Eon XXXIX – The Rooting Age – Mythic History Timeline And Campaign Lore

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Eon XXXIX — The Rooting Age, Villages, Fields and Inherited Land

The Rooting Age begins when villages stop being places of return and become inherited worlds of field, hearth, grave and oath—and therefore places worth defending, seizing or destroying.

Eon XXXIX — The Rooting Age, Villages, Fields and Inherited Land

Time Frame: c. 7000–5000 BCE

Common Name: The Later Neolithic and, in parts of Eurasia, the Early Chalcolithic

Theme: Permanent settlement deepens into inherited village life as houses, fields, herds, graves, wells, crossings and sacred places bind generations to the same land.

The Rooting Age begins when remaining in one place becomes harder to reverse. Houses are rebuilt upon older houses. The dead remain beneath occupied floors. Fields require annual return. Herds require pasture and water. Wells, ditches, paths and storage rooms demand labour beyond a single season.

The Dawning Age established permanent settlement and the first long experiments in cultivation. The Rooting Age turns those experiments into enduring obligations. Stored grain must be guarded. Water must be shared. Boundaries must be remembered. Ancestors, neighbours, spirits and nonhuman peoples acquire claims that cannot be ignored merely because they are unwritten.

Rooted life creates security, but it also creates targets. Fields can be burned. Herds can be driven away. Wells can be seized or poisoned. Granaries can be looted. Defeated people can be taken as hostages, servants, forced labourers or slaves.

This is not solely a human transformation. Dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings and other peoples already possess settlements, territories, sacred places and inherited customs. Their histories do not begin when human records notice them.

Nor does the change happen everywhere at once. Mobile hunters, fishers, gatherers and herders continue to thrive across enormous regions. Some communities combine permanent homes with seasonal movement. Others grow into dense villages whose inhabitants depend upon shared labour, specialist craft, inherited law and long-distance exchange.

The Rooting Age is not one peaceful march towards civilisation. It is the age in which many peoples discover that a place occupied for generations begins to possess its own memory, rights and demands—and that possession creates rivalry as readily as belonging.

The World at the Beginning

Permanent settlements already exist in several regions.
Cultivation and animal management are established but remain part of wider hunting, fishing and gathering economies.
Sea levels continue reshaping coasts, estuaries, islands and lowlands.
Communal monuments and large settlements exist without kings, palaces or territorial states.
Dwarven holds, elven territories, gnome settlements and halfling kin-networks already occupy parts of the world.
Raiding, feud, hostage-taking and captive labour already exist, although no single system of warfare or slavery is universal.
The political world of the Hyborian kingdoms has vanished into broken memory.
Stygian, Acheronian and other elder relics survive without the institutions that created them.
Serpentfolk and other prehuman survivors remain within concealed ruins and underground enclaves.
Mnar remembers the destruction of Ib and the doom of Sarnath.
Crossings into the Dreamlands, Fey World, Ethereal Plane and Shadow Plane remain fixed to particular springs, caves, dreams, groves and burial places.

The peoples of this age already possess watercraft, domesticated dogs, stone tools, woven fibre, pottery in some regions, ritual burial and extensive knowledge of plants and animals. The defining change is not invention from nothing, but the deepening of settlement into inheritance.

The Rooting Age Timeline

c. 7000–5200 BCE — Çatalhöyük Endures and Changes

Çatalhöyük has already begun during the closing Dawning Age. It now reaches its greatest Neolithic development and continues into the Chalcolithic period.

Its houses stand tightly packed without ordinary streets between them. Many are entered through their roofs. Domestic rooms contain ovens, platforms, paintings, reliefs and organised work areas. The dead are commonly buried beneath occupied floors, tying household identity to both the structure and the ancestors beneath it.

Later occupation shifts towards the western mound. The community changes rather than simply disappearing, carrying older practices into a new material tradition.

Dense settlement creates tension as well as cooperation. Roof access, fire, rebuilding, waste, household boundaries, stored food and the treatment of the dead require rules that no household can enforce alone.

c. 7000–6000 BCE — ‘Ain Ghazal and the Plaster Ancestors

‘Ain Ghazal grows into one of the largest settlements of the southern Levant. Its inhabitants cultivate crops, keep animals, construct mud-brick houses and participate in exchange networks linking several neighbouring regions.

The community creates large plaster figures with human faces and carefully modelled bodies. These figures are not portraits of kings. They serve as ritual bodies for communal ancestors, protective spirits and powers whose presence belongs to the settlement as a whole rather than to one household.

When a figure’s period of service ends, it is buried deliberately. The burial is not disposal. It is the formal withdrawal of a sacred presence that may remain dangerous or authoritative after its visible body is concealed.

‘Ain Ghazal marks an important change: public ritual is beginning to create identities and obligations larger than the household, even though no temple state or hereditary monarchy yet exists.

c. 7000–5700 BCE — Jiahu Flourishes

Jiahu in central China supports houses, kilns, pottery, stone and bone tools, turquoise ornaments and a substantial cemetery.

Bone flutes made from crane wings preserve an advanced musical tradition. Marked tortoise shells and other objects reveal increasingly elaborate systems of ritual interpretation and symbolic memory.

Jiahu belongs to a wider world of early East Asian villages developing local forms of cultivation, craft and ceremonial life.

Seventh–Sixth Millennia BCE — Mehrgarh Develops

Communities near the Bolan Pass establish mud-brick houses and combine cultivation with the keeping of sheep, goats and cattle.

Burials contain baskets, tools and ornaments made from materials carried across considerable distances. Shell, turquoise and lapis lazuli connect the settlement to wider exchange systems.

Mehrgarh forms part of South Asia’s own long development towards the later civilisations of the Indus lands.

Seventh Millennium BCE — Farming Villages Spread into Europe

Farming, herding and permanent village life spread through Anatolia, the Aegean and southeastern Europe.

This movement includes migration, marriage, trade and selective adoption by communities already occupying the affected regions. Domesticated cereals and animals spread, but hunting, fishing and gathering remain important.

New settlement does not prove that the land was empty. Earlier seasonal routes, graves, woodland management, hunting rights and spirit agreements continue to generate disputes.

Some conflicts end through exchange, intermarriage or recognised boundaries. Others result in burned houses, stolen animals, captive-taking and the displacement or destruction of established communities.

c. 6500–5000 BCE — Mesopotamian Village Traditions Diversify

Across northern Mesopotamia, the communities later classified as Hassuna, Samarra and Halaf develop distinctive pottery, architecture, storage and ritual traditions.

Farther south, early Ubaid settlements expand into landscapes where dependable agriculture requires more deliberate management of water. Channels, ditches, storage and coordinated labour begin shaping settlement more strongly.

These communities remain villages rather than later city-states. Authority is becoming more durable, but kingship, bureaucracy and urban government are not yet normal.

Control of communal works nevertheless creates new forms of coercion. A powerful household, ritual leader or war captain may compel labour, seize a larger portion of stored food or turn temporary obligation into lasting dependence.

Seventh–Sixth Millennia BCE — Nabta Playa and the Law of the Wells

Communities gather repeatedly around the seasonal lakes and wells of Nabta Playa in the eastern Sahara. They combine hunting, wild-plant gathering, pottery, livestock and movement between dependable water sources.

No single king rules Nabta. Access to the wells is governed by an oath shared among several communities. Those who draw water must contribute labour, protect the approaches and respect agreed grazing limits. Poisoning, blocking or secretly deepening a well is treated as an attack upon every people dependent upon it.

Ritual specialists begin recording the movement of the sun, stars and seasonal rains against distant horizons. The great stone arrangements of later centuries do not yet exist in their mature form, but the sacred observation of sky, water and seasonal return has begun.

Nabta Playa demonstrates that wide-ranging pastoral and hunting communities can create binding law, sacred assembly and inherited territorial rights without becoming one permanently settled state.

c. 6300–5900 BCE — Lepenski Vir and the River Persons

Communities at the Iron Gates of the Danube construct carefully planned houses, shrines and burial places beside one of Europe’s most powerful river corridors.

Their lives depend heavily upon fishing, navigation and knowledge of the Danube’s seasonal movements. Monumental stone sculptures combine human and fish-like features.

These carvings represent recognised river persons: ancestral beings and nonhuman powers of the Danube who possess identity, memory and territorial authority. Some are remembered as transformed ancestors; others belong to the river itself and predate human settlement.

The people of Lepenski Vir do not worship the river as an empty natural force. They negotiate with particular beings whose favour governs fishing, safe crossing, burial and the lawful taking of life from the water.

Contact with incoming farming communities brings exchange, intermarriage, new foods and new tools. It also creates conflict over shorelines, burial grounds and whether a field boundary can override an older river right.

c. 6200 BCE — Climatic Disruption and the Storegga Tsunami

A sudden period of cooling and drying affects communities across several regions. Rainfall shifts, growing seasons change and settlements dependent upon particular crops or water sources come under pressure.

At approximately the same time, the Storegga submarine landslide generates a major tsunami across the North Atlantic. Waves strike Norway, Scotland, the northern islands, eastern Britain and parts of the North Sea basin.

The surviving lowlands of Doggerland are devastated, but the tsunami does not destroy the whole region in one moment. Rising seas have already been shrinking and dividing it for generations.

Human, elven, halfling and other coastal communities lose settlements, seasonal grounds and burial places. Gnome crossings and older sacred sites vanish beneath changed shorelines. Survivors preserve memories of sudden water and lands swallowed between one season and the next.

Displaced communities seek new territory inland. Some are welcomed or absorbed. Others arrive as rivals, raiders, dependants or captives, increasing conflict over already occupied land.

Sixth Millennium BCE — Pottery, Textile and Kiln Traditions Deepen

Pottery becomes increasingly important across many settled regions. Fired vessels allow food to be cooked, stored, carried and measured in new ways.

Painted designs and vessel forms become marks of household skill, regional identity and exchange. Kilnwork creates specialists whose knowledge may be valued beyond their own settlement.

Spindle whorls, loom weights and fibre impressions reveal increasingly organised production of cloth, cordage, baskets, mats and nets. These technologies are less visible archaeologically than stone but are essential to settled life.

Specialist knowledge can provide status and protection, but it can also become a reason for a craftsperson to be taken captive rather than killed during war.

Sixth Millennium BCE — Water Management Becomes Political

Wells, channels, ditches and maintained banks make settlement more dependable. They also require collective labour and rules governing access.

Those who control water influence planting, grazing, sanitation and survival. Water remains vulnerable to drought, contamination, sabotage and supernatural claim.

The first enduring water agreements become some of the oldest laws inherited by later communities. Some involve several mortal peoples as well as river, spring or well spirits.

Seizing a spring or breaking an irrigation channel can defeat a settlement without open battle. In regions where water is scarce, control of a well may be more valuable than possession of a wall or weapon.

Sixth Millennium BCE — The Green Sahara Remains Inhabited

Lakes, wetlands, grasslands and river systems continue to support communities across regions that later become desert.

Fishing, hunting, wild-grain gathering, pottery and experiments in animal management create varied economies. People repeatedly return to lakes, wells and seasonal pastures, establishing burials and sacred places across the landscape.

The Nile is one important corridor within a much larger northern African world.

c. 5500 BCE Onward — The Ubaid World and the First Sanctuary at Eridu

Irrigated villages spread through southern Mesopotamia. Farming, fishing, reed-working, boat travel and the maintenance of channels bind settlements to the rivers and wetlands.

