The Malpais Chronicle: The First Three Centuries
(Note: this is an after-action report for a campaign in the After the End mod for Crusader Kings II.)
Joshua I “the Bloodhound”
aka “the Butcher”
Count of Grand Staircase 2676 - 2709
Duke of Green River 2696 - 2753
Duke of Salt Lake 2709 - 2753
King of Deseret 2717 - 2753
The first Malpais king of Deseret, Joshua was born to Grahmua, count of the Grand Staircase in 2669. An adventurer of unclear ancestry, Grahmua had led a band of warriors, the Burned Men, into the Grand Staircase and expelled atom worshippers who had previously infested the narrow canyons and gorges surrounding Kanab.
Joshua spent his childhood and formative years in this untamed environment. He spent much of his early adult life hunting Strangite heretics in his father’s demesne, becoming an expert in picking the most advantageous ground to stage a battle, and in finding and exploiting unguarded flanks.
The death of Joshua’s mother in 2696 brought the lands of the Green River and the Western Slope into his demesne and instantly made him the most powerful lord in the diminished kingdom of Deseret.
It did not take long for Joshua to leverage this power to catapult himself to greater heights. In 2708, following a failed attempt by King Amos IV (“Harelip”) to retake Salt Lake from the heretics, Joshua made his own attempt, brushing aside the exhausted Strangites and entering Salt Lake City in triumph.
Joshua promptly set himself up in Bluffdale, proclaiming himself the Duke of Salt Lake by right of conquest. When Amos IV demanded Salt Lake be returned to him, Joshua raised his banners in revolt instead of relinquishing his prize. Marching swiftly down to the interim royal capital in Fishlake and storming it, he captured Princes Ammaron and Aha and, in a ruthless act that earned him the epithet “the Butcher”, put the two young princes to the sword.
The outcome of the war was never in doubt. Within a month, Amos Harelip capitulated and abdicated in favor of his youngest and only surviving brother Omni. But Joshua was done being the power behind the throne. When the young Omni revealed a cruel streak by having his older brother tortured and executed, Joshua stepped in and forced Omni to relinquish his throne at swordpoint, and formally acceded to the throne of Deseret as Joshua I Malpais.
As king, Joshua’s first priority was setting the realm to rights. Deseret had fallen into a sorry state under the wicked rule of Amos III, and Deseret was infested with heretics following the wayward teachings of Strang and Woolley. Over the course of his thirty-six year reign, Joshua either forced the errant nobles of the realm back onto the true path of the Godhead, or simply stripped them of their demesne at the point of a spear.
Joshua also engaged in skirmishing with the atom-worshippers to the south, making minor inroads into Navajoland. It was in one such conflict that Joshua and his band of light foot pursued and harried a warband of mounted Navajos for seven days and seven nights, eventually cornering them in a deep canyon, an episode that earned him the epithet he is most widely known as today, the “Bloodhound”.
His conquest of the greatest significance to his successors, however, would lie to the north. During the so-called “Strangite Renaissance” in the reign of Amos the Wicked, Strangite adventurers struck north from Salt Lake and forged a power base along Snake River, forming a formidable realm that was an existential threat to the survival of Deseret. Launching a great campaign with assistance from the Nauvoo Legion, Joshua sacked the Strangite stronghold of Idaho Falls and forced the Daggetts of Snake River to bend the knee. Over the course of the next couple of decades, he systematically broke the power of the Daggetts and incorporated the various tribes of the Bitterroot Mountains into the Mormon fold.
Joshua the Bloodhound lived to the ripe old age of four-score and four before being recalled into the embrace of the Godhead. He had nine children who survived to adulthood, seven of them legitimate. Upon his death, his throne passed to Grahmua, his eldest son by Lethea Anthophile.
