Ancient Homeland: Skyre Islands
Ancestry: Giant-kin
Planar History: Failed incursion into Caelra
The Fomorians are a giant-kin people descended from an ancient civilization that once held considerable power in the region now known as the Skyre Islands. Early accounts describe that society as magically sophisticated and strongly hierarchical, with the ancestors of the Firbolgs living beneath Fomorian authority. Its defining catastrophe came when the Fomorians established or exploited a connection with Caelra and attempted to force their way into the Realm of Impulse.
The people encountered in later ages are physically and culturally far removed from that ancient civilization. Their altered forms and the loss of much of their old magical power were consequences of the Fomorian defeat in Caelra, imposed deliberately by powerful inhabitants of that realm. The transformation was not an automatic judgment by Caelra itself, and surviving histories do not preserve enough information to reduce the conflict to a simple story of a plane punishing wickedness.
The Caelran Incursion
The purpose of the ancient invasion is no longer known with confidence. Fomorian traditions, Firbolg accounts, and fragmentary planar histories preserve different explanations, and none provides a complete record of what the Fomorians hoped to gain. What is clear is that the attempt was substantial enough to bring them into direct conflict with Caelran peoples capable of resisting them.
The Fomorians were defeated. During the aftermath, powerful Caelran inhabitants stripped them of much of the magic upon which their civilization had relied and reshaped their bodies into the distorted forms associated with Fomorians in later history. This was an act carried out by their enemies rather than a spontaneous effect of the Realm of Impulse. The identities of the principal Caelran powers involved, the duration of the conflict, and the exact terms of the Fomorians’ defeat are not reliably preserved on Kor Sirok.
The Firbolg ancestors living under Fomorian authority were treated differently. Caelran victors did not regard them as equally responsible for the invasion and released them from Fomorian control. Relationships formed in that liberation became the origin of the enduring Firbolg connection with Caelra and of many of their later druidic traditions.
Aftermath
The Fomorian civilization of the ancient Skyre Islands did not recover its former position after the defeat. Survivors withdrew from the surface into caverns beneath the islands, while some groups moved farther downward into the Underdark. The great magical society remembered in the oldest traditions disappeared, leaving later Fomorian populations separated from much of the world that had existed before the incursion.
Fomorians have nevertheless remained part of the history of the Skyre Islands. Accounts from later periods occasionally describe encounters or violence involving Fomorians emerging from the islands’ interior or underground regions. Such reports demonstrate survival, but they reveal relatively little about the organization, beliefs, or daily life of the communities from which those individuals came.
Modern Understanding
Most knowledge of ancient Fomorian history comes through traditions preserved by peoples who survived or opposed them. Firbolg histories naturally emphasize subjugation and liberation, while surviving Caelran accounts are fragmentary from the perspective of mortal scholars. Fomorian traditions themselves are poorly documented outside their communities. As a result, the broad sequence of the ancient conflict is better established than its causes or internal politics.
The physical transformation of the Fomorians is one of the most visible surviving consequences of that history, but it should not be treated as a reliable account of everything the ancient people were or everything their descendants are. Modern Fomorians inherit the consequences of a catastrophe thousands of years old; the surviving record does not provide a complete description of the societies they maintain in the deep places of the Skyre Islands and the Underdark.