At Eridu, successive sacred buildings establish the first enduring public sanctuary of Enki. The sanctuary is more than a household shrine. It belongs to the settlement and requires labour, offerings and maintenance from several communities.

Enki’s priests and water-keepers judge disputes concerning wells, channels, fisheries, contamination and the repair of communal works. Their authority remains dependent upon service and recognition rather than upon a later royal state.

Eridu is not yet the mature Sumerian city of later history, but the distinction between ordinary homes and a permanent public sacred institution has become binding.

Sixth Millennium BCE — East Asian Village Cultures Multiply

Small farming villages spread across several river basins in China. Pottery, timber buildings, storage, hunting, fishing and cultivation combine in different proportions.

Distinct ceramic and regional traditions prepare the way for the Yangshao, Hemudu and other later Neolithic cultures.

Sixth Millennium BCE — Coastal Communities Intensify Marine Lifeways

Communities around the Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean coasts develop increasingly specialised use of fish, shellfish, seabirds, marine mammals and estuarine plants.

Permanent coastal settlement does not depend upon agriculture everywhere. Productive marine environments support rooted communities with their own storage systems, property customs, boats and sacred landscapes.

Control of landing places, fisheries and boat routes can lead to tribute, piracy, hostage-taking and warfare between communities that depend upon the same waters.

c. 5500–5000 BCE — Agriculture Deepens in the Nile Lands

Farming and herding become increasingly established in Lower Egypt and the Nile Delta. Annual flooding produces fertile land but requires observation, seasonal planning and repeated return.

Pottery, tools, burials and exchange become increasingly elaborate. These communities form part of the foundations of later Predynastic Egypt, but pharaonic kingship and the dynastic state do not yet exist.

c. 6200–5000 BCE — Copper Experimentation Leads to Smelting

Communities in the Balkans collect coloured copper minerals, work native copper and experiment with the intense heat already used in pottery production.

By the close of the age, specialists at sites such as Belovode repeatedly transform ore into copper. This is extractive metallurgy: metal can now be produced rather than merely found and reshaped.

Copper remains rare and valuable. Stone, bone, wood and fibre provide almost every ordinary tool. The existence of smelting does not create one worldwide Copper Age.

Dwarven craftspeople possess deeper traditions of excavation and metalworking, but most holds protect their ores, furnaces and techniques. Human and nonhuman metallurgy develops through exchange, theft, experimentation and independent discovery rather than one universal dwarven gift.

By c. 5000 BCE — Maize Cultivation Continues to Develop

The long domestication of maize continues in southern Mexico. Cultivated maize remains close to its wild ancestor and is less productive than later varieties.

Communities continue relying upon hunting, gathering and other managed plants. Maize is becoming part of a larger cultivation tradition rather than replacing older food systems.

Around 5000 BCE — The First Hemudu Communities

Settlements begin developing in the wetlands of the Lower Yangtze. Their inhabitants cultivate rice, fish, hunt and construct raised timber buildings suited to wet ground and seasonal flooding.

Sophisticated woodworking and fitted joints allow structures to survive in landscapes where ordinary mud-brick construction would fail.

Hemudu belongs principally to the following age, but its emergence marks the closing threshold of the Rooting Age: regional village traditions are becoming large, specialised and architecturally distinct enough to support more complex centres.

By c. 5000 BCE — Some Villages Begin Becoming Towns

Public sacred buildings, irrigation systems, central stores, specialist workshops and expanding exchange require institutions able to command labour beyond kinship and household custom.

No universal city-state yet exists. Nevertheless, the separation between private household, public store, sacred centre and organised leadership is becoming permanent in several regions.

By the Close of the Age

Large villages, inherited fields, household shrines, public sanctuaries, managed water, specialist crafts and long-distance exchange are established in several regions.

Some settlements are becoming too populous and complex to organise through household custom alone. Public works require continuing labour. Stores must be counted and guarded. Ritual authority extends beyond one family. Wealth and influence become less evenly distributed.

War leaders, powerful households and ritual authorities increasingly possess the means to compel labour, demand tribute and hold captives beyond the immediate end of a conflict.

The Rooted World

Africa

The Green Sahara, Nabta Playa, Nile Valley, highlands, lakes and savannahs support many distinct lifeways. Fishing, pottery, gathering, herding and early farming develop without one continental centre.

South and West Asia

Mehrgarh, Anatolian settlements, ‘Ain Ghazal, Mesopotamian village traditions and early Eridu establish durable systems of farming, herding, mud-brick construction, burial, craft, water law and exchange.

East Asia

Jiahu and other village cultures develop pottery, music, cultivation, ritual signs and permanent settlement through their own regional histories. The earliest Hemudu communities begin emerging at the age’s close.

Europe

Farming communities expand through southeastern and central Europe while hunting, fishing and gathering remain powerful across northern and Atlantic regions.

Lepenski Vir preserves the authority of older river communities while Balkan copper workers begin producing metal from ore.

The Americas

Communities continue developing regional systems based upon fishing, hunting, gathering, forest management and early cultivation. Maize domestication advances in Mexico while other peoples manage local seed plants, wetlands and animal populations.

Australia and Oceania

Long-established communities maintain detailed systems of land, water, fire and seasonal movement. Rooted life is expressed through custodianship, repeated use and inherited sacred geography rather than farming villages alone.

Nonhuman Peoples of the Rooting Age

Humans are not the only peoples establishing settlements, defending inherited land, raiding neighbours or negotiating with spirits and monsters. Dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings possess their own communities, internal divisions and regional histories.