Grahmua I “Clubfoot”
aka “Son of Satan”
King of Deseret 2753 - 2774
Grahmua I, still known in certain circles as “Son of Satan”, was fifty-seven by the time of his accession. Though born with a grotesque clubfoot, Grahmua showed great promise as a youth, being something of a prodigy in financial matters. For most of his father’s reign, while Joshua and his other sons were leading armies in one conflict or the other, Grahmua was regent in Bluffdale, presiding over an economic boom that restored prosperity to Salt Lake after the devastation of the Strangite renaissance. The Tower of Malpais that still stands today is commonly attributed to Joshua I, but was in fact the brainchild of Grahmua Clubfoot.
Grahmua’s actual children, however, would prove to be the greatest source of his sorrows. In 2752, his two sons Raystan and Calbert fought one another in a duel, where Calbert cut down Raystan in personal combat. In a fit of grief and outrage, Grahmua challenged his surviving son to a duel and slew him, it is said, by opening Calbert’s throat as he pleaded for his life on his knees.
The ordeal seems to have broken his mind, and by most accounts Grahmua was not quite right in the head by the time of his accession.
Grahmua’s reign was marked by religious unrest and tensions with the clergy. When the Mormon president refused to recognize his secondary wives, he renounced his allegiance to the Mormon Quorum and established his own, publicly adopting the teachings of Woolley.
A devoted, pragmatic bureaucrat during his father’s reign, Grahmua was obsessed with theology during his own. He would lock himself in his chambers for days on end, emerging only to issue a series of bizarre decrees. One particular decree that drew much comment and derision at the time was the “Cessation of Violence Act”, in which he proclaimed all violence to be an affront to the Godhead. Naturally, no one took these decrees very seriously.
Grahmua Clubfoot collapsed clutching his heart in June 2774 while wandering the halls of his castle pants-less (for he had also decreed pants to be unlawful). He was seventy-eight, and had sat on the throne of Deseret for nineteen years. As he left behind no surviving male descendants, the throne passed to his nephew Ammaron, son of his late brother Ammaron.
Ammaron II “the Adamant”
King of Deseret 2774 - 2807
Judge of the Plains 2796 - 2807
The Secret History of the Mormons, written a few centuries later, claims that Ammaron II was not in fact the issue of his father, another Ammaron, but from an illicit affair between his mother Princess Ethel of California and his grandfather Joshua the Bloodhound.
This is almost certainly a distorted reflection of slander from contemporary Woolleyite dissidents, for in the wake of his mad uncle’s misrule, Ammaron II drew much of his legitimacy from his descent from the Anthophiles, and in particular his great-grandfather Ammaron the Just.
The first decade of Ammaron II’s reign was concerned chiefly with the reassertion of order within Deseret, that had become increasingly frayed in the final years of Grahmua Clubfoot’s reign. One of his first actions upon his accession was a reconciliation with the Quorum of the Twelve, restoring Salt Lake Temple to the Mormon President.
On the international front, his reign saw the wholesale annexation of Arixo and New Mexico into Deseret. While Grahmua raved and babbled in his chambers, the squabbling atom-worshippers had been conquered by a Sioux adventurer and united into a single powerful kingdom, spanning from the Sandia hills in the east to the banks of the mighty Colorado in the west.
War, when it came, was a hard-fought affair, with the Arixans getting the better of the Mormons in initial encounters. The tide finally turned at the Battle of Flagstaff, where Ammaron himself held the center against repeated charges by Navajo horsemen, until his son Prince Arnol brought his Nauvoo Legion to bear upon the rear of the Arixans and routed them.
After the battle, so the story goes, King Nijuga the Wolf sent envoys to parley for peace. Seven times the embattled king of Arixo offered Ammaron half his kingdom in exchange for an immediate peace, and seven times Ammaron turned him down. Ammaron’s adamance was vindicated, for he soon gained all of Arixo for Deseret, extinguishing the nascent threat to its south once and for all. Though a few major revolts would flare up over the course of the next century, never again would the atom worshippers pose an organized threat to Deseret.
