The continent of Dietroch's history is as long and infamous as Asterland's. Dietroch was the former home of the pre-war humans. It was here that technology riegned supreme and wizards were the outcasts. An industrial revolution similar to the one that our own world underwent during the early 1900's happened here as well. If anything, it went faster. Wizards had long understood the nature of the universe and our place in it. Alchemy and the understanding of matter was augmented by the use of magic.

The electron microscopes of our day are rivaled by the use of magic scrying to see things on the quantum level as well as on the astronomical scale. Think for a minute what we could accomplish today with the knowledge that the magic of our active imaginations could dream up.

Where in Asterland, magic was the accepted mainstream and technology something to be shunned, on Dietroch, just the opposite was the rule before the war and in the steam age as well. Technology has never been fully embraced in the same way that it was before the war, but it is fostered as a means of holding off the creatures that the magically unstable regions gate in from other planes.

This day to day battle against the forces of raw magical chaos is what has kept the humans and the humanoid troll races from attacking Asterland long ago. Also, the number of purestrain humans has not grown like the elves' numbers have. Through weakening of the genes, humans do not multiply as they should. A large family consists of a wife and husband and four children. This is not for lack of means to support them, but for the barrenness of the species. Many purestrain humans are not able to procreate at all. The trollish races, on the other hand, are able to have numerous offspring, so their numbers grow. They see the purestrains for the intellegence that they possess, and gladly give the leadership to them, realizing their kinship to the humans. The unmutated pity the trolls, but do not look down on them as inferior, but use their superior strength to fill roles in their world other than thinking jobs. It is an anti-racist view springing from understanding and the necessity to get along in order to survive in a very cruel environment.

The wild magic zones of Dietroch move from place to place, though they move less and less each decade. Many are vast, swirling vortexes opening into the zones of the abyss. These are what remain of the vast tears in the weave of the planescape ripped open by the vengence of the Elves. At one time, hundreds of square miles of the landscape were taken up by these seas of chaos. Large metropolan areas were swallowed up by the abyssal implosions. In their place the elves' spells left chasms to planes wierd and often dangerous. The havok attracted those beyond, hideous beasts of demiplanes sourrounding the abyss. The cold of the planes sucked the heat from jera itself, icy vapors rushing from the gashes.

The years that followed have little records to detail them. Much of Dietroch fell to complete anarchy. Governments simply ceased to be. In the years that followed, a simple feudal system gained roots throughout the land from the basic need for protection that all required, refuge from the invading horrors. Many of the creatures' attacks were in the form of psionic attack, to which the more intellegent were particularly vulnerable.