I've been doing a lot of research lately and want just to rest my head this evening. So I'll pick up an older obsession of mine - Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically Taladas, the "lost continent" of the Dragonlance setting.
For the likes of me, the Taladas lore was fascinating for a few reasons. For this post I'll start with a longstanding problematic of Epic Fantasy: after Melkor sets up his throne in northern Beleriand, where is everyone else on Middle Earth. Especially consider the closing stage of the Silmarillion after the Unnumbered Tears, when the Dark Lord is mopping up. Let's say we're not Christian and we don't call in The Apocalypse, like Tolkien did. (Here stands Fantasy-Flight's Midnight line.) What do - say - the Haradrim think about a Kingdom Of Iblis looming to their north? Would anyone try to stop it?
The Taladas authors made to solve this for the Dragonlance epic.
Whilst Takhisis was setting up her dark plan of conquest, she concentrated on reasonably-civilised Ansalon; to which end, she used Taladas as laboratory and garbage-pit. Ansalon is front-stage; Taladas, back-stage. Thus the whole continent is involved. If not yet invested.
It follows some features of Ansalon don't apply to Taladas.
Tracy Hickman was a LDS missionary at the time he was sketching out his saga, in 1980ish - very soon after also-Mormon Battlestar Galactica. As a result, the first few movements of Dragonlance read like LDS soteriology. In Hickman's eyes, a theocracy adopted worship of the True Gods and then, in its hubris, enforced it. The True Gods then evoked, or permitted, a disaster; and abandoned the survivors. A few hundred years later some of the gods trickle back - like, er, Takhisis. But also some benevolent divinities like Mishakal reached out. Here is the "restoration theory" of Islam, some Protestantisms, and LDS in particular.
Taladas didn't have a King Priest. It did have an empire, of sorts: Aurim, ruled by the Hlafdae. (That's a singular, like Inca or Pharaoh or 皇帝.) The sixth or seventh such ruler is known to have built an extensive tomb, like the Qin in Asia.
It would be quite the coincidence if Aurim's Hlafdae had waxed proud there at the same moment the King Priest challenged the gods here. On this point the lore is (fairly) consistent... that the two imperia were not on the same level.
The cardboard leaflet which describes the Tomb Of The Great King states outright that Aurim's two western successor-states Thenol and Kristophan (now the Minotaur League), for their own propaganda, overrate their ancestors. Their humans, to get there, had to MIGRATE - implying, Aurim had no handle on the west beforehand. The west instead had a civilisation of lizard folk in the (then-ebbing) southwest marsh, the Armach-nesti Elf Israel hugging the west coast, and some goblin villages in the northwest. In between were valleys of kender halflings and vast forests of huldrefolk elves; Fianawar dwarves, some hobgoblins. As for the northwest steppe, forget it.
Aurim, at the time of Hiteh's Night, was still on its ascent, not doing enormities. That Hlafdae who built the tomb (or got imprisoned therein...) was a possible exception. (The netbook calls him Tinjatus.) But this Hlafdae was succeeded by more reasonable monarchs, like the Han succeeded the Qin; the New Styrllians do not remember being particularly oppressed by their overlord. I'd further question which of those "Aurim!" monuments on the Ring Mountains and Steamwall have aught to do with Aurim herself, directly. These may have been neighbouring statelets, albeit perhaps tributary. Add the question of Taladas' surface-area and, well.
(Maybe the King Priest had subjected Aurim to himself . . .)
And because Taladas was an afterthought, when the gods turned from Ansalon, they didn't turn from Taladas. Mishakal "Mislaxa" maintained her priesthood, although her priests don't build vast temples. Takhisis "Erestem" stuck around for her horrid experiments. Most of all, Hiddukel "Hith" / "Hiteh" set up shop in the new lava sea in Taladas' centre.
The question Taladas poses to the Dragonlance fandom is: how to adventure in the epic's shadow.
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