Culture: Death

In the culture of Butter Bay, even more so since the Freeze began, death is held in great reverence. The Libram’s account of the death of Voland at the hands of Bishal and his subsequent resurrection has ingrained itself into the collective consciousness of society, and instilled a deep respect.

Namelessness

The most obvious sign of this reverence is in the rite of passage known as Namelessness. Namelessness is a coming of age ritual that all inhabitants of the Bay go through; it is absolutely mandatory. If, somehow, one was to not do it, they would forever be considered a child. When you go through your Namelessness you are re-enacting the death and resurrection of Voland, claiming your place in the world as one of his children. The process begins at the festival of Sorrows. All children who have turned twelve in the year since the previous Sorrows are deemed ready to go through their Namelessness. A parent or other family member, or occasionally a Keeper, will use their own saege knife to cut off the child’s hair in a ritual performed in front of the whole community.

After the ritual is completed, the children, now called nameless, are considered to be dead. The role of the community in the Namelessness is simply to not interact with the nameless in any way. The nameless must fend for themselves, preparing their own food, dressing themselves, repairing clothing, and anything else that might arise. Though the nameless are not officially supposed to speak at all, they sometimes speak with and interact with one another; the rest of the community does not enforce the no-speaking rule because they are not allowed to acknowledge the nameless. It is also common for the nameless to help one another with food, clothing, and protection; this is also accepted because the community is not allowed to acknowledged them, but some view the practice as a positive as it helps instil the nameless with a sense of community.

When Nighsend, the new year’s festival, arrives, another ritual is performed; the nameless are each presented with a saege of their own, to carry and guard the rest of their lives. Once this ritual is completed, the nameless become adults, and are considered alive again. When the nameless regain their life, they are allowed an opportunity to alter their given name if they so wish. As adults now, they are expected to contribute to society just like everyone else by farming, or fishing, or mining, or even joining the militia.

Dying

When people die in the Frozen Over setting, things work somewhat differently than normal. Upon dying, the person immediately returns as a ghast, a sort of undead spectre of themselves. Ghasts are able to continue to exist in the world for a time if they so choose, but it takes a focused effort to hold onto the land of the living. Over time, the person’s ghast slowly slips away and crosses over to the afterlife. A ghast can choose to let go and cross over of their own accord at any time.

What this means in game terms, specifically in 4th Edition D&D, is fairly simple. After dying, either by way of three failed death-saving throws or by dropping below their negative bloodied value, the character immediately regains 1 hit point and consequently regains consciousness. However, they are no longer a living creature, rather they are undead. A ghast character functions as normal with two exceptions: first, the character gains the following racial feature:

Slipping Away: While you are bloodied, you can move through blocking terrain, obstacles, and enemies as if they were difficult terrain; you must still end your movement in an unoccupied square. In addition, you gain insubstantial while you are below 0 hit points.

Second, you have a pool of ten “ghast points”. Each time you fall unconscious, fail a death-saving throw, or take an extended rest you lose one ghast point. You can also expend a ghast point to gain a +2 bonus to one attack roll. However, when you no longer have any ghast points, you immediately cross over. There is no way to regain lost ghast points.

When you return as a ghast, your dead body remains on the ground, meaning there are effectively two of you, one corpse, and one ghast. The corpse is naked, and all your clothing and equipment is on your ghast body.

Resurrection

Death is taken seriously in the society 0f the Bay. It is to be respected and revered, and not to be counteracted. Returning the dead to life is actually illegal in all but the Uruk nation, and even there it is not looked kindly upon. Part of the reason for this attitude is that resurrection generally doesn’t work, at least not in the way you would expect. The ritual to return life to the dead is relatively simple, but it doesn’t return the body to its original condition. At first glance it will appear to have worked perfectly, but as the days go by it will become apparent that though the persons mind and spirit have been returned to the body, the body is still slowly rotting away as if it were dead.

