The Known World

The Known World is pretty interesting, and the lands beyond it probably even more so - real shame you're not gonna learn jack shit about those.

We're going by Known World from Lamara's POV because it's got the largest "known world" out of any nation/culture, although the average Lamaran probably doesn't even know about the existence of half these places.

Lamara

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Lamara is about the size of Britain from the outside, but from the inside is Europe-sized because spatial anomalies, not including the uninhabited ones.

It's home to anywhere from 70 million to 190 million people - almost 2/3 people just may or may not exist - with a population constantly jumping up and down due to high birth rates regularly shooting the population upwards and regular epidemics and civil wars that cleave out large chunks of it.

Lamara is practically a small continent of its own, linked only to the mainland by a bridge of land that's only 100 meters wide at its thinnest point. As a country it's much longer than it is thin, even with the anomalies. There are regular rows of mountains and other natural barriers that make movement across the country by foot extremely difficult, but has a great many rivers, some underground, that can be navigated by boat.

Lamara also has a general lack of especially dangerous natural predators, hence it being able to build up dense enough population centers for epidemics to be the main source of death and especially infant mortality. If you encounter a monster in Lamara, it's probably not there naturally as it's common, albeit extremely illegal, for monsters to be imported either to use their body parts (medicines, delicacies, drugs and, most of all, experiments) or for the live creatures to be used in things like war, entertainment or experiments.

Unlike most other locations that'll be listed here, Lamara is a single nation - at least in name. Currently, the nation ruling over it is the Lamaran Unity, although it was the Krysa Empire until it completed its pretty arduous task of unifying the land. There have been multiple Lamaran Unities before, all falling or shattering apart to various causes before reunifying either due to common threats or someone forcing them to reunify.

The current government system is mostly feudal, with powerful families managing areas of land for economic and military benefits, some of which they pass up to a more powerful family whose land theirs is situated within, up and up the feudal layer-cake all the way to the Monarch, who rules over the country.

Obligations between vassal and liege vary wildly, as do the rules regarding many titles and lands attached to them, and some titles aren't associated with land but leadership of institutions, so trying to actually run anything is impossible compared to keeping those running things for you in check being more your job as you get higher up. As a result, assassination and civil wars are just a part of how the country works.

Religion is an important aspect of their government, with Temple being headed in theory by the God-Tongue but in practice by their religious council (the God Tongue gets high af in order to speak to the gods and receive their visions, the religious council is supposed to discern whether a God-Tongue actually got messages from the gods or is just tripping balls). The Temple controls the country's laws and punishments by deciding sin from virtue, with the nobility and monarchy enforcing these laws, and has a lot of its own land, institutions and armies.

Religion also helps justify the rule of magic people, who are almost all high up in the nobility or Temple, over regular people by claiming that magic families are the direct descendants of demigods, and that they've been chosen to rule over regular people, defending/leading them against threats and guiding them away from sin. The highest magic family in Lamara are the Krysa, as it's a requirement that the Monarch and God-Tongue each be Krysa.

Magic people outside of those native to Lamara are often accused of having demonic origins. Magic families known to have been created artificially, and new ones due to regular people mutating, are likewise actively snuffed out so that they can't threaten the power of magic families currently ruling everything.

Government aside, Lamara is very internally varied between a lot of cultures and regions. One major cultural difference between Royal Territory, an area roughly the size of France, and the rest of Lamara is that within Royal Territory the Krysa are very thoroughly worshipped.

Lamara, despite its institutional disregard for the rest of the world, has the largest "known world" out of any of these places, and is a bit of a trading hub for traders from outside of Lamara, mostly since its nobility and royalty have vast amounts of wealth and weapons to trade for things from outside of Lamara.

As for gender equality, the sexes are equal before the laws, rights and duties made by their religion, except for pregnant women. In practice, however, you'll mostly see men and women in different occupations. Polygamy, fornication and adultery are illegal, so everything other than monogamy within marriage takes place behind closed doors.

Pregnant women are less free but much more protected, with it being illegal to deny a pregnant woman your hospitality if you have the means to provide it, and if you don't then you have to point her to someone who can. Pregnant women also cannot be executed for crimes, although they may be imprisoned until they've given birth and then killed for whatever it is they did, with the child either being raised by the woman's relatives, the father or his relatives, or the Temple. The only exception to this are pregnant women who are also slaves, as slaves are not viewed as people.

