Riftrender

Founding
According to the earliest annals of their clan’s history, the line of Riftrender traces its ancestry back to the royal family of Clan Silveraxe, one of the eight original Clans whose leaders were chosen by Moradin himself. In their account, Gemma Silveraxe was firstborn of the king, but not a daughter of the queen. The royal couple later produced a son, Camien, as heir, and while he grew up with his every whim attended to within the Silver Palace’s walls, Gemma was raised far from their hall and worked from her teenage years in the underground kingdom’s silver mines, growing stronger with every swing of pick and hammer. By the time she was in her late twenties, she’d grown to being perhaps the largest and strongest dwarf in the Hold, and had herself uncovered the kingdom’s first vein of adamantium, becoming legend such that it was said she could smell precious ore through solid rock. When the old king and queen died, however, her great popularity made Camien fear his half-sister might contest his claim to the throne, and so plotted her demise. The day after the old king and queen were laid to rest, Camien ordered one of the mines which had already been played out reassessed, and Gemma was naturally the one chosen to lead the survey team.

In this, supposedly one of the earliest tunnels supported by the most unyielding rock, a collapse suddenly struck, killing most of the dwarves sent inside. But Gemma, thinking quickly, had pulled a few nearest to her under the shelter of a sturdy beam and survived, though trapped within some of the most stubborn stone ever tunneled. Unlike her comrades, she did not give in to despair, and put out all their candles to conserve their air. Then, feeling her way in the absolute dark, she found the tiniest faults in this resolute stone, and started cracking them open with hammer, wedge, and her own steel pick. As she dug, they found other survivors, totaling seven in all, and following Gemma miraculously tunneled their own way back out. The other miners lauded her as a hero, and named her Riftrender as a title of honor. Her half-brother, however, was not pleased by this turn of events, and had her brought before a trial for causing the cave-in herself. To much public outcry, Gemma was banished from the Silveraxe domain.

The historians of Clan Silveraxe, however, dispute this claim, firmly asserting either that she was found guilty of causing the collapse because she wanted to hide something the surveyors found, left of her own volition, or that she never existed in the first place, conflicting accounts which cast aspersions on the quality of the Silveraxe recorders. What is known for certain is Gemma departed the Silveraxes’ kingdom, and left her old name behind in favor of a new one; Gemma Riftrender. She travelled the surface world, a rarity in those times, and became an adventurer whose numerous exploits may have been embellished over the centuries since. In time, of course, she longed to return to the comfort of stone halls, and leading a few dozen of her kin, many of whom had left their own clans voluntarily to follow her or were outcasts she’d inspired to reform, into the roots of the Gabbrostar Mountains and there, began to dig into the black granite. In the span of a generation, these pariahs had excavated a great city for themselves, and taken on the name Clan Riftrender.

Soon, Queen Gemma took a royal consort and produced an heir of her own, reigning for over a century before going peacefully to Moradin’s side. As only the tenth dwarven nation, the first not declared by their god’s clergy to be formed by divine will, the Riftrenders were seen as an affront, as was their use of the Common tongue when the other clans’ refusal to trade forced them into business with surface-dwelling humans. A keen old miner, however, Gemma had chosen the site for her new kingdom well. The riches her successors gleaned from the mountain in gold, silver, and adamantium and unrivaled trade with surface world made them too wealthy to be ignored, and over the next millennia they became the template for a dozen other small clans to follow. The First Clans were gradually forced to accept change in their society, and Riftrender was allowed to take part in deciding matters which affected all of dwarfkind, though grudges against them ebbed slowly.

Reign of the Bloodstone King
The dynasty of Riftrender continued unbroken for almost a millennia, guiding their clan through expansion as new caverns were discovered and inhabited, using the riches they unearthed to further their own influence through trade. They took part in relatively few wars, fighting only a few goblinoid hordes until the reign of King Heliodorus, when their realm came under sudden siege by an army of the undead. His queen fell victim to one of the first attacks, and in anguish locked himself alone in the royal smithy, where he began working ceaselessly to escape his sorrow. After a month, he emerged with a wondrous sword he named Griever and called together a special force of his finest warriors, dubbing their company the Deep Eyes, to find who or what was responsible. The cause, as their mission revealed, was a powerful necromancer who’d been driven into hiding underground after being ousted by an alliance of the surface world, one which Heliodorus had refused to aid. Blaming the loss of his beloved and his people on his own selfishness, the king took it upon himself to slay the necromancer personally. With Griever at his side and the Deep Eyes at his back, Heliodorus set off into the darkest tunnels of his kingdom.

