This article is divided into two parts. The second deals with the great City of Babylon. But let us start with the first part.



If you haven’t already, take a look at the article, “Magick and Healing in Fantasy, An Example”. It has a few errors in composition and vocabulary, but for all that is an excellent look at how one person deals with the subject of healing in fantasy games, and the effect magick could have on it. Go ahead and read it, I can wait. With a little revision and expansion it could find space in a professional publication.



This is why I started “Writing Practice”. To see if I could get people to contribute to The Gaming Outpost. The more material people can find on this site, the greater the potential audience.



Also today I learned (yet again) why it’s not a good idea to be grumpy. People are grumpy right back.:) (See the “Writing Practice” for Nov 28th, 2001.)



At the same time, I did get a good comment on the subject, but you’ll have to look at the article’s page to read it. Click on the “Writing Practice, Nov. 28th 2001″ link and scroll down to the bottom. The author presentS some good points, and it’s my hope he’ll expand upon them for submission to GO.



With that out of the way I now proceed to a rough hewn story about the great and glorious Empire of Babylon.



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The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate



Part One: A Rumble in the Mountains



The story of Babylon begins in the land of Dilmun, the Land of the Sweet Water. This was a green and pleasant land. A warm and well watered land by the shores of a great freshwater sea. Here a stocky, round headed, black haired people lived. Learning from their gods the arts of agriculture, herding, and early writing. They lived in villages, some of whom were growing into small towns. Their lives were not entirely peaceful. They did know somewhat of the arts of war. But conflict was an infrequent thing.



Their country was savannah, with occasional copses of trees and stands of bush. They settled along the creeks and rivers, using the trees found there to make their huts and houses. Fish was plentiful, as was game. Though at times the migrating herds did do serious damage to their fields. They grew wheat and barley, netted fish, snared birds, and hunted antelope, horse, and cattle. With the encouragement of their gods they tried keeping the last three, but only the cattle proved amenable to captivity.



This was at the end of the Ice Ages, the end of the Gods’ War. The non-human races and their gods were leaving Ærth to Humanity and his deities. Among those leaving were the Frost Giants and their cold souled divinities. Thus it was that the great ice sheets were retreating, and the waters thus pent up returning to the seas.



Far to the west, across the fresh water sea was a mighty escarpment. In that escarpment was a cleft. A cleft that reached for many miles nearly to another sea, a salt water sea. A sea that was higher in altitude than the sea that nourished the land of Dilmun.



Over the course of years, centuries, the salt water sea wore away at this dam. Around the year 15,000 BAF (Before Atlantl’s Fall) the dam failed. it was not a gradual thing. There were no precursors, no warnings. The wall of rock just gave way and millions of gallons of sea water poured through the cleft to the great valley beyond.



No one knows how many died. How many early civilizations perished in that great flood. It is thought that the sea we call the Mare Ostrum (it combines our Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas) filled in less than a century. Filled so quickly that the waters of the Mare Ostrum did not mix with the waters near the bottom of that long lost fresh water sea, and so one could find fresh water at the very bottom of the Mare Ostrum, had one the skill and tools for the task.



The people of Dilmun, of the Land of Sweet Water, had to flee. Flee to the east to a new, harsher land. There they would try to rebuild their lives. Rebuild their villages and homes. Replant their fields and replenish their herds. Only to fail thanks to another catastrophy. But that is a tale for tomorrow.

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Coming Up: The Parching of Central Azir. In which the people of Dilmun become the victims of a very long term drought (it continues still) and flee to (and through) the Iranian Plateau. Till then.



Alan