> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Valtorran Empire > [![[Valtorran_Empire_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Valtorran_Empire.webp) > ###### Faction Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Faction | > Category | Imperial State | > Allegiance | Ruling power of [[Valtorra]] | > Leader | [[Empress Morganna Eventide\|Empress Morganna]] | > Base | [[Val Luminor]] | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Active | The Valtorran Empire — known across the continent as the Crimson Empire — is the imperial state that rules the whole of [[Valtorra]], the unchallenged power on the continent for the last hundred years. Seated at [[Val Luminor]] under [[Empress Morganna Eventide]], it bound six ancient human kingdoms, a conquered dwarven realm, and a continent of lesser peoples beneath a single crown, and has held them there through an artful marriage of velvet and iron: a familiar face on every old throne, and behind it the certainty of overwhelming force. It is the stage on which the campaign is fought and the power the rebellion has risen to break. ## Purpose & Goals The Empire's stated purpose is order. For a century it has presented itself as the answer to the long ruin that preceded it — the power that ended the squabbling of the old kingdoms, pacified the roads, and bound a fractured continent into a single peace. To its loyalists that promise is real, and it is the Empire's deepest source of legitimacy: stability after an age of chaos, paid for in obedience. In practice the Empire's overriding aim is the preservation of its own dominion. Every institution it maintains — the garrisons, the enforcement orders, the indirect rule that leaves conquered kings on their thrones — exists to keep the continent quiet and the wealth of the provinces flowing toward the centre. It does not expand; having taken everything it could reach, it now spends its strength holding what it has. The screw has tightened markedly in the last decade, and the Empire's energy is increasingly bent to a single task it will not name aloud: containing the rebellions that have begun to catch across [[Valtorra]]. ## Structure & Leadership At the apex stands [[Empress Morganna Eventide]], sole and absolute sovereign, ruling from the Luminor Citadel at the heart of the capital, [[Val Luminor]]. She is rarely seen — a serene, ageless figure who appears only at carefully orchestrated moments — and the Empire's day-to-day weight is carried by the structures she built beneath her. The Empire's genius is indirect rule. When the continent fell, [[Empress Morganna Eventide|Morganna]] did not depose the kings she conquered; she offered each the same choice — rule on as an Imperial governor, or be replaced. Most chose survival, and so the six human Kingdoms of Old became six governorships, each still ruled by its own surrendered royal line. Subjects see one of their own upon the old throne rather than a conqueror's appointee, and that familiarity is the Empire's cheapest and strongest instrument of control. Beneath the velvet glove sits the iron. Each governor's court keeps an Imperial garrison and a [[Voice of the Empire|Voice of the Empire]] standing at the governor's shoulder, and any province may be visited at any time by the [[Hand of The Empire|Hands of the Empire]], whose authority overrides local rank entirely. A governor who considers stepping out of line reckons with all three. The structure has held for a hundred years; its single weakness is that it depends on the loyalty of those surrendered royal lines — and that loyalty can rot from within without the centre ever noticing. ### Rule of the Major Cities How a city is governed depends on how it fell. The kingdoms that surrendered kept their royal lines on as Imperial governors; the one that resisted was conquered outright and is ruled by the Empress directly; and a handful of places at the margins were never truly brought to heel. | City | Governance | Standing | |---|---|---| | [[Val Luminor]] | Direct Imperial rule, in the Empress's own name | The capital — the old Luminor line resisted and was extinguished | | [[Val Miriel]] | Imperial governorship under House Miriel — [[Governor Tarlis Evandron]] | A southern seat of old money and divided loyalties | | [[Val Aran]] | Hereditary governorship of the Aran family — [[Bjorn Aran]] | A northern frontier hold, far from the centre | | [[Val Aerie]] | Imperial governorship under its old ruling family | A southern highland seat | | [[Darmouth]] | Imperial governorship under [[Eamon Hightower]] | Built by the Empire from nothing; a true loyalist city | | [[Camaar]] | A nominally independent mayor's office | Free in name, subservient to the Empire in practice | | [[Val Noren]] | Crown reclaimed by [[King Marius Noren]] | Formerly a Noren governorship; now in open, successful revolt | | [[Val Solis]] | Free kingdom under the Solis dynasty | Never conquered; sealed behind the [[Shield Wall]] | ## The Arms of the Empire The Empire's will is carried by three distinct enforcement arms, each with its own domain — beneath which stands the regular army, and beside which moves a darker, only half-attached power. | Arm | Domain | Role | |---|---|---| | [[Hand of The Empire\|Hands of the Empire]] | Force | Elite enforcers — the dreaded Red Cloaks. Soldiers, lawmen, and hunters at once, deployed where the Empire needs certainty rather than numbers; a single red cloak outranks local authority. | | [[Voice of the Empire\|Voices of the Empire]] | Magic & counsel | Court-mages, one posted to each governor's