The Utterends
A proud and ancient mélange of nomadic people dwell in a vast and deadly swamp once considered in Xha’en legend to be the location of the utter ends of the earth. This is the nation most commonly referred to as the Utterends (or variously Gyuubou, Guivo, or Gibo in different local tongues). To outsiders, the Utterends often seem like a hellhole: sweaty, primitive, and perilous, but that is only the barest surface of this deep and complex land.
It is true that the creatures of the Utterends, both magical and mundane, are often deadly and terrible, many venomous or bloodthirsty, and some even possessed of a vile and cruel intelligence. The Utterends are not an easy place to make one’s abode. Nevertheless, these terrifying swamps have become a haven and a refuge to many who call it home.
An isolated pocket of improbable weather, the Utterends are heated by winds blowing down from The Cauldron to the north, hotspring runoff from several springs on the mountains’ southern half, and by underwater springs and volcanoes off the coast, a continuation of The Cauldron range. This combination creates a unique climate in all the world, with bizarre wildlife and weather seemingly wholly divorced from the seasons around them.
Never cold and always damp, the Utterends has a “dry” season in what surrounding regions call late winter and most of spring, and a monsoon season that ramps up in late spring and doesn’t typically wind down until “winter” solstice. This pattern (and the heat) makes the Utterends’ main agricultural cycle quite short, with a planting celebration for the new year and harvest before summer solstice. A second harvest cycle takes place during the wetter months for plants that prefer to be partially submerged.
Many rare and valuable plants grow well in the humid Utterends, though all attempts at agriculture here come with a plethora of other challenges. It is perhaps due to the sheer diversity of hardships in the Utterends’ region that so many disparate peoples have been able to come together to form a cohesive society based upon mutual cooperation, support, and boundless hospitality.
History and People
As far as the historical record can show, tabaxi were the original natives of the Utterends. Locked in constant war with the brutal chike, the desperately beleaguered tabaxi began a millennium-spanning tradition (unlike no other known tabaxi community in the world) of welcoming any and all fellow humanoids willing to fight alongside them in their struggle for survival. The earliest remains of this culture show that it was bloody and warlike, nearly as cruel as that of the chike themselves, and that the first group to join the tabaxi were the lizardfolk, who immigrated north and west from the Akadonian Forest. Humanoid cats and lizards shared the land in close alliance and learned to prosper together.
The next group to join the Utterends mix were tengu, who moved south from the Xha’en region in response to human expansion. The tengu, too, formed a friendly alliance with the others and brought with them new types of military tactics and a partial tempering of bloodthirsty patterns. Records of this era are sparse, but the bas-relief sculptures all over the Chafa (or Tcha-i-F’ha) Temple walls indicate repeated attempts to make peace with the chike during the next several centuries and to bring them into the multi-species fold. But such efforts were met always by rejection, misdirection, or betrayal. No chike records of the era have been found.
Local legend says that 5,000 years passed this way, though elven scholars believe this number to be wild hyperbole.
The next group to join the growing Utterends culture came nearly 1,600 years ago, in and around Xha’en Calendar year 3230 (1928 I.R.). These were an influx of Xha’en rebels defeated in their attempt to oust the powerful Huris dynasty and driven into the Utterends to escape Imperial retaliation for their treason. This influx marked the beginning of the Guivoc language, as well as a more streamlined integration of the three humanoid peoples with their new human immigrants. What had formerly been a trade pidgin of Tabaxi, Draconic, and Tengu was joined by Xha’en and recorded using Xha’en characters on scrolls for the first time. Several multi-species communities sprang up during this period, and the pidgin evolved into a full-vocabulary creole. The Guivoc creole has since become the dominant language of the region, though all four of the languages it is derived from are still spoken in places, and most inhabitants speak at least three local languages.
Though no one knows precisely how it happened, the next major event in Utterends’ history was the Dragon Plagues in XC 3678–83 (2376–81 I.R.). During this period, a wave of hideous, magic-resistant poxes swept through the Utterends, annihilating the majority of the region's reptilian humanoids and dragon-related creatures. Ordinary reptiles and non-dragon magical beasts were unaffected, but all other dragonids and humanoid reptilians were felled by the thousands. These species-spanning poxes are believed to be the work of Xha’en Emperor Amaran su Bha (later revealed to be a lich), perhaps as an unintended side-effect of experiments regarding undead dragons. Wherever the plagues came from, their death toll was high, and they departed as mysteriously as they arrived.