Eventually the flesh will fall away completely and the still-conscious and fully active person will be nothing but a skeletal being known as an esquel. The length of this process varies depending on the temperature, and therefore the time of year; in the summer it will take only a month, while in the winter it can take up to six months. Ressurected individuals who are obviously decomposing or have become esquels are not accepted in society and the citizens of the Bay are liable to hunt them down and destroy them if they are discovered. An esquel takes a -10 penalty to Diplomacy, and Streetwise checks, but gains a +10 bonus to Intimidate checks; while still rotting the penalty and bonus are only 5.

There is a way to resurrect a deceased individual without them becoming an esquel; it involves creating a substance called the Blood of Voland. If the Blood of Voland is used in the ritual to raise the dead, they are returned to their original state, fully alive with no lasting effects. An esquel can also consume the Blood of Voland and their flesh will slowly regrow, with similar timespans as the process of rotting took. The catch, however, is that the recipe for creating the Blood of Voland is long lost, and the ingredients are exotic and difficult to find. If your adventurers are determined to return a lost companion, the quest to do so should be a large undertaking all on its own and will lead them into distant and uncivilized lands far from Butter Bay.

Undeath

Various types of undead creatures exist; ghasts and esquels have already been discussed above. The other major types of undead are liches, and thralls. Liches are effectively esquels who have enacted additional rituals to preserve themselves, binding their spirit to a phylactery. If their body is destroyed, but the phylactery is still intact they will slowly regenerate. No-one knows how long it takes to regenerate, but estimates are usually quite lengthy, in the range of decades or even a century. Thralls, unlike the other types of undead, are no longer people, but are instead mindless beasts; their bodies were simply reanimated rather than resurrected. Like esquels, they begin covered in flesh, but eventually are little more than animated skeletons; fleshy thralls are sometimes called zombies. A thrall is usually bound to the will of whoever created it, but if they die or their body is destroyed the thrall simply crumbles. It is possible to create thralls that will survive past their master’s destruction, but they are more difficult to keep control of, and nearly impossible to control in large numbers.

Friday: The Uruk Race

Threat: Merrow, Part 2

What are Merrow like? What are Vellans like?

Merrow largely keep to themselves, they do not live among or interact with other races except for their slaves, and very little is known about them by the people of the Bay. Encounters with merrow invariably end in conflict, as the aquatic beings are extremely territorial. Their borders are not marked in any visible way, the merrow simply expect outsiders to know and react accordingly. This means that vessels sailing out of the relative safety of the confines of the Bay risk provoking the ire of the merrow at any moment, and being blown about by a storm is all the more perilous.

Vellans, on the other hand, prove extremely docile when encountered. After generations of enslavement few, if any, consider the possibility of their lives being different. Those who are aggressive are weeded out and killed by their masters, so even when confronted by non-merrow they rarely attack. If ever they do, it will be at the urging of their masters, and they will run from combat as soon as there are no longer any merrow to force them to continue. The merrow use vellans for all the most dangerous and labour-intensive jobs, especially those that involve going onto land for long periods of time, such as mining useful ores.

Merrow Society

Most of the information in this section is unknown to the people of the Bay, even the most well studied individuals. As DM, it is at your discretion to decide what details are known to the player characters. The society of the merrow is very clearly separated along caste lines and it is almost three distinct cultures.

Warriors keep largely to themselves; strength, skill, and survival are the key factors in determining rank; the oldest are usually the highest ranking. Sometimes a warrior of lower rank might challenge a superior’s authority; the matter is settled with a duel to the death. The warriors patrol the borders of the tribe’s territory, killing first and asking questions never. They are also responsible for keeping the vellans in line, serving as guardsmen, slave drivers, and executioners when the need arises. Warriors live in communal barracks with their brethren, eating simple food and having few tangible luxuries.

In contrast, the royals live in opulence. They still live communally, but rather than in cramped barracks they live in the spacious tribal palace. Royals have fine clothing, fancy decorations and jewellery, and nearly any other indulgence you can imagine. Meals are great feasts with rich and varied dishes, often featuring the flesh of specially selected and plumped vellans or, more rarely, other races like those that live in the Bay.