seat. Advisory in the open, coercive beneath; the rarest and subtlest of the arms. | | [[Eye of the Empire\|Eyes of the Empire]] | Intelligence | Covert spies and assassins, unacknowledged and unknown even to most Hands and Voices. They answer to the Empress alone. | Beyond the three arms stand two further bodies of force: - The Imperial Legions — the regular standing army, manned by a mix of conscripts, career professionals, and loyalist volunteers. They garrison the cities, walk the road checkpoints, and form the mass of any Imperial host, with the elite tiers layered on top. Service in the legions is one of the surer ways an ordinary Valtorran rises within the Imperial order. - The [[Red Priests]] of [[Valfyria]] — a cult of necromancer-priests loosely attached to Imperial campaigns, lent to sieges to raise the dead and shatter walls. They are feared even by the soldiers who fight beside them, and captured troops insist they answer to a master darker than the Empress herself. ## Reach & Limits Imperial authority is near-total across the Luminor Plains and the great Vals, but it frays toward the margins. The island-city of [[Val Solis]] was never conquered — its fleet-breaking [[Shield Wall]] held, and the Empire simply cut the island off rather than keep bleeding for it. The island-city of [[Val Noren]] rose in open revolt and threw off Imperial control entirely. The free port of [[Camaar]], with its privateer [[Mawbreakers]], has never been fully brought to heel, and the northern frontier of [[Lighthaven]] and [[Point Blackrock]] is tolerant of the Empire at best. Beyond settled country lie the wholly ungoverned wilds — the [[Borealia Forest]], the lawless goblinoid expanse of the [[Xericana Sands]], and the sealed elven cities of [[Erivan Island]], which the Empire could never take because its own warded death keeps every non-elf out. ## Symbols & the Crimson Name Formally it is the Valtorran Empire; in the mouths of its subjects it is the Crimson Empire, or simply the Red Empire. The colour runs through everything Imperial — the crimson cloaks of the Hands, the banners that hang from every garrison wall, the deep red that marks Imperial authority wherever it is displayed. Ask a Valtorran why the Empire is crimson and the answers vary. The official line is the simplest: this is how the Empress dressed her order from the very beginning, crimson as the colour of sovereignty and permanence. Others give it a darker reading — that the red recalls the waves of blood shed during the conquest, a warning worn openly so that no one forgets the price of resistance. Both explanations are widely believed, and both are wrong about the true origin of the colour. ## The Empire and Its People Valtorrans are not of one mind about the power that rules them. A century of occupation has bred three broad temperaments, and most cities hold all three at once: - The indifferent — most Valtorrans, simply getting on with their lives. To them the Empire is the water they swim in, and so long as it is not meddling directly with them, they pay it little mind. Imperial rule is not, for the ordinary farmer or tradesman, a daily horror — it is taxes, checkpoints, and the occasional show of force, endured the way weather is endured. - The resentful — those who hate the Empire outright, for its restrictions, its conscription, its shows of force, and the citizens who vanish in the night without explanation. This is the ground in which the rebellion has taken root, and the rusty-nail mark of [[The Bloody Nails]] is its rallying sign. - The loyalists — those who credit the Empire with a century of stability across a continent that spent five hundred years in chaos before it came. To them the rebellion is not liberation but the return of disorder, and the rusty nail a threat to a hard-won peace. ### Taxes, Conscription & Supply The Empire is funded by taxation and conscription across the provinces, the harshest example being the dwarven gem-mine service imposed after the failed dwarven rebellion. Its standing weakness is its southern supply: for a century the Empire depended on the [[Mawbreakers]] to carry cargo through [[The Maw]] into the [[Gulf of Miriel]], an arrangement neither side liked. Its attempt to escape that dependency — the great viaduct of [[Skyreach]], raised over the [[Aeolian Chasm]] to drive supply highways north — was destroyed before it ever carried a cart, leaving the Empire's southern lifelines a quiet, unresolved vulnerability it cannot afford to admit. ## History The Empire was born of conquest. A hundred years ago [[Empress Morganna Eventide|Morganna]] arrived on Valtorra's eastern shore with no visible army, and city by city the continent fell to her — not to siege but to something quieter and harder to resist. The human kingdoms were bent to her will and made into governorships, the dwarven kingdom of the [[Silver Mountains]] was conquered outright, and the elven lands in the south were found already abandoned. From that conquest the Crimson Empire rose, and Morganna's indirect rule has held it together ever since. Roughly fifty years into the occupation the dwarves rose in rebellion. It failed, and in its aftermath the Empire imposed the conscription that defines dwarven life to this day — every dwarf, on reaching eighteen, sent down to the gem mines until twenty-five. For decades afterward the Empire's grip was a settled fact, enforced reliably by the Hands under the long command of [[Dread General Gerard Blackmarsh]]. The last decade has seen the grip tighten hard — harsher laws, steeper taxes, more disappearances. The