Iceni Allegiance Skills
- Words: Look Beyond The Water
- Colors: Light Blue Tartan
- Symbol: Light Blue Tartan, Selkie, Seal
- Patron: Eldrea of the Three Sisters
- Cultural Majority: Brynn
- Leader: Raven Domnall mac Eily mac Glenveigh
- There is currently no clan Chief; there are three contenders and the clan is deadlocked between them. The clan Raven leads until the deadlock is decided.
- Seat: Ashford
- Pronounced: eye-SEE-nee
After more than a decade in hiding, Clan Iceni has emerged from their forests into the light. They are an outgoing people, sailors and travelers and wanderers who hold hard to the Clan’s northern heritage. Someday, they hope to retake their ancestral lands surrounding Lake Ambegon in the north. Until then, Clan Iceni builds ships, trains cunning warriors, and stands strong against its enemies.
- Clan Iceni are cunning, shrewd, and careful. They plan ahead, rehearse the plan, and the execute the plan when pursuing goals in combat, trade, governance, or any other endeavor.
- They believe that the north is their homeland; all their efforts are bent towards returning to their ancestral lands.
- They build plans, trade networks, ships, and weapons to fulfill their goals and needs.
- They fiercely and viciously root out every piece of the slave trade: bandits who capture innocents and sell them to the slavers who then pass those slaves on to the highest bidder.
- They burn with hatred against the Drune cultists, who they fought for a decade in the forests of their lands.
- They carry special grudges against Orkenay in the north, both for past slights and (they believe) the attempted assassination of their Clan Chief.
In 146 AR, Clan Iceni’s capital is the city of Ashford; they also control the port of Standar’s Watch. Many other nearby settlements and resources are unclaimed by any Allegiance.
CLAN ICENI HISTORY
- Duke Kentrid Reginius and Leanna Ambrosius nearly destroyed Clan Iceni. When their army fled Albion, they invaded Iceni lands, killed Iceni defenders, and enslaved much of the clan’s population.
- When Kentrid and Leanna founded the kingdom of Orkenay, they did so on the corpses of the Iceni and their descendants rule what were once Iceni lands to this day.
- For two generations, Orkenay ruled and oppressed the Iceni and drove them nearly to extinction.
- The remnants of the Clan fled to the high mountains where Orkenay’s heavy infantry were disadvantaged; the Iceni fought a guerrilla war to maintain their survival.
- In 110 AR, three Heroes are called to the Golden Phoenix: Eily mac Aoife, Velcorix ap Eldrea, and Saoirse mac Roisin. All three arrive in Cornerstone on the same day and end up swearing allegiance to House Ambrosius, the Grey Council, and House Costayne respectively. These Heroes and these oaths would change the fate of Clan Iceni forever.
- In 111 AR, these 3 Heroes led a strike team of Heroes against the Silence, the Orkenay slave camp which held Velcorix’s children and many other political prisoners of Queen Leanna.
- Standard Orkenay oppression tactics was to capture and hold the children of dissidents to ensure their cooperation and/or good behavior.
- The Heroes also coordinated Iceni strike teams to raid the other three Orkenay slave camps, leading to the freedom of nearly 1000 prisoners of all races and cultures.
- Freeing Leanna’s blackmail leverage crippled her power and led to mass uprisings across the north against Orkenay forces.
- In summer 111 AR, most of the orphans freed from Orkenay’s slave camps were re-homed at an orphanage in the Albion town of Cornerstone, funded by Lord William Whitehall and operated by the Iceni Heroes.
- Lord Whitehall approached the Iceni Heroes and informed them that with the huge influx of orphans and adoptees, a political structure was needed to facilitate organization.
- Those children whose parents were dead or could not be located were all adopted by Eily mac Aoife, earning her the name “Mother of the Clan.”
- In winter 111 AR, the Mother of the Clan declared a Standing for Sept Chief, founding sept Glenveigh in Cornerstone as a way to protect all the new adoptees with the intent of eventually moving back north to traditional Iceni lands.
- By a magical listening device, the other Iceni sept chiefs in the north heard Eily mac Aoife’s oaths as Sept Chief and together declared a Standing for Eily as Clan Chief of the Iceni in absentia.
- In December 111 AR, Eily mac Aoife ap Iceni became the first Clan Chief of the Iceni in nearly two generations.
