New faction for my flintlock fantasy worldbuilding project(leave questions and criticisms below)

It is my pleasure to present Tribanous, the masters of coin and swift death at the hands of the sixteen great guilds. But it was not always like this.

Long ago—before Angloria or Erilto, in the Age of Scholars (my Bronze Age)—the merchant nation of Tribanous rose to power, and they remained a power in the ancient Old World. But upon the “Great Felling” (the Bronze Age collapse), Tribanous fled to the dark places of the world. You can’t have a nation underground naturally, of course, but there was a way: they drew magic from the ores of the earth. With this, they grew crops and brought light to places where it had never been seen before. For many ages they dwelt underground, unknown to the rest of the world, who believed them to be just another victim of the Great Felling.

That changed two hundred years ago, when the Old and New Worlds first met. This mixing of Old World and New World magic systems was so catastrophic that all magics across the world failed. For Tribanous, this meant famine and darkness. So they returned to the surface, emerging into a new version of the Old World they once knew.

They longed to be a great power once more. The first hurdle was technology, but they overcame this quite easily by using their vast ore supplies to pay Erilto for guns, cannons, and bombs. Yet despite having land, wealth, and modern tech, they lacked what makes an empire a true empire: ambition. This modern world cared no longer for bloodlines, gods, and holy lands. Instead, the powers of today cared for ideological spread, spices, and cheap labour. So Tribanous was left in the south of the Old World—a shell of what it could be.

That changed when the Mist formed a hundred years ago. When knowledge spread of the Mist’s ability to prevent death, a dark flicker appeared in the eyes of the guildmasters. They had gained a goal: to tame death—not to spread it nor end it, but to control it like a pet.

Great fleets were sent out to collect the Mist, bringing it back to be given in small doses to the higher classes of Tribanous. This extended their lives without transforming them (for taking in too much turns one into zombie-like things). And so the same sixteen guildmasters have remained in power for a century, despite none looking a day over sixty.