The Scarlet Coast
Blood on the Rocks
The coast cannot be conquered - it can only be survived, or so the stories always used to say. From the cutthroat harbors to the storm-swept juts of rock, to the jags of lightning that mark the skies from dawn to dusk, twilight to dawn, the Scarlet Coast appeared indomitable. Rivers from above cut like old scars into the basalt - some wide enough for warships to course downstream without scraping their hulls, and the Galasteri could claim all the lands along rivers flowing into the Sea, but it was all just a polite fiction.
Now? The Blooded Houses of half-orcs stand as an independent thalassocracy on the Coast, answering only to each other. After all, it was they who shed and shared their blood with generations of orcish champions and defectors. It was they who stood in solidarity with the great Savrias and who still pay the lion’s share of the Empire’s disgraceful reparations. To some, they’re the noble protectors of trade, community, reason, and proper values. To others? They’re no better than the pirates or the Galasteri. Both versions are true and false in parts. But in the end? The Blooded Houses rule it all for now.
And as surely as they own the coast, the old halfling Families hold the keys to their indebted coffers.
Themes: blood and water, honor and profit, gambling and holding ground, romance and abandonment
Geography
The coast is cruel, and those who survive it can be crueler. Aside from fruit-laden coves and valleys, most of the coast is a ragged mess of basalt and black sands. It derives its name not just from all the violence, but also from a seasonal algae bloom that many harvest for food. Tales say that this “red tide” sustains the Coast, and is born from the blood shed upon it. If so, it’s no surprise that such tides can last for days on end, with dozens of red tides a year. Less dramatic scholars point to undersea forests of crimson kelp.
Beyond the coast itself lies a narrow tropical strip and then a narrower range of mountain peaks, both windswept by southern monsoons and thick with life fed from the Delta and the Old Wilds. Crops of coffee, tea, spices, sugar, and other staples of northern luxury are all found here or across the Ragged Isles at sea. Patrols from the Houses keep the trade roads more or less safe, but threats from folk and nature are many. The Scarlet Coast has many children and no friends among them, or so the stories say. The Ramparts were once counted as as the easternmost and mildest third of the Scarlet Coast, but now is viewed as an independent territory by most nations and maps. Few would consider them one place.
Travel
Pirates. Kuo toa. Sahuagin. Ghost ships. Fey hunters, eager for sport. Sleeping nightmares, awakened from the darkest depths. The fractured remnants of the annual Hordes. These are just the common, best-known threats that plague the Scarlet Coast. Travel is never without incident, making hired escort teams or tribute to the Blooded Houses a thriving, if captive market. Violence, the red trade, has made many wealthy. It’s made many more corpses, or merely wishing for stillness and silence after their death.
Reduce the result of any wayfinding roll that isn’t a 6 by 1 along the Coast. In addition, you may never go from a landmark of neutral or friendly tone to another of the same temperament that you left. You’ll never cross two friendly faces without risks. At best, you find a neutral place. At worst? Danger finds you.
Peoples
Life on the Coast can be brutish and short, but it can also be quite lucrative. If one’s death is assured, then surely one ought to make the most of it , or so the coastfolk believe. The people of the Scarlet Coast favor vivid, often garish colors, loud choruses, and accompanying music for all hours of the day and night. As much as the risks are real, there are folk in villages and cities who never see a day of violence. To them, this is the realm of passion, poetry, vice, and beauty. Even so, everyone has a story about a maimed sibling or dead friend, and most are true. Danger’s never fully out of sight in coastal life. Never.
That said, a sense of honor pervades the many cultures that call the Coast their home. “Lie for blood or lie to blood, but bloody traitors always” is the code of the halfling Families, and remains popular among sailors, soldiers, peasants, and urchins alike. Once one’s word is given, breaking it is the one taboo beyond forgiveness. Otherwise, there’d be no basis to get business done. Blooded Magistrates are proud to stand witness to and keep records of oaths and are the closest thing to incorruptible on the Coast.
An uneasy peace has settled in between the organized crime Families of halfling origin and the Blooded Houses of half-orcs who’ve built up their names and strength despite centuries of persecution. Between the underestimated and the feared, they made easy allies against the corrupt prevailing city-states, and together they parceled out sections of their conquest according to need and utility. The Houses provide a buffer against orcish incursions and share blood ties to the Galasteri nobility, giving them a sense of legitimacy, while the wealth and many talents of the Families deal with any problems the Houses cannot.
Places and Faces
The Tooth. At the mouth of the three great Delta rivers lies the Tooth, a massive waterfall cove with a jutting peak that casts its long shadow in many senses of the word. Beneath that peak, a city of three tiers has been built on rocky shelves and extended by a mess of platforms, rope bridges, and whatever junk (or junks) have accumulated over the years. The Top Tier hosts lavish mansions for retired ‘heroes’, aunts and uncles of the Families, and the Blooded House of Arakhai. Below that, the Market Tier offers adventure, danger, casinos, pleasure houses, and the greatest auction complex in all of the Dream. The sea-level Harbor Tier swells with vast tenement-ships, gangs of thieves, and every quality of scum, scurvy, and plague imaginable, sharing space with the many families working for the folks above them.
