Beast Men

The Beast Men may be described as a peculiar feature of society on the Alluvial plain south of the Eleven Cities, though to describe them as a part of society may be something of a misnomer as one of their defining characteristics is their general shunning of social contact. They appear to spend most of their time haunting uncultivated wilderness areas such as the dense woodlands and various ranges of rocky hills that dot the plain (the two environments often coincide), occasionally venturing close enough to villages and settlements to be spotted by those who work the soil in those areas. People who venture far enough into the forests, conversely, will occasionally come across Beast Men or evidence of their recent presence. They live in caves, thickets or hollows in the woods or hills, apparently able to find food and shelter throughout the year without the aid of any of the tools or techniques that civilised farmers or hunters use. Their one concession to tool use are their long, heavy spears, which are often tipped with sharp stone or bone heads rather than metal.
Encounters with Beast Men tend to be tense affairs. These individuals tend to be visually intimidating, being dirty and unkempt, armed, typically tall and distinctly burly, dressed (often rather revealingly) in animal skins, and seldom capable of speaking more than a few words, if that, of any recognisable human language. They often communicate solely in unnervingly convincing renditions of animal noises such as the bleating of goats, the growling of wolves or the hooting of owls. Exactly what a Beast Man may want in any given encounter is therefore hard to judge, and the company of an unpredictable armed stranger is seldom particularly pleasant. Visitations tend to last only a few minutes or seconds, however, typically ending with the Beast Man returning to the forest from whence he (generally) emerged, either in haste or with indifference towards the person he met. The civilised partner in any such encounter will often come away from the experience emphasising the peculiar inhuman aura of their visitor, particularly their eyes, which are often described as somehow not entirely human. This being said, accounts of Beast Men doing anybody any actual harm are very rare, and such behavior is almost always a response to provocation. More often than not a Beast Man will quit such an encounter peacefully and of their own accord.
Sightings of Beast Men are of interest to thaumatologists because these individuals are widely thought to be surviving devotees of the god Pergyad - people whose very survival raises perplexing questions. Furthermore many accounts of these people attribute them with seemingly supernatural abilities which thaumatologists would hope to understand, if not replicate.

Modus operandi

The Beast Men appear to be outdoorsmen of weirdly incisive skill, capable of thriving in the least hospitable of environments. Accounts describe them digging for roots with their bare hands, eating raw meat, climbing trees with preternatural skill for birds nests, emerging from what appear to be underground burrows and walking barefoot through the bitterest of frosts. They also seem to have bizarrely high thresholds of pain. They do not appear to build anything recognisable as houses or huts, though there are accounts of people lost in woodlands coming across nest-like structures of twigs and foliage thought to be their domiciles. They hunt with their long spears, often evincing unnerving strength and accuracy in throwing these implements, which most civilised hunters would struggle to use as a thrusting spear. 
The Beast Men abjure fire, approachnig it only warily and not apparently being capable of making or using it themselves. How they survive on cold winter nights, when farmers in civilised villages often shiver in their well-built houses, is one of the abiding mysteries related to them.
Beast Men seldom speak, although they can reproduce animal noises with remarkable clarity and skill. These noises, along with the occasional grunt or wordless exclamation, appears to be their only method of communication. One of their more common abilities attributed to them is the ability to converse with animals; accounts often describe them takling to birds or goats.

History of accounts

It is impossible to say for certain when the Beast Men started appearing in the forests and hills of the south. They are a part of the folklore of the plain, and as such evince a somewhat timeless quality - they have always existed and, as far as those who swap stories about them are concerned, they always will. This makes them difficult to study without first-hand experience. Villages often collectively conflate various sightings over time as examples of encounters with a particular individual, often over preposterous lengths of time; the same hale and hearty man may haunt the local woodlands for a century or more. Peasants will often explain this by recontextualising such people as not being human at all, but rather an animus of the local wilderness, and multiple tellings of a given encounter can warp the unnerving aspect of these people into genuine supernatural powers. People may tell, for example, of an encounter with an intimidating wild man in a wolfskin cloak; their grandchildren may tell of someone who can transform into a wolf and thus live as wolves do in the wild. Other accounts may be entirely fictional, or based on other accounts from other places. As yet no serious, properly-researched assessment of this oral tradition exists.
Written accounts of the Beast Men are sparse. The first such account concerns Wesmod himself, who is said to have encountered a wild man in animal skins while travelling through a dark forest between two villages on his mission to spread his invective against the Boles of Dahan during his reformation. He is said to have followed the man into the trees, leaving his bodyguards behind, and conversed with him for some time before emerging (unharmed) from the woods, shaking his head sadly and continuing his journey. The account explicitly identifies the individual as a cleric of the beast god Pergyad, which is what most researchers agree the Beast Men are.
Other writings on the Beast Men are somewhat more picturesque. The anonymous book Southern Curiosities has been circulating in the Eleven Cities for at least two centuries and is largely given over to fanciful accounts of a cabal of shape-changing wizards who run an animalistic, hidden parallel culture in "the dark places of the world." These stories have been assimilated into urban folklore and are particularly common in Tyros and Andymalon, cities famed for their self-conscious sophistication. Some have even been turned into songs. The thaumatologist Margyas Maray included a section in her book on the Boles of Dahan to the Beast Men, though in all but one case her examples were drawn from Southern Curiosities, leading some subsequent researchers to suggest she never did any serious work on the topic.
Serious thaumatologists are wary of such romanticisation, though as noted above reliable information about these people is hard to come by. In his published writings Qroyatan Medys includes discussion of a Beast Man he claims to have encountered on one of his expeditions to study the megaliths of Dahan. This individual is said to have resembled a "horned wolf" and to have used gestures and growls to communicate a sense of contempt for the stone circle in which they met. Medys records nothing supernatural about this man but claims to have shared a meal with him; the Beast Man took to cheese "as though rediscovering the delights of youth" but steadfastly refused both wine and bread.
Most other thaumatologists base their research into these people on second-hand accounts, a methodology they agree is inadequate. Tracking down a genuine Beast Man and gathering useful information from him or her is something of a priority, especially for those who study thaumatology related to animals. Though few researchers credit all of the stories about these people's purported supernatural abilities, the study of thaumatology is essentially that of peculiar phenomena that may or may not be magical, and the Beast Men are certainly that.