The worker caste is the glue that holds the race together. They are the most numerous, and do a large part of the work that keeps their society functioning. Workers oversee and direct the efforts of the vellans; they see that sufficient food is produced; they are the bureaucrats, administrators and servants. The workers of each tribe usually live in a large town surrounding the palace of the royals, but also have other smaller communities elsewhere. The worker caste also live among the warriors, seeing to the more technical aspects of supporting armed troops. Each worker belongs to a brood, a large group of workers hatched from eggs laid at the same time; the brood is like their family, and each brood usually takes on a specific task with all its members working to the fulfilment of that goal. Some workers take it upon themselves to learn magic that might be beneficial to the tribe and so are found among the warriors serving as healers and artillery.

Each tribe has a Queen, one female royal who rules over the tribe and is never questioned. The Queen is larger than the rest of the female royals, her torso is roughly the same but her tail swells up until it is nearly 6 times the size of her torso. She rarely moves from her throne; the royals have all their feasts there in the throne room to accommodate her presence. Whenever a tribe’s Queen dies, her corpse releases a chemical into the waters of the palace that causes the other females to become engorged as they produce a single extremely large egg. Whichever female lays her egg first is selected as the new Queen. She then devours the egg and promptly falls into a coma as her body transforms into that of a Queen, a process that takes roughly a month. Once the transformation is complete, she awakens and begins producing and laying eggs at an increased rate. The new Queen rules until she dies, when the process begins again. Occasionally females take this opportunity to begin their own tribe, in which case they travel to a new territory with at least one male and devour their egg to begin the transformation; members of that Queen’s original tribe are generally hostile toward the new tribe, seeing them as traitors.

Using Merrow and Vellans in Play

To use merrow and vellans as opponents in your D&D game there are a number of options. For vellans, you can use the same sort of monsters as you might use to represent varkers, simply add a swim speed and give them the aquatic keyword. Merrow are a more complicated matter; your players should rarely ever have to face royals, but warriors and workers would appear in combat. You can use such creatures as sahuagin, craud, or even chuuls to represent these castes, but given the scant nature of available stand-ins, I plan to post a number of example monsters in the future. These will give you a better idea of how they operate in combat and serve as a starting point for you to design or modify your own.

Monday: The Human Race

Threat: Merrow, Part 1

The coast and sea north and south of Butter Bay are the domain of the aquatic merrow. With their slaves, the vellans, they rule with figuratively iron fists and literally scaled bodies.

What is a Merrow?

The merrow could best be described as merfolk, though their upper bodies are covered in the same scales as their lower portions. Though naturally aquatic, they can come up out of the water for periods of time, resting on their strong snake-like tails. They can’t live out of the water on a permanent basis, generally requiring to take a swim at least every 12 hours or risk drying out. They can survive up to 30 hours out of the water, but it is in no way comfortable and they get progressively weaker the longer they are in the open air.

Merrow do not have genders as we know them; most of their people are genderless beings that never mate. Instead their race is divided into a number of physically different castes. The majority of their race is split between the warrior and worker castes.

The Three Castes

Warriors are extremely large and have an exoskeleton like a crab or a lobster, meaning that they are naturally armoured. They can also stay out of the water for about 50% longer than the other castes (18 hours comfortably, 45 hours before dying). The warriors’ shells are usually bright red, but variants ranging from yellow to nearly black do occur. It is common among most tribes to tattoo themselves with dark blue-purple markings that show their rank in the caste.

Physically, the worker caste is distinct because of the workers’ limbs; unlike the other castes they actually have legs instead of just a tail, and their tail is shorter and far less muscular. In addition to their four legs, they also have four arms where the other castes have only two. For most workers, one pair of arms is dominant, being stronger and larger than the other pair. The scales of the worker caste vary greatly, ranging from black to white, red to yellow, or green to blue; really nearly any colouration is possible.

The last caste is the royal caste, which does have normal gender. Females lay eggs without requiring fertilization, and those eggs will naturally hatch and develop into warrior caste. It is possible for a male to fertilize the eggs after they have been laid, in which case they will become worker caste, or the eggs can be fertilized before being laid through normal sex, which results in the eggs growing into royal caste. Within any given tribe it is usual to destroy most eggs not laid by that tribe’s queen.