When the plagues finally passed, many species were extinct in the Utterends, including kobolds, black dragons, hydras, and countless others. The lizardfolk population dwindled into the hundreds, though by a cruel twist of fate, the ever-hostile chike population recovered from the plagues within three generations, due largely to differences in chike versus lizardfolk reproduction. Most dragonids common in the region today are species that arrived to carve a niche for themselves in only the last few centuries, and chikes and lizardfolk remain the only reptilian humanoids in the Utterends.
Following this regional tragedy, the culture of the Utterends was badly shaken, as some lizardfolk found themselves no longer able to relate to their less-bereaved neighbors. Inter-community disagreements became heated, and a band of lizardfolk leaders set out to consult a solitary gold dragon believed to have survived the plague. This dragon had indeed survived, albeit scarred and blinded beyond the ability of any magic to cure (as was typical for the consequences of this particular wave of plagues). Despite his own suffering and grief at all he had lost, he advised the Guivoc lizardfolk, and ultimately all of the Guivoc peoples, to take this regional trauma as an opportunity to grow closer as a people and to improve their way of life.
This era saw local improvements in many aspects of life for the Guivoc people. Once again peace was sought with the chike. The blind gold dragon, Mikan (referred to almost exclusively in history texts as the Lord Dragon, though he has never held any official status in the Guivoc legal code), went personally to serve as mediator between chike and Guivoc communities. The chike insulted the Guivoc delegation, poisoned them, and attacked while they were ill. Mikan defended the helpless Guivoren and, recognizing the poison used, brewed an antidote in time to save most of them, but his interference was claimed by the chike to prove he was never a neutral mediator, and retroactively adopted as the justification for the attack.
Subsequent scholars have postulated that — like true dragons and some extraplanar beings — some inherent aspect of chike physiology makes it impossible for them to behave in any way other than overt hostility. They certainly tend toward brutality amongst themselves — not just toward the Guivoren — but it is yet unknown whether such hypotheses are fair to the chike. Regardless, no subsequent attempts at reconciliation have succeeded either, in more than 1,000 years.
Guivoc culture, however, made a meteoric rise after the Dragon Plagues ceased. Soon, the lich-emperor Amaran su Bha, still enthroned in Xha’ahan, noticed their economic and military power. With Xha’en having long claimed the Utterends as imperial territory, the undead emperor began to extort exorbitant taxes from the Guivoc people. The people of the Utterends rejected his demands and defiantly declared their nation of Guivo to be officially independent of Xha’en. They spent the rest of the lich-emperor’s reign effectively cut off from the outside world, with undead forces boxing them in by land and sea, and the elves of the Green Warden Forest unwilling in that period to have any dealings with a “human-loving” nation, or with a nation they saw as being probably full of spies for the lich king.
The deadly Cauldron Mountains became the only route into or out of the Utterends, and since it only led right back to lich-oppressed Xha’en, this perilous passage offered less in the way of aid for the Utterends than it did a string of Xha’en refugees to Guivo fleeing their undead overlord. Within the Utterends, the chike chose to side with the lich king for reasons of their own, and the Utterends spent decades fighting for its life.
Through it all, the Guivoc people remained steadfast in their commitment to the Lord Dragon’s compassionate wisdom, and Utterends’ histories record that the Utterends provided succor and supplies at one point during those benighted times to the band of heroes who ultimately recovered the Ahra artifacts that were used to depose the lich.
Once Xha’en was saved and the Tilgi dynasty begun, the Utterends were again ignored by an empire busy licking its wounds. But as both nations recovered from that terrible time, later emperors remembered that the Utterends’ declared independence was never legally acknowledged by the Hegemony, and that Xha’en still claimed the marshy territory as its own. Armed “tax collection” forces were turned away at the Utterends’ borders, by violence if necessary, but always as compassionately as possible. Diplomats sent to Xha’en seeking official recognition of Guivoc statehood were variously ignored or even imprisoned for insurrection.
To this day, Xha’en claims the Utterends as part of the Hegemony, acknowledges none of Guivoc history, and insists that the Guivoren are “bandits,” savages eking out a squalid living in the fetid swamps the emperor cannot be bothered to “clean up.” The swamps themselves, as well as the geography around the Utterends, have protected the Guivoren from true invasion or occupation by Xha’en forces. Xha’en can and periodically does cut off the Utterends from contact or trade with any but The Cauldron and the Green Warden Forest, and this has significantly stifled the Utterends’ economic growth. But what Xha’en can’t do is field forces that can survive the perilous Utterends’ swamps and marshes well enough to defeat Guivoc natives on their home territory. No leader since the lich-emperor has been foolish enough to try.
