The Nefarious Nine after more than a
year are back on the trail of one of their longtime White Whales, the
Golden Barge that I mentioned the other day here. After a number of
NPC horse trades the current resting place is in the hands of a
fiendish satrap in the hitherto blank(ish) spot on the map, the
Scarlet Sultantate.
Which is all just to say “yay” by
me as it gives me an excuse to hone down on creating some new real
estate in the campaign. Here's a first stab.
The Scarlet Sultanate
No other human land gets as much verbal
abuse, naked envy and off-color joke-making in Overkingdom
conversations as does the Scarlet Sultanate. To be sure the land
called Himyar by its inhabitants, a name that roughly translates into
Vulgar Hyperborean as the “human nation that is not shit,” is a
dizzying place of refinement, great beauty, baffling mores and
terrifying mystery.
The sun-dappled northern and eastern
edges of the mini-continent are quite pleasant year-round in climate,
dominated by ancient chaparral-covered low-rounded mountains
punctuated by broad, citrus-groved valleys, willow-choked box
canyons, bizarrely-twisted iron-woods, wide black-sanded beaches and languorous red-walled cities. Further in the mountains rise up high
and the northern faces are covered in thick cedar forests and
cratered moonscapes with small clusters of mountain-clan towerhouses
clinging to cliff faces here and there. The southern reaches--tucked into the rain shadow of the Persimmion Sea--are a bleak and cold
rocky desert, only made more terrifying by the vast cyclopean ruins in its stony interior.
The People
While culturally the peoples of the
coastal areas are fairly homogenous, a curious divide exists around
skin pigmentation between the albino “Whites” and coal-hued
“Blacks.” Though there is literally no biological, social class,
or other meaningful distinction between the two “races”, Himyaris
tend to socially segregate among these lines.
Supreme power is held by the Scarlet
Sultan, an anonymous monarch chosen from the youngest son of the
royal family of scarlet-skinned “Reds” who overthrew the insane,
devil-worshiping “Yellows” centuries ago. While absolute in his
power, by tradition the monarch does not sully himself with the dirty
work of anything like ruling. All real political decisions goes
through the Barren Mothers (a court council of
ritually-sterilized Reds), a shadowy network of assassin-mystics, and
the White and Black necromancer-satraps of the provinces.
Religion
Traditional Himyari religion revolves
around the worship of “Ilmuqah
the True Moon”, a third white moon that believers say is so pure in
its divinity that it cannot be perceived by the inadequate human eye.
Popular representations of the deity present him as a
massively-ripped, vine-draped man with a bull's head who
masochistically rips himself apart with raw lightning in the shape of
a sickle once a month. This divine self-mutilation is said to be both
a training regimen for his annual “ass kicking” of the Sun Lord
on the first day of winter and a self-imposed penance for the
self-evident horribleness of human existence.
In recent centuries traditional worship
has been replaced in the sophisticated coastal cities with the
abstracted doctrine of the Thousand-Seeded Pomegranate, a belief
system that is so multi-faceted, highly-theorized and internally
contradictory that it stubbornly defies explanation to heathen northerners. The
mountain dervishes while outwardly professing old-time Ilmuqah religion
are said to worship in secret a tribe of demon dancers.
Metagame Feel and Inspiration
Think Umayyid-era Al-Andalus with
healthy doses of pre-Islamic southern Arabia. Throw in some heavy
doses of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique and 19th century
Orientalist painting (so, so terribly sorry Professor Said).
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