Origin theory and problems therewith

The dominant theory for the origin of the Beast Men is that they are the clerics of the beast god Pergyad, whose cult died out with those of the other gods during the Wesmodian Reformation. This was among the stranger cults, as the clerics did not live in the communities they served, but rather abode in wilderness areas near the communities and made their presence felt at important times, typically spring when domestic animals were breeding. A continuation of such a regime would probably look a lot like the Beast Men. The universal presence of a large hunting spear, Pergyad's divine sceptre, among the accoutrements of the Beast Men stands in support of this idea. The general feeling among thaumatologists is that the cult of Pergyad never actually died out; it just became smaller and more retiring as it lost popular support. The Beast Men could very well be out there practicing rites to Pergyad to this very day, a possibility that makes them very interesting to most researchers in arcane matters.
One of the big problems with this theory - and indeed about the phenomenon in general - is the question of how the Beast Men perpetuate themselves. It is unclear how the cult of Pergyad did this in pre-Wesmodian times, and even less clear today. There are certainly rural accounts of Beast Women, who seem not to have existed in pre-Wesmodian times, raising the possibility that this peculiar subculture gains new members the same way any human community does, though the rarity of Beast Women counts against that. The question of how couples might find each other to propagate themselves is another query here. Beast Men are widespread but by no means common and apparently strictly solitary, and tracking down a mate would be quite a task, unless they possess some sort of organisation or means of communication.
One potential solution to this issue is that the Beast Men abduct children from the civilised communities they visit and school them in the traditions of the cult. This is a possibility, furthered by the fact that a large proportion of the people who report seeing these people are indeed children (mostly boys). The fact that these children remain in their home villages to make their reports, however, counts against this, unless the Beast Men are less skilled abducters than they evidently are at finding food and shelter beyond the sown.
The competing theory, occasionally voiced by folklorists, is that the Beast Men are not human at all but some sort of anthropomorphic cryptid, or possibly the animi of the forests that some stories make them out to be. There are plenty of stories of Beast Men exhibiting apparently supernatural powers such as shapechanging or the ability to talk to birds, scholars note, but no reports of any Beast Man ever dying or being found dead. This leads some to conclude that the are not flesh and blood at all but some sort of magical phenomenon. This of course stokes rather than quells interest in these people as it proposes the existence of a non-human intelligence.
One theory, recently emerged in the thaumatological community of Tyros, is that they are not people who become animals but animals who can turn into people, comport themselves as an animal might believe a human does, and attempt to make contact with human communities. Proponents of this theory observe that Beast Men are often said to be wary or afraid of fire, an animalistic behavior. More research is required before anything more can be said about this interesting idea.

Notable cases

This list is by no means comprehensive and itemises only a few of the most famous examples to reach the ears of urban thaumatologists.
* The Medys Wolfman, a wild man wearing a cloak made from a wolf pelt who approached Qroyatan Medys and shared a meal with him.
* The Grey Man, another man in a wolf cloak said to haunt a stretch of wooded hills far to the south of Chogyos, notable for being one of the few Beast Men to be actively violent.
* Brother Mole, a man said to wear a tunic and breeches made form the skins of moles and to maintain a network of tunnels in a woodland to the south of Ramoros.
* Ratty, a wild man frequently sighted on the Chondolos River and its tributaries, notable for employing a coracle.
* Old Black Maggy, an elderly woman said to haunt the outskirts of a village somewhere to the south-east of Pholyos, wearing a coat of feathers and actively conversing with crows and ravens.
* The Black Goat, popularly supposed to exist in the wooded uplands at the extreme southern edge of the Alluvial plain, regarded by the inhabitants of nearby villages as a fertility spirit.
* Honey Roarer, a man in bearskin robes attested across wide stretches of woodland in the central environs of the plain.
* Black-Eyes-and-Bloody-Bits, a woman who exists in the wastelands surrounding the Forest of Veils and is evidently concerned with keeping people, particularly children, out of the forest itself.
* The Other Hunter, an armed man wearing goatskin clothing who occasionally approaches hunters in the forested uplands along the southern edge of the plain and shares his kills.
* Horny Perg a wild man with a large horned headdress occasionally sighted by goatherds in the eastern environs of the plain.
* The Watcher, a man covered in feathers, said to have enormous eyes, living somewhere in the Forest of Vales.
* The Ox-Man, a huge leather-clad man living near a ford in the eastern part of the plain, known to approach wagon trains to barter for vegetables, said to have hooves instead of feet.