pressure was driven first by the Empire's drive to build and accelerate [[Skyreach]], and since the viaduct's fall by the spreading rebellions it now strains to contain. That present war has gone badly: the loss of Skyreach cost the Empire its southern supply strategy, and the liberation of [[Val Noren]] cost it both its most prominent commander, Blackmarsh, and the illusion that its rule was inevitable. The Hands continue without a supreme commander; the resistance gathers strength. ## Relations ### Bloody Nails The [[The Bloody Nails|Bloody Nails]] are the Empire's most consequential active enemies, though the Empire does not yet grasp the full shape of the threat. Begun as five escaped prisoners, the band has destroyed Skyreach, helped liberate Val Noren, and killed Blackmarsh — and their rusty-nail mark has become the continent-wide sign of resistance. To the Empire they are, for now, a particularly destructive nest of rebels; to the rebellion they are its spearhead. ### Order of Ravens The [[Order of Ravens]] is the Empire's oldest standing enemy. For roughly fifty years the Hands have held a kill-on-sight order against all Ravens, hunting their agents and breaking their nests across the continent, while the Order's methodical intelligence work has steadily undermined Imperial control from the shadows. Neither side has landed a decisive blow; it is a slow war conducted in the dark of every occupied city. ### Mawbreakers The Empire's relationship with the [[Mawbreakers]] was managed toleration for a century — it licensed the guild because it needed the only crews who could move cargo through [[The Maw]], and neither side was comfortable with the dependence. The destruction of [[Skyreach]], which the guild engineered, shattered that equilibrium. The Empire cannot openly accuse them without exposing the classified project its fleet died defending, and so the relationship is quietly broken, with neither party able to say so aloud. ## [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 01 - The Rusty Nail]] The campaign opened beneath the Empire's hundred-year shadow. Its founding was laid out as the defining political reality of [[Valtorra]] — human cities felled, dwarven strongholds extinguished, elven lands found abandoned — and the present-day tightening of the grip was made plain: harsher laws, steeper taxes, citizens vanishing in the night. It was aboard an Imperial prison ship bound for a labour camp that the party first found themselves thrown together. #### [[Session 16 - The Fall of Skyreach]] The party brought down [[Skyreach]], the secret viaduct the Empire had spent a decade building to free its supply lines from the [[Mawbreakers]]. The colossus fell before it ever carried a crossing, and with it went the Empire's entire southern supply strategy — the first great blow the rebellion landed against Imperial power. #### [[Session 21 - The Governor's Daughter]] In a hidden war room beneath [[Val Miriel]], the party learned that the Empire's indirect rule could be turned against it. [[Governor Tarlis Evandron]], an Imperial governor in good standing, revealed himself as a secret rebel and charged the party with uniting the fractured old kingdoms against the Crimson Empire — proof that the surrendered royal lines the Empire relies upon could harbour treason the centre never saw. #### [[Session 25 - The Chimera]] Arriving at [[Val Miriel]], the party found a city transformed into a police state — gates barred, martial law in force, streets scarred by recent riots. The walls were plastered with revolutionary propaganda detailing the Empire's draconian new taxes and conscription laws, a vivid picture of the tightening grip driving ordinary Valtorrans toward open revolt. #### [[Session 42 - Liberation of Val Noren]] The Empire lost a city and a legend in a single day. On the bridge at [[Val Noren]], the party helped break the Imperial standoff; when surrender became the only alternative to death, the surviving [[Hand of The Empire|Hands]] killed themselves rather than be taken, collapsing the morale of the three thousand soldiers behind them. The city was reclaimed, and [[Dread General Gerard Blackmarsh]] — supreme commander of the Hands — fell, costing the Empire its most prominent instrument of war. #### [[Session 44 - The Elven Archmage]] Casting Speak with Dead upon the severed head of a [[Red Priests|Red Priestess]], the party learned that the cult operates out of [[Valfyria]] and serves [[Empress Morganna Eventide]] — who in turn serves an ancient entity named [[Kharazoth the Crimson Shadow]]. It was the first thread tying the Empire's public face to a far older power standing behind the throne. #### [[Session 49 - The Silver Sage]] Beneath [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]], the ancient silver dragon Praetor'Varanous reached a definitive conclusion about the Empire's sovereign: [[Empress Morganna Eventide|Morganna]] is a lich, her ageless face masking a far older form, and her true power may exceed anything the party has yet faced. The Empire's serene, eternal Empress was revealed to be something else entirely. ## Trivia - The Empire's two names tell two stories: Valtorran Empire is the formal style used in proclamation and law, while Crimson Empire is what its subjects actually call it — the colour, not the conquest, being the thing people remember. - For all its martial reputation, the Empire conquered Valtorra with almost no open warfare. City after city simply pledged allegiance, a pattern so unlike ordinary conquest that scholars still struggle to explain it.