In appearance, the royal caste are most like the archetypal merfolk; they have a humanlike upper body, and a long fish tail below. While they do have scales all across their body, some royal merrow have scales of a different colour above their tails, resulting in an appearance that the two halves are distinct and separate. The colouration of royals varies as much as the worker caste, but royals from the same tribe are usually similarly hued. Many royals also have small scaled tendrils that look somewhat like hair on their heads; these are always either pure white or pure black, or a mixture of the two.

What is a Vellan?

Finally, outside of the merrow race itself are their slaves, the vellans. Vellans are extremely similar to varkers, small furry rodent-like creatures. The difference is that vellans are aquatic in nature with oily fur that water simply rolls off of. If a varker would be compared with a rat or weasel, a vellan is more like a beaver or a muskrat. Because they lived largely on the coast, nearly all vellans have been subjugated and enslaved by the merrow, but it might be possible to find isolated free tribes further inland living in large lakes.

Friday: Part 2

Threat: Varkers

A number of outside forces threaten the security of the Bay, but by far the most well known of these are the ubiquitous varkers.

What is a Varker?

Varkers are a race of thinking beings, like humans and the other races of the Bay. However, unlike the races of the Bay varkers are generally uncivilized. Instead of living in organized towns and villages, varkers live in tiny groups, called bands, in the wilderness. Each band is part of a larger tribe that occupies a region.

In appearance, varkers from different tribes can vary wildly. They tend to be shorter than humans, more on the size scale of hodekin, but some tribes are exceptions. Varkers, especially the local Redfeather tribe, are often described as rat-like in appearance, with elongated snouts and long hairless tails. Redfeather varkers are lightly furred across their whole bodies, and their fur ranges from bright oranges to deep rich auburns. In general you can think of a varker as being like an anthropomorphized rat, mouse, or other rodent.

You can treat Redfeather varkers as a baseline; some tribes tend to be taller than Redfeathers, others somewhat smaller; some have radically different hair colour; much more hair, or much less; some have no tails, or differently shaped tails; some are heavyset and bulky, others slender and lithe. Each tribe is different, and mixture between tribes happens fairly seldom.

What are Varkers like?

The primary thing to know about varkers is that they respect strength. A varker doesn’t fight you because he hates you, but rather either because he sees you as a threat that has to be put down, or because you have something he wants. For a varker strength is everything, and if you have the strength to take something from someone else, then you have earned the right to possess it. Varkers will generally decline negotiations, but they can be reasonable and a show of force will be respected and might lead them to back down.

In general, varkers want the same things as other races: they want to keep their family, band, and tribe protected and safe, and they want to provide for their own as well. Sometimes, if supplies are tight, providing for their own means taking what they need from someone else such as another tribe or the people of the Bay. The fact that needs to be remembered is that varkers are not any more evil that humans, they simply have a different worldview that is sometimes at odds with that of civilized people.

Varker Society

Each tribe is a distinct entity and a varker doesn’t usually show any more affinity for a member of a different tribe than he would for a human, uruk, or alfar. That said, there are rare occasions when tribes will work together if they all stand to gain from it, but these arrangements are always short-lived and usually end with one tribe betraying the other.

Leadership among varkers is, perhaps unsurprisingly, based on strength. A varker will declare himself Ri of the band, and gains the position if none oppose him. If he does face opposition, the matter is solved with simple combat. Nearly all disputes among varkers are solved in this manner; they do not usually fight to the death, instead the weaker individual usually concedes defeat and the stronger is considered the winner of the argument. While each band is led by a Ri, there is also a higher position called an Ardri who leads the tribe as a whole.

Using Varkers in Play

Many different monsters can be used to represent varkers, and you may want to represent different tribes with different races. The best race to use for the Redfeather varkers would be kobolds, as their abilities agree with the baseline rat-like nature. Other monsters that can be used for varkers include goblins, orcs, lizardfolk, gnolls, minotaurs. and anything else you might think appropriate. Don’t be afraid to re-skin more exotic creatures into varkers as well, especially for a champion, Ri, or Ardri.

Monday: The Hodekin Race