Nubari (ancient)

The Nubari (often called the "Ancient Nubari'", or simply "the Ancients", to distinguish them from the race of humans who descended from them) were a starfaring race that settled on Toril in the region of Malatra.

Description
The Ancient Nubari were an exceptionally tall (reaching seven feet in height ) and willowy race of humanoids with large, elongated skulls. They had only three fingers and a thumb on each hand. Their skin was dark brown, and they had golden tinted eyes.

Society
The Nubari were lovers of art, magic, philosophy, and science and lived in harmony with nature. They had advanced and alien technology. They even developed a hard form of ceramic that they used in place of metal.

The Nubari abhorred violence and for millennia maintained a utopian existence on the Malatran Plateau. Prior to their settlement there, they lived on several worlds that were said to be like paradise compared to Toril and they their spelljamming craft to travel between them.

History
In ancient times these people had a society that engaged in warfare and interfered with the natural development of other species, that was spread across several idealic worlds. Eventually, thousands of years before the Time of Troubles and before Abeir-Toril had split, they got caught up in a celestial war and were forced to flee their crystal sphere on spelljammers in search of peace and a new place to call home.

The Ancients came to discover Abeir-Toril and evaluated the jungles of Malatra as being an ideal location to settle, viewing them isolated and undesirable to its natives. They then used their powerful magic to raise the ground and create the vast Malatran Plateau. There they vowed to not repeat the mistakes of their ancestors and strived to create a utopian society.

In order to ensure their isolation, the ancient Nubari built a long chain of magical domes around the Malatran Plateau that generated an effect similar to the hallucinatory terrain spell, but with permanency and on a massive scale. They also wove powerful and permanent variations of the antipathy spell into the domes. Altogether this ensured that the plateau, as well as the domes that made this effect, would go unnoticed by the people below.

When a group of creatures called the garuda began decimating the plateau's gorilla population, the ancient Nubari felt sorry for the animals. They decided to make the gorillas smarter, giving them the capability of speech and the knowledge of making tools, thus creating the saru. When the garuda were eventually banished from the land, the ancients would go on to offer many saru jobs as laborers.

Eventually some disaster, whose exact details were unrecorded by history, struck the Ancient Nubari and destroyed their civilization. Most of their buildings, culture, and knowledge was lost in this disaster. A legend passed down by members of the Simbara claimed that the Nubari were discovered and attacked by their ancient enemy. The surviving ancient Nubari would flee what was left of their homes, taking up a primitive way of life in the plateau's jungles and plains.

Years following the destruction of the Ancient Nubari's civilization, some native humans that were ancestors of the later Shou people discovered the vast Malatran Plateau and somehow managed to both ascend it and overcome its magical barriers. These humans would go on to intermingle with the Nubari and gradually, over a period of about a thousand years, formed a new race of humans, also called the Nubari, which came to be the dominant ethnic group of the region.