Lore · Cities & Peoples
Kaladim and the Stormhammers
Before Kaladim was a city, it was a dragon’s home. A dwarf with a warhammer changed that, and paid for it with an arm.
Before Kaladim: Maldura
The dwarves remember an older age underground. Trade villages in the deep tunnels fought each other out of jealousy and pride. Maldura’s rich mines made it the wealthiest and most envied, and its elders fortified it until it was the largest citadel below. As others explored the surface, they found new ores and metals such as carbonite and feyiron.
The dragon’s lair
In an earlier age the site of Kaladim was only a series of mining tunnels, and its caverns a dragon’s lair. Jendl Mizebrite killed the dragon by smashing its skull with a warhammer, but lost an arm in the fight. The dwarves moved in.
Iron gates and tree towers
There is only one way into Kaladim, through the front gate, guarded by iron gates and by towers made from hollowed-out trees. At the entrance stands a giant statue of either Brell Serilis or the first king, Dagnor Butcherblock. A river runs through the city under bridges; some claim its underground waterways eventually spill into the Ocean of Tears, but “this claim has never been confirmed.” The mines are guarded by the Stormguard, and the cleric and paladin guildhalls sit in the smaller northern district, off the mining district.
The Stormhammers
Kaladim is ruled by King Kazon Stormhammer, “just, strong, compassionate, and wise beyond his years,” who has kept up a prosperity that goes back to the city’s founding centuries ago. It is the “Forge of Norrath,” home to 48,000, and it exports metals, gems, sandalwood, mushrooms and other fungi. Its people “keep a long memory of those who have wronged them,” and do not tolerate anyone “born under dark orientation.” Ogres and dark elves are not welcome. Its berserker guild, the Berserkers of the Underfoot, tells young dwarves it is time “to control that fiery temper of ours and use it to our advantage.”
Neighbours on Faydwer
Dwarves once lived alongside ogres on Faydwer. The ogre king Orduk II raised an army, but neither side broke the peace, because the elves would have joined the war on the dwarves’ side. The elves needed Kaladim, as the dwarf Hurgadil explains over an ale to a young Felwithe noble: they were too “dainty and frail” to mine their own gold. When she says Brell made the gnomes too, he sputters: “If the Underfoot had anything to do with gnomes, the tunnels of the world would be filled with pinwheels and fiddlesticks.”
The Mining Journal
Kaladim’s paper, The Mining Journal, brought the wider world to the miners: the slaying of Clan Grobb’s leader Bortar Ripkiller in Neriak, the troll civil war, the Neriak army’s march, the fall of Gukta, and the Wayfarers Brotherhood’s voyages. It carried local news too, such as Garrk Stonearm, who had worked the Kaladim mines for more than thirty years, standing for the vacant post of Miners Guild Captain.
In the game
Kaladim was the dwarf starting city in 1999, set in the Butcherblock Mountains near the docks for the boat to Freeport. Underfoot, in 2009, took the dwarves deeper, into Brell’s Rest and the realms below.
Where the sources disagree
The RPG names two possible subjects for the entrance statue, Brell Serilis or Dagnor Butcherblock, and does not decide between them.
The Library of Erudin is our source for Jendl Mizebrite and the dragon’s lair.
Sources
[1] Library of Erudin: Kaladim · [2] Library of Erudin: King Kazon Stormhammer · [3] Library of Erudin: Brell Serilis · [4] Library of Erudin: Berserker (Berserkers of the Underfoot) · [5] EverQuest.com: Underfoot: Unfolding the Lore, Brell’s Rest (2009)
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources listed on this page; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.