- In January 112 AR, at the Feast of Midwinter’s Peace, Chief Eily mac Aoife ap Iceni took the knee to King Uther Ambrosius of Albion, accepting the title of Lady of Albion and lands in the north of that country.
- Within weeks, Iceni from the north began trickling in to the new Iceni lands after hearing word of the Clan’s salvation.
- As soon as the snows cleared from the mountain passes, many remaining Iceni from the north trekked to their new homeland and settled there.
- In under a year, all Iceni forces were consolidated in Northern Albion.
- When the Red Death descended upon Brittanis, the Iceni were hard hit. Their ships brought the plague home to the Clan’s lands quickly and their population dwindled.
- The lands granted to the Iceni by the Pendragon are heavily forested; having mastered hiding from the forces of Orkenay in living memory, in 127 AR Clan Iceni retreats into the deepest part of the woods.
- At the same time, tales begin spreading of rampant monsters and roving packs of feral plague victims in Iceni lands. The forests of the north-east coastline become known as a haunted, terrible place from whence no intruders return.
- For many years, common knowledge assumes that Clan Iceni was wiped out by the Red Death.
- In the deep woods of Clan Iceni lands, they discovered a terrifyingly-large cult of Drune– apocalypse cult adherents who desire to usher in the End Times.
- The Drune and the Iceni fight a shadow war for many years, but in 130 AR the largest battle is fought– later called the Battle of the Black Scar.
- The Drune tipped their arrows in a deadly poison which burned its victims from the inside out, killing many.
- Fought north of Glenveigh sept, the Iceni loss at the Black Scar decimates Iceni fighting strength; within a year, the clan cannot defend Glenveigh sept and it is abandoned.
- Fallout from the Battle of the Black Scar cripples Clan Iceni for over a year.
- Clan Chief Eily mac Glenveigh ap Iceni is gravely injured by the Black Scar poison; she survives but is permanently maimed by her battle against the toxin.
- Eily’s adopted son and Tanist, a bard of Rhaine, is wounded by the poison and dies several days later in Ashford before Eily emerges from her wounds. Fear of the Drune’s necromantic magic cause all the corpses to be burned before Eily awakes from her struggle against the poison.
- Saoirse mac Roisin, Hero of the Golden Phoenix, loses her daughter at the Battle of the Black Scar as well, her corpse lost in the fighting. Saoirse, maddened with grief, leads a warband to recover all the bodies lost to the Drune, but neither Saoirse nor the warband returns.
- Chief Eily is crushed by her grief– the loss of her son, her sister and her niece cause the Chief to turn the clan inward and focus on its own issues.
- In 140 AR, Clan Iceni emerges from the shadows of both their forests and their war against the Drune. They are a hardened people, spending more than a decade at war against the plague and the insidious Drune.
- 142 brings massive change to the Iceni. After 30 years as Clan Chief, Eily mac Glenveigh ap Iceni begins the process of retirement.
- She appoints her most competent remaining child, Domnall mac Eily, as the clan’s Raven.
- 3 contenders for the Clan Chief seat step up, and the Clan is divided between them. A stalemate exists with none of the 3 willing to call a Standing, and Eily unwilling to step down until the matter is decided.
- In 143, the Fomorians return to ravage Iceni coastal settlements. The Clan wages a vicious campaign against the Fomorians still clinging to the coasts of Brittanis. Under Domnall’s direction, the Iceni have built a small flotilla and taken the fight to the Fomorians on the waves– a domain they previously held uncontested by any major foe.
- Also in 143, Chief Eily is struck down by an assassin’s knife. She lives, albeit in a coma and unable to lead–the best medical care is given to the Chief, but the Shamans say that the knife which struck her down carried a spirit-binding poison. Someone has the Clan Chief’s soul imprisoned.
- Raven Domnall declares an oath of vengeance upon whoever sent the assassin, and dedicates many of the Clan’s resources to solving the mystery. Domnall clearly believes the assassin was sent by Uriens of Gorre, son of Leanna and Kentrid of Orkenay. Domnall believes the resurgence of Clan Iceni is a threat to Uriens, who has proven an intractable foe and a cunning strategist.
The Iceni are exceptionally skilled and motivated against their former oppressors; the Clan excels in scouting, intelligence gathering, and asset removal/appropriation, and show particular zeal during missions against Orkenay foes.
MAP:
