The Great Houses of the Southern Nomads.
Every House is called a 'Great' House, no matter how large they actually are - this basic is courtesy. They are composed of extended family and kin groups, and the largest are around 2000 people, the smallest 30 or so. All of them have heraldry (usually a mixture of animal motifs, geometric and optical patterning, and stellar constellations, with cadet branches adopting variations on the main branch heraldry), and all will wear this as a flag-cloak (a practice that they share with the Northern Nomads), and get it tattooed on their body. They also get tattoos signifying great feats of hosting, hunting, raiding, and religious sacrifice.
Like their northern neighbours, they keep chivalric traditions. In the south these focus on raiding and hospitality - where the Northern Steppe Errants go questing to get wisdom, the Southerners engage in feuds, kill their enemies, hunt the Ice People and other sea monsters, and vie to outdo one another in expensive sacrifices and feasting.
They don't ride horses or keep cattle (no grazing in the south), although wealthy families sometimes buy these animals as status symbols and feed them with imported grain. They do keep dogs; big, aggressive, snow-white wolfhounds who work as pack animals and accompany warriors on raids.
Southern Houses typically live semi-nomadically: they travel most of the year, and hunt, trade, and feud with one another, but each family will also keep a 'Seat' - a settlement/fortification that they can retreat to if needs must, and that they can winter in if the season is a particularly bad one, or the killing sunlight becomes too much to handle out in the open. In the northern regions these 'Seats' are small stone fortresses, usually built on the coast for access to fishing and seal-hunting, but further south they are said to become stranger: there are rumours of forts built from ice that never melts; of manor houses that float in the coloured fire that hangs in the frigid, crystalline night air; of iron castles that walk the land on iron legs; of ghost houses, of stairways that lead up into the vividly burning stars.
The Houses are famously taciturn and difficult to impress, and in the North they have a reputation for brutality, cold-bloodedness, and cannibalism. Warbands and whole families are sometimes hired in Errant country, and even the Barony, to serve as experienced shock light infantry, where they are famously illusive and dangerous in rough terrain.
Re cannibalism: Southern Mentats do butcher and prepare human corpses (especially their organs), and this is accepted practice - part of the great and horrible otherness of that caste. There is also a general understanding among the Southerners that eating corpses is preferable to starvation, and they will partake when forced to. They are not (usually, exceptions exist, especially among the Ice Houses) actively or murderously cannibalistic, and the fears and horror stories of the Northerners are significantly tinged with xenophobia.
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All Southern Nomads have excellent stealth and concealment and superlative survival skills when in their home territories. They roll all appropriate checks with advantage. They wear colourful heraldic flags when fighting in feuds against other Houses (a trait they share with the Errants of the North), but make forgo these and instead make effective use of camouflage when raiding 'barbarians' from other societies.
A 'medium weapon' below is usually a longsword - where Northern Nomads favour a cross guard straight sword, while the Southerners mostly use basket hilts, often insulated with fur. They will also occasionally use heavy bear spears, with wide, sturdy wings beneath the leaf-shaped blade.
Southern House Scion
As Bandit, equipped with: medium weapon, bow, light armour, cold weather gear, sun goggles, movement: as human, disposition: hunters and foragers, prideful, distrusting.
Southern Raider
As Man-at-Arms, equipped with: medium weapon + shield or heavy weapon, bow, cold weather gear, sun goggles, medium armour, movement: as human, disposition: duelist, terror raider, prideful, distrusting.
Raiders who roll max HP have been trapanned by their Mentat, and have a single gift from the list.
A Raider-Captain has HD+1, and a 1 in 2 chance of carrying a Preserver from the Southern Gear list here.
Patriarch/Matriarch
HD2-4, medium weapon, shield, bow, cold weather gear, sun goggles, medium armour, movement: as human, disposition: king or queen of a small territory, used to mediating disputes and making leadership decisions. Dressed in between 50 and 200s of whale and bear-bone jewellery. Will take respect, face, and decorum extremely seriously. Any raiding party that includes a noble will always carry a Preserver with them.
Each House will usually only have one Patriarch or Matriarch, although exceptions are not unusual, especially for husband/wife or older parent/adult child rulerships. The House Raiders will usually be organised into an informal bodyguard for their leader. Every House will have precisely one Mentat - they are respected, feared, and distrusted by most right-thinking southerners, but they are also irreplaceable and untouchable.
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House Seats, Castellans, Sun Logic, Bravo Plays
Every House of standing keeps its Seat, a small fortress, ranging in size from a fortified house to a small keep. Houses of means will also keep a settled staff of Castellans at their Seats, to maintain them, exercise sacred hospitality to travellers in the House's name, and defend them from attack if necessary.
Castellans are a cultural institution of their own - they are settled in one place for life, and they do not raid or feud. They mostly marry between one another (Castellans often betroth their children between Seats to secure alliances and goodwill, and this can serve as a sort of 'back channel' to normal raider politics and House feuding), and are considered strangely-gendered and strangely-sexed in mainstream Southerner society.
Importantly, Castellans are also storytellers and actors - all Southerners are singers and dancers, but the Castellans are the ones who plot (in the sense of plotting a novel) and stage works of drama. Most Seats are also theatres, and Houses measure their wealth against one another by the quality of the entertainment their House can provide travellers.
Southern plays are strange by Baronial standards: scenes are arranged into non-sequitors, and often start in media res, with minimal scene setting or props. The audience is expected to do quick and difficult interpretation of what is unfolding, and it is expected that different people may come to different conclusions and see or take away different things. The Southerners call this 'Sun Logic', and find Northern drama plodding and unimaginative in comparison. The White City has a great love of, and fascination for, the 'Southern Style'. A perennial favourite subject for the Castellan drama are the so-called Bravo Plays, which take Baronial Bravos for their cast, and which are famously lurid, violent, sexualised, and ridiculous. The Castellans vie to outdo one another in how insane they can push these Bravo Plots of betrayal, forbidden love, massacre, sex, addiction, drug visions, bathhouses and abattoirs, hot temper, cold calculation, etc. etc. etc. Bravo Plays are a great favourite with all Southerners, very few of whom have ever met a Baronial in person, let alone seen the capital.
Southerners who actually meet Bravos are inevitably just slightly disappointed by the reality (like Paris syndrome), but they tend to be polite about it.
When you eat with Castellans, you will always be served meat, seafood, blubber, oil, and salt, along with sweet fresh water. Anything less than this would be an insult, or evidence of poverty with your hosts. If you are in good standing, this fare might be augmented with imported grains, milk and alcohol, fruits, nuts, and berries from the North, and the strange, poisonous extremophile lifeforms that grow in their billions in the chemical vents that dot the region. These last must be very carefully prepared before eating, and are considered a delicacy, although nearly everyone from the North says they taste like shit. If you are an exalted guest or ally, you might be given sugar.
Southerners also love to smoke whalebone pipes, but make do with very little smokeable material in the region - what there is is mostly dried and powdered fungus, and, while the Southerners do have a tooth for it, it tastes a lot like dirt. They will pay very well for good quality smokeable drugs imported from the Barony - at least ten times what they are worth at home. The effects of these vastly more potent drugs on the lower-tolerance Southerner constitution is often a source of much merriment and hilarity for both vendor and buyer.
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The Screamer Cult
The Screamer Cult is a mystery. The Southerners hate the Screamers more than they hate anyone, and a good portion of conflict and misery in the Southern Steppe is directly caused by Screamer hunts inside the Great Houses. The thing about Screamers is that they are, or could be, anyone. They are a secret society, and they live among the Houses in complete anonymity. There are said to be signs and mannerisms that they recognise between one another. They help one another where they can, and are significantly concerned with the getting and keeping of power in the Houses. They owe allegiance to no house, and exist in all houses. They are an enormously destabilising force in the South, and are spoken of (if at all, mentioning them unnecessarily is in poor taste) it is often in existential or apocalyptic terms. Many Southerners live in fear that a day may come where there are more Screamers than people, which would be the end of the world.
If they are discovered they are put to death, and often tortured first, in an attempt to get the names of others. The torture rarely works, and Screamers often implicate innocents before they die, which has lead to many terrible tragedies and injustices.
They get their name because, when they are discovered, and can no longer plausibly lie, something strange happens. They begin to scream with a horrible, vivid intensity. The sound is loud and sustained, and nothing at all like a person. They will then try to kill anyone around them with a hysterical strength. They don't seem to feel pain while screaming, and attack like beasts, battering and strangling with their bare hands. The screams are worldless. No one knows if the Screamers are a religion, an illness, a strange parasite from the sun or the stars, ghosts, demons, or what. Baronials who have seen them think maybe demons? It's not clear.
Sometimes they will decide to kill someone to further their strange agendas. The typical scene goes thus: you hear the screaming, so horrible and so loud, and you run towards it, hoping to get there in time. You find the body of the victim, mangled to pieces, but not the Screamer. They are already back in your community, composing their false face, pretending to be a person again.
The Southerners will tell you that the Screamer Cult exists across the world entire, in every race of people, but that their benighted territory is the only place so far where they have woken up.
Screamers have the stats of Commoners, Scions, Raiders, etc., depending on what they do. They are normal people, living apparently normal lives, with normal relationships and normal professions. They communicate by mundane means (notes and cyphers, secret hand signs and meetings, etc.), and have normal political motives and goals, so a determined investigation might unmask one, but they are extremely difficult to spot.
While they are screaming they no longer feel pain or test morale, and take -1 damage from all physical attacks. While in combat with one, while you can hear it screaming, you take 1 psychic damage and d6 fear damage per turn, with a CON save for half (wax in the ears and similar will automatically pass this save).
Hearing them scream from afar (outside of combat) is very unnerving, but deals no damage.
