly.

Original Location

The land of Drack was located south of the Erum Range, past the Agras Plain, on the Greater Continent. The region was originally bordered to the north by the Erum Range (which at the time was impassable), to the east by the lower Barrier Range, to the west by Clearwater Sound (which during the bulk of Drack civilization was called the Salted Sea as they did not know it was a sound), and to the south by the Southern Highlands.

Modern Location

Following Drack's destruction at the hands of an early iteration of the Marcon Alliance, the land was transformed into a twisted series of mountain ranges, dotted with highly-contaminated radioactive waste. The surviving Drack then worked with dragons to enclose the area with mountains and form Deadwater Lake, preventing the radiation from reaching the sea, which they then named the Clearwater Coast and later Clearwater Sound.

History

The Drack began as the Bear Clan during the Black Period of the Age of Darkness. By the Gray Period, they had already settled on a fertile plain south of the Erum Mountains, along the coast of Clearwater Sound.

By the beginning of the Mage Wars, the Bear Clan had evolved into the Drack, a name used both for the people-group and for the country. The region around Clearwater was, at the time, a very fertile plains region, with many natural contours trapping abundant water. The Drack quickly became skilled earth-workers, building dams and culverts and canals all over their region.

By 3475 B.G.A., the capital city of Daraka was at the center of a sophisticated network of waterways allowing for trade and irrigation all over what was then called the Clearwater Plain. Nuclear fission was probably discovered around this time, and by 3455 B.G.A., the first Drack nuclear reactor went critical. Electricity had been known to the Drack for decades by then, and at the time, they were considered the leaders in Magic-Tech.

The Drack also had access to several working Roads and had established numerous off-world colonies. By the Intermediate Period, the Drack controlled several planets. They had not, however, developed space-travel, nor any means to reach these colonies except through the Roads, which they had not yet learned to reproduce. Daraka, the capitol, still remained the hub of the entire Dracken world.

The beginning of the Dynastic Period can typically be set as the proto-Marconian invasion of Drack. The Marcons had begun to take over the entire Greater Continent, and decided to begin with Drack.

The Drackens, meanwhile, had been preparing for this invasion for generations, and unleashed a vast arsenal of inter-continental ballistic missiles at Marconian territory. Dozens of massive craters on the Marconian side of the Barrier Range, still visible by the Sixth Age, mark the sites of Marconian cities and towers.

But the Drack would not succeed in modifying the Marconian topography nearly as badly as the Marconians would devastate the Clearwater Plain. The Marcons build dozens of secret towers within the Barrier Range, selecting targets not of strategic value, but of geologic weakness. They aimed their spells at the very earth itself, raising huge mountains and opening volcanoes. In a year and a day, the vast Drack civilization was reduced to ashes.

Of much greater concern, however, were the nearly 1000 years' worth of nuclear waste the Drack had been accumulating. They had, from the outset, understood the dangers of radioactivity, and taken great pains to properly and safely store what materials they could not recycle.

With their world quite literally rent asunder, their precautions were ill-effective. But the waste was of little concern next to the hundreds of nuclear reactors suddenly breached. Loss of containment was total; nearly every core was exposed to the atmosphere. And with 90% of the Drack population instantly killed, it was well-past a worst-case scenario.

The Drack refugees traveled to Last Mountain, where they convened a meeting of their remaining scientists and explored what to do about the massively-contaiminated radioactive wasteland the Marcons had just created. A few hundred-thousand of Drack were still alive and healthy, but they were not going to survive for long. The Dracken Defense Force (D.D.F.) used its remaining tactical nuclear weapons to blast a path through the Erum Range, which they named Desperation Pass. They then evacuated the women, children, and surviving families onto the Agras Plain, cross the Agras river, and founded a city called New Hope. Some 75,000 Drack were said to have made it.

Those that stayed behind enlisted the aid of the Seacrest Spire Flight in dealing, as best they could, with the mess that was their homeland. The bulk of the contamination was contained in a new series of mountains that created a watershed to contain the radiation.

Dragon Mages helped the Drack raise two new mountain ranges, as well as a series of highlands, while the Drack diverted rivers into the now-enclosed region. Finally, the remaining Drack spent the next half-century building an elaborate series of earthworks to hem-in the final 500 miles of the verse's largest toxic waste dump. The resulting inland sea would come to be known as Deadwater Lake.

The descendants of the Drack mingled with the other peoples of the Agras Plain, and fought alongside them until the end of the Mage Wars. By then, few could trace their heritage back as far as the 75,000 settlers of New Hope, but every single person of Drack descent knew to stay north of Erum Range.

Foundation Actions

The old Gudersnipe Army was the first to discover the massively contaminated Drack. As they were busily crushing the Marcons at the time, there was little to do about it.

During the early Golden Age, one of the first acts of the then newly-formed Gudersnipe Foundation was to establish the Clearwater Commission, first tasked with determining the cause of the unusually-polluted area. Despite no signficant standing on the ground, the Foundation retained responsibility for the region, and over a thousand years later, Pendragon Sydnee Stanton used the region as grounds to have the Foundation remove its Boing-Boing missiles from service.