None forms one worldwide civilisation. No single lifestyle, moral character or political custom defines an entire people. The patterns below are common among some Rooting Age communities, not universal racial laws.

Dwarves — Holds Beneath a Rooted World

Dwarves possess no single homeland. Their enclaves are scattered through mountain ranges, high valleys, volcanic country, rocky coasts and extensive underground systems.

During the Rooting Age, many dwarven households consolidate older caverns and refuges into lasting holds. Their works include:

cisterns and protected wells;
drainage channels and ventilation shafts;
retaining walls and stone bridges;
burial chambers and ancestral galleries;
sealed food stores;
defended tunnels and concealed entrances;
quarries and carefully worked mineral seams.

Dwarven settlements are generally smaller than the great subterranean kingdoms of later ages, but their stonework and engineering already exceed that of most surface villages.

Different holds trade salt, obsidian, tool stone, mineral pigments, native copper, gems and knowledge of underground water. They rarely reveal every source or method. Mining rights, hidden passages and deep wells are governed by hold-law and inherited obligation.

Dwarves are long-lived and strongly attached to tradition, repair and durable workmanship. This does not make them unchanging. A hold may adopt a new method slowly, test it for generations and then preserve it long after neighbouring peoples have forgotten it.

Mountain territory brings dwarves into repeated conflict or negotiation with giants, trolls, linnorms, kobolds, goblins and orcs.

These relationships are not one permanent war. Particular holds and neighbouring peoples may trade, recognise boundaries, exchange hostages, demand tribute or pursue inherited feuds.

Some dwarven holds use defeated enemies as miners, stone-haulers or tunnel labourers. Others forbid the enslavement of recognised persons but permit debt service, penal labour or temporary bondage after war. Dwarven law differs by hold, and long memory can preserve both ancient protections and ancient injustices.

Elves — Mortal Keepers of Forest and Coast

Elves are mortal peoples, not simply Fey wearing mortal bodies. Their long lives and deep relationships with woodland powers allow many elven communities to understand Fey customs without being subjects of the Fey courts.

Some of the oldest surviving elven concentrations occupy forests, coasts and wooded uplands in lands later known as Britain and Scandinavia. Other elven peoples live elsewhere and possess different customs.

Rooting Age elves do not form one global kingdom. Many organise through kin-groups, seasonal assemblies, sacred groves and territories defined by rivers, coastlines, migration routes and long-remembered trees.

Elven land management may include:

controlled burning;
protection of useful trees and woodland plants;
maintenance of deer and game corridors;
seasonal fishing grounds;
managed fruit and nut groves;
preservation of old paths and clearings;
agreements with tree, spring and woodland spirits.

Incoming farmers may mistake such country for unused wilderness. Elves recognise it as a worked and inherited landscape.

Elven communities bargain with independent Fey and magical creatures, including satyrs and unicorns. Such beings are allies, neighbours, rivals or territorial powers rather than elven property.

Elven memory reaches across drowned coastlines and the final generations of the Hyborian world. Some families preserve accurate knowledge of ruins and crossings that shorter-lived neighbours remember only through fragmented stories.

Elven responses to defeated enemies vary. Some communities demand compensation, hostages or withdrawal from disputed woodland. Others take captives, impose labour or hold descendants responsible for inherited debts. Long life can make reconciliation durable, but it can also allow a feud or punishment to survive for centuries.

Gnomes — Hidden Settlements and Guarded Knowledge

Gnomes inhabit hills, wooded country, root-filled caverns and other sheltered landscapes. Rock and forest communities already possess distinct traditions, and some gnome lineages maintain unusually close relationships with the Fey World.

Rooting Age gnome settlements are often small, concealed and strongly defended through misdirection rather than monumental walls. Entrances may be hidden among rocks, beneath roots or inside slopes that appear unoccupied.

Gnome communities are associated with:

careful observation of plants, animals and mineral substances;
herbal medicine and early alchemical practice;
mineral dyes and fine decoration;
small precision tools;
illusion, concealment and misleading paths;
traps and prepared defensive ground;
interpretation of unstable supernatural crossings.

They are not yet an industrial clockwork people. Later mechanical traditions develop from a much longer gnome interest in knowledge, experimentation, precision and the refinement of difficult crafts.

Some gnome communities act as interpreters between Material settlements and Fey powers. Others avoid all such work. Their links to the Fey World vary by lineage and region rather than defining every gnome.

Gnomes sometimes maintain household agreements with brownies and other domestic Fey. Such agreements depend upon hospitality, secrecy and reciprocal service rather than ownership.

Conflicts with kobolds, goblinoids, trolls and giants already occur around hills, mines, forests and underground routes. Gnome communities prefer concealment, traps and misdirection but are capable of organised defence.

Some gnome communities take hostages to protect hidden settlements or bind trespassers into temporary service. Magical compulsion may be treated as lawful punishment in one settlement and an unforgivable form of enslavement in another.

Halflings — Kin-Networks of Field, River and Road

Halflings are an established mortal people, not reduced humans and not the offspring of another race.

No single settlement pattern defines them. Some Rooting Age halfling communities are settled; others move between seasonal sites; many combine permanent household centres with fishing, gathering, herding or exchange journeys.

Halfling communities are found in productive lowlands, river margins, wooded meadows, lake country and sheltered coastal regions. Their settlements are often dispersed between related households rather than concentrated within one dense village.

Many communities combine several modest food sources:

small cultivated plots;
seed gathering and preservation;
fishing and trapping;
nut and fruit-tree management;
small livestock;
basketry and food storage;
seasonal exchange between related households.

This diversity can make halfling settlements resilient when one crop, herd or fishing ground fails. It also means that their rights may be scattered across a wide landscape rather than contained within one defended boundary.

