The village of Unthar still holds to the old ways, like many of the human settlements outside the cores of the great kingdoms. Indeed, the wise women who make up Unthar's Council of Elders consider themselves to be the true heirs to the original human civilization, more so than the "clan matriarchs" of the villages close to Tiefanue's borders, who they see as echoes of the trend toward centralization of power that Unthar has been resisting for centuries. Local sentiment in Unthar blames the "patriarchy" for not only lowering the quality of life for the average citizen, but also for having been responsible for the Slaying of the Council centuries ago, and humanity's resulting misfortunes.
Unthar lies to the east of what used to be Tiefanue's borders, on the shores of a lake not far from the coast. As the nearby kingdom grew, Unthar resisted falling under its sway by making friends with other powers, and eventually by seeking the protection of the High Elves. The elves, overjoyed to find a group of humans who would actually listen to them for a change, were only too happy to help. What emerged from the relationship was strongly coloured by the Unthar villagers' emphasis on peace and harmony: the Unthar Holy Ground, a radically ecumenical complex of shrines and temples contributed by most of the races, cultures, and religions on the continent, dedicated to fostering understanding between peoples and faiths. All the deities of Light and Balance are worshipped (in a rather syncretized way), and there is even a "Temple of Night" which celebrates (or at least tries to appease) a very watered down and sanitized version of the Dark gods, with most of their worst excesses stripped out of the liturgy.
Attached to the Holy Ground is a seminary which is a major center of religious and magical learning. Clergy of many faiths are trained in Unthar, albeit with a definite slant toward syncretism and religious liberalism that is otherwise alien to many of those faiths. The Comparative Religion department is, naturally, the Unthar seminary's strongest point, and the Unthar library attached to the seminary hosts one of the world's foremost collections of rare and obscure texts in religion and philosophy. The Thaumatology department is surprisingly strong, as is the teaching in magical spheres commonly practiced by clergy. And, of course, there are the usual seminary subjects: Philosophy, Doctrine, Apologetics, Scriptural Exegesis, and so forth.
Before the Holy Ground was constructed, the natural religion of the people of Unthar was the worship of the threefold Mistress of Life, and her worship is the most popular among the local inhabitants of Unthar to this day. The irony of Unthar becoming a center for temples and shrines and the teaching of scholarship and doctrine, when the worship of the Mistress is a folk religion involving spontaneous gatherings of the people out of doors or in private homes, is entirely lost on the Untharites, their Council, and their Elvish sponsors.
Regrettably, the Unthar project hasn't had the success that the High Elves had hoped. Suspicion of outsiders is sufficiently universal that only the fatuous and idealistic — or, among races of a darker bent, the renegades and dissidents — show much interest, and Unthar is seen as something of a joke by those who know of it at all. The chief exception to this is the brief period before the recent war in which Unthar and its theology became fashionable in the Republic of Duvain. An "Unthar Chapel" was founded in Duvain's capital, and as an identifiable new religion rather than a collection of delegations from otherwise uninterested cultures, it might have gone somewhere if Duvain's fortunes hadn't fallen in the aftermath of the war.
In 2236, disaster struck. The dead in the catacombs beneath Lake Unthar rose from their graves, animated by a powerful Lich King, and Unthar found itself under siege. A defense was organized under the command of Father Aethelgrim, the dean of the seminary, and riders were dispatched to summon aid from Suvant. The aid never arrived. At a critical point in the battle, Aethelgrim fell in single combat with the Lich King, and the undead had the upper hand for a long while. Eventually, the defenders of Unthar won the victory by flooding the catacombs with lake water, and a band of scholars and clergy destroyed the Lich King. After the ensuing celebration, a party was sent to discover why help hadn't arrived. They quickly discovered that Suvaunt hadn't sent help because it had disappeared completely from the face of the earth, and the messengers that had been sent along with it.
The power vacuum left by the disappearance of the High Elves drew Tiefanue's gaze eastward, and the entire region around Unthar was quickly annexed by the kingdom that Unthar had tried to resist for so long. A group of hot-headed young Untharites armed themselves and prepared to defend Unthar from yet another onslaught, only to be told by the Council that there was to be no resistance: Tiefanue, and its Church of Light, would be welcomed. The Church of Light has been "supervising" the Holy Ground ever since, and has absorbed Unthar's clergy as a minor order within the Church itself. More conservative members of the Church hierarchy look askance at the relatively heterodox doctrine taught in Unthar; more cosmopolitan Church figures see it as a vehicle to propagate veneration of the Light, as defined in Tiefanue, to other cultures. (Widespread rumour has it that Unthar's Council sees the Church of Light, in turn, as a vehicle for propagating Unthar's vision more widely.)
Even under its new management, Unthar continues to attract like-minded pilgrims, students, and seekers from far and wide. Individuals and groups come from as far away as Jormunger, Melinda, and even lands across the sea. Yet even under its new management, Unthar still hasn't been able to shed its "bunnies and light" reputation among the general public, save for a few articles of scholarship published by the professors at its seminary.