Ammaron II died a natural death at the age of seventy-six, having ruled Deseret for thirty-three years, and was succeeded by his grandson Ammaron.
Ammaron III “the Purifier”
King of Deseret 2807 - 2846
Judge of the Plains 2807 - 2846
A phlegmatic figure, Ammaron III was a man weighed down by the expectations of his bloodline. By all accounts, he took little joy in physical indulgences. Some sources, including the Secret History, claim that Ammaron III was homosexual, though others insist that is a distortion of the vow of celibacy he took later in life.
Ammaron III’s reign was marred by a resurgence of Strangite heresy in Deseret and a rash of millenarian uprisings in the dark valleys of the Bitterroot Mountains.
Ammaron, who was chaplain in the court of his grandfather, continued his fight against heresy with the same grim competence he had displayed before his accession. Though he himself was not a particularly zealous man, he presided over an aggressive inquisition in which thousands of heretics, smallfolk and noble alike, were rooted out and hanged, drowned or burned at the stake.
Despite this, the borders of Deseret continued to expand throughout Ammaron III’s reign. Forward bastions on the edge of the Great Plains greatly lessened mounted raids on Salt Lake itself, and further south, Mormon armies streamed down from the Sangre de Cristo to evict petty Peyotist warlords from its foothills.
A bookish, shy man in disposition, Ammaron was a competent commander but never took much joy in it. After a brutal skirmish against Peyotist raiders that saw his brother-in-law and close confidant (lover, some insist) cut down in front of him, Ammaron became despondent, and buried himself in work.
Ammaron the Purifier was discovered slumped over in his study at the age of sixty-two with his wrists slit, likely by his own hand. He had sat the throne of Deseret for thirty-nine years. Later historians consider him a transitional figure in the history of the Malpais - it was during his reign that Deseret transformed from a regional power to a truly imperial one, though House Malpais would not officially don the purple for another two generations.
Part II: Zion Rising
Ammaron IV “the Great”
King-Regent of Deseret 2842 - 2846
King of Deseret 2846 - 2897
King of Socal 2887 - 2897
Judge of the Plains 2846 - 2897
Judge of the Arizonas 2970 - 2897
Judge of the Mountains 2891 - 2897
The only son of Ammaron the Purifier, Ammaron IV was born for greatness.
From his accession to the throne of Deseret at the age of twenty-eight, Ammaron would spend the next three decades being constantly at war, and the Kingdom of Deseret would see the greatest territorial expansion up to this point under his reign.
In the north, Ammaron IV’s reign saw the rise of the Kainai horde, after which raids on Mormon territory intensified. One of these raids culminated in the infamous sack of Salt Lake City itself in 2858, in which many treasures, including a fragment of the original Nauvoo temple, were looted and carried off, never to be recovered.
To avenge the sack of Salt Lake, Ammaron launched a punitive campaign into Big Sky. Months of maneuvering culminated in the Battle of Swift Current, in which thirty thousand Mormons were cornered by twenty thousand screaming horsemen in a close-run battle that only turned in favor of the Mormons after Duke Geronimo the Grim of Gadsden met warchief Makkapitew on the field of battle and slew him in single combat.
The death of Makkapitew shattered the Kainai host, and soon thereafter the Kainai horde itself, which rapidly splintered into quarreling clans. Though the northern prairie would not be be fully pacified for many decades to come, the defeat and subsequent disintegration of the Kainai horde is generally considered by historians to mark the end of the age of the prairie horselords.
To the east, Ammaron IV waged a series of hard-fought campaigns against the mighty Sedevecantist kingdom of Platte, culminating in the capture of Omaha and the capitulation of Jeroboam the Bewitched, the last king of Platte.
Under Ammaron the Mormons also skirmished frequently with the disunited petty fiefdoms of Comancheria. It was in one such campaign in Amarillo that the Mormons first encountered the vanguard of the Red Death (known today as Thrax). As the campaign ended and warriors returned to their home all across Deseret, they unknowingly carried the Pale Horseman with them.