Halfling buildings commonly use earth, wood, turf and reed. They leave fewer monumental remains than dwarven halls or later human cities, causing subsequent historians to underestimate their age and distribution.

Some communities place great importance upon food-sharing, guest protection, seed ownership and household stores. Others possess more mobile or warlike traditions. Hospitality is a recognised halfling custom in many regions, not a guarantee that every halfling settlement welcomes strangers.

Halfling warfare often favours ambush, traps, concealed routes and attacks upon supplies rather than massed fighting. Some communities ransom captives or adopt them into households. Others practise debt bondage, forced labour or hereditary servitude. Small settlements are capable of both strong mutual protection and severe exploitation of outsiders.

Halflings may share settlements with humans, elves, gnomes or other peoples through marriage, alliance or negotiated residence. They are not natural dependants of larger peoples.

Other Peoples and Territorial Powers

The Rooting Age contains many other intelligent or organised beings.

Orcs occupy hunting territories, uplands, grasslands and surviving ruins according to their own regional cultures.
Goblins maintain settlements, warrens and mobile communities in forests, hills and abandoned places.
Kobolds construct trapped warrens around mines, caverns and sites linked to dragons or draconic ancestry.
Serpentfolk preserve hidden enclaves, cults and relics from prehuman and Hyborian ages.
Giants claim mountain valleys, islands and highland routes.
Trolls hold caves, forests, bridges and difficult borderlands.
Linnorms dominate remote territories and may demand tribute or complete exclusion.
Brownies establish household relationships based upon service, food and respectful secrecy.
Satyrs defend gathering places, wild groves and sacred revel grounds.
Unicorns guard particular forests, springs and unspoiled territories.
Bokrug remains worshipped in Mnar after the doom of Sarnath.

These beings are not isolated encounters wandering through an otherwise human world. Many possess homes, descendants, customs, sacred obligations, allies, enemies and territorial claims older than the villages expanding around them.

Orcs, goblins, kobolds, giants, serpentfolk and other peoples may trade, raid, take captives, pay tribute, impose tribute or become subject to it. None is uniformly hostile, innocent or naturally suited to slavery.

Mythic and Divine Developments

Hearth, Water and Ancestor Powers

As communities remain in one place, divine and spiritual relationships become increasingly localised.

Hearth powers guard homes, kinship and stored food.
Spring and river spirits gain authority over settlement survival.
Field powers become associated with germination, weather, harvest and blight.
Herd guardians protect breeding animals and seasonal pasture.
Ancestors become defenders, witnesses and claimants within occupied land.
Threshold spirits govern entry, hospitality and protection against intrusion.
War and vengeance powers receive offerings before raids, feuds and the recovery of captives.
Spirits of oath and hospitality punish those who enslave protected guests or violate recognised sanctuary.

These powers do not form one universal pantheon. Their names, laws and relationships differ between peoples and regions.

The Dead Beneath the House

Burial beneath or beside occupied homes makes ancestry physically present within settlement life.

The dead may confirm a household’s claim, guard descendants, demand offerings or resist changes made without their consent. Removing a family from its home can therefore separate it from both property and recognised ancestors.

Captives brought into a household may be denied access to their own dead, names and burial customs. This separation can become a tool of domination and a cause of hauntings, ancestral vengeance or later revolt.

Hyborian Inheritances Recede

Relics of Stygia, Acheron and the fallen Hyborian world remain, but their histories become increasingly fragmented.

A metal weapon, sealed tomb or written fragment may preserve knowledge beyond the surrounding material culture. Such objects are difficult to reproduce because the mines, workshops, schools and states that supported them no longer exist.

Later peoples may inherit genuine relics or bloodlines without becoming unchanged continuations of the vanished kingdoms.

The Warning of Sarnath

Mnar remembers the destruction of Ib and the doom of Sarnath. Bokrug’s judgement becomes a warning carried by traders and dreamers: denying personhood and territorial rights to an older nonhuman people may create a debt that survives every original offender.

Permanent Crossings

The planes already exist and are not formed during this age. Rooted settlement instead gives many crossings fixed mortal contexts.

A spring may open into the Fey World on one night each year. A recurring dream may lead to Mnar or another Dreamlands region. A burial chamber may become thin to the Shadow Plane when its rites are neglected.

Human, dwarven, elven, gnome and halfling communities all establish custodianship over such crossings. None possesses an automatic right to every portal connected with its ancestry or traditions.

Peoples, Magic and Technology

Households and Neighbourhoods

The household becomes an enduring economic, legal and ritual unit. Homes contain food, tools, sleeping places, workshops, burials and sacred objects.

Neighbouring households must negotiate fire, waste, shared walls, paths, water and rebuilding. Mixed settlements must also negotiate different concepts of privacy, inheritance, kinship and sacred space.

Captives, servants, adopted outsiders and dependent families may live within the household without possessing equal rights over its stores, marriages, rituals or decisions.

Fields, Herds and Storage

Cultivated land requires seasonal labour and protection. Herds require water, breeding knowledge, grazing rights and negotiated movement.

Granaries, pits and jars protect food from lean seasons but also create wealth that can be inherited, stolen, counted or controlled.

The household or leader controlling a communal store may demand labour, loyalty, marriage, tribute or military service in return for access during famine.

Exchange

Obsidian, shell, pigments, stone, timber, salt, fibres, ornaments and rare metals move between settlements.

Dwarven mineral goods, elven forest products, gnome dyes and medicines, halfling seed varieties and human pottery may all travel through the same exchange networks without producing one common culture.

Exchange routes carry marriage partners, rituals, illnesses, stories and feuds as well as material goods.

Captives may also be exchanged, ransomed or transferred through these networks. Their movement is not always recorded separately from livestock, tribute or household property by societies that deny them independent standing.

