The Southern Nomads

 

I just posted a new class called the Star Seed, but forgot to write up any context for it. This post aims to rectify that grievous error. 

The Southern Nomads

The Southern Nomad kingdoms are culturally distinct from the more familiar (to Baronials) nomads of the North. The Northern Kingdoms practice chivalric errantry, animal husbandry, and horse archery. Their contact with the Star People is via their smiths, who make their terrible weapons for elite young errants to take on great wandering pilgrimages. 

In the South, the land is icebound much of the year, and not suitable for horses or other herd animals. The Southern Nomads live in smaller communities, called houses, and each house is infamously self-sufficient, pragmatic, and mobile. The Southern houses exist within a complex and ever-shifting political map of alliance, resource management, feud, and (very rarely), warfare with one another. These relations are impenetrable to outsiders - the Northern Nomads nearly universally consider the southerners frightening cannibals, with a culturally enshrined tradition of raiding and terror warfare.

A Southern Nomad house is made up of family groups, usually between 30 and 150 people. Every adult member of the house is expected to be able to hunt, and to be ready to fight in raids or inter-band warfare. The favoured weapons are the bow, the machete, and the spear, and armour is usually made from leather and cloth, and incorporated into cold weather gear. Whalebone sun goggles are mandatory kit - without them, the southern sun does strange things to the mind.

The Southerners do not have star smiths like their northern kin. Their connection to the Star People is more direct. 

Every house is organised around a single Star Seed, who performs the roles of raiding champion, conduit to the night sky, and spiritual leader. Star Seeds are not political leaders (the houses elect their kings and queens), and they do not manage the survival of their fellows. They can kill people if they feel they need to - they are exempt from all terrestrial law, with the exception (hard learned) they can never marry or reproduce. They are expected to fight against the enemies of the house in battle, but that is where their duty to their extended family ends. 

Often, Star Seeds come into possession of their own Star Weapons, by methods obscure. Sometimes they are lead to strange machines in the ice (the walking fortresses of the ice floe houses are an example), which their fellows will excavate, and which they may, night after freezing night, prostrate beneath the stars that burn like cold bonfires, be taught to pilot. Most often they are simply shadows in the shape of people, twisted and broken, eating the bodies of the slain and dismembering them for parts. 

If another Star Seed takes root (this happens in early adulthood - young fighters spend a night staring into the aurora storms, hoping to be chosen), a house will split. There can never be two in close proximity. Where splitting is not possible, the two will fight, and the victor will eat the vanquished, and (it is thought) take ownership their prowess and property.

Star Seeds are a horror story for the Northern Nomads, a disease, an indescribable and obscene fanaticism that pervert what they consider to be sacred truths. 

What the Southerners think of their Northern neighbours is not recorded.