Vike (Greenhallow)

Vike are a playful, mischievous people given to destructive tendencies. Their survival on Greenhallow is owed to their creative appropriation of the powerful elements of their home world.

Appearance

Body

The Vike appear as humanoid creatures averaging 4 feet tall walking upright on 2 thin legs. Their arms can reach the ground while standing. Their fingers are long and triple joined. Their skin can vary in color of brown to grey to green to white. Fur tufts on their head, neck and back in thick mats.

Face

Vike have two large Grey eyes spread wide on their face to allow wider field of vision. Their nose is flat and broad. Large pointed segmented ears allow for independent movement on the head. Longer finer hair also grows through the fur on the head. Their mouths are large, curved and curled, giving an appearance of a perpetual sardonic grin. Many small sharp teeth line two rows of the month, upper and lower.

Clothing

The Vike adorn themselves in animal hides and woven cloth. While the Vike can work metal, they prefer to adorn themselves with found objects from the Elmari Tradition. This is especially true of armor that is too large for their small frame.

Technology

The Vike are a people of borrowers and crafters. Their collective output is the reuse of found or gathered objects into useful things. The clever Vike live exciting lifestyles in the Great Forest of Greenhallow gathering rare objects and components and repurposing them into their needs. The Vike have mastered small scale metal work but is limited to ore that can be gathered on the surface around volcanos as no Vike has the patience to chisel away at rock to mine ore.

Racks

Vike villages, called Racks, are home to tens of thousands of Vike living both among and beneath the trees of Greenhallow. These communities are a bewildering assortment of fanciful structures and deadly contraptions made of bone, wood, hide, stone, iron, horn, and crystal. Some of these devices are actually functional, but most are just awaiting being repurposed again into something else.

Alchemy

The Vike are master chemists. They have perfected their art of gathering ingredients and remixing them into useful outcomes. Much of the advancement of the Vike culture is centered around better living through chemistry.

Literacy

The Vike have two forms of written and spoken language. The first, Vikestal, is a pictographic language drawn on preserved wooden planks. The second, New World Vike, is all but undecipherable for non-Vike as it relies on a borrowing of 8 different languages from the Talus Dominion since the Stormfall.