Rulership and Races of the Land

Iuz has secured the main cities, castles and towns with his priests and mages in firm control, allowing the remainder of the land to be pillaged, marauded, or ruled by fiends, priests, or humanoids as is expedient. This strategy works well for a land where the main goal is to ruthlessly exploit and dominate the people, but it also gives rise to some problems. Especially to the east, near the Bandit Lands, where the uncoordinated nature of the rulership makes effective control of armies very difficult. Open conflict often results, the most notorious case being the warring fiends of Stahzer. Away from the main centers, rulership is often exercised by the person or fiend strong enough to enforce his dominion. All serve Iuz, of course, but they have differing views of how service should best be rendered. Exercise of control is not helped by the fact that the nominal ruler of the land is the embittered mage Vayne. His location in Admundfort is too distant from the sites of many conflicts and the mage himself is not exactly a faithful and loyal servant of Iuz (see Villains and Heroes chapter for more details).

The Shield Lands have no indigenous humanoids, of course. All orcs, hobgoblins and such are drawn from the west (the Armies of Iuz chapter gives details of numbers). The Location section below notes the major humanoid garrisons around the Shield Lands. Fiends have carte blanche to do as they wish, outside of the major controlled towns and cities. To the east, they are supposed to tell the priestly rulers of Balmund what they do, but being chaotic, they rarely bother. Free-roving renegade fiends are as unpredictable as the servants of the warring Nobles of Stahzer and every bit as vicious. The remaining human population of the land has almost entirely been enslaved and they are treated appallingly. Many thousands have been sacrificed and a typical strategy employed by Iuz's priests in the fertile farmlands here vividly demonstrates the brutal treatment meted out to the survivors. Often, a farming village of 100 people will have twenty or so slain and animated as zombies, to work at the very simplest menial duties on the land. The others are then told to work 16-hour days under their hobgoblin masters or else they are slain and animated themselves. Ideally, Iuz would like to have the entire human population animated as undead, but some intelligence is needed for most tasks and live humans can also be used as hostages, most notably surviving Knights of Holy Shielding, imprisoned both within these lands and in western fortresses and cities. So, some 30,000 of the Shield Lands original pre-war 65,000 human population is still alive, but it isn't an existence that most would envy.

There is virtually no opposition from this quarter to Iuz's rule. The Knights of Holy Shielding are all but lost to the land, and a rare niche of surviving rebellion such as Ringland is not capable of any active resistance of note. Iuz has crushed the Shield Lands and he is content with that.