The document on top of the stack of papers appears to be some kind of official record. A mix of printed words and structured lines are put to the page alongside handwritten text to fill in the blanks. It is odd to see the precise lettering so close to the handwritten scrawl. The printed section is entirely flawless, not a line out of place, almost as if made by a modern printer. The paper is a yellowed color, not from old age but as the natural shade of whatever the pages were constructed from. The purple sticky note attached to the top reads in the ever-present blue pen:

R1.17.15

Removed from Redacted Files #17

OFFICIAL ADVENTURERS' GUILD DOCUMENT Submitted by: Helvia warren POST-MISSION REVIEW Accepted by: Falners Rangers TASK Greenrot keep goblin subjugation DESCRIPTION Accompany duke Boren’s men to the keep. Assist in reducing the goblin den’s numbers. Search deeper into the dungeon to recover artifacts and treasure

REWARDS

5 silver/ Goblin Ear, 10% stake in the sale of artifacts personally recovered. Percentage of other treasures to be assigned by contribution

REPORT

Nothing to report on travel to the Keep. Boren runs a tight ship. We made no discoveries on the week-long journey through the forest. Monster attacks were minimal. No Injuries.

The keep was a mess, it’s always a mess, none of the newbies were ready. If any of them need a dressing down for some overblown heroic report let me know. Though Uliuns Swords were surprisingly effective, we almost had a TPK from Bardic Reeds, Ulin saved them. We had 14 injuries, 4 deaths, and 1 missing among the 22 adventurers on the mission. No deaths in the rangers but Rickle got a pretty nasty cut.

Despite all of the craziness this is the fourth keep subjugation we’ve done with Boren’s knights. Remind me to thank the brilliant bugger who had the idea to make a map last time. We got way deeper into the dungeon this time; the duke will be quite happy with the number of artifacts recovered. By my count there were six of varying quality, none captured by Falners Rangers unfortunately. We did however find some old stash of valuables in a chest. I estimate the total haul will be close to 1700 gold for everything found, excluding artifacts, make sure this duke doesn’t skim some off the top that he doesn’t deserve.

Last thing, this is going to sound crazy Helvia, I’m pretty sure we found a Traveler. The knights don’t know. I managed to pass her off as a poor abducted villager. I’m going to need some help from the guild. This could be big.

Solen, Leader of Falners Rangers

REWARDS GIVEN 100 silver or 1 gold for goblins slain. 29 gold 75 silver for contribution STATUS

----------------------------------------

ACCEPTED & PAID

Beneath the report is a huge stack of papers, which appear to be the beginnings of a textbook. It is entirely printed this time, and still on that oddly yellow paper. The book is missing its binding, the glue on some of the pages indicating that it had been bound together at one point. Looking into the document the Jujubee mysteries discord indicates that the textbook is missing the last half, about 200 pages. The last few pages that are still attached to the book are unreadable, damaged by water and dirt. Whatever this book was used for it was not reading. What follows here is the introduction.

Fall of the Dark Races & Rise of a Golden Age

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A human perspective of recent history

Written by: Ritter M. Frank

It is a uniquely human fault to forget the events of the past, our short life span and eager temperament leave us far behind the civilized races in memory. What humanity thinks of as ‘long past forgotten by time’ is to a dwarf ‘an ancestral account’ or to an elf ‘recent history’. However, the march of innovation and progress favors our race’s traits. With the free ability to record and organize information we have created solutions to such weakness.

Thus, I write this textbook, so that history will never again be leveraged against us unfairly by those longer-lived races. This will cover our history going back nearly a hundred years, as going any farther back leaves us with no reliable human records of events. There will be no sources beyond those created by humanity. To ask for history from any race beyond humans would corrupt the very purpose and truth of this record.

Before any learning can be done about history, we must first know the whole of what leads us to the present. Without a firm grasp on this timeline, all understanding of an event's context, cause, and effect are lost. I shall introduce the history known by humanity in a summary here to display the concepts in this textbook and to provide such pivotal context.

So, students, read these accounts carefully and take forward into the future their knowledge. No more shall dwarves ridicule us for hasty judgment, and improper records of lineage. No more shall elves speak of humans as ridiculous apes endlessly stuck in cycles repeating history once a centennium. Now we too shall forge ahead and define the future, learning from every mistake in our pasts!

