The Great Gummies refers to gummi civilization at the height of its power. The ancient society that flourished during the First Coming, raised the greatest works of gummi craft and magic the world has ever known, and ultimately withdrew from history rather than bend to the greed of humankind. By the present day (~Year 1050), they exist more as legend than living memory, known chiefly through the fragmented records preserved in the Great Book of Gummi.
The Golden Age (~Year -1000 and prior)
At its peak, gummi civilization was among the most advanced the world had ever produced. The Great Gummies were magicians, engineers, artists, and advisors to kings, builders of majestic palaces and redirectors of rivers, as comfortable in a royal court as in a mountain workshop.
During the era known as the First Coming, gummi and human civilizations existed in genuine cooperation. Side by side, they shaped what the old chronicles call a Golden Age of Peace: a period of shared discovery and mutual prosperity that lasted for centuries. The Great Gummies brought knowledge; humans brought ambition. For a time, the combination was generative.
Their accomplishments during this period are staggering in retrospect: advanced machines, feats of architecture, magical scholarship, and a written tradition vast enough to fill the Great Book of Gummi many times over. The quick tunnel network connecting communities across the known world was itself a product of this era.
The Betrayal and Withdrawal (~Year 525)
The Golden Age did not end through war or catastrophe, it ended through mistrust. Some humans grew jealous of the gummies’ knowledge and began using deception and manipulation to extract their secrets. As schemes multiplied and good faith eroded, the gummi bears turned away from humanity entirely, withdrawing into their hidden warrens and inaccessible mountain cities.
This withdrawal, later called the Great Exodus, marked the end of the Great Gummies as a civilization in any meaningful sense. Some communities sealed themselves into isolation and turned inward. Others sailed west across unknown seas, their destinations unrecorded or lost to time.
Stagnation and Decline (~Year 525–1050)
Isolation proved a slow poison. Cut off from the friction and challenge of the wider world, gummi communities stagnated. Ceremonies became traditions; traditions became rituals; rituals lost their meaning entirely. The hard-won knowledge of the Great Gummies began to fade. Not destroyed, but forgotten, misread, or locked away in texts too difficult to translate.
Each generation grew less gummi and more simply bear. Communities dwindled. Warrens fell silent. By the time of the present era, most gummi settlements in the known world have been abandoned, their passages crumbling, their libraries gathering dust. The few surviving communities like Gummi Glen, are scattered remnants, often ignorant of each other’s existence.
Among humans, the Great Gummies passed entirely into myth. Stories of the wise and gentle bears became children’s tales, their legendary feats embellished into the impossible. Most educated people came to believe gummi bears had never existed at all.
Present Day (~Year 1050)
The term “Great Gummies” carries two meanings in the present day. The first is historical, referring to the ancient civilization described above. The second is more personal: the gummies of Dunwyn use it to speak of the residents of New Gumbria, the descendants of the community of gummi bears who sailed west during the Great Exodus and, against all expectation, survived.
First contact between the two communities was made roughly 25 years before the present day, and it is remembered warmly by those who were there. After centuries of believing themselves alone, the gummies of Dunwyn learned that the civilization they had only ever known through crumbling pages and half-translated spells had not entirely vanished. For a time, correspondence flowed between the two communities, and what little New Gumbria shared confirmed that the Great Gummies’ legacy had been kept far more intact across the sea than it had been in the warrens of the old world.
In ‘The Gummi Way’
⚠️ This section contains spoilers. Read the comic to catch up. 😉