Gloamveil Sovereignty
Gloamveil Sovereignty
The Gloamveil Sovereignty is one of the two elven kingdoms of Oblivion Vale. It holds the Gloamveil Forest, a large, politically central forest zone that touches multiple human borders. The Sovereignty survives by strict control of movement, strict protection of resources, and slow law that favors stability over mercy. In the Third Age, it functions as a living barrier between human realms, the northern wild zones, and the pressures that spill outward from the Plaguelands.
Territory and Border Control
Gloamveil is divided into three practical layers:
Guarded Border Groves: patrolled edges where trespass is met fast and without debate.
Controlled Travel Corridors: marked routes where outsiders may pass only with escort, fixed rules, and timed entry.
Deep Sanctuaries: interior zones tied to lineage sites, water points, and long-term stores; outsiders do not enter.
Travel is managed like a ration system. Entry is tracked, supplies are counted, and movement is limited by season. Border patrols treat illegal logging, poaching, and well theft as desecration. Punishments focus on removal, seizure of goods, and long restitution demands that can bind a family for years.
Government and Law
The Sovereignty is a slow-moving council-state or monarchy with a long memory and deep records. Authority is held through:
Lineage records that define land, duty, and access to protected zones.
Oath trees or oath stones that serve as public witness and legal anchor.
Restitution law that prioritizes repayment and repair over short punishment.
Gloamveil law is harsh because resources are scarce. It treats fire, cutting living trees, and disturbing protected seep zones as crimes against the whole forest, not against a single owner. Trials are formal, quiet, and often decided by record weight and oath history.
Water, Food, and Resource Doctrine
Since rivers and lakes are gone, the Sovereignty relies on:
Deep forest wells and guarded cistern vaults.
Hidden seep pockets fed by underground water movement.
Strict conservation rules enforced by wardens and lineage courts.
Water is treated as sacred stock. Theft is not framed as hunger. It is framed as sabotage. Food is based on controlled hunting, managed groves, and careful harvesting. Waste is a social offense. Repeated waste can lead to exile from protected corridors.
Economy and Trade
Gloamveil tolerates limited trade because it cannot produce everything it needs. Trade is narrow and supervised. It focuses on:
herbal medicines and rare forest compounds
treated timber taken only from approved deadfall or controlled cuts
crafted goods from long-lived elven workshops
In return, it demands goods that are hard to secure within the forest:
salt, metal tools, and worked hardware
sealed grains and preserved food
some medicines that only human or dwarven routes can provide
All trade is corridor-based. No open markets are allowed near sanctuaries. Smuggling is treated as a direct threat to water control and border stability.
Security Forces and Internal Discipline
Gloamveil’s security posture is defensive and methodical. It prioritizes:
patrol control of corridors and border groves
removal of raider camps before they settle
denial of access to water points for intruders
quiet containment of plague-risk travelers
The Sovereignty uses layered watch and response rather than large field armies. It prefers ambush control, route denial, and long pursuit inside familiar terrain. It avoids open war unless a border is breached near a protected water site.
Magic Policy
Magic in Oblivion Vale is rare and feared, and Gloamveil reflects this. Elven magic is uncommon and mainly used for:
concealment of routes and water points
boundary wards and warning measures
limited defensive shaping of terrain
The Sovereignty discourages public displays. It treats uncontrolled magic as a destabilizer that draws attention, panic, and retaliation from human courts. Practitioners are monitored through lineage duty rather than open registries, but the pressure is the same: power is allowed only when it serves stability.
Faith and Ritual Practice
The Sovereignty recognizes the three major gods—Life, Death, and Fate—through strict local rites, even though the gods never speak. Faith is treated as discipline, not comfort:
Life is tied to ration ethics, healing triage, and controlled growth.
Death is tied to clean disposal, boundary rites, and denial of undead risks.
Fate is tied to oath witness, lineage consequence, and restitution duty.
Blessings are accepted as real but never treated as proof of political right. A blessed person is watched, not celebrated.
External Relations
Human Kingdoms: Gloamveil maintains uneasy treaties focused on timber limits, corridor passage, and border calm. It distrusts courts that seize resources by decree and fears refugee pressure during famine years.
Crowbriar Dominion: The Sovereignty respects Crowbriar’s strength but sees it as too rigid and too eager to treat outsiders as permanent threats. Cooperation happens when raids surge along old roads.
Dreadhorn Holdfast and Stillsong Enclave: Relations are practical. Gloamveil values tools, seals, and controlled engineering, but it limits contact to prevent dependency and kidnapping risk.
Orc and Goblinoid Camps: Treated as constant border pressure. Gloamveil destroys camps inside its reach quickly, because lingering camps become water threats.
Current Condition (3A 3192)
In the current year, the Sovereignty is stable but strained. Scarcity drives more illegal cutting and poaching from human border towns. Smugglers attempt to map corridors and bribe escorts. Refugee movement rises during bad seasons, forcing harsher denial policies that damage treaty trust. The Sovereignty remains committed to a single priority: the forest’s water points must stay hidden, guarded, and unbroken, even if that requires cruelty