Month: July 2015

The Lizardmen are the dominant race of the Mahiri Jungles, Kemesh, and Suvanea, with smaller isolated groups being found on islands and in marshes as far north as the Tavir Mountains. They are on average a head taller than humans or elves and often weight twice as much, but the clans of some regions are of much more slender build. While not particularly fast or agile on land, they are very good swimmers and divers and most often make their homes directly at the water. As the other races are concerned, lizardmen show few emotions or individual personalty and seem generally somewhat dull, but in reality they are not any less intelligent. Much of their culture seems very strange to other peoples, such as their apparent lack of families. Eggs and young children are cared fore collectively by the women of a village and most make very little difference between their own children and those of others. Men are often not aware which children of the village are their own and young lizardmen become mostly independent of their caretakers by the age of ten. Positions of authority are usually attained entirely be merit and not by right of birth. To people from other tribes lizardmen often appear as highly indifferent and uncaring towards their children and eggs are usually regarded as replaceable, but they protect their young just as committed as all other peoples.
The cultures of the lizardmen are among the oldest in the Ancient Land, with many of their realms predating even the earliest elven kingdoms. However, the people of most major cities consider the lizardmen to be stuck in the past and having reached the limit of their abilities. While many of the outlying tribes do indeed have no writing or barely any metal, the major cities hidden deeper in the jungles are just as advanced as any elven kingdoms.

Gandju

The tribe of the Gandju lives in the many islands of Suvanea on the eastern end of the Inner Sea, which they share with the much less numerous human Amakari. Though there have been a few old naga castles in Suvanea, the Gandju never were made slaves in large numbers and their culture is entirely their own. Like the Amakari, the Gandju use no metals except for a few knives and spear blades taken from elven ships that have been boarded or run aground in the region. Gandju villages are mostly found on the beaches or lakes found on some of the larger islands. Their boats are much smaller than the merchant ships of the Keyren, Neshanen, and Takari and not well suited to endure storms out on the open sea, but very fast and maneuverable and perfect for travel between the islands. Some clans are frequently visited by merchant ships buying fresh food for the long journeys across the Inner Sea, but others are pirates who simply steal whatever goods from foreign lands they find a taste for.

Kuraka

The Kuraka a group of highly diverse clans of lizardmen whose most common trait is that they never were slaves to the naga or part of the Mayaka kingdom. They have no cities and only a few towns of significant size and they don’t make bronze, but have long ago learned to work the metal taken from dead Mayaka and Suji soldiers and they have many bronze spears and daggers in addition to their own stone and obsidian weapons. The Kuraka are most numerous in the highlands west of Kemesh, but small clans can be found throughout the huge unclaimed territory that separates the lands of the two great powers of the region and on many stretches along the coast. Most clans don’t want anything to do with either the naga or the Mayaka and live in small villages in hard to reach places.

Mayaka

The Mayaka are the largest of the lizardmen tribes and one of the most advanced civilizations in the Ancient Lands. Enslaved by the naga lords who ruled over most of the Mahiri Jungles and Kemesh many hundreds of years ago, the lizardmen in the western cities rebelled when the power of the naga began to wane and over several generations gained control over a large territory. Shamans of the slaves had been worshiping the Sun in secret for centuries, and it was these shamans that eventually were able to overcome the naga sorcerers, allowing the warrior slaves to conquer the great city Nakat Sahri. The shamans chose one of the greatest warriors of the rebellion to take charge of the armies and made him the first king of the Mayaka. While the king has been the leaders of the Mayaka warriors and in control of most of the everyday business of the kingdom for almost a thousand years, each king is chosen by the high priests of the Temple of the Sun, who may even replace him if he ever becomes unworthy as the avatar of the Sun.
Having driven the naga from one of their greatest cities and making it the seat of their new kingdom, the Mayaka had access to large irrigated fields and mines of copper and tin from the very beginning, when most other tribes where still living in trees and caves with nothing but sharp stones for weapons. Even almost a thousand years later, only the Neshanen and the skeyn have achieved a sophistication of technology to rival theirs. Though only a relatively small number of Mayaka is living in the great cities of the kingdom, most villages are well connected to the bureaucracy of the kingdom and the army of the kingdom is well organized and has many fortresses and camps on the borders to the dark elves in the West and the remaining naga cities of Kemesh in the East. In addition, the king also commands the Guard of the Royal palace, which is one of the most well trained and organized forces in all of the Ancient Lands, being rivaled only by a few of the best companies of the Sakaya. Soldiers of the Royal Guard wear bronze lamellar armor and swords, which make them stand out clearly from the regular Mayaka soldiers, who are equipped with armor made from corded rope and iron spears. While Mayaka soldiers are rarely seen outside the borders of the kingdom when not on a campaign to destroy enemy troops, soldiers of the Royal Guard also have the duty of escorting dignitaries of the kingdom to other countries and are sometimes chosen send on special assignments that lead them to far away places. Within the great cities of the kingdom, children of women of the palaces are raised away from those of the common masses, creating a kind of aristocratic caste that is unknown to the other lizardmen tribes. Commoners can still rise to position of great power and might even be selected to become king, but the children of the palace are given much better education, which puts them at a great advantage.