Magic

Magic remains closely tied to household, body, season and place.

protective marks are placed upon doors, roofs and storage vessels;
burial rites preserve relationships between ancestors and descendants;
weather-working and fertility rites support fields and herds;
dreamers negotiate with spirits and Dreamlands powers;
healers use plants, touch, song and sympathetic objects;
curses target water, fertility, stored food and inherited land;
elven rites preserve groves, migration routes and seasonal balances;
gnome illusion and concealment protect settlements and crossings;
dwarven runes and craft-rites defend stone, water and ancestral halls;
binding magic restrains captives, debtors, oath-breakers or dangerous entities;
elder relics offer power that local traditions cannot reproduce safely.

Formal arcane schools and kingdom-wide magical law belong to later urban societies.

Land, Law and Personhood

The Rooting Age transforms use into inherited claim for human and nonhuman peoples alike. Dwarven excavations, elven woodland management, gnome crossings, halfling gardens, Fey territories, ancestral graves and human fields may all create legitimate rights over the same landscape.

Inherited Claims

A community may recognise rights based upon:

ancestral burial;
construction and maintenance;
cultivation;
water management;
repeated seasonal use;
herd movement and pasture agreement;
woodland management;
marriage or adoption;
gift, exchange or negotiated settlement;
successful defence;
custodianship of a portal or sacred place;
agreement with spirits or nonhuman inhabitants.

Several claims may apply to the same land. A human family may cultivate a field above a dwarven watercourse. Elves may retain woodland rights along its boundary. A halfling kin-group may possess seasonal gathering rights. A spirit may govern the spring keeping all three alive.

Shared Water and Stored Food

Springs, wells, channels and emergency stores cannot always be treated as ordinary household property. Their maintenance and use affect the survival of the entire settlement.

Rules develop around priority, drought, contamination, compensation, theft and the opening of communal stores.

A water source may have several recognised authorities: the people who dug the channel, the households maintaining it, the upstream community and the spirit or creature claiming the spring itself.

Mobile and Dispersed Rights

Permanent settlement does not erase older seasonal use. Mobile peoples may possess recognised rights to pasture, fish, gather, hunt or travel through land occupied by settled communities.

Halfling gardens, elven managed woodlands and seasonal human camps may appear scattered or unfenced while remaining part of an inherited territory.

Nonhuman Personhood

There is no universal law declaring that human claims outrank all others.

A being capable of communication, custom, agreement and recognised territorial conduct may be treated as a person or neighbouring power. Species alone does not settle the question.

Recognition does not require peaceful behaviour. Dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, humans, orcs, goblins, giants, Fey and other persons may raid, murder, steal, demand tribute or break agreements. Recognised persons can face judgement, feud, compensation, exile or war for their conduct.

Predators and destructive entities that neither communicate nor observe agreements may be hunted or driven away. A monster is not granted rights merely because another member of its kind once bargained elsewhere.

Overlapping Territories

A dwarf hold may control the stone and tunnels beneath a valley while surface communities control its fields.
Elves may retain hunting, gathering and sacred rights within woodland cleared by farmers.
A gnome doorway may remain a recognised crossing after another people builds around it.
A halfling kin-group may possess dispersed gardens and seed stores without ruling one continuous block of land.
A brownie may possess household rights without owning the structure.
A unicorn or linnorm may claim a spring or forest without governing every creature living within it.

Building upon land does not prove that it was empty.

War, Raiding and Feud

Warfare in the Rooting Age is usually local, but local war can destroy an entire people. A settlement of several hundred inhabitants may possess no reserve population, distant capital or allied army able to replace its losses.

Conflict commonly begins over:

fields and grazing land;
wells, springs and channels;
fisheries and landing places;
stored food and livestock;
mines, quarries and salt sources;
burial grounds and sacred places;
marriage, abduction or disputed adoption;
the recovery of captives;
broken hospitality;
murder and inherited feud;
tribute and refusal of tribute;
settlement upon land already claimed by another people.

Raiding

Raiding is often more common than open battle. Small groups strike fields, herds, fishing camps or travellers and withdraw before the settlement can assemble its defenders.

Successful raids may seize:

livestock;
grain and stored food;
seed stock;
tools and weapons;
boats;
craft specialists;
children or marriageable captives;
hostages;
sacred objects;
knowledge of hidden routes or water.

Village War

Open conflict may involve ambush, missile fire, attacks upon isolated workers, the burning of houses, destruction of crops or attempts to breach a settlement boundary.

Stone axes, spears, bows, slings, clubs, shields and fire are more important than organised military formations. Dwarven stoneworks, gnome traps, elven woodland knowledge and halfling concealment create different local advantages.

Victory rarely means occupying every part of an enemy territory permanently. It may instead produce tribute, hostages, surrender of a disputed field, access to water, forced migration or the destruction of the defeated settlement.

Feud

Where no recognised superior authority exists, a killing may create obligations between entire households or peoples.

Feuds can be settled through compensation, marriage, hostage exchange, oath or ritual judgement. They can also continue across generations, especially among long-lived peoples who remember the original offence clearly.

Not every retaliation is lawful. A community may use an old injury to justify conquest, enslavement or the killing of people who played no part in the original offence.

Captivity, Slavery and Forced Labour

Slavery exists during the Rooting Age, but there is no single worldwide institution or legal definition. Captivity takes many forms, and the same person may pass through several conditions during a lifetime.

