The Beastfolk

The Druhokas -

Their name for themselves is druhok, pronounced d-ruh-hawk (males) or druhoka, pronounced d-ruh-hawk-uh (females). Druhokas for plural, and in combat, they're known for being tough-as-hell to kill. 

They all have large horns or large antlers, sometimes both and a sloping face, but these features are defined more-or-less randomly during puberty.  Sometimes this chaotic process produces results that are similar to elk or deer, but their faces just as often resemble no other known animal.  While their faces are furry the rest of their body is hairless, which makes the bestial face look a bit odd. 

Druhok are incomprehensibly virile.  They can certainly impregnate any mammal, and quite a few non-mammals.  Smaller mammals give birth to skewed little halfbreeds that are usually sterile and sometimes have small horns of their own.  (Animals in their homelands sometimes feature horns for this reason.)  Larger mammals actually produce genetically normal Druhokas, so in theory, a solitary beastman could buy a cow and repopulate.

And it's not just the usual methods of transmission.  Even their blood and spit carry their seed, and fertilization can occur like catching a cold (aside from the more traditional vectors).  After warring with beastfolk, soldiers are advised to wash their hands before returning to their wives.

Druhokan warbands on extended campaigns sometimes travel with herds of goats that they use for food, recreation, and procreation.  Druhok warbands are bad news.  Sometimes they go on world tours.  Twenty years later, the warband that returns home contains only a few original members and quite a lot of their children.  Also lots of plunder.  Also a shit-ton of goats.

When a druhok is born, it resembles a baby goat or lamb.  After about six years, the young druhok quickly metamorphizes into their adult forms.  It's a more awkward puberty than most.  It's also a good reason to only buy your baby goats from licensed goat sellers.

Druhoks remember their childhood, when they walked on four legs and could only bleat.  For this reason, many of them empathize with horses, deer, goats, sheep, etc.  It certainly doesn't stop them from hunting, but they treat baby farm animals very well, and most beastfolk are at least mildly uncomfortable with horseback riding, some even defend horses against this abuse with force. 


Beastmen lack a nimble tongue and full lips. Their language is a mixture of grunts, barks, and hand signals.  It's a complex language full of nuance, metaphor, and meme-forms (not the internet meme)










Culture and Women
The Beastfolk worship in hot springs, believing all hot springs to be sacred places.  They cover their kings and queens with ribbons and bells, and their two biggest trades are brewing vast amounts of wine and being the only race known to have perfected yogurt making. The techniques and recipes needed to make yogurt are religiously kept secrets. The Druhok word for Yogurt is Dahirm (Dah-heer-m) 

They're a bit misogynistic, as you might suspect, though not in the "I beat up women" way, but rather in the "Women have a role and Men have theirs, and these should not be mixed" way.  Most people don't know about Druhoka, the beastfolk women.  Unlike the males, they lose most of their animal affections during their pubescent metamorphosis, so that they perfectly resemble humans in adulthood. The only bestial aspect that Druhoka retain are their cloven feet and their unguligrade legs which add 6" to their height.  They still speak in the grunts and waves of their mother tongue, but their perfectly human faces allow them to learn other languages with relative ease.  They, like their male counterparts they retain their goat eyes.

Diagram of Unguligrade legs that I stole from some furry artist.

Only the women can ever learn to be magic-users, since the males can't pronounce words. The women also fulfill the religious niches of society and  wield significant sway on domestic issues.  It's consider vulgar in their society for women to arm themselves, and so the women that do must use "non-weapons" like flat, bladed shovels and big kitchen knives (sometimes with a hilt).  A beastman would likely blush and faint if he saw a woman fighting with a broadsword.

Most beastfolk come from big families and the family bond of a Druhokan family group cannot be overstated. Druhokans are nomadic people, and they usually travel within these tight knit family groups. Most have a few dead siblings that they quietly honor by setting out bowls of water in quiet places, and then letting them evaporate. It is said that a sibling who goes thirsty in death must truly be hated. 