Suji

The Suji are a unique tribe in the Ancient Lands, as they have no chiefs or shamans and are entirely under the rule of the naga of Kemesh. They are almost never seen outside the naga realms, except when crewing the rare occasional ships that transport their naga masters to other lands. The Suji perform almost all manual labor in Kemesh except for the casting of weapons and armor for the naga and their elite serpentmen guards, and they also make up the majority of the vast naga armies that are in a slow but almost constant war with the Mayaka, and occasionally come to clash with each other. According to the Priests of the Sun and the Mayaka king, they are continuing their rebellion to free all lizardmen from naga slavery, but to most Suji they are heretics who are refusing to bow to their divine masters. Fieldworkers from villages captured by the Mayaka are often brought to the kingdom and live pretty much as slaves, with their young being raised in Mayaka hatcheries. Suji soldiers often fight to the death rather than joining the heretics and it is rare that any are taken alive by victorious Mayaka armies.

Humans are one of the minor people who live in the Ancient Lands. They consist of four major tribes that are very different from each other and live separated by many hundreds of miles from one another. They have been few in numbers and of little importance in the history of the Ancient Lands for the most time, but in recent centuries Vandren from the Vestanen Mountains have been coming into the lands on the Inner Sea in increasing numbers and started to settle in some parts of the lowlands. There are still many Falden or Ruyaki who have never seen a human in their entire life, and with the exception of the Amakari in Sunvanea they are almost unknown to the lizardmen of the Mahiri Jungles and Kemesh. Humans are very similar in height and stature to elves, though usually somewhat bulkier build. By the age of 20 they are fully grown, but rarely live for more than 80 years and even that is very rare except for some powerful shamans and witches.
Even though humans are not as strong as kaas or lizardmen and lack the speed and agility of elves, they have an endurance toughness that beats that of all the other humanoid people. As long as they have sufficient water, humans can travel almost an entire day with very little rest, even in heat that brings the strongest kaas or elves down within an hour and they can keep doing so for many days with only little food. Humans who are traveling light can easily cover as much distance in a day as a horse, and even outdistance them on a hot day. Scouts and patrols of other people rarely attempt to pursue humans who have a good head start as the chances for catching them are slim. And outrunning human pursuers on foot is a situation in which even the most experienced and toughened never wish to find themselves. Skeyn may have a similar ability to keep up hard physical work for long time, but nobody outruns even a moderately healthy human over long distances. In addition to that, humans are also exceptionally hardy when it comes to dealing with malnutrition and the various diseases that often accompany it. They are able to survive on a wider range of food sources than almost anyone else and it’s often said that there is nothing sold as food in the markets of the Ancient Lands that humans couldn’t digest. Their bodies are also able to deal reasonably well with food that has been partly spoiled and become inedible to other people without becoming thick. In the centuries in which human mercenaries have been hired by elven warlords, it has become well known that they will almost always outlast nonhuman enemies in a siege, regardless of which side of the walls they are on. Unsurprisingly, this has made them highly valued as mercenaries for the wood elven tribes and Amakari slaves often bring the best prices for Takari slavers. In recent generations they have even started to be hired as sailors on Keyren ships.

Amakari

The Amakari are one of the two tribes that inhabit the countless islands of Suvanea in the eastern waters of the Inner Sea. They are taller and broader build than humans of the other tribes and have deep brown skin with dark earth and sand colored hair and beards. They are not very numerous, even in their home islands, which they are sharing with the Gandju lizardmen. Amakari technology is very similar to that of the Gandju and uses almost no metal except for a few small ornaments. They travel between islands and catch fish in small but very fast boats that can be both sailed and rowed. They have the fewest similarities to other human tribes and some think that they might actually be neither humans nor elves, but something else entirely.

Kaska

The Kaska are a small tribe that is very similar in appearance to the Vandren of the Vestanen Mountains and speaks a similar language, but as at home many hundreds of miles to the north in the Witchfens between the great Nareven forest and the Rayalka Moutains. They are of similar height to Vandren and wood elves and have straight black hair and light brown skin. The Kaska are very reclusive and usually hostile to people of any other tribes, but many of the neighboring people believe that they are fighting just as much among themselves. Not much is known about them by people from other lands, as the Witchfens are a highly inhospitable place and nobody is sure what drive the Kaska to make their homes there in the first place. Kaska warparties regularly creep through the hills of the Erhait to raid villages in the valley of the Kaldaven for weapons, grain, and slaves. Within the Witchfens, the true power over the Kaska clans lies in the hands of their witches. Most of them are women who have great power over the clan chiefs, but they also have their own hierarchies and rivalries of which even the common Kaska understand very little.