Through steel and stealth, the dwarves managed to reach their target, only to find the necromancer, Lavia Lamentia, had transformed herself into a lich. Their battle was brief and bloody. By its end, half of the Deep Eyes lay dead and the king’s sword had been lost, but Heliodorus had seemingly accomplished what he set out to do. When they returned, however, the king was not himself. Though most folk thought it to be the loss of his queen, others raised questions about the palace steadily needing new servants or guards, though none of their predecessors had ever been seen to leave. Members of the advising council suffered tragic accidents, and those who remained vigorously supported the king’s ever-more radical decisions. Finally, Heliodorus shocked the whole kingdom when he announced his new queen was to be a human. When she arrived, the woman had a terrible beauty about her, carried by a grand procession to the palace, and was never seen outside it again. Shortly after, Heliodorus commissioned the building of a new, even grander citadel as a monument to dwarven strength. The clan was pressed into effectual slavery under new, harsh masters to complete the task, and worked day and night excavating. Only a lone mason suspected the truth.

Istrian Gault’s life had nearly passed him by without renown. He’d been an architect, son of an architect, but in his whole lifetime the Riftrender capital had commissioned no great building projects he could have signed his name to. Instead, he found work carving out the ornate tombs beneath the city and crafting unusual inventions in his private workshop. When a young cousin of his who’d been a chambermaid in the palace was suddenly laid to rest, Istrian waited until the rites had been completed and been left alone to seal the tomb, then looked inside the casket. To his shock, he found the body completely drained of blood, two puncture wounds in her neck. Quickly, he thought of a plan and went to the palace at once, demanding an audience with the king. While he witnessed perversions unbefitting children of Moradin inside, upon reaching the throne room he threw himself prostrate before his lieges, claiming to have seen a vision from Moradin himself of a grand new palace he was to design and begged to be allowed to see it made real. Remembering enough how his grief had once possessed him to create, Heliodorus granted him this favor.

And Istrian did not disappoint. A great ziggurat with walls plated gold and gates of solid adamantium was realized, carved as one solid piece from the mountain’s roots to serve also as a support for a whole new cavern to build a city around. Inside were columns of white and black marble, with a red walkway carpeted by bloodstone gems in place of cloth, all leading to a dais wide enough for the entire royal entourage and a giant, silver hammer, a symbol of Moradin, suspended above it. So pleased were Heliodorus and his queen that they saw fit to bestow what they deemed a rare gift upon Istrian. The human queen revealed her true form, the lich Lavia, and drained the life from his body, making him a permanent member of their undead court while leaving his mental faculties intact. Then, together, the entourage was paraded through the city until they reached the new citadel. They marched up the bloodstone pathway, each taking their places on the dais, and when they were all assembled, the king and queen took their seats. Istrian, though he and his liege were both unholy creatures, murmured a prayer of forgiveness to Moradin for the crime of killing his king as the pressure plates within both thrones activated. The great hammer above them, laced with pure and righteous silver, was released, crushing all upon the dais dead.

With no source of power or guidance, the undead remaining within the city either crumbled or were dealt with shortly by the clan wardens. It took some time to piece together what had happened, but a letter left by Istrian made all clear. Honored as a martyr, he and the members of the royal family were memorialized with honor, though the gory remains had to be burned together. For a time, the clan’s future was uncertain without an heir of Moradin-chosen blood to take the throne, even if Istrian’s killing of the reanimated royal family had been necessary, and factions began to form around several prospective leaders until Prince Daneken, eldest son of the king, revealed himself to have survived, smuggled out of the palace by the Deep Eyes at the debacle’s start and living in exile until it was safe to return. Once his identity was confirmed, the line of Riftrender was restored to the throne, and the great Hammer of Istrian was rehung as a reminder to all dwarven monarchs who followed of their responsibility.

Organizations
Serving their monarch as Special Forces, the Deep Eyes were rangers and scouts who specialized in navigating the tunnels and caverns far below the earth’s surface. In their heyday, they were known to carry out raids and reconnaissance even into the deeps of the Underdark, and though they lost many comrades this way, it was considered an honor and privilege to serve with them.
 * The Deep Eyes

While the Deep Eyes served as an offensive force, the Holdenwarden were Keep Riftrender’s first and last line of defense, guarding everything from the palace to the city gates. In the few instances when the Riftrenders declared or took sides in a war, their guardsmen were called into service as a militia army, though more suited to auxiliary work defending supply lines than the heaviest of combat.
 * The Holdenwarden

As with practically every dwarven city, a central feature of the Riftrender capital was a great temple dedicated to Moradin, and in its halls, clerics and paladins contemplated scripture and practiced in martial techniques as they trained to become missionaries and holy warriors in service to the Forge God.
 * The Order of Moradin

As close as most dwarves dare to stray towards study of the arcane, the runepriests of this order served the court as advisors in magical matters and regulated the creation of magic items in conjunction with the clan’s smiths and craftsmen, while decoding the mysterious symbols left behind by the gods themselves in order to better understand the cosmos and where all things fit in the grand design.
 * Runepriest Order