Forms of Captivity

War captivity: defeated enemies are taken instead of killed.
Household slavery: captives labour within a household without the rights of kin.
Forced agricultural labour: captives cultivate fields or tend animals for their owners.
Construction labour: prisoners dig channels, haul stone, repair walls or build communal works.
Debt bondage: a debtor works for a creditor until an obligation is judged repaid.
Penal labour: offenders are compelled to work as punishment or compensation.
Hostage service: relatives of a rival leader live under supervision to guarantee an agreement.
Hereditary servitude: children inherit the status or obligation of captive parents.
Captive adoption: outsiders are incorporated into another household, sometimes with eventual rights and sometimes without them.
Tribute labour: a defeated community provides workers for part of each year.
Ritual captivity: prisoners are held for sacrifice, ordeal, divine service or exchange.

Lawful and Unlawful Bondage

A society may recognise some forms of bondage while rejecting others. One village may permit temporary debt service but forbid hereditary slavery. Another may regard every war captive as the property of the captor. A third may require captives to be adopted, ransomed or killed rather than permanently enslaved.

Recognition as a person does not guarantee freedom. A captive may possess a name, kin, rights of complaint and protection against arbitrary killing while remaining legally enslaved.

Other peoples may reject the captor’s law entirely. Relatives may raid to recover captives. A neighbouring ruler may refuse to return escaped slaves. A spirit or god may declare a particular bondage invalid. An enslaved person may retain obligations to their birth community that conflict with the commands of an owner.

Children and Inherited Status

The status of children born in captivity is one of the age’s most dangerous disputes.

Possible customs include:

the child belongs to the owner of the enslaved parent;
the child belongs to the free parent’s household;
the child is free but owes service;
the child must be adopted formally to remain;
the child can be redeemed by relatives;
the child inherits bondage until a fixed age;
no person may inherit slavery, regardless of a parent’s status.

Differences between these customs create feuds, raids and competing claims that can survive for generations.

Escape and Ransom

Some captives may purchase freedom, be exchanged, complete a fixed term or receive release through marriage or adoption.

Others escape. Whether escape restores freedom depends upon who has the power to judge the claim.

A settlement may shelter fugitives as free persons, return them to preserve an alliance or demand compensation before deciding. Sacred places and supernatural crossings may become recognised refuges where ownership claims cannot be enforced.

Magic and Enslavement

Binding oaths, curses, marked collars, dream-geases and spirit contracts may enforce service. Such magic is never automatically lawful merely because it functions.

A magical bond may:

prevent escape;
punish disobedience;
conceal a captive’s identity;
sever communication with ancestors;
transfer an obligation between owners;
bind a household to release the captive when a condition is met;
allow a god or spirit to witness abuse.

Breaking a magical bond can save a captive while also releasing the danger, debt or spirit originally contained within the agreement.

No People Is Naturally Master or Slave

Humans are neither the only enslavers nor the only victims. Dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, orcs, goblins, serpentfolk, giants and other recognised peoples may practise, prohibit, suffer or resist slavery according to local custom and political power.

No race is naturally suited to servitude, naturally innocent of exploitation or universally committed to one law.

What Changed During the Rooting Age

Permanent villages spread across more regions.
Houses are repeatedly rebuilt upon inherited sites.
Burial ties ancestors directly to household and land.
Farming and herding expand without replacing every older lifeway.
Pottery, weaving, kilnwork and specialist craft deepen.
Water management becomes central to settlement survival.
Storage creates surplus, authority, inheritance and theft.
Long-distance exchange networks widen.
Regional cultures become more distinct.
Public ritual begins extending beyond household worship.
Eridu establishes an enduring public sanctuary of Enki.
The communities of Nabta Playa create shared law around wells and seasonal gathering.
Lepenski Vir recognises the Danube’s river persons as territorial powers.
Extractive copper smelting begins without replacing stone technology.
Leadership becomes more durable but has not yet become universal kingship.
Dwarven holds expand deep-water systems, stone halls and defended routes.
Elven woodland territories face growing pressure from clearance and fixed agricultural boundaries.
Gnome communities formalise the custody of hidden settlements and supernatural crossings.
Halfling kin-networks spread seeds, food practices and exchange links through productive lowlands.
Agreements increasingly govern territory shared between several mortal and nonhuman peoples.
Raiding becomes increasingly valuable as settlements accumulate food, livestock and specialist tools.
Captive labour, debt bondage, hostage-taking and hereditary servitude develop in some communities.
War leaders and powerful households gain influence through the control of stores, captives and defended water.
Some villages begin becoming towns organised around public works and sacred institutions.
Land, water and older territorial claims become harder to ignore.

What Survives from the Rooting Age

settlement mounds containing generations of rebuilt houses;
plaster ancestors buried beneath abandoned communal spaces;
ancestors buried beneath later homes, streets and temples;
wells governed by agreements older than written law;
Nabta water-oaths still invoked by later desert peoples;
abandoned channels whose spirits still expect maintenance;
the earliest sacred foundations beneath later Eridu;
stone river-persons guarding lost crossings of the Danube;
pottery traditions preserving migration and marriage;
seed stores sealed during famine or conflict;
rare copper objects and forgotten smelting sites;
village boundaries preserved after their markers vanish;
dwarven cisterns, tunnels and bridges beneath later settlements;
elven grove boundaries preserved by trees older than surrounding kingdoms;
gnome doors that open according to forgotten seasonal or lunar rules;
halfling seed houses containing plant varieties lost elsewhere;
household agreements with brownies and other domestic Fey;
water rights shared between villages and older river powers;
Dreamlands crossings guarded by hereditary households;
Hyborian relics preserved as sacred objects without remembered origins;
territorial disputes created when later rulers mistake nonhuman land for wilderness;
mass graves, burned villages and abandoned fields left by local wars;
bloodlines descended from captives, hostages and adopted outsiders;
families claiming that an ancient debt of service was never lawfully ended;
magical bindings that continue enforcing forgotten terms;
refuges where escaped captives were once granted protection;
the warning of Sarnath carried far beyond Mnar.