Mari

The cold northern land of Venlad on the coast of the Northern Sea is the home of the Mari, a small human tribe that has lived mostly in isolation from the rest of the Ancient Lands for countless centuries. Unlike other humans or elves they have relatively light skin and brown hair and they tend to be somewhat taller than most of these people, though not as big as the Amakari. Most Mari are reindeer herders or fishermen, since the cold land doesn’t lend itself well to growing crops. Villages are small and most houses built partly into the ground to be protected from the fierce winter storms, but there are also a few small towns of wooden houses on the coast where ships from the South come during the summer to trade for pelts, whalebone, and dried fish.

Vandren

The Vandren are the largest of the human tribes that live in the Ancient Lands and have their traditional homeland in the Vestanen Mountains between the forests of Nareven and the Red River. They are similar in height to most elves with black hair and light brown skin and make many of their clothes and armor from leather, as they keep many herds of goats, sheep, and mountain horses to survive in a land where growing crops is hard and difficult work. Though gold, silver, and copper can be found in the mountains, the greatest treasure of the Vandren is salt, which they trade with merchants from all over the Ancient Lands. For several centuries elven merchants have been hiring Vandren warriors to protect the valuable caravans from bandits and the warriors of hostile clans, and they soon began to employ large numbers of Vandren mercenaries in their wars against each other. Vandren have been migrating from the mountains to the borders of the elven lands ever since, and while still mostly disorganized and relatively few in numbers, they are becoming a new powerful tribe on the coast of the Inner Sea.

The most famous of the Vandren mercenaries are the Sakaya, who began as a religious group in the Vestanen Mountains that had its own warriors to protects its great monasteries and farming villages. During times of peace, these warrior monks took up mercenary work to hone their skills of combat, but some never returned to the mountains and instead made their new homes in the conquered fortresses of their defeated enemies. Though the Sakaya of the lowlands accept warriors of any tribe or clan into their ranks, the majority of them are still Vandren, and for many people on the Inner Sea there is very little difference between the two.

Dark elves are at home in the Mahiri Jungles between the Red River and the Mayaka Kingdom on the southern shores of the Inner Sea. They resemble wood elves of the northern lands in stature, but their skin is a dark ashen gray and their hair ranges in colors from white to light blond and various shaded of silvery gray. The color of their eyes is usually in shades from dark ember or copper to a deep dark red and they have excellent vision in the night, even under the dark shadows of the thick jungles. Being well adapted to the dark, dark elves often make their homes in caves or live in homes with small windows, and life in the villages and towns usually starts only in the afternoon when the trees of the surrounding jungles provide plenty of shade and continues deep into the night. Like wood elves, dark elves are fully grown at around 24 years of age and often live well over 300 years if they don’t fall victim to disease, war, or accident.

Ruyaki

The Ruyaki are the smallest of the three tribes of dark elves that lives in the Ancient Lands. They inhabit the northernmost parts of the Mahiri Jungles and the lands along the Red River south of the Vestanen Mountains. They often wear shawls and hoods to protect themselves from the sand that gets blown up from the dry banks of the Red River and to provide some shade for their eyes in more sparsely forested northern reaches of the Mahiri Jungles. They are also known for their armor, which is often made from the hides of giant insects that live in the region. Ruyaki clans are often rather small, often numbering just several hundred people or a few thousand. Vandren from the Vestanen Mountains rarely travel into Ruyaki territory, but the relations between clans most commonly depend on the past history between specific clans. There are few Ruyaki towns of remarkable size and some clans are almost entirely nomadic and live from hunting and keeping antelope-like mountain goats.

Takari

The Takari clans live along the coast of the western Mahiri Jungles between the Kuremo swamps at the mouth of the Red River and the territory controlled by the Mayaka. Like the Neshanen on the northern shores of the Inner Sea, their culture is centered around several major port cities and towns that have come to considerable wealth through trade with other cities. Highborn Takari often live in great city mansions or villas in the surrounding villages. In addition to the valuable goods from the jungles, the Takari also trade in slaves, which are usually captured from the Yagashi clans deeper in the jungles or Amakari and Gandju villages in Sunvanea.

Yagashi

The Yagashi are the largest tribe of dark elves and are spread throughout a vast region of jungle south of the Takari coast and west of the Mayaka Kingdom. Most live in small villages that have little contact with the people from other land, but there is also a number of great temple cities deep within the jungles, which are ruled by powerful shaman queens. The Yagashi use little worked metal and most bronze is used for spear blades and arrow tips. Their warriors wear simple armor made from corded tree fibers and reinforced with animal bones that serves them well in the hot and humid jungles of their homeland. Their warriors are also painted in complex swirling runes made from a mixture of white clay and the ground bones of monsters, which binds the spirits of those creatures to them and gives them some of their powers. As much as they revere and honor the creatures of the jungles, they rarely wear more than two or three such runes on their body at the same time, as they fear the spirits might be able to possess them fully if they use too many at once and for a long time. Sleeping without washing off the runes is regarded as highly dangerous and warriors will often destroy the runes on an ally who falls unconscious in battle even before treating his wounds.