Influenced by the Lord Dragon (now a Great Wyrm) and by their money-averse elven neighbors, the Guivoc people have chosen to accept this state of affairs with Xha’en peacefully. The chike remain a more pressing problem since they too are warriors native to the swamp and not so easily defeated by compassionate means. Though generally considered to be of near-animal intelligence and barely able to use simple tools, the chike are wily and tough, and they reproduce as quickly as the food supply allows (unlike the lizardfolk, whose former numbers have still never recovered from the Dragon Plagues).
The Guivoc have largely found means to defend themselves from chike raids, and they stay out of chike territory whenever possible. Other language-capable creatures in the Utterends, such as the tombotu and malkeens, have allied themselves with Guivoc culture even when they have elected not to join it. The chike prey upon these creatures as well, and on anything else they find within their grasp, though they are known occasionally to ally themselves for brief periods with hanu-nagas or a gray dragon on the coast. Guivoc culture interacts with these elements of the Utterends wilderness only if necessary, in self-defense.
The rest of the time, the Guivoren pursue peaceful occupations such as fine art, education, poetry, and music. They trade with the Green Realm and The Cauldron, and have established a discreet trade relationship with Ejindor, one wherein so long as they never mention where they are from, the Ejindor officials never accuse them of being “Utterends’ bandits.” As simply “traveling merchants” therefore, they are able to participate in the Ejindor markets and bring home books, tools, and new technologies from all over the world for their libraries and schools.
Some have remarked that the Guivoren have grown so peace-loving and intellectual that were it not for the ever-present chike threat forcing them to keep their swords sharp, they would lose all interest in the art of war and be easily subsumed by Xha’en. Whether or not that is the case, what has indeed become true is that those who know the people of the Utterends well have come to see them as a haven for refugees from oppression. Xha’en discontents of many species have continued to find a home there over the centuries, so long as they are willing to abide by Guivoc laws. Even occasional Green Warden elves, sick of the anti-human bigotry and isolationism of their homeland, have found the humidity and stirges to be worth the advantages of the warm community that the Guivoc culture can offer.
The Lord Dragon, for his part, is alive and well, and spends most of his time wandering the Utterends, disguised in whatever humanoid form takes his fancy, hiding his blindness with magic and draconic abilities as best he can (since few types of blindness are not magically curable, and the condition would otherwise give him away). Scarred old Mikan does not rule the Utterends and does not wish to and avoids making “Lord Dragon” appearances whenever possible. But he always appears when he is needed. It is believed that he is not yet 2,000 years old, and that as a gold dragon (a particularly long-lived species), he may last two millennia yet or more. Some have speculated that without his influence, the perilous Utterends would quickly descend to their former bloodthirsty ways. But for now he lives, and Guivoc is a just and compassionate place.
Religion
Religion in the Utterends tends to be celebratory and closely tied to the natural world. Most people mix and match all the common religions of the region together in personalized, private worship, and public ceremonies tend to be vaguely worded so as to appeal to as many types of belief as possible.
The most important religious site in the Utterends is the ancient stone temple at Chafa (or Tcha-i-F’ha in Tabaxi). The Chafa Temple is carved in intricate and lovely bas-relief with the ancient history and legends of the early Utterends’ peoples. The temple is dedicated to all Utterends’ ancestors, and it is where the histories, both local and foreign, are kept, guarded from tampering and humidity alike by a dedicated clergy of scholar-priests.
The Chafa Temple is also a place for communities to mourn departed loved ones or to pray to direct ancestors. When a nomadic band arrives at Chafa each year, a large community funeral is held (in addition to the smaller, personalized funeral that takes place just after a death). This group grief ritual focuses on gratitude for everything the departed offered to the community while alive, and on convincing the departed that it is safe for them to leave their loved ones behind and move on to the next life, by demonstrating — through feasting, dance, gifts, and kind words — just how well the communities care for one another and how loved and appreciated the bereaved are by the living people around them.
Trade and Commerce
In addition to rare plants that can be more easily cultivated in the Utterends’ strange climate, and to the unique and often poignant works of art produced by the Guivoc people, the Utterends are most particularly known for tabaxi steel. Tabaxi are understood to be gifted with weapons, intuitively able to understand them. The tabaxi of the Utterends have honed and perfected this talent, such that Guivoc tabaxi weaponsmiths are known to be some of the best in the world.
Any maker-marked weapons produced in the Utterends are considered to be masterwork, as even non-tabaxi smiths must meet exacting traditional standards to ply their trade in the region, but something about tabaxi senses gives them a particular edge in the weaponsmithing process, and thus far only tabaxi smiths have ever passed the grueling examinations required by the Utterends' smiths guilds for the right to incorporate the elite “four claws” mark into their maker stamps.
Four-claws smiths are able to use the smells, sounds, and feel of every moment in the ritualized and time-consuming traditional Utterends’ steel-making process to pull the natural magic of the land into their craft. As a result, any weapon, tool, or armor with a significant steel component made by a four-claw smith is inherently magical, even if the smith is not a spellcaster. Some four-claws smiths have more ability than others, and four-claw caster-smiths can do more still, but any four-claw Utterends’ smith produces exclusively magical steel goods.
The Guivoc culture being what it is, even the most pacifist smiths are still usually willing to craft weapons in some circumstances. The Guivoren know that even the compassionate are sometimes forced to defend themselves and their homes. However, many Guivoc smiths will not craft weapons for people they do not know or trust. Others exact a vow to never use their weapons for unnecessary harm, accepting customer responses with varying degrees of naivete (or shallow ritualism). Few smiths craft weapons for resale to strangers, but tools or defensive items (such as amulets, bracers, bucklers, helms, etc.) are often pre-crafted and sold to merchants or sent to market in Ejindor.
Large steel items such as tower shields or full plate armor usually require that a buyer bring the required iron as part of payment in advance and be willing to wait long enough for the iron to be processed into steel before the item can be crafted. This is because the Utterends are in fact a terrible place to find iron. Mining is extremely difficult in the wet marshes, and all the old above-ground sources have been long-since exhausted. Thus, for all the excellence of Guivoc steelmaking, the vast majority of their raw iron must now be imported from outside. For this reason, quality raw iron can be worth as much as copper in the Utterends, and steel ingots of four-claw smith quality are worth as much as gold. Precious metals are otherwise worth comparable amounts to their values in other places and are often used in sculpture.
Loyalties and Diplomacy
Despite Xha’en's claims to the contrary, the Utterends maintain their independence and do not offer fealty to any other nation. Isolated as they are, the Utterends are also largely lacking in allies, as the elves are too insular and few of the intelligent creatures living in The Cauldron Mountains share a worldview compatible with Guivoc philosophies. In many ways, the ever-brutal chike have an easier time forming (brief, treacherous) alliances than do the Guivoc given their location. This is one of many reasons why it is so often believed that the Utterends will only maintain their open-hearted attitudes for as long as the Lord Dragon yet lives. Without his influence and protection, it seems likely that the Guivoc people would experience a great deal more pressure to conform to prevailing attitudes around them.
Government
Guivoc government is as minimal and localized as possible, and no one person is ever permitted to hold a great deal of power over others. Small nomadic communities (usually no more than 300 people) choose their own leaders however they wish, often by consensus. Professional guilds are larger, some spanning the entire Utterends, but these never have a single leader, and are instead often governed by large councils.
A typical way for guild councilmembers to be chosen is that they must be nominated (without volunteering) by three guild members in good standing who are not already on the council. Should nominated individuals choose to accept nomination, their credentials are presented to the council, along with all other nominees. The council then votes among the nominees, using a ritual voting process wherein choices are ranked by preference so that the nominee with the broadest appeal to the largest number of voters is selected. Decisions of the council are made through a similar process and are usually quite slow. Councilmembers typically serve five-year terms, with a limit of no two terms in a row and an unlimited possibility of re-selection after any five-year period not spent on the council.
Crime is usually handled by community leaders, or, if applicable, by the relevant guild. Unless the crime is violent, punishment is meted out in hours of some form of service to the community, with certain privileges revoked until service hours are completed. Violent crime leads to imprisonment and rehabilitation efforts the first time, longer imprisonment and more intensive rehabilitation efforts the second time, and the third time to permanent exile from the Utterends, enforced where possible by geas or other magic. Suspected criminals may always appeal their sentences to the Guild of Justice, which handles disputes between communities and studies international law, among other things. Further appeals go to the Chafa Temple, where priests of knowledge use magic to determine the lies or truth of all parties involved. The final tier of appeal is finding the Lord Dragon and convincing him to hear the case, which is far easier said than done.
The Lord Dragon’s interference is more likely when the Guild of Justice finds itself unable to mediate a major internal dispute, as old Mikan dislikes internal conflict in his chosen homeland and will, if he has to, go out of his way to help everyone get along. The Guild of Justice was founded primarily with the intent of making sure the citizens of Guivo try the Lord Dragon's patience as rarely as possible.
Military
Most adult Guivoc have some combat training due to the perilous nature of