Red Blades

Elite Elven soldiers

The Red Blades have been an elite military group since the creation of the Holy Irillian Empire. They have found behind the lines of their enemies, bringing death and destruction in their wake.

The Red Blades are known for carrying a pair of short single-edges blades with a wrapped red leather hilt. When they must infiltrate an enemy encampment they leave their blades with a trusted member of The Blades or carry the knives with them.

The Red Blades started as a group of elves who lived in the wild places in the Holy Irillian Empire. The forests and glades were their fortress and the priests and soldiers were their prey. Rarely did they kill the peasants, but when they found a village whose supplied were vital - they killed everyone in the village. They even saw the act of killing children as mercy for they could not survive without the adults. When they granted these mercies their blades ran thick with blood, thus their moniker.

When the bulk of the elven army crossed the Caragan Sea to besiege the Irillian cities, the Red Blades returned to Ellendar as they were no longer needed to fight the Irillians. They lived along the shores of the Caragan destroying the few isolated pockets of Irillians that had not surrendered. When the xianese struck everything changed.

Xian burned the forests were the Red Blades hid and when a armed company was accompanied by a Child of Zarn the odds favored simply retreating. These Children were powerful creatures not to be underestimated. The hit and run warfare that worked so well against the Irillians faltered against the zealots of Xian.

At the start of the war with Xian the Red Blades numbered over three hundred (300) members, when the Xianese were finally turned back at Valparia less than thirty remained. The Red Blades were shattered and its strongest members killed during the war as they did everything they could to stop the Xian advance. Within a decade the Red Blades disbanded.

The surviving members did not simply disappear. Instead they returned to their lives they left behind when they joined the group. Hundreds of years later they were approached by a elf that wanted them to reform the company. He promised him that he had elves ready to dedicate them to the cause of the Red Blades - he would rebuild the company and give it renewed purpose.

That purpose was to regain the lands they had lost to all of the humans. Ellendar had lost too much land to the Xian, given away too much in the treaty to the Kingdom of Dakar, and even parleyed with their enemies in the founding of the Three Kingdoms. This elf called his organization Root, for it would restrengthen the spirit of the elves that was lost long ago by building from the root to the branch.

Although not even half of the surviving members agreed to his terms, the Red Blades were reformed with new members loyal to their patron. The older members grumbled that loyalty to the Red Blades was paramount, but these newcomers were cut from a different cloth. Eventually war took all of the remaining individual members that signed on for the new Red Blades. When the last one died the leader of Root took command of the Red Blades as well.

• Dwarven Magic of the Dakarian Insurrection campaign. The PCs frustrated their efforts to take out Ulrichstein.