Threats To Eden I: The Sorians

The Spirits of Eden campaign setting is a more civilized and safe fantasy campaign world than usual, but not entirely so. Not every road is safe, not every wild conquered. From the seemingly random whims of capricious spirits to strange animals and monsters, to the patient schemes of the aberration masters and the terrifying heritage of the Devas of the Ashura, from long-forgotten curses to hidden devices, the world of Eden plays host to many dangers. While it is generally safe within the guarded paths, off those beaten trails there are many dangers to be found. This series of posts will cover threats to the people and peace of Eden.

The Sorian Horde

Sorians are brutish, monstrous humanoids with lizard-like snout faces that have small communities scattered all around Adel, and a much larger community in Selvage. Their skin is composed of smooth scales, and each clan of Sorian lizardfolk has a particular color of scales, purple or red, or green, and so forth. As adults, they stand a head and shoulders taller than Damakran, with powerful builds and sharp teeth. Sorians are strong enough they could pick up a Damakran by the neck and hurl it across the room. Their snake-like eyes come in their own multitude of colors, and the tops of their heads grow decorative frills that they often cut and style in their own fashions. With powerful legs, long tails and meaty fists they are a force to be reckoned with in close combat.

The Sorian race has existed for as long as Iomadi have. During the Tribal period they were part of the warlike Kusant tribe, but only for convenience. Sorians were their own people – they distrusted the Iomadi as the Iomadi distrusted them, but they were bigger than Damakran and the Iomadi supplied them enemies to conquer and glory to gain. The Sorians knew from the outset that they would someday fight their current allies just as they were currently fighting their enemies. It was all a matter of time, because the Sorians could never imagine themselves as a part of a greater society.

Through the Aptoan period they were considered part of the Aptoan civilization, albeit a troublesome part, and often hired as a sort of mercenary force. They kept to their own for the most part, living in their own communities apart from major developing areas, but working with whoever paid and was close. Sorians had little use for coinage, but weapons, cattle and exotic fruit they couldn’t grow on their own were welcomed. The Aptoan age of discovery necessitated the Sorian’s ability to navigate the unfathomable deeps of the wilderness and engage the savage creatures that hid there for their Iomadi masters.

During the Intolerable War, however, the Sorians all over Adel banded together as their own disparate factions in the war, for the creation of their own Sorian nations. But their prior existence betrayed them – never a part of any nation and too scattered to form large enough racial groups, the Sorian clans battled imperial and revolutionary alike to no avail. There were countless different warbands of the Sorian race, but never one presence large enough to take a whole territory and call it irrevocably their own. When the Aptoan Empire dissolved and the Seven Nations were established, the Sorians found themselves lost across Adel, with the largest concentration in Selvage. The more organized races had beaten them to the punch and a Sorian government could not be established coherently anywhere, not fast enough or large enough to become legitimate to the rest of the Nations, so the Sorians were soon an afterthought to the growing world. They had always been apart, and to the Adelians, they would continue to be apart.

But the Sorian’s strength never faded. In the jungles of Sargasso and Periterim, in the mountains of the Hetuku and Noshiki, in the desert of Vedaria and the forests of Selvage and the Adelian Southland, pockets of Sorian civilization thrived. Living in locations given up by Adelians as too thick, too dangerous or too ominous, or that were otherwise avoided, the separate clans of the Sorians thrived apart from the Adelians, as they always were. The superstitions that kept Adelians from the underground did not exist to the Sorians. In places ignored by the peaceful civilization outside, the Sorians continued their ways.

When the two civilizations met up again, it would always be in conflict. The war-like Sorians never moved on from the tribal period – to them there is always a fight going on, a fight for survival. It is not about nations, but about stomping grounds. The Sorians have claimed much of the untamed wild as their own, and when they venture out of those places it is either to raid or to expand. These monstrous humanoids have not given up the dream of a Sorian nation, and with subjugated goblins at their side, they can at times rally numbers enough to march to war – and when they can’t, they can still take to banditry and be general nuisances to the organized nations, until suitably put down.