Black Forest

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The Black Forest is a forest of trees with black leaves. The trees are also often entire miles tall depending on the quality of the soil on which they sit, and either have a space stretching effect or just to happen to be somewhere where the spatial anomalies are so extreme that it's practically impossible to travel all the way through it, and nobody knows what horrors linger in its deepest depths.

From the outside its size is about that of Norway. It's currently estimated to have a size equivalent to Asia from within, and may be infinite.

The black leaves absorb light from the entirety of the spectrum, including x rays and radio waves. Yep, radio waves. Functional radios may not be all that common in a dark-age-tech setting, but goddamn it'd be terrifying to go in there with a radio and it just stop working because the fucking leaves are eating your communications.

The trees are all the same species, but have such an ability to change themselves at will and create other life forms that one has to wonder if they are actually sentient, and possibly even in kahoots with each other. They can make their leaves edible or inedible, they can grow fruit and flowers of various colours, including bioluminescents, they can release a variety of poisons and pheromones yeah okay they're definitely running this gig.

As for the rest of the wildlife: nightmare fuel.

The Black Forest is North of Lamara, on the other side of a small strait of ocean, and from the outside seemingly hugs the coast. It's encircled by the Derrippi Mountains.

There are 5 main groups present in the Black Forest:

Hami:

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This is the group you'll probably hear about the most as they're the most active in things outside of the Black Forest, such as invading Lamara multiple times. They're probably the most "wholesome" "faction" in the setting.

They live mostly as tribes operating as close allies to one another due to blood relations, and it's pretty common for overpopulated tribes to gather together for the formation of new tribes from the excess populations, working together to get the territory the new tribes will inhabit, although this often results in the overpopulation being solved by shitloads of them dying at the hands of the wildlife or whichever group they tried to expand into the territory of.

These collections of tribes that are generally very cooperative with each other are called Greater Tribes, and they maintain travel and trade within these Greater Tribes with networks of tunnels, most of them leading back to a central, largest tribe with a High Chieftain that's home to a High Shaman.

Different Greater Tribes are generally also cooperative with each other, with the "us vs them" mentality being one of Hami vs everything else, although infighting is still pretty common especially due to personal issues such as family feuds escalating into wars. Shamans are meant to prevent this kinda thing by acting as judge and jury but these escalations still take place.

Resource wars aren't particularly common because of their highly ritualised hunter-gathering that generally prevents them from bleeding anywhere dry so to speak, plus they do have some agriculture such as insect farming that they lean more heavily on whenever the hunter-gathering isn't going as well so they can let the land heal, and of course there's the mentality of just sending a load of your people out to form or join an outer tribe if there's not enough food.

It's common for the people of "Outer Tribes", which inhabit a sort of frontier, to regularly host Hami from "Inner Tribes", where the population is far more dense, who are passing through to gather into tribes further out, forming new Outer Tribes.

Inbreeding is generally avoided through the rule that children may be raised in one tribe, but must leave and join another when they're adults. Some have different rules about it and rituals around it but the gist is the same: the kids leave the nest as adults, or all the kids of one sex leave the nest as adults while the other sex stays and takes care of elderly parents alongside their spouses that moved in from other tribes.

Honestly the sheer ant-like functionality and unity of these people who aren't forcibly held together by a state or anything like that, just their common cultural and religious values and identity, as well as a couple common enemies, is probably among the most utopian things about them.

Now for the cannibalism.

The Hami are cannibals. They believe eating something absorbs some of its spirit into you and lets them watch over you, therefore everyone eats grandma after she dies so her spirit can stay with her descendants forever. They believe that spirits that don't join others, due to bodies not being eaten and decaying or being burnt to ashes in burials and cremations, become malevolent free spirits.

This practice includes the taking of some of the corpse and bringing them to the tribe's mead chamber. Yup: every tribe has a big mead barrel, and that mead includes dissolved human and Hamiko (we'll get to those) meat. If you're a guest with some Hami and they let you drink this mead, then they're basically saying you're like a part of the family... also you're drinking people.

This belief in spirits from what you eat is also a part of the basis for the rituals around their hunting and foraging that prevent them from bleeding their land dry. You ate it, its spirit is with you forever now, and it'll fuck you over if you don't do the rituals before hunting its friends or didn't do the ritual before hunting it. No hunting Belligots in Winter, no wasting food, etc.

Now Hamikos.

Hamiko means friend of the Hami. They're like if a horse had a baby with a crocodile, or a dinosaur, having a large, horse-like build but clawed hooves for extra grip and a large, point-toothed mouth, and don't have lips. They're not purely carnivorous, but mostly eat meat. For Hami, they are dogs and horses in one as they're ridden into hunts and battles alike, their smell being used to help track prey. Hami generally hunt atop the backs of Hamiko, taking down their prey with bows and arrows and spears tipped with sedatives and poisons.

For this reason, every time the Hami have invaded beyond the Black Forest, such as into Jioctal Lamara (Northern tip), taking them out has been an utter nightmare. Remember how the Mongols made their huge-ass empire off of horse archery? Well now the horses are also terrifying forces in melee combat, easily biting off people's heads with their powerful jaws, and already have a predatory mentality.

Hamiko will not usually let non-Hami ride them, and are unfriendly towards non-Hami. This is because Hami are literally evolved to befriend them.

Hami have a palette of skin, eye and hair colours identical to that of the Hamikos. This, combined with the similarity of Hami hair to the manes of Hamiko fowls, more or less tricks the Hamiko's brain into considering Hami to be of the same species, and therefore friends. Grey skin, white or grey hair, yellow eyes etc are common among Hami.

Gender equality wise, they're pretty equal. Nobody's barred from anything on the basis of their sex or gender. Female Hami are literally stronger than normal woman and have lower fertility, albeit a higher libido, due to much higher testosterone levels and more Galibi in their muscles, so the physical gap between men and women is a lot smaller, which may have contributed to this, but it may just as much be a simple desire for people to be egalitarian and a lack of anything pushing them not to be.

Slavery is usually a temporary punishment for crimes, a means of compensating whoever you've wronged. Most buying of slaves from foreign traders is done to either bolster numbers after heavy losses to disease, or kids growing up and leaving the tribe without any moving into the tribe (which can leave a tribe without any young people to take care of its elderly, forcing those elderly to disband the tribe and go join others, potentially losing millennia of internal traditions), or to fix imbalances in the number of heterosexual males to heterosexual females.

The idea of a person owning someone, rather than someone belonging to a tribe as all people do anyway, doesn't really clock with most of them, however it's been growing alongside the use of more intensive agriculture and fishing practices for coastal Hami, who feel more of a need to be able to compete with the outside world.

Polygamy, both of men with multiple wives and women with multiple husbands, are usually not allowed except in situations of gender imbalance, and even then it's preferred that any love triangles be actual triangles, in which the 2 of the same sex are homosexually married to each other as well as having a common spouse. Polygamy going beyond bigamy, in which a single person has 2 spouses, is not allowed. Essentially, polygamy is a backup plan, not the norm.

Divorce is always allowed, with Shamans facilitating an equivalent to family courts if there are kids and one parent moves to another tribe or is from another tribe.

Coastal Hami are quickly adopting the technologies of the outside world through trade, and these technologies are then spreading through many of their tribes. It's no longer an uncommon sight for a Hami to not only have a steel spear, but for that spear to have been made by a Hami blacksmith. Another source of knowledge is escaped Hami slaves that return to their homelands with knowledge of other places, as it's common for Hami to be enslaved in other lands due to raiding and kidnapping.

Oh yeah, and Hami are immune to the effects of prions in brains and stuff, and they don't just eat raw human meat they put it through a lot of processes that result in it being safe enough for them to eat.

Branch People:

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Where Hami dominate the ground with their Hamikos, the Branch People dominate the branches above with their hook guns.

The Branch People are mostly descended from escaped slaves and refugees during Lamara's unification, and adopted Meklasan technology for their hook guns as a minority of those among them were Meklasans escaping their civilization's destruction.

The Branch People are mostly to the East of the Hami heartland, and live pretty symbiotically with the Hami where they live, even hunting together by going both above and below prey they wouldn't be able to hunt without each other, although Hami in the heartland are generally a lot less approving of these relative newcomers.

Branch People build their settlements up on the vast branches of the Black Forest's trees, getting a lot more sunlight than their ground-dwelling neighbours. They eat a lot of fruit, nuts, berries and, of course, the very leaves off the Black Forest trees, which are usually edible but not very nutritious, and most of their meat comes from much smaller creatures than the great beasts the Hami regularly take down.

These settlements use a lot of ropes, rope bridges and the like and Branch People children grow into very skilled climbers. These ropes are mostly made by processing and winding together bark from the Black Forest trees, although other materials like human hair are often used.

Their life up in the trees pretty much forces ingenuity out of them, so a lot of inventions the Hami use in their homes were actually invented by Branch People. Most of these are to do with making otherwise inedible things edible and extracting even more use from the parts of what they eat, so even most of the Hami that disapprove of them can't help but approve of the inventions as they match up with their "use everything" mentality.

For mobility, the main thing they use are their hook guns. Go watch Attack On Titan on Youtube. No, really. Do it.

Their hook guns fire a hook on a rope, and then can retract the rope back into the gun. In the rope there's a smaller, slack rope that goes taught to get the hook itself to retract its claws so it can detach from whatever it's been shot into.

Actually watching spiderman might be better, since spiderman shoots the webs from his hands, although he also doesn't retract the webs back into himself.

This, to say the least, makes for some insane mobility in the treetops.

Religion-wise: Chaos. Lamaranism, Meklasanism, Hamiism, weird hybrids and sects of all 3.

Kids born of Hami-Branch Peep relations are pretty common, and it's common for Hami to join tribes of Branch People and vice versa. Most are in agreement that Western Hami and Branch People are probably gonna merge into a new hybrid culture over time.

The one major point of opposition between the Hami and the Branch People is the cannibalisation of the dead. Most cultures are pretty opposed to it, and the Branch People are descended from non-Hami cultures.

Wendigo, half-Wendigos and Wendigo Demons:

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Hami put the human meat through processes, some of them ritualised, before eating it. Hami cook meat, human or otherwise, and while they're definitely an ethnicity unlike any on earth they are still absolutely human.

Wendigo do not like cooked meat. They still like human meat, though.

Wendigo are the result of magic experiments by a powerful Hami warlord, who worked with some Salkites in creating obedient monsters for his armies. The Salkites were given plentiful test subjects, some of this warlord's own sons and daughters from his concubines among them.

Half-Wendigo have razor-sharp teeth, deer horns, claws on their fingertips, small noses and some have layers of fur over their skin. The human half of most half-Wendigo is Hami, so whether the fact that they otherwise look like Hami is due to that or part of being a half-Wendigo regardless, or somewhere in the middle, is unknown.

They don't need human meat to live, but they have a strong craving for it.

They possess great strength, stamina, speed and have human intelligence.

These Wendigo killed the warlord and Salkites alike, becoming their own warlords who wreaked havoc upon the Hami, slaughtering countless Hami to feed their hunger. Their eventual defeats are what led to the Hami living under their current tribal shaman-empowering system, made to encourage Hami cooperation and discourage warlording.

Female Wendigo, what few were fertile anyway, would almost invariably die if they ever get pregnant, and those pregnancies don't usually come to fruition due to how early those deaths are, as Wendigo fetuses begin developing their horns around the same time they start developing arms and legs, which rip apart and kill the mother from the inside.

Due to this, and Wendigo dying to vengeful Hami and old age, there is only one fertile full-blooded Wendigo left, and all of her half-human offspring are born infertile.

The Wendigo Queen learned great powers of flesh mastery from Salkites, giving herself the power to stop the growth of her children's horns until she'd birthed them, as well as biological immortality. She also accelerated development of her offspring in her, and could choose when she gave birth, all in addition to good old regenerative abilities.

And she can ensure the immortality of her children, albeit only a limited number of them, by reversing the effects of aging in them, and can slow down their aging by putting them into coma-like states. They already age slower than humans anyway, too, going up to 200 years old.

She essentially uses her half-Wendigo kids as enforcers over a large chunk of territory extremely deep in the Black Forest, forcing local tribes of Hami to give tributes to serve as Wendigo Queen's (Wendigo Queen is literally her name. If she had a name back when she was just a Hami kid caught up in the mad ambitions of a mad warlord then it's unknown) food and consorts/concubines (she seems to be bisexual, possibly lesbian but sleeping with men anyway to conceive her half-Wendigo enforcers).

She's almost definitely altered her appearance to some extent with her flesh mastery, so it's not fair to say what Wendigo look like based on her... also nobody who's seen her has lived to tell the tale, as only those who spend the rest of their lives in her mountaintop fortress may see her.

Now, for Wendigo demons, these are half-Wendigo that the Wendigo Queen has turned into especially monstrous beings as punishment for things like disobedience. They've lost their intelligence, and are sent out into the wilderness, living hundreds of years in constant pain. They're often found dwelling in ruins, and are extremely aggressive towards humans, with their desire for human flesh heightened immensely. They have in them utter fear and opposition towards ever setting foot in the Wendigo Queen's territory baked into them, so they're everyone else's problem.

There have been at least 14 separate attempts by the Hami to free those of her brethren that live under her rule, but none have been successful. Attempts to help Hami in her territory escape are largely unsuccessful.

The Hami in her territory are much more agrarian than their free counterparts, living in a fertile mountain range within the Black Forest where the Black Forest trees do not grow.

Additionally, they're biologically different to free Hami to some extent, probably a mixture of the Wendigo Queen's flesh mastery and some Salkite blood being in them. In short they're physically weaker than and have more kids than regular Hami.

Salkites:

You sure you wanna read this one, pal?

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A general term for some extremely inbred, mysterious and secretive people with flesh-crafting knowledge and possibly a shared religion. They're found in the Black Forest and Derrippi mountains and the lands beyond.

They're also found beyond the ruins of the Akwin civilization, seemingly unaffected by the Red Death that raged through it and the other groups around them, as well as suggesting they inhabit almost the entirely of the far inland of the continent, outside of the Known World. Their numbers are unknown, but likely even more numerous than the Lamarans.

They're seemingly immune to all or almost all diseases, yet horrific epidemics seem to have a way of spreading to groups like the Hami and Jioctals through them.

Very little is known about them, except that getting involved with them always ends badly.

They seem very lacking in self preservation instincts, and nobody really knows why any of them are doing what they're doing half of the time. They've been sighted jumping on mass off of cliffs to their deaths, ripping their own throats out with their bare hands, and other crazy fucked up nonsensical shit.

Interactions between different groups of Salkites are almost always violent. They all seemingly hate each other for some reason.

Also, they keep big armies of monsters of their making underneath their settlements in weird sacks and shit. An attempt by a co-team of Hami and Lamarans to genetically test some of these monsters after wiping out a Salkite village and killing the monsters while they were in their sacks strongly suggested the DNA was human, so these creatures aren't or probably aren't anything to do with the dangerous creatures one might encounter naturally eating, hunting and reproducing in the wilderness.

Their shrines, which vary wildly, are often covered in and surrounded by cancerous nodes and diseased flesh, seemingly offerings to whatever they worship.

They vary wildly in appearance, but often look weird as fuck. Those within the same Salkite village usually look pretty much identical, and will sometimes possess the same abilities.

Attempts at stealing Salkite babies and raising them in different cultures have yielded the result that all this is somehow embedded in their very natural instinct, flesh-crafting, their religion, and the keeping of all of it extremely secret.

For how widespread they seem to be, they don't seem that interested in expansion. They build those armies of monsters under their settlements but almost never do anything with them, despite the value they offer as beasts of war and labour.

Sometimes entire villages just kill themselves, go rabid and all kill each other, or go braindead and all die, or have giant indiscriminate orgies where some of them die in the sex piles, or just all do this weird thing, or sit around and let themselves die of starvation. Or half of them will do it. Seriously these guys are just beyond normal comprehension. Sometimes one of these will happen across an entire region of villages at once.

Yeah something's fucked up with these guys. Also they basically never express emotion.

Nobody wants to take them as slaves, either, because of this weird shit they do. Slaves that just randomly grab rocks and bash their own heads in, and lack that sense of self-preservation needed for threats of violence if they don't obey to work, aren't really any use. Plus if you wake up the monsters under their village that's a bad time for everyone.

Monsters and people with magic engrained into them have a seemingly natural fear of Salkites. It's been described as "like every nerve in my body is telling me to run from it, hide from it, or kill myself" by Brija Brijild-Bailey, who was chained to a chair in a room across from a similarly captive Salkite as a method of torturing her.

Animals without magic similarly seek to avoid them at all times.

The only semi-successful interrogation of a Salkite, carried out in Lamara, was achieved using Jarlets after force-feeding that Salkite their blood. While no data was extracted, the Salkite in question started uncontrollably crying and laughing, regularly vomiting but always keeping their mouth shut and re-swallowing the vomit, for about 14 hours straight.

This Salkite then slept for 2 days, and when they woke up they were initially thought to be brain-dead but flinched in response to being threatened with a raised fist - something a normal Salkite would never do. They eventually learned Lamaran, despite already knowing it before drinking the Jarlet's blood, and revealed that they couldn't remember any the time before they'd drunk the blood, only that they'd desperately wanted to keep it in them once they'd drank it.

The Salkite went on to not exactly live a normal life, but a mundane one nevertheless. He married, had 7 kids, and was known to have been extremely obedient towards his wife, who was also known to be abusive towards him. Said wife was the daughter of the Jarlet who'd fed him the blood, but wasn't herself a Jarlet.

Additionally, all of the kids he had with his wife were almost identical to her and his parents-in-law, although they still varied in gender. Lamaran gene theory suggests every one of his genes was submissive where all of hers were dominant.

He died 32 years after he'd drunk the Jarlet blood, and old man on his death bed surrounded by his kids. His kids and all but one of his grandkids were all killed 3 years later in the Year of Retribution, when the village they inhabited was burnt to the ground and all inhabitants slaughtered as part of the war between Krysaken and Holberth, and was before the Lamaran unification under the Krysa Empire.

What came of his only surviving granddaughter, who left the village as an adventurer with a Jarlet husband intent on "saving" Salkites by feeding them Jarlet blood, is unknown. Any kids with her husband would not have been Jarlets, and it seems Salkite genes are extremely submissive so they wouldn't be particularly distinguishable from normal humans...

I should add that most Salkites look weird as fuck, so it's pretty lucky for this guy's kids that they looked nothing like him or they'd have suffered a lot of discrimination. This Salkite that had a "normal life" had completely white skin and their ribcage jutted upwards at a weird angle. His toes grew upwards from his feet rather than forwards, and he had such thick hairs growing from his chin and scalp that they were more like nails than hair. His tailbone was enlengthened but had almost no flesh around it - basically a spinal cord hanging down between his ass-cheeks.

Hoga

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Do not possess human intelligence.

Imagine chimpanzees. Okay now those have had babies with Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Now they're the size of bears. Also they almost all have ripped-off cheeks that make it look like they're constantly grinning.

They don't express emotion or communicate in any way that's noticeable for humans yet they just look at each other and seem to know what's up.

They are extremely strong, sadistic, and travel and large troupes.

They get to count as a faction because their intelligence is enough for them to act kinda as one.

[ That's it about the Black Forest./spoiler]

Meklasa

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K so what the fuck is Meklasa?

Big island, about the size of Madagascar. About half the area of the island is taken up with the remnants of a long-gone civilization, the other half by wild jungle, and with a great cliff separating them, although the ancient civilization half does then slope downwards the further you get from the cliff that separates it from the jungle, so there's still a beach.

Well, 2 long gone civilizations.

The first of these is classified as the Meklasan Predecessors. They're probably the creators of the incredible technology and architecture on the island, as well as the general lack of significantly hostile wildlife. Meklasan stories claim that these people never existed in the first place and the technology was made by the gods, but uhh bro please elaborate on those skeletons over there yeah buddy made by the gods to be nice decorations huh?

Additionally, almost none of their technology works once it's off the island. Magic doesn't exactly stop working, but is wonky on the island, with magic people struggling to use and control their abilities there, or being physically unable to. Krysala described being on the island as being like she had "fuzzy nerves" until she acclimated to the place. There are no magic families known to have originated on the island, but hey there's plenty of families that nobody knows jack shit of the origins of.

Meklasans themselves being on the island is a bit weird. Did they get there by sea, were they our good old isekai protagonist peeps-that-died-on-earth, or were they descended from the survivors of an apocalypse, or some mixture of all 3? Genetic testing via bloodworms shows they're not that genetically similar to the makers of the technology, but it wouldn't be the first time crazy mutations have occurred.

If it's the apocalypse survivor option, they got a round 2.

The island was home to AI or program (how sentient, sapient or emotional they were was never figured out) machines that guarded and partially provided for the people on the island. They didn't do enough and cover enough areas that people didn't have to work to live, especially since a theocratic cult took over thanks to the lack of external threats that normally discourage theocratic governments.

Additionally, there were complex technological items that didn't seemingly have any kind of AI attached but were still very useful, albeit haphazard. While the underlying technology never came to be understood, there were those skilled in playing Frankenstien with the tech to make new items, although this was considered heretical by the Meklasan religion that worshipped the technology and those caught doing it were usually killed.

The machines clearly didn't take too kindly to people messing with the technology either, also killing anyone they caught doing it.

Anyway, these machines normally stopped people from killing each other by restraining everyone and cauterizing any serious wounds (resulting in a religious tradition of self harm to see if you could receive the "burning blessing"), executions having to be carried out out of their sight.

One day, they stopped stopping people from killing each other... right as a civil war started over some internal religious differences.

Both sides take it as permission from their gods to kill the other side and AWAY WE GO UNTIL

Holy shit 30% of them fucking died. Both sides were extremely into mass-murder, and 2 years into the war the machines stopped working entirely and stayed still in their buildings - each side taking it to mean they must fight harder to bring back the machines, causing many who'd been reliant on them to fall into horrific poverty, disease and death, especially since both sides not being able to take the stuff the machines produced meant them taking stuff, including food, from regular people instead. The war lasted 8 years.

When the machines didn't power back up for 3 more years, despite all the offerings and such they were constantly being given, it was taken as a sign that the winning side were the heretics and there was an uprising against them that lasted 2 years, with the rebels winning.

Meanwhile, a separate faction entirely formed on the edges of the ruins of the civilization they lived in that promoted reliance on the technological items and people rather than the machines, claiming that the robots had been the equivalent of the gods feeding their children, the humans, but that humanity had to become self reliant.

The "fly the nest" part we usually associate with this didn't apply for most of them as it was only normal for kids to move out due to marriage (and one would expect just as many moving in due to marriage), big work opportunities or the household being overcrowded, and moving out except in these circumstances was considered a sign of disrespect towards and lack of desire to take care of your aging parents, something you'd only do if they were really shitty parents.

10 years later, the first Lamarans with extremely toxic monster-repellent seaweed on the undersides of their ships came to the island. They interacted with the Meklasans, and stories of this Meklasa place, which lacked dangerous wildlife just like Lamara but had the added benefit of all that cool tech - which I should note as far as anyone knew was basically magic, reaching Lamara brought about the idea of it being a second Lamara for those who'd been even more pure of heart than themselves... this didn't sit too nicely with the Lamaran elites.

So anyway, an invasion was launched on the island, claiming that the machines of the Meklasans turning off meant the Meklasans may have once had divine blessing but had clearly lost it in their infighting, and that the Lamarans must save the Meklasans from themselves and that they'd be all kumbaya once the Lamarans had fucking killed a shitload of them.

Problem: The machines turned on during the landing, just a few minutes after the fighting started. Meklasans saved?

Problem: The machines were indiscriminate: everyone was a target, armed or not, Lamaran or Meklasan.

Maybe they were annoyed about all the dried blood and guts on them from those animal sacrifices.

The machines, who I should add were fucking massive, launched rocks that sunk the ships at the back of the landing, trapping the beached ones on the shore, and then began their massacre. The Lamarans and Meklasans on that beach managed to get past them - or I should say some of them did - and hiding in the ruins became a very fucked up game of hide and seek from machines that could seemingly see through walls.

So few of the Lamaran soldiers survived that they both didn't bother to and didn't care to stop Meklasans who'd managed to free the boats on the beach from escaping - there were plenty to go around now - and so 10,000 ships full of Lamaran soldiers going into Meklasa turned into 3,000 ships returning with only 400 of them being filled by Lamarans.

The Meklasans, as well as further ones who escaped the island turned death trap by other means, were enslaved in the Gavik region, forced to work in rudimentary factories producing various things as they were able to understand what a factory was unlike a lot of slaves from more stone-tip-spear type places. These factories were not at all efficient and not very technologically advanced, working far far more on "do your bit, pass along" than any machines, and were almost always very unsafe... plus there's just the usual mistreatment of slaves.

Many of them escaped their slavery 17 years later during the Beans Uprising (started due to beans) and escaped to the Black Forest, joining with escaped Lamarans and slaves from across the known world to form the Branch People.

Also despite them not understanding the predecessor technology around them, the Meklasans weren't a technologically hopeless case. Directly reverse-engineering the tech was heretical, but making your own technology wasn't, and they actually made some pretty advanced stuff despite being terrible at chemistry and biology, and this definitely transferred with the formation of the Branch People.

Meklasa itself is now largely shrouded in mystery. Whether or not there are still any people there is unknown. The machines roam the land actively and gather the technology into buildings that they guard, and they throw rocks at any ships that get too close to the shores, plus the fact that almost nothing on Meklasa works outside of Meklasa - turning the greatest items into useless trinkets - greatly disincentivises attempted exploration.

The technology itself is currently classed as anomalous: not explainable by science, or normal magic, or a combination of both.