Monday, 29 May 2023

Hex Crawl 23 #149: Quiet Farms on the Shi-Ar

Ten hexes north, one northeast of Alakran.

This is a placid, settled stretch of irrigated farmland along Shasari's principal river. 

Pirtiyessar is a village of 300 built on the banks with almost no features of note -- there are the usual weavers, potters, woodworkers, blacksmith, and a small shrine with a lay devotee of Mitra. In times to come it would be ravaged by the beastmen army that boiled out of Nathrak in pursuit of the Band of Bronze, just south of the river-straddling field of battle where the forces of Shasari, aided by the Band, defeated the horde at frightful cost. The event came to be known as the Battle of Broken Horns.

Gadhappa's soil is too hard and clayey to support anything but garden agriculture, but that trait makes it an excellent source for bricks, pots, and roof-tiles, and its position athwart the river and the road to Shasari city makes it a nexus of merchants, traders, and tax collectors. It is also a dread place of execution, where particularly bad malfeasors who take sentence in Aish Mashuila or Shasari are staked to a high cedar platform, where their death by slow thirst lies out of sight and -- thanks to a rag stuffed in the mouth -- our of earshot from the passersby. Only when the unpleasant smell becomes undeniable, will guardsmen remove the culprit's corpse.

Then we have the goatherds of Minum. This village is small, no more than 150, and has one remarkable custom. Fatherhood is often unknown; the women disport themselves when they please, and give birth when ready to a communal creche, where the best and most stable individuals instruct the growing children. Minumi villagers are unusually well-balanced and resourceful as a result, but many men leave the village resentful at the lack of paternal recognition, so that the numbers split more like 60 male and 90 female.

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