Ancient Empires

One of the greatest lessons in cosmology and setting design to come from the 4e era was the concept of ancient empire that are long gone, but echoes of their past grandeur and horror still linger.  In DH5, the protagonist nations are deliberately meant to be new colonists from Earth, who over relatively few generations have had to accustom themselves to this foreign yet familiar world, so the potential for lost empires in the very territory that they now occupy is quite significant.

As a quick reminder or update; here are the basic protagonist nations and a very brief precis of their character.  They are all expatriate Earthlings, but it's been over a hundred years since any contact with Earth has occurred.

• The Six Colonist nations: 
• Normaund—a Norman colony, with some of the substrate citizens of various Norman domains on Earth brought over as an underclass—Anglo-Saxons, Gallo-Franks, Sicilians, etc.
• Culmerland—refugees from Anglo-Saxon England that never submitted to William the Conqueror (DH5 takes place about the time-frame of Ivanhoe, so the crusader colonists left Earth not any later than 1100; shortly after William's conquest.)
• New Cumbria—originally another ethnic separatist enclave; Welsh-Cornish separatists who pined for a semi-legendary Golden Age before the Anglo-Saxon conquest.  After a rush of naming things in the Old Brythonic language gave this region much of its linguistic character, the Old British have not managed to maintain strict ethnic control over this country, and the population is heavily mingled with others from the Colonist nations, although it still maintains some political and cultural distinctiveness.
• New Dalriata—A primarily Lowland Scots and northern English nation that bears some of the anarchic and tribal character of the Border Reivers.  What they lack in political unity, they make up for in bellicosity and unruliness.  Eventually they are ripe to be made a subsidiary of one of the other kingdoms, but not in the immediate future.  They still maintain a fair bit of distinctive Scottishness about them, in spite of their blended heritage, by and large.
• Trondmark—a claimant to the lost throne of Cnut the Great; an illegitimate half-brother to Harthacnut sent his son as a Crusader to reestablish the glory of Cnut's North Sea Empire, which became the foundation of Trondmark.  This country has a predominately hybrid Viking and Anglo-Saxon character, much as might have developed had either Cnut not had his own issue die shortly after his death unable to secure his legacy, or had Harald Hardrada been successful in pressing his claim as king of England.  In reality, this is probably the most cosmopolitan of the Six Colonists, although most citizens today have left behind their older identities if they were Scottish or Welsh or what-have-you and instead become assimilated into the emergent Anglo-Viking Trondmarkian ethnicity.
• Skeldale—It wasn't only the descendants of Cnut who moved into the new world from Scandinavia; a collection of jarls and lords from the north who fell out of favor when Magnus took Norway from Cnut's heirs banded together and brought their retinues and families along with them to found Skeldale, a much more "pure" Viking colony.
• The Hill Country—sometimes called "the Seventh Colony" this was actually a much later settlement, largely by Anglo-Saxons and Scots from Culmerland and New Cumbria and a few other locations who found themselves not completely satisfied their their lot in their new colonies and went and founded their own rural republic further to the South.
• Another earlier pulse of colonization based on a period of contact with Earth that predates the arrival of the Six Colonist nations by about two centuries created the nations of Carlovingia and Terassa—Frankish in the case of the former, and drawn from the northern Reconquista countries of Asturias, Leon, Navarre and Aragon in the case of the latter.  Their longer duration here has given them some time to diverge and merge with locals more than the Six Colonist nations, although they still maintain much of their former character still.
• Timiscburg has lost the records of when it came from Earth, but clearly it did.  It appears to be a combination of Lombards, Byzantines from the Exarchate of Ravenna, and other Germanic and Slavic peoples from Bavaria and  Carantania.  Politically, this has been often combined via dynastic union with Terassa and/or Carlovingia, but it seems to maintain its distinctive character.  It is currently ruled by a king of native Timischer stock; a kind of Germanic ethnicity that would be very similar to what later emerged as the Swiss or Tyrolean people we know.  It is a place of dark repute, as at least some of the aristocracy are rumored to be vampires.
• Porto Liure is a city-state of primarily Terassan settlement, but which is completely politically independent.  Infamous as an alleged haven of pirates, it has a vile reputation, but seems to be both politically and financially rather secure at the moment.
• The final (and earliest) of the Earthling kingdoms on the new world is Tesculum, which came sometime in the years between Theodosius I (395 AD) and Zeno (480 AD) from the failing Western Roman Empire, and represent a kind of late Roman population, which has nevertheless undergone significant evolution and hybridization with the locals since its arrival in the new world.