The Red Death reaped a gruesome harvest as it swept through Deseret in the terrible summer of 2878, sparing neither the pious nor the mighty. Though the king himself himself miraculously survived the disease, his children were not so blessed. Of the nine children of Ammaron the Great, seven were carried away by the Red Death, including his eldest son and heir, the dashing Prince Ammaron the Able. Only the youngest, newborn Prince Daniel, was spared, having been secluded deep within the Wasatch mountains.
In the aftermath, it was whispered that the Red Death was the scourge of the Godhead, come to Deseret to punish Ammaron’s overweening ambition, a suggestion the king seems to have taken seriously. He spent the next few years in intense religious soul-searching. It is in this period that most of the work of exegesis known today simply as Contemplations was written.
Already in his sixties, the aged Ammaron had one final conquest, one that would prove to be the most historically significant. In 2886 he led a grand expedition into southern California at the behest of the Quorum. He had struck at a most opportune moment. The mighty Empire of California was in disarray as Garcia Marcel the Whisperer had recently seized the Celestial Throne from the last Yudkow, a child emperor.
The expedition was a complete success. Though the Cetic lords of Socal banded together and put up a valiant resistance, the lords of the Valley and Jefferson did not rally to Emperor Marcel’s banners until it was too late.
In 2887, with Sacramento under siege by Mormon armies, Marcel had no choice but to make peace, ceding Socal to the Mormons. So it was that Ammaron IV was crowned King of Socal in a grand ceremony in Pasadena.
Socal was to be Ammaron IV’s final major conquest. He spent the last decade of his life in well-deserved semi-retirement, educating his grandchildren and writing a memoir of his reign that would be unfinished when he died in his sleep at the age of seventy-nine.
Daniel I “the Sword of Moroni”
King of Deseret 2897 - 2926
King of Socal 2897 - 2926
Judge of the Arizonas 2897 - 2926
Judge of the Plains 2897 - 2926
Judge of the Mountains 2897 - 2926
Emperor of Zion 2926 - 2942
The sixth son of Ammaron the Great, Daniel I was, at his birth, not destined for great things. But that all changed when the pale horse sauntered into Salt Lake and struck down his five elder brothers, while he was still being nursed in a remote cabin in the Wasatch mountains.
Despite the warlike moniker history has conferred upon him, Daniel showed no great martial inclination, and did not often lead his armies personally in battle. The scion of a suddenly endangered house after the Red Death swept through his family, his father took great pains to keep him away from the battlefield.
Nevertheless, the epithet “Sword of Moroni” is well-deserved, for Daniel committed his forces to two expeditions against heathen empires and emerged victorious. In the east, the expedition for Missouri brought the ancient papist capital of St. Louis under Mormon control.
In the west, following on the heels of his father’s conquest of Socal, another expedition was declared, this time for the fertile breadbasket of the Californian empire, the Valley. The war itself was largely uneventful, as the Californians were unable to muster an effective resistance against the massive armies of Deseret. The war ended swiftly when Sacramento was stormed and sacked, and the Celestial emperor and his household captured.
The successful expedition for the Valley and the sack of Sacramento revealed the full extent of the Californian emperor’s impotence, and it was clear to many that the time had come for the king in Deseret to seek a grander title more befitting of his splendor.
And so in a lavish ceremony in Salt Lake Temple, the ancient Crown of Los Angeles (recently liberated from the Californian emperor) was placed on Daniel’s brow by the Mormon President, and he rose the Emperor of Zion, High Judge of Greater Deseret, lord of the plains, the mountains, and the Great Basin, and protector of the Quorum of the Twelve.
Emperor Daniel spent the next few years enacting several internal reforms that would transform the very nature of the Mormon state. To alleviate the increasing unwieldiness of his massive realm, he took a page from California’s imperial administration and formalized the floating caste of clerks and petty administrators into a bureaucratic class that existed outside the feudal hierarchy. He also appointed from among the prominent dukes of Zion a few “governors” (a classicizing throwback to prediluvian America) and gave them viceregal authority over large swaths of the empire.
With few modifications, Daniel’s imperial system (sometimes called the “Danielite system”) would persist till the end of the Meridian Age and the passage of the Aureate Bull.
Throughout, as the realm fundamentally transformed itself on the inside, the outward expansion of Mormon influence continued unabated. On the northern prairie, the border forts continued to inch northwards, allowing civilization to pacify the plains in their wake.
In this period, Louisiana was also temporarily conquered by Mormon forces, though control of the region with its tangled marshes and wetlands was tenuous, and the region fell away from Mormon rule upon Daniel’s death.
At the age of sixty-four, while touring his empire, Daniel fell ill on the road and expired “while attending to chamber business”, according to the Secret History. He was succeeded by his eldest son Ammaron.
Ammaron V “the Unready”
Emperor of Zion 2942
Ammaron V’s brief reign lasted all of five months before it was cut short by his untimely death.
Death came unexpectedly for Ammaron during a routine campaign to punish a recalcitrant horselord in Big Sky. Before the final battle, the Crow horselord, Mistawasis issued a personal challenge to the Emperor. Against the advice of his commanders, Ammaron V rashly decided to answer the challenge himself, rather than leaving it to one of his commanders.
Though Ammaron, a formidable warrior, easily won the duel by lopping off the warlord’s hand, the deceitful warlord had coated his dagger in rattlesnake venom and thrown it at Ammaron before expiring. Though it was only a shallow cut, it festered, and the emperor quickly sickened. Before the day was out, the new emperor was dead, brought low by his hubris and a treacherous opponent.
Having sired no sons, only daughters, the throne of Zion passed instead to Ammaron’s younger brother Theon.
Theon I “the Good”
Emperor of Zion 2942 - 2983
Theon I’s first act as Emperor was to pardon the Crows, whom the Mormon army had rounded up and planned to massacre as revenge for their chief’s involvement in Ammaron’s death.
This would set the tone for the rest of Theon’s reign. Though an effective commander and a brilliant administrator, he never shook his reputation as a soft prince. His kind and tolerant nature was often taken advantage of by those close to him - of his five younger brothers four took up arms against him but were all pardoned in their turn and welcomed back into the imperial fold with gifts and open arms.
Under his reign, Woolleyism flourished and many high lords openly took on secondary wives. There was no official edict of toleration, but Theon’s unwillingness to persecute heretics made flouting the Quorum a relatively safe choice under his rule. Daniel I’s policy of a “royal monopoly” was set aside, and hereditary kings were enfeoffed in Louisiana, Jacinto and Missouri.
Nevertheless, Theon’s reign was in other ways a continuation of his father’s, and Zion’s borders continued to push outward in all directions. All of greater Louisiana was annexed under his rule, as was Missouri, bringing Mormon hegemony to the western bank of the great Mississippi.
In California, the Garcia dynasty was fully expelled from California proper, though a Celestial Emperor continued to rule over a rump state in Cascadia. Two seaborne invasions in the Bay Area were pushed back into the water, cementing the legitimacy of Mormon rule in California.
Theon’s home life was a happy one. Unmarried at the time of his accession, he took his brother’s widow, Princess Barbi of California, to wife, and though the marriage was from the outset a political one, they were by all accounts deeply in love. Empress Barbi was an accomplished lyric poet, and during her lifetime dedicated many loving poems to her husband. Today, they are collectively known as the Shastan Sonnets, still widely considered a classic of High Californian poetry.
Theon the Good passed away peacefully at the age of seventy-one, lord of the greatest realm in the Americas. He was succeeded by the elder of his two sons, Jeremiah.
