The Kingdom of Shathorn

=History= The land that is now Shathorn has always had a high population of High Elves since it’s time as the nation of Arathon. An ancient Arathon king had, in an effort to navigate a particularly sticky political situation, made an elf a Marquess. To maintain his noble status the elf required that he marry another of “noble” blood. All the other nobles in Arathon were human, however, so the heir to the Marquess Lacontor was a half-elf. For most of the Era of Arathon, the Lacontor house was snubbed for being part elven, but the March of Lacontor became known as an elf-friendly place, and so it became overrun with them.

When the Arathon Reformation occurred, the Marquess Lacontor took the opportunity to break away from the rest of the country and establish a nation for elves and humans to live in harmony. They threw off the human name of the place, and in its stead named the place Shathorn, using the elven name for friend to create a human sounding name.

=Government= The Kingdom of Shathorn is a monarchy. In order to prevent one race from gaining more power than the other, the Marquess appointed an equal number of elven and human houses to his aristocracy, and wrote into the founding law that there would always need to be equal numbers. Interracial marriage, however, has cause the lines to be a bit blurred, and so most of the nobility is labelled based off of “majority heritage”. In order to maintain a balance, many times the king will require a certain house to marry a notable member of the peasantry of a certain race.

There are few remaining “pure elven” bloodlines among the nobles, but with low numbers they are usually simply grouped among the “elven heritage” houses.

=Population and Culture= Among the population, humans, elves, and half-elves are all common, and live side-by-side. The only real racial friction is during marriage: Elves often carry a stigma for marrying humans (though half-elves are fine), because of the length of their lifespan. This means true “half-elves” are rare, but it has happened often enough, and with half-elves marrying among themselves, that “part-elves” or “part-humans” can be seen as a significant part of the population, even if it is still a minority.

=The Arathon Alliance= Shathorn was pressured into joining the Arathon Alliance by the two neighboring nations. While it usually uses the two nations against each other to keep them in check, this was a rare time that the other two nations agreed. They both “requested” Shathorn enter the Alliance since “if we fall to the Empire of Khoria, you would be next”. Still, it gains little direct benefit, since it does not have a trade route to Khoria.