Ghyll:Looliers

Dib! --DrAckroyd 09:45, 2 Dec 2004 (EST)

Useful Information...

From Grimporke Grimoire:

Ser Malmiz, also known as the Drunken Prophet, was quite infamous in his foolhardy explorations of both occult lore and dubious culinary "delights". In spite of this, the Loony Loolier, as he was called due to his fascination with said tribe, made a regular diet of this unholy concoction. It is believed that this odd culinary choice fueled many of his subsequent visions.

In any case, Ser Malmiz claimed on more than one occasion to have plumbed the secret depths of knowlege of not only the Sarfelogian Mountains but also the ritual secrets of the ancient Looliers.

From Bordingbras his hatt!:

A strange epic poem of the little-understood Loolier people, and the only extant manuscript to survive their destruction. They were destroyed sometime between -400 and -323 EC, in a not entirely understood conflict. They are said to have massacred a force of rival Exingians over a matter of dispute in Theoalchemy, and then to have been destroyed for their vile crimes. By whom or what they were destroyed remains unclear to this day, though the Vale of Serdoch is suspiciously close to the ruins of Alezan. They have been often vilified for the events of the Battle of Barnum Stones, but some modern historians question this claim.

From The Battle of Barnum Stones:

History of course is written by the victors, and the Looliers can hardly be described as that. We know little enough of them, beyond what is related here. Only one Loolier manuscript has so far come to light -the long satirical poem Bordingbras his hatt!- and across the centuries the Looliers are yet still so despised that most mainstream scholars disdain to study it. Further, the passing of time has dignified what took place at Barnum with the epithet “Battle”, attributing the noblest of motives to the Exingians, and most often denigrating the Looliers as little better than lascivious lunatics more interested in fornication than washing. The slaughter of the Exingians at the hand of Salerny Redthighs was the spark that ultimately ignited the patrician tribes; they finally united, thus setting in train the events that led inexorably to the Raking, to the total destruction of the Looliers and to the present order.

But recent archaeological evidence may finally and perversely lend strong support to an entirely different reading of events, in which the Looliers are not the makers of massacre but rather, simple victims in the grip of events entirely beyond their comprehension. In this version, the entire Battle was masterminded by a mysterious Third Force. This certainly would accord with the tale offered by Bordingbras his hatt!, the only Loolian manuscript still extant, and held in the Odlucian Library. This is the only document we have which tells the Looliers’ side of any events at all.

This comparatively little-studied poem by an unknown hand is the only document in the Loolian dialect to have survived the rage of the times, and hitherto it has been a lone voice of dissent in the centuries of constant praise for the perceived “noble sacrifice of the Exingians”.

The poem relates the doom-laden, tragic fate of Bordingbras, a lost hero who is a mere bagatelle in the hands of a Fate that is not so much arbitrary as wilfully capricious. The hero (bravebeste Bordinbracche!), destined to be perennially misunderstood and perennially to misunderstand, will ultimately go willingly, sword in hand, to the slaughter just like a beast. This is of course exactly what befell Salerny Redthighs and his Looliers.