Campaign Legacies

The Buried Ancestor

A plaster figure from ‘Ain Ghazal is uncovered beneath a later settlement. It recognises some inhabitants as descendants and condemns others as intruders, but no surviving tradition explains what agreement it was created to enforce.

The River Person’s Judgement

A Lepenski Vir sculpture is removed from the Danube and sold as an ancient idol. Fish vanish from the river, drowned bodies begin returning and the river-person demands recognition as a lawful territorial power.

The Broken Water-Oath

A ruler claims exclusive ownership of an ancient Nabta well. Several communities produce different versions of the original oath, while the well itself begins refusing water to anyone arriving under arms.

The First House of Enki

Workers beneath a later temple uncover the earliest sanctuary at Eridu. Its surviving water-law contradicts the authority of the current priests and identifies an imprisoned spirit as one of the sanctuary’s original legal witnesses.

The House Beneath the House

A collapsed floor reveals generations of burials belonging to several peoples. The present household claims the building, but an elven ancestor wears halfling ornaments beside a human child interred with a dwarven key.

The Dry Channel

A village depends upon an ancient watercourse first cut by dwarves and maintained by human and halfling households. The flow fails after a new leader refuses to recognise an agreement with the spirit of the spring.

The Hidden Door

A gnome doorway opens beneath a newly built granary. The villagers demand that it be sealed, while the gnome custodians insist that closing it will trap a dangerous Fey procession on the Material Plane.

The Last Seed House

A halfling store contains a crop variety able to survive an advancing drought. Several neighbouring communities demand access, but the seed is protected by an oath restricting where it may be planted.

The Grove That Was Never Empty

Farmers begin clearing woodland for new fields. Elves produce ancestral markers proving the land has been managed for generations, while a unicorn claims the central spring and rejects both sides’ authority.

The Children of the Captives

Several families discover that their ancestors were taken during a Rooting Age war. A surviving oath-tablet appears to declare their descendants permanently bound to a nearby settlement, but part of the agreement is missing.

The Refuge Door

An ancient gnome crossing once granted freedom to any captive who reached it. A local ruler demands that the doorway be closed after enslaved labourers begin disappearing through it.

The Captive Smith

A dwarven craftsperson taken generations ago forged the tools upon which a human settlement now depends. The dwarf’s descendants demand ownership of the forge, while the settlement claims the original captive was adopted and freely transferred the knowledge.

Ending State and Transition

By c. 5000 BCE, rooted village life has become a permanent force across many regions. Large settlements support specialist craft, inherited ritual, managed water, public sanctuaries and long-distance exchange.

Humans and nonhuman peoples occupy increasingly connected landscapes. Their farms, forests, halls, crossings, grazing grounds and sacred places overlap. Cooperation becomes more valuable, but the consequences of disputed inheritance become more severe.

Household and neighbourhood custom remain powerful, but some settlements are becoming too large to organise through kinship alone. Public works require continuous labour. Stores must be recorded and guarded. Captives and dependants must be assigned a recognised status. Ritual authority extends beyond one family. Wealth and influence become increasingly unequal.

War captains, storehouse keepers, water judges, ritual specialists and powerful households accumulate followers, obligations and captive labour. These developments do not yet create universal kingship or state slavery, but they prepare the foundations from which later rulers, temples and cities can command entire populations.

The next age begins when large villages become urban centres and public institutions gather labour, surplus, military power and sacred authority on an unprecedented scale.

The Rooting Age therefore passes into The Blooming Cities.

Historic and Mythic Context

The Rooting Age combines archaeological developments from c. 7000–5000 BCE with the setting’s inherited history of elder ruins, Dreamlands contact, nonhuman peoples and active supernatural powers.

There is no single global Neolithic timetable. Çatalhöyük, ‘Ain Ghazal, Jiahu, Mehrgarh, Lepenski Vir, Nabta Playa, Eridu, Mesopotamian village traditions, African lakeside communities and early American cultivators develop through different environments and inherited practices.

The terms Neolithic and Chalcolithic are regional archaeological descriptions rather than universal stages reached by every people simultaneously. A community may farm without pottery, work copper while relying upon stone tools or maintain a permanent settlement without territorial kingship.

Where archaeological interpretation remains uncertain, SpiralWorlds makes a binding campaign ruling rather than leaving every question unresolved. The plaster figures of ‘Ain Ghazal are ritual bodies for communal ancestors and guardians. The sculptures of Lepenski Vir portray recognised river persons and transformed ancestors. Nabta Playa’s wells are protected by shared sacred law, and its communities begin systematic observation of seasonal skies. Eridu’s earliest sanctuary is a genuine public house of Enki and the first enduring centre of his water-law.

These rulings establish campaign truth without claiming that every mortal scholar in 1454 knows or accepts it.

Dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings do not wait for human civilisation before developing their own laws, settlements and conflicts. Their age-specific histories remain varied: scattered dwarven holds, mortal elven woodland territories, concealed gnome communities and dispersed halfling kin-networks coexist with human villages, mobile peoples, Fey territories and older monstrous domains.

The age is not romanticised as an era of peaceful cooperation. Archaeological settlement, inherited land and stored wealth create opportunities for defence, conquest, enslavement and coercion as well as mutual support.

Slavery is presented as a varied political and legal practice rather than a natural property of any race. Captivity, debt bondage, forced labour, adoption, ransom and hereditary servitude differ between communities and remain contested by victims, relatives, rival peoples, gods and spirits.

The vanished Hyborian kingdoms, Mnar and Bokrug remain part of world history, but they do not replace the histories of Holocene cultures. They survive as inherited ruins, exceptional powers and unresolved claims within a much broader world.

Continue the Timeline

Selected Historical and Literary References