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The Ice Houses
Even further south, where there is no land at all, live the Ice Houses. They don't have heraldry, Seats, feuds, or anything like that. They don't raid. They tend to move in small groups, even single families. They are holy people, close to the stars, close to the sun. They want nothing that we have. They are magicians and phantoms. Best to leave them to their obscure business, and grudge them not their sacred right to hospitality when they make their rare incursions onto the mainland.
Stat Ice Houses as Raider bands with no metal, always accompanied by a single Mentat. All members of the band will be trepanned, and as such all will have a random gift from the table.
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The sun in the South shines for three months in the summer, without once dipping below the horizon. During this period, the Southerners call it the Killing Sun. Exposure without taking precautions is gradual, and then all at once - sensitive people get headaches and visual distortions, then start vomiting and lose their sense of balance, which makes walking and sometimes even crawling impossible. After a few minutes of this, you see white, and you do things that you can't remember. This can include taking all your clothes off and running into the icy sea, self mutilating, or trying to kill your friends. People maddened in the grip of the killing sun are called revenants, and their faces are mad with hatred and terrible to look at.
Adventurers, even the sensitive ones, are hardy people. Whenever you are exposed to a high stress moment in the sunlight, you must save CHAR. 'High stress' here certainly means combat breaking out and taking damage (two different tests), but might also include certain tests and environmental challenges (jumping a crevasse, dealing with traps, high stakes negotiation).
- -1 per day you have been exposed.
- -1 per hp you have below your max.
- -2 if you didn't sleep last night.
- -2 if you have taken psychoactive drugs today.
- -2 if you have any templates in Artist or Little Saint (-4 if you have both).
- +10 if you are wearing sun goggles.
If you fail this test, advance this tracker one step (two steps on a critical failure):
- Roll all tests and saves with disadvantage, until you can get somewhere dark.
- Reduce your movement to a crawl, until you can get somewhere dark.
- White out. You are a (probably violent and dangerous, and potentially suicidal) NPC under the control of the DM for the next d4-CHAR mod hours (minimum 1). In this state, you no longer suffer any of the penalties from steps 1 or 2. When you snap out of it, reset the tracker to 0.
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Black Hair
The Southerners bury their dead in caves. Some of the Ice Houses weight the corpses and throw them into the sea. You have the get the body away from the sun. If you don't, they get up and walk back to their communities.
Corpses who walk like this are called Black Hair (in plural and singular), because the hair on their heads grows extremely quickly and often completely obscures their face and shoulders. On older creatures it can easily reach the ground. Black Hair want to be with their family, and will hang around their House, trying to grab at people that they used to love, or force their way into their old home. They are not usually violent, unless they were killed violently, but even a benign Black Hair is a terrible thing. They smell awful and can spread disease (the cold often keeps them from rotting too badly, but are still sunburned, flyblown corpses), and they are horribly strong. You can't really kill them - while they exposed to the sunlight, every part of the decaying nervous system functions. You can cut off an arm or a head and it will keep trying to get at you. You can dissolve or burn Black Hair, but they typically respond violently to attempts to liquidate them this way. Most normally, you need to trick them into some place where you can cut them off from exposure to the sunlight. Black Hair are not stupid (they have the minds of the people they were in life, albeit distorted and fixated, and some of them can be horribly clever), but they are desperate, and will act like desperate people to get the contact they crave. Sometimes all you can do is wait for the sunset in two months time, and bury the body properly once it collapses again.
Black Hair are another great mystery in the Barony. They appear to be genuine undead, ghosts or zombies, and not entities possessing corpses, which is how similar beings are produced in the climes further to the north. The Killing Sun is truly a wondrous and terrible thing.
Black Hair
HD3, battering strength (as medium weapon x2) or strangulation (a special grapple that deals d10 damage per turn it is maintained, and silences its target), unarmoured but impossible to kill while in sunlight without laboriously cutting and smashing it to pieces (once HP is depleted, each attack that hits severs a limb or destroys an already severed limb), takes -1 damage from physical attacks. Movement: as the ghost in Ju-On or the girl walking towards the camera in Pulse/Kairo, disposition: varies wildly, depending on how the particular Black Hair died. Always fixated, miserable, persistent, and incapable of disengaging or learning from mistakes.
The body of a Black Hair has a 1 in 6 chance of carrying a random disease. The skin often looks scorched and burnt. If a Black Hair is ever cut off from the light of the sun, its body immediately de-animates.
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The Vacuum Labyrinth
Built long ago by unknown hands. A maze of black, airless tunnels and shafts carved into the black bedrock. A very holy site, and a very bad place for humans. When the Old Capital came to build its facilities in the south, the Vacuum Labyrinth was already there.
It was built as a habitat for something. The Mentats won't tell you what. Some Houses think it is one of the Star People - not their transient astral forms, not the projections of their great, buzzing intelligences - the body of the thing itself, huge and folded up in that void warren. Others say that it is from the sky (like all holy things), but not from the stars - that it is something else, more terrible, less ancient.
There are known entrances inside several of the regional chemical pits.
The Mentats will try to kill you if you essay it.
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