Traitor’s Rock. A simple, flat slab of basalt at the center of a circular cove, this rock marks the site of the first orcish defection to the Galasteri mainland. While never truly turning against their homeland, the First House swore an oath on the rock to reveal no secrets of their people and to marry their blood to the land in its defense. By intermarrying with local coastal nobility, they forged the alliances they’d need to survive the champions sent to retrieve or destroy them. To this day, the Blooded Houses hold a delicate balance between open defiance of the Horde and slowly returning to it. In a way, they insist that they serve as Knives, inclining the unconquered lands towards orcish rule. One day, that could be true.
Kronharak Arakhai. Dubbed ‘The Only Honest Man on the Coast’, Krohnarak of House Arakhai is both a warrior in high regard and the captain of a ‘technically undefeated’ pirate-hunting vessel. This elder blood brother to the adopted and now-fallen Galasteri heir Thelwen Lohrian is seen as the best the Houses have to offer, and the pressure has aged him prematurely. His clashes with Li Fei, the Horde, devils, dragons, and worse have become legends, but his lingering bachelorhood is just as frequently discussed. The Houses have tried repeatedly to leverage his ties to the Lohrian to unite all of the Houses in one marriage scheme or another. His eternal response has been ‘I politely decline, but thank you’. For now, he trains a new generation of magistrates and advocates on both imperial and orcish expectations.
Great Uncle Aniruddha Bosal. Head halfling uncle of the Market Tier, Bosal has made a name for himself with a reckless reliance on his luck and his willful use of horror to maintain order. That his ‘golden luck’ has held against the wealth, weapons, and betrayals of his many rivals is no mean feat. He offers liars, traitors, and losers as ‘boons to the Muses’ in imaginative, gory displays of torture or blood sport that have become both the terror and a form of performance art among the underworld circles of the Tooth.
Xiangshan Li Fei. THe undisputed pirate queen of the Scarlet Coast and the Ragged Sea has eluded orcish ironsides, bronze dragons, and the concerted efforts of three of the Blooded Houses for two decades. Her exploits, though surprisingly low on fatalities, are full of intrigue, deceit, dismemberment, and cruel threats. Her network of pirate wives, husbands, adopted widows, and pensioners was inherited from her retired mother, who was a venerated legend in her own right. Many sailors, in fact, openly worship her still-living mother, a fact which brings her no small amount of annoyance. To build her own name, she’s started seeding the coast with small ‘pirate kingdoms’ to draw tribute from the land as well as the sea.
Regional Practices
The Scarlet Coast is awash with countless religions, ritual practices, and beliefs - too many to simplify or categorize. One commonality that the Houses strive to promote is the idea that all of these faiths are connected as lesser guises and avatars of greater gods, taking on local cultural or familial forms to meet mortals where they live and die. The true nature of such beings is unknowable to even the Muses, as the building blocks of the planes themselves demand gods for certain roles. This cosmic view has caught on, even as it offends the less urban folk of the Scarlet Coast who fear that their gods will be ‘eaten by orcs’.
Another common practice and problem is a local sort of infernalism. A trade in magic, souls, and fiendish favors have become common as the fiends themselves are viewed in a more neutral light, especially by the human communities of the coastal city-states. In these cities, fiends can walk openly among the people, bound by blood magic to linger and reincarnate so long as their family name endures. Many tieflings result from such families and unions with the ‘native fiends’. These native fiends are rarely loyal to the Nine Hells or to the Demon Princes anymore, which further allows them to behave in unexpected ways. Even so, so long as they remain within the Dream, so too will paths to the Hells or the Abyss. The Houses are aware of this, and where their influence is great, purges and witch hunts are sure to follow.
To the surprise of all parties, some native fiends and blood-marked souls have transcended the limits and expectations placed upon them, taking on the qualities of aasimar or even celestials. Many insist that such claims are impossible, but evidence to the contrary walks down city streets every day. As they claim, the captivity of hells and mortal realms both are a limit on the spirit. One that can be overcome.
Blood Bias. Along the coast, blood is the medium of law, order, and justice. If it bleeds, so must it serve. If it serves? It can damned well pay some taxes - or so the Blooded Houses demand. Blood is used to bind contracts, oaths, and even marriages. The idea of blood as inviolable ink has links back to practices of community castes along familial lines that the Blooded Houses continue to work at purging with only moderate success. Blood biases remain common and social mobility is rare. Blood is the one thing that the Houses, the orcs, the fey, and even fiends seem to hold in equal regard and it carries a grim weight.
Impressment. Debt, not gold, is the primary social currency along the coast and at sea. A contract is a mutual requirement that rises above petty games so that society can flourish. Those who do not honor their agreements? Are punished with fines and corporal punishment in public areas. If the issue cannot be addressed so simply, these payments can turn into terms of service as a slave. The unpopular practice of inherited debts is slowly growing, and could come to haunt countless generations if not stamped out. The Galasteri have tried to abolish the practice as ‘un-imperial’, but many Houses choose to ignore it.
Places and Faces
Regional Practices
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