Sorian Civilization

Sorians live in clan groups of varying numbers of individuals, sometimes as few as 50 and sometimes as many as 500. They generally have many goblin slaves. Sorian goblins, called Muks, are very small and numerous. They are little lizard-like creatures 2 to 3 and a half feet tall, with round bellies and thin limbs. They do much of the Sorian’s menial labor as well as serving as scouts and sometimes as food. Sorians are foragers, hunters, fishers and farmers. Farming has always been their forte – Sorian saliva is said to contain nutrients for the strange vine crops that they grow all over the walls and ceilings of their wooden forts and community lodges and longhouses. One can tell that a Sorian clan is near by the intruding vines over the forest floor and the strangely-shaped fruit that grows from them. Sorian males and females are just as big though not too difficult to distinguish from each other. They reproduce through egg-laying, and as other humanoid creatures do, they do love their mates and enjoy being with them – particularly fighting alongside them.

Sorian society can be contained nearly anywhere, including in caves and underground, and in the harsh lands of Selvage. The heirloom crops they grow are surprisingly hardy and flexible as far as their environment is concerned, so Sorians can cover a house above ground with vines as well as they can cover a cave or underground tunnels, so long as there’s soft soil of some kind. And if there isn’t, with some ingenuity, there soon will be. The more dangerous Sorians are those that live within the network of caves running beneath Adel. Not only do they come into contact with subterranean spirits and aberrant ruins from the Pre-Cataclysm World, but they have steady access to mineral resources and plentiful escape routes should they be attacked. Sorians living in swamps and forests are insidious and closer to villages and towns they could sack, but when found they will be destroyed quickly and with little hope for escape, unlike the underground Sorians.

Sorians speak Adelian, having been part of the Aptoan Empire before. However, they tend to slur their words and speak in a strange dialect even more informal than that of common Adelian villagers. They wear light clothing, often robes worn untied and with loincloths or thick leather pants. They typically go barefoot – precious little can harm their big feet. Their goblin slaves typically wear rags (or nothing at all) and speak the same dialect.

Sorians worship spirits of agriculture and nature and they worship the greater spirit Koyki most of all, for it is the ultimate hunter, a force of destruction, death and war that the Sorians respect above all others. Despite this, Sorians rarely exhibit any kind of supernatural powers. They can coax naturally malevolent or apathetic Spirits to aid them, but seeing an actual Sorian magic-user is extremely rare, almost unheard of. Sorians are much more likely to take up their heavy crossbows and machetes and fight physically.

Sorians are usually led by a clan leader. This is typically the one who most quickly shouted that he or she was now clan leader, after the last clan leader died. If it’s not that one, then it’s the person the last clan leader said would be next clan leader, or the one that most Sorians, for one reason or another, have started thinking of as the clan leader. If a Sorian is actively more interesting to other Sorians than the current clan leader, for example, then that Sorian is now clan leader. Sorian power structure is typically rather confused below Clan Leader. It typically amounts to Clan Leader at the top, then the Clan Leader’s immediate family and below that there is a confused jumble of Sorians who may or may not deign to order each other around and may or may not obey those orders. Since Sorians often fight in headlong rampaging rushes or chaotic ambushes, this suits them fine.

Not all Sorians are members of the clans. Some small scattered mercenary groups actually live within Adel’s civilizations, and some lone wolves even interact somewhat calmly with the rest of the races. Though suspected and feared wherever they go, they are part of a seedy underbelly in nations such as Periterim and Vedaria. A mafia with a few Sorian bodyguards is sure to have its territory and business respected by rivals. Sorians living this way are not considered citizens of the Nation, but that hardly matters to anyone – an individual Sorian’s existence is not illegal or in and of itself dangerous. The Nations want to destroy Sorian warbands – with mercenaries and individuals they are merely suspicious and intrusive, rather than violent or genocidal.

Sorians In Battle

Sorian’s chief weapons are crossbows and machetes. Their crossbows do not shoot light bolts, however. They have thick rocky projectiles shot by the sinews of spirit-animals, which lend them a lot more punch than typical crossbows. They use hand-held versions as well as heavier, two-handed traditional crossbows. Their machetes are common enough, but with the Sorian’s monstrous strength are deadly weapons. Sorians have their own forms of martial arts, but these are mostly intended to be flashy and intimidating. In reality a Sorian has little use for finesse. A good punch is a good punch, from a Sorian. Their fists can break bone in a solid hit, wherever they hit.

