Upland Colossal Civilization

Overview

The Upland Colossal Civilization is the first of Caeldon's three great vanished elder civilizations.

They were not giants out of a monster tale. They were terrace-makers, ridge-road keepers, storm-watchers, and horizon priests who built on the killing heights where later peoples barely dare to walk: roads too broad for any living builder, terraces whose walls no one can now raise, shrines that face the storms rather than any town. Later peoples meet them mostly as ruins, and sometimes as a tall shape on a high road at dusk.

The god of the upland colossal world, Haurûm the Mountain-Father, fell asleep when it withdrew; only the surviving Giants still speak his name.

Civilizational Character

The colossal world lived in the open, at the top of the world.

Its peoples held high ridges, escarpments, terrace belts, and storm-beaten uplands, where a road could be seen for days and nothing could be hidden. They raised ridge roads, terrace flights, weather shrines, high tombs, horizon markers, and great fitted stonework in places later peoples judge too bare, too costly, and too cold to hold. Where the Dwarves later went down into the mountain and Humans spread along the valleys, the colossal peoples went up, and ruled the dangerous heights from the heights.

Decline and Fragmentation

The colossal world was never conquered. It withdrew: the later Material Plane stopped favouring its great bodies and exposed lands, and its roads, shrines, and settlements grew too sparse and too costly to keep. It broke into remnants, local memories, abandoned works, and stories, and no later great people descends from it whole. What it left are works and memories that outlived the people who made them.

Its rise is the subject of The Rise of the Upland Colossal Civilization.

Later Inheritance

Later Caeldon walks the colossal world's roads without knowing who built them.

Its terraces, broken ridge roads, weather shrines, and high tombs stand above the Headwater Marches and the outer Ironspine, in the bare high country of the Stormcrown. Headwater farmers plough colossal terraces, and caravans walk the Long Tread along the outer crest. The works are dangerous: colossal roads and terraces give way without warning, the high tombs hold dead nobody has named, and the summits are left alone, because Haurûm is said to sleep beneath them and climbers hear something like a heartbeat in the rock.

Some of the old road-keeping lives on. Troll crossing houses still keep oaths first sworn to colossal road-keepers in The Swearing of the Crossing-Charges, and Edgeway Kindred circuits began walking the abandoned roads in The Walking of the Unkept Roads. Kindred caravans still bring down worked pieces from high tombs, and the holds below still ask whose dead those were. Beneath the Human roads, the Dwarven holds, and the ruin-towns, the uplands remember a greater age.