STATS N SHITT

• +2 Con, +2 Wis, -1 Cha
• Men can't speak or wear helmets; women can't wear shoes.
• Can survive just fine on grass and leaves, although they must eat a lot of it.
• Men can gore/butt with their horns when they charge.  1d6+Str bludgeoning damage.
• Women can easily run through rocky terrain and steep hillsides. While you're hammering pitons they're jogging up.  They can climb non-vertical surfaces without using their hands.
• If you have Cha 13+, and die from an injury (drop to 0 hp) you may attempt to roll under half your charisma score on a d20, if you succeed you instead survive with 1 hit point.  (This doesn't work if their head is cut off or something.)

And you know that Beastfolk warlords have, like, 16 charisma. 

Quaya Part 2 Trystero and Salendar

Monkeyrats -

In the cities and towns of Quaya, you'll find very few of the huge, diseased rats found in other parts of the world.  Instead you'll find monkeyrats.

Monkeyrats are the same size as rats, but they're better climbers, and most importantly, they're smart as hell. They're rare in the wild, but extremely common in the cities,  living in huge troops of up to 100 individuals, usually inside roofs or in the drier parts of the sewers. They're smart enough to figure out ways to subsist on human excess, by stealing a couple of nuts here, eating some garbage here, and avoiding people whenever possible. Some Trysteran Lenguamancers claim the Monkeyrats are smarter than the average peasant, although whether this is meant as a compliment to the tiny beasts.

They fight a constant, invisible war with rats, which they usually win (by virtue of cooperation) and also with cats, which they usually lose (because cats are murder machines).  Still, cats in Trystero frequently die when they get surrounded by monkeyrats, or when the monkeyrats drop a brick on them from 3 stories up, so owners beware.

The cities have a complicated relationship with monkeyrats.  They're seen as pests, but they're a bit too intelligent to treat like vermin.  And they're too numerous to ignore.  Huge extermination attempts have been enacted in Salendar with partial success.  But whenever the monkeyrats are killed, normal rats jump up to replace them.


Trystero the city that never thirsts-

The gleaming city of Trystero is surrounded by a gleaming sandstone wall, the stones of which were mined over 80 miles south long before the Moon Emperor descended to the earth. Fragrant fields of hops and wheat grow alongside ginger root beds and raspberry vines grow along the warm hillsides past the west wall of the city, the eastern wall protects the Trysteran Citrus Grove, a sprawling grove with over 15 varieties of lemon grapefruit and various citrus trees as well as a large stand of cocoa trees.

There are 3 major factions in the city of Trystero:

The Casque Masters Guild, where beer masters of renown the world over make finely crafted, often magically imbued ales and wines. The head of the Guild is Mug Brewington, famous for his Eisbock, a strong lager style beer made by partially freezing the beer during fermentation and removing the ice that forms before finishing the brewing process.

The Confectionaires Guild: Where sweets and cakes of a thousand varieties are made, where chefs come to study the art of sugar blowing and chocolate making. There are whispers that the confectionaires guild sometimes dabbles in dangerous and rare ingredients such as the infamous Red Honey and Underdark Cocoa Beans, which must be grown and harvested in the flesh of still living slaves.

The Lenguamancers College, where mages study the magic of the Tongue. The lenguamancers have an ongoing rivalry with the confectionaires guild over who can construct the most universally appealing and ecstasy inducing flavors. They had a brief rivalry with the Casque Masters, but lost miserably as Mages have no idea what people find appealing in their alcohol.



Salendar the city of chimes -

The road between Salendar and Trystero is 40 miles longer when you travel northward from Salendar to Trystero than it is when you travel south from Trystero to Salendar. No one is really sure why, a number of mages have investigated it and believe it might be related to a long dead a lamellar labyrinth of hypertoroidal tissues.