.............- Professor Ritter

Introduction

The only reliable statement that can be made referencing the previous age is that it ended with the fall of the dark races. In this time the powerful nations of the world were not composed of only civilized peoples. Poor and pitiable places were instead ruled by barbaric tribes. You would know of them today as the orcs, the demon-folk, and goblins. A large portion of this very continent was overlorded by the worst and most despicable of those races; the orks.

At the dawn of humanities current golden age, our wise King, Othenoth, realized the danger and depravity of such creatures. The orks were, in this time, at the peak of their warlike ways. Their horrid nation had consumed much of the nomadic lands of the demon-folk and encroached upon the borders of the civilized nations. Othenoth devised a plan with the dwarves and elves to push back the threat of the orks' dark lord.

The plan devised was simple, retaliate before the expansionist orks reached their borders. To pinch the retreating demon-folk between a combined civilized force and the orks’ dark horde. The civilizing force would filter the demon-folk, letting the natural and docile beast folk through their lines and offering them sanctuary, then pushing the aggressive and warlike demons toward the orks. After the ork front lines were softened by the demons they would be pushed back across the continent. Any other such barbaric races would be swept away alongside the orks.

And so it was, the black tide was swept away and the civilized races, led by humanity, claimed the continent. What is now called the Great Civilizing War. So thorough was wise King Othenoth that, over the course of the thirty-year war, he ensured, even to this day, not a single demon or ork can be found from coast to coast across our great lands.

The one failing of the Great Civilizing War was the goblins, who lived deep in the forests, mountains, and swamps. With a nasty habit of multiplying like rats, they prove to this day to be impossible to fully eradicate. King Othenoth realized this and saved his campaign's momentum from being halted by these pockets of goblins, instead passing them by and bottling them up inside their isolated homes. To make sure the goblins were kept in check, he created the Adventures Guild and gave it its endless mission; Ensuring all the monsters are carefully monitored, and the spots they frequent checked, and their populations cleansed. Goblins will never rise to be a threat to humanity.

Othenoth led the way for his descendant, King Vorenth, to lead us into a golden age. During the conquest of the orks it was discovered that they had desecrated and ruined their lands with great machines, things of metal, smoke, and oil. These horrible edifices were what had powered the orks conquest and allowed them to dominate despite the demon-folk’s tribes greater martial and magical strength. The orks would drown the tribes with their people and weapons, careless as to the lives it would cost.

The king realized, at the tipping point of the war effort, these base and horrid machines had to be stopped in their desecration and ruin of the land. So, he led the human armies to claim the factories, the means of producing the great machines, from the orks. The battle that ensued was the bloodiest and most devastating conflict of the great war, known today as the battle of the Iron Hills; named as such for the massive amount of blood spilled on the battlefield staining the hills red. Othenoth was ever wise in his victory, and instead of burning the factories and removing their blight from the land, as the elves begged him to do, he instead handed over the technology to the dwarves with a promise to share what they discovered. The dwarves would later cleanse them from the terrible byproducts and enhance their effectiveness, nullifying the orks' advantage and leading the civilized nations, elves kicking and screaming, into a world of industry.

After the war the dwarves forgot our great sacrifice and sought only to power their new industry. They deconstructed the great factories and stole back to their hidden mountain keeps, removing them unjustly from humanity's lands. What could have been a disaster, a halt in humanity's progress by the spurious dwarves, was fortunately avoided. In the wise ways of his father, Vorenth, the crown prince at the time, had saved the schematics of the factories and machines won from the orks, allowing humanity to recover the loss.

The hypocritical dwarves and elves objected to humanity's use of this knowledge. The dwarves claimed we had stolen the designs from their keeps, and the elves objected to the use of factories on the whole, claiming that the future of such creations would doom the planet in millennia's time. These claims of both dwarf and elf are fallacious and suspect. To address the dwarves, the designs were fairly won by humanity in the war. To address the elves, professionals and innovators of technology and magic discredit their claim, explaining that not even elves have memories that can predict events so far to the future. The disagreements over these things lead to a huge increase in tension across the civilized nations and murmurings of a second great war.

King Vorenth was as great a diplomatic leader as his father was a visionary and avoided the incitement of the elves and dwarves toward war. With his guidance of our national diplomacy the objections of the dwarves and elves faded away from threats of war to petty violence then, finally, to promises of peace and separation between the races. With the inventions and mixing of mechanics and magic over these last fifty years of peace we are brought to the present golden age of humanity.

Are you ready, student, to learn the great and powerful history of humanity? Let us begin.