Jeremiah I “the Just”
aka “the Hammer of Zion”
King of Jefferson 2978 - 2983
Emperor of Zion 2983 - 3020
Jeremiah spent much of his formative years in California, first as a ward in the gubernatorial court of Joshua the Quarreler at Sacramento. When Joshua was felled in a duel in 2978 Jeremiah was enfeoffed as King of Jefferson, acting as de facto governor of Greater California until he was recalled to Salt Lake upon his father's death.
As emperor, Jeremiah I was largely preoccupied by domestic concerns. The Woolleyite heresy his father had allowed to flourish and grow within Zion matured into a full-blown crisis during the reign of Jeremiah. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that by the 2980s at least a third of the realm was following the teachings of Woolley.
He responded with an inquisition to a scale not seen since the days of Ammaron the Purifier. In a particularly brutal campaign now remembered as the Harrowing of Idaho, squads of imperial inquisitors swept through the narrow valleys of the Bitterroot, holding tribunals on noble and smallfolk alike, often extracting confessions under torture. The brunt of this brutality fell on the common folk, but many noble houses who’d been ruling in the area since the days of Joshua the Bloodhound had their holdings confiscated wholesale.
Elsewhere in Zion, the inquisition was less intense but nevertheless claimed many victims, including the emperor’s uncle, Prince Grahmua the Gregarious, who was burned at the stake with his secondary wives in 2988.
Exacerbating the misery of Idahoans, a series of particularly harsh winters drove Peyotist tribesmen from the rugged glacial valleys of the Rockies to engage in large-scale raiding of the Mormon lowlands, ranging as far south as Idaho Falls in one instance. Jeremiah took the fight to the Peyotists of the Rockies with the same zeal he’d employed against the Woolleyites. Over the course of the next couple of decades, the tribes of the valleys of the northern Rockies were systematically conquered and pacified.
An event that received much historical attention in hindsight but barely elicited a comment in contemporary documents was the final end of the Empire of California. When the end came for the empire of Elton Lawbringer, it came with a whimper, not a bang. The loss of California and any territory outside a desolate corner of eastern Cascadia had rendered the Garcias’ imperial pretensions increasingly risible, so when young Blaine II (“the Last”) died under suspicious circumstances, his cousin and heir quietly allowed the title to lapse.
A more significant event that occurred towards the end of the reign of Jeremiah I was the collapse of the great Kingdom of Superior upon the death of Christoph the Conqueror. In a series of annexations known to historians as the Fury, Mormon adventurers under the auspices of Jeremiah pushed the borders of Zion from the banks of the Missouri to the western shore of the Great Lakes.
Outside of territorial acquisitions, one of Jeremiah’s lasting achievements was the construction of a grand campus for Brigham Young University (today the National University of Zion) in Salt Lake. Though he would not see its completion in his lifetime, he oversaw its funding and construction for almost two decades in his capacity as chancellor of the university.
Jeremiah had only one son, Theon, who died in childhood of smallpox, so upon his death the throne passed to his cousin Daniel, a grandson of Daniel I.
Epilogue
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| The Empire of Zion at the accession of Daniel II, 3020 AD. |
The reign of Jeremiah I is widely considered the high water mark of the Malpais dynasty. The accession of Daniel II (“the Wicked”) and his assassination just a few years later without an obvious heir would mark the beginning of a period of instability and civil war that would see the throne fiercely contested between several rival branches of the dynasty.
Though there would be a Malpais on the throne of Zion for another century and a half, and intermittently after that as well,
the Malpais dynasty would never again regain the same preeminence they enjoyed in this period.
A cadet branch of the house of Malpais would cling on as minor barons in Provo for several more centuries, even for a time surviving the revolution that toppled the American monarchy. The last of the Malpais, Ammaron Longhair, was implicated in a Quorumite plot and executed via firing squad by a Young Strangite militia in 3494.
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