Salendar is known for it's uncountable chimes. Homeless children build chimes of broken glass and junk string, while the richest nobles and merchants build massive chimes from entire buildings. The chimes are all dedicated to the wind spirits who call Salendar home, there's a great cliffside at the edge of the city wear the veil between realities wore thin thousands of years ago, now it's a minor gateway to the elemental plane of air, and air elementals of all sizes and dispositions pass into and out of our reality with relative ease.

There was once an elementalist college here,  mages studied how to bind and control the spirits of the wind now it's great halls and towers lay in ruins, a reminder of the past. A great tempest elemental was summoned and then bound by the elementalists long long ago, but it escaped it's bondage and destroyed the mages, shatteand leveled half the city before becoming entranced with childlike joy over a childs wind chime. Ever since the city has lived in awed respect and admiration for the great creatures and view mages with distrust. 

Quaya Part 1 - The Warm Hills

The Warm Hills 

Sometimes called the Yellow Hills for the variety of wild wheats which grow abundantly in the rocky soil there, the Warm Hills are home to 2 major populations.

The first group call themselves The Dwarven Common Grace, a half dozen villages of mostly hill dwarves who are essentially Dwarven Calvinists. They worship a god of labor and humility which they have dubbed Armok, God of Sweat and Blood. To labor and toil is to praise their God, and most things outside of honorable labor are considered sinful in someway or another. The dwarves of the common grace are notoriously dull and uncreative creatures, as creative endeavors are often sinful and children are taught what they must know to shepherd the great goat herds or work the fields.


Their villages usually consist of a handful of communal dwellings in hollowed out hills, where the dwarves sleep in triple bunk beds packed tightly together with neither personal aesthetics nor privacy allowed. These are usually built in a ring  around a central meeting area and communal dining hall.  On the surface of these holowed out hills the dwarves usually grow wheat or else pen their great goat herds. A dwarven great goat can grow to be massive, some growing as large as 8 feet tall at the shoulder. The dwarves use them as beasts of both labor and warfare.

The largest dwarven community in the warm hills is the town of Great Mill, (the common grace dwarves detest fancy names and believe a thing should be named for what it does) so called because of the massive millstone the town is built around. The stone has a radius of just over 40' wide and weighs several thousands of pounds. It's operated by 20 massive goats, the largest goat from each village is sent to help pull the millstone. A village which sends a small or weak goat to pull the millstone is generally considered shameful and dishonest. The dwarves pay nicely for fertilizer and produce a vast ammount of flour which they sell far and wide. Despite all this seemingly impressive economic activity, the dwarves own no luxuries, and store all of their communal wealth in neatly stacked gold bars beneath their hills, a rainy day fund they'll never actually use.

The second group living in the Yellow Hills are the Great Goblin Encampment of Thanorek Thanorek is one of the least powerful goblin encampments in terms of its ability to wage war, but it is widely regarded as a place of pleasure and excess where those with the coin can purchase all manner of intoxicants and carnal experiences. Thanorek is run by a Hobgoblin named Niu Bo Wei.

Niu Bo Wei is a sybarite and hedonist; he does not care for the responsibilities that leading the Thanorek encampment imposes on him, but he does thoroughly enjoy the pleasures that his position allows. Niu Bo Wei maintains power mostly through his intense charisma and charming decadence—he sees his encampment as the worlds greatest brothel,  where all are welcome and where all appetites are satisfied.

While most goblin hordes move from place to place the Thanorek encampment, is more permanent having been built around The Brazier; a fire pit made of rune-etched iron in which an efreeti is bound by magic. The goblins of Thanorek worship the “Flame Lord” as a god, but the efreeti wishes only to be fre
ed. The majority of Thanoreks population are goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, but all races are welcome and it is not uncommon for people to come to Thanorek to disappear or hide frome their troubles. The goblin locals live in low round yurts, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle for the most part. The pleasure domes, decorated in garish colors, some laced with magic pigments that sear into the eyes of those who view them, are large and varied. It is said there is no pleasure in the Material Realm that Thanorek cannot provide, and few pleasures beyond the material which it cannot find for the man with the right coin.