Sorians either form small raiding packs of 5-10 individuals (and 20-30 goblins) or they just take the entire clan out to war depending on what they want to accomplish. Sorian have little use for battle tactics. The most sophisticated attacks they perform involve ambushes and traps. However, every once in a while a Sorian is born with a good head for actual strategy – such a creature and its clan become truly terrifying indeed, and may inspire Oni, malevolent spirits, Shasa, undead or even Dragons and others to head out to war with them. An event of that scale has occurred only once before, a hundred years after the Intolerable War, known as the 3-Month War. Andaliel and Emderuer destroyed that coalition, but not before there was blood and destruction across many villages and some towns, and the Adelians have mostly forgotten the monstrous might it brought to bear.

Such forgetfulness may cost again them in the future. Though the idea of a Sorian warband, no matter the size, being able to destroy a whole Nation is near impossible without some powerful Spirit trickery at work, Sorians can destroy many villages and towns and scatter many civilians. And if they could close in on a major city such as Oomash, they could wreak unimaginable havoc on that Nation’s government.

Adelians, however, have access to magic and arms more advanced than those wielded by Sorians, so the battlefield is evened out between brute strength and Adelian finesse.

Sorian Culture

Sorians are highly religious, and aside from Spirit worship, they also practice a strange kind of idol worship in the form of reading “The Good Book.” No one quite knows which Sorian at which point wrote this book, but it is the only book Sorians care to read. It seemingly contains everything from battle tactics, to recipes for goblin flesh, to stories of past Clan Leaders and warlords. The Good Book is sacred to them, and they gather around every Seventhday to read from it, without fail. It is one of the few times Sorians sit still.

Physical sports are a big part of a Sorian’s day. Sorians enjoy “wrasslin’” with each other, a fight where the objective is to pin the other Sorian until he or she gives up. Sorians also have drinking contests and a sport called “Muck-Runnin’.” The point of this sport is to pick up a goblin and run to the end of a field of play, while every other Sorian tries to steal the goblin and then run to the opposite end of the field of play with it. It is played in teams, but these teams tend to shift and break up confusingly over the course of a game.

Sorians enjoy telling tall tales. Every journey into the jungle, every hunting trip, even going out behind a bush to relieve oneself can be an adventure. Sorians don’t believe each other’s stories, so it becomes a bizarre debate whenever a tall tale is told. Due to this nature, Sorians also don’t to believe each other when it is important to do so.

Sorian Motivations

•Stuff. Sorians like to steal things they are unlikely to have any use for. They melt down Adelian coinage into random, strange Sorian trinkets, and decorate their lairs with jewelry, and eat art objects, but nonetheless they love both the things they take and the violent act of taking them. Mercenary Sorian are more enlightened than this, in the value of currency.

•Land. While it is rare to see an actual Sorian war party (that is to say, one larger than just 10 Sorians in one place at one time), Sorians do still hold the dream of one day being their own nation, and bossing some Adelians around. They can unite with other clans for this dream. More pragmatic Sorians just want better places to live than the deepest jungles and forests, the harshest swamps, the coldest mountains and the deepest caves.

Sorian Allies

•Mucks. Wherever Sorians are, lizard-goblins will be plentiful. These pitiable 3-feet-tall creatures are the eternal slaves of the Sorians, and even when they manage to break away and form their own communities, they are likely to be destroyed by Adelians. Without their Sorian masters, Goblins are vulnerable and reckless, so most are happy to shine shoes, sew clothing, prepare food, build weapons and other tasks for their masters.

•Spirits. There are malicious spirits that enjoy seeing Sorians hacking limbs and biting off chunks of their enemies. There are also less malicious spirits that were just bored that day and decided to help out. Whatever their many strange motivations, Spirits can ally with Sorians just as much as they could potentially ally with anyone else.

•Dragons. Dragons are rather amused by Sorians and Sorians rather impressed with Dragons. No other lizard-like creature is as big or a strong as a Dragon. Sorians have a synergistic relationship with certain Dragons. Adelians avoid areas in a Dragon’s territory. They don’t travel to, don’t expand into and don’t build around those areas. So aside from troublesome adventurers or other crazy people wandering there, Sorians can hide within a Dragon’s territory and live relatively unmolested. In exchange, the Sorians and their goblins do the Dragon’s menial labor and give it any jewels and other goods they steal.

•Oni. Oni are even rarer than Dragons, but Sorians know the secret places where they can find these centuries old ogres or giants leading their solitary lives. They can either coax or coerce these beasts into their armies, giving them a tremendous boost in manpower.