Human Empire history

						A brief history of the Human Empire
								or
					How to fuck up everything for everyone for centuries to come.





Regarding the fall of humanity. Holy crap that sounds like a fluster-cluck of epic proportions. It's almost like everything lined up to tear the human civilization apart afterwards. Are dynastic curses a thing in this world? Like "For the sin of genocide may all you built crumble before your eyes."?

Eh. The empire was essentially formed by strong-arming local lords- people who had lived side by side with the monsters for generations, and turning them on their neighbours. Human supremacy was imported from the other side of the world, where the humans had wound up settling near a few weaker monster types. They easily dominated them, and, using the fact that they could expand freely in their area, massively outgrew the other cities/townships/etc. Then they decided that, as the 'strongest' human settlement, they were of course divinely blessed and meant to rule.
So they ran around, kicked dirt in everyone's face, at which point they ran into a variety of problems.
1- Humans are short lived, and weak to boot (sans classes, of course)
2- Monsters elsewhere in the world ARE NOT.
So the empire went up against the forest, before it had settled on the plains and built the capital. And when the 'expeditionary force' went up against the forest, they got slapped down, exceedingly hard. SO they limped back to the plains, declared themselves the rulers of all humans, etc- at this point, they were so large the economic pressure they could bring against townships forced everyone under their umbrella.
People generally didn't give a fuck about monsters, outside of the ones who'd kill people- but after a few generations of the church of human supremacy, and the empires rulings preventing trade and contact, outside of the scattered sort you get in the borders, people who'd gone under the empire's banner were more willing to listen, and, being the sort who would never forget a black mark against his divine bloodline, the emperor declared a crusade against the forest, and the rest is history.
There's a pile of other crap going on as well- Your standard aristocrat level corruption, the trade bans keeping a great deal of people poor, the empire neglecting cities it didn't found, and so on. but that about covers it.
Now to answer your actual question, Fate curses of that sort require bringing gods into the equation, and are excessively rare. Being 'policed' by gods, though, means that penitence is possible to lift the curse.


Was it only the monster races that hit a "dark age" of civilization (not like they completely regressed aside from a few groups such as the lizardmen and the packs), or did humans/elves/dwarves also end up having a collapse of their own?

Elves didn't get involved. As far as they were concerned, monsters have always been around, and always will be- and for a race as short-lived as humans, trying to 'tame' them was a fools errand. There was some gloating, and then they went back to doing whatever it is that elves do.
Dwarves didn't have a dark age, though their relations with the humans took a huge hit- The humans wanted to hire what essentially amounted to 'all the dwarven mercenaries', and dwarves took one look at their plans and said 'No', then slammed the door in their face.
Halflings wound up even more spread out than they were- When the army marched, it picked up 'volunteers' as it passed, acquired necessary rations and taxes, etc. When the halflings couldn't or wouldn't cooperate, they were driven out. Nearing two weeks into the march, every halfling town they passed through had been abandoned.
Human civilization fell to its component pieces, from a centralized ruler to barely cooperating lords- The key part is that when the army fell, the lords who had opposed the plan withdrew from the empire, while the rest tore it apart with infighting, coups made from whatever soldiers they'd held back- which would then fall apart as the citizenry accused the new lord of holding back men just for this purpose. By the end of the year, the empire's capital was a ghost town, more than half the lords had died, and noone was willing to put any faith in them anymore, from the peasantry to merchants, meaning they only held a limited military power.
The capital city, without a government to control it, or money to pay people to take care of it, fell apart. The ruins still stand at the centre of the plains halfway across the world.



Yikes. Approximately how long ago did this imperial implosion happen? Are we talking centuries or millennia here?

Centuries. About 6 and a half-ish. Long enough for the artificial hatred of monsters to fade, mostly into a tolerable sort of fear. Border towns are better, and the trade cities have it basically kept in check- They're nervous about monsters, but they want goods and money, so...
The human superiority church was driven back into the original city, where it still festers. People quite easily understood that ranting about slaughtering the worthless subhumans would mean that none of them would ever come to town- so they applied that quiet pressure of no money, and no attendance.