There are also some local kingdoms of natives, many of which represent the rump states of former empires which existed over much of the territory covered by these Earthling nations.  These include the following:

• Kurushat—the home of the jann, which once spread nearly to the Eastern Sea.  Kurushat is the name of the original empire of the jann, which is maintained in their current holdings, but in reality it Balkanized and separated over time, and the names of kingdoms like Thuran, Izvand, Ochar, Qard and others are kingdoms that shared the same culture.  All except the current Kurushat rump state are long gone.
• Baal Hamazi—another rump state of the kemlings, which once stretched across much of this same territory.  Baal Hamazi grew by wresting territory from the Balkanized petty kingdoms of old Kurushat, but has since fallen into ruin itself, riven by dissension among its noble caste and most especially the rejection of their rule by all of their component peoples, who were horrified by their heathen idolatries and dark cults.
• Lomar—Although some trading outposts of old Zobna exist, the Cursed of Lomar are themselves a new arrival to the region, having been forced out of their ancestral home in Zobna to the north by the savage Inuto tribes.  Their ancient empire is, therefore, mostly inaccessible to the Six Colonists, but a handful of trading cities and city-states founded by Zobnans do exist as ruins deep in the forests and prairies.
• Gunaakt—conversely, the orcs and goblins once ruled a territory farther to the south.  Their power was broken by the waxing of Kurushat many centuries ago, but they still remain in a much reduced territory.
• Nizrekh—today, this is only an island with a dark reputation as the home of necromancers and snake cultists.  In reality, waves of both snakemen empires of the past and the dark sorcerers who became the Nizrekh Heresiarchs once ruled much of the territory now covered by the nations listed above.  Lingering blots of dark, inhuman evil still remain from this long-gone era, and it is believed that the curse of vampirism originated from some ancient Nizrekh ruins left behind in the territory that became Timischburg.  Worse evil still lingers, hidden, sometimes sealed or dormant, but waiting to be discovered nonetheless.  Nobody still remembers how the dark sorcerers made common cause with the snakemen, who's own empire had already been long lost by this time, but some believe that old Gunaakt may have been their rival and the cause of their alliance.  Some also believe that the savage Wendaks may be a lingering population, dwindled into barbarity, of Nizrekh settlement in the distant past.  A few names of these Nizrekh kingdoms and city-states still linger as whispered curses: Mnar, Kadatheron, Thraa, Ilarnek, and Sarnath.
• Leng—The Mind Wizards of Leng are still confined, as far as anyone knows, to Leng (wherever that is), and have never had an open Empire—but their baleful influence has been felt many times in the past as they've exercised their dark wizardry to topple empires and kingdoms, or subjugate them in secret.
• The snakemen empire is the earliest about which anything is known, but rumors of various even older empires predating anything human are not hard to find among scholars and, occasionally, simply the imaginative.  What clues or finds have led people to believe in these ancient empires is unknown, and some of them might be entirely fictional—but some of them may not.
• An ancient "civilized" ape empire.  Today, rumors of apes who can speak and use tools and build with stone and wood are just rumors, but they remain persistent.  Frequent assertions and associations that they were rivals to the snakemen in a time when the climate was warmer remain.  Today, temperate and even cold-weather apes and monkeys are rare but not unknown, but they have devolved if they once had an empire, for they live simply as animals, without language, culture or tools.
• Rumors of a lizardmen settlement when times were warmer also make the rounds, and some claim to have seen their ruins buried in remote fastnesses of the Hill Country or the southern reaches.  Today, lizardmen have no kingdoms or empires, but are almost unknown except as savage tribes living in some remote southern expanses.  What their former settlement may have looked like before the arrival of humans and near humans (like the jann, kemlings, etc.) is unknown.
• The very oldest realms that stretched across this land about which anything concrete is known were the Realms of Monsters that preceded the Gigantomachy.  While the heathen religion of the natives suggest that their gods cleared the earth of these realms to make room for mortals, the Christian arrivals from Earth dispute such an interpretation.  That said, that there was a Realm of Monster overthrown in a titanic struggle with beings of immense power, worshiped by subsequent heathens as gods is not contested.  The remnants here take the form of rare (or even singular and unique) monsters inhabiting strange and remote lairs, appearing rarely, but causing suffering and death whenever they do.
• Some strange scholars, considered by some to be insane, suggest that much of this territory was once covered by a vast shallow sea, and was ruled by thoroughly alien fish people.  They contend that such still linger just off-shore and beyond where the waters are much deeper and occasionally prey on isolated coastal villages, worshiping their demon-patrons Dagon and Cthulhu (if they aren't in fact the same being) and Bokrug.  Some may still linger in deep marshes, lakes and waterways where they managed to hold on to a tiny scrap of their former territory, and they plot the flooding of the entire earth again to usher in again their underwater empire.
• While nobody speaks of empires or past grandeurs, tales of an era when ratmen ruled the continent also remain.  Their degenerate and savage descendants still linger in a few places, although many refuse to believe that such ever existed at all.
• For those poor few who know what a shoggoth or dark young is or have seen the vile and forbidden pages of tomes such as The Book of the Black Prince, The Book of Eibon or The Necronomicon, they speak of an age even before the age of the Realms of Monsters, when truly alien horrors walked the land.  If such an era existed, little, if anything, is known about it.
• The Thurses have territory far to the north.  They are primarily savage and don't build cities or empires or even kingdoms, but they now walk in the lands where the Zobnans and others once walked, and rumors of their continued prowling of the lands of Skeldale or Trondmark or other more northerly Colonist nations persist.
• It's unclear if the woses, before their blood thinned and they were still werewolves, had any kind of kingdom, but the woses themselves speak wistfully of the power of the Golden Age of their werewolf ancestors, who hunted the forests and plains unmolested by the weaker human and near human races.  They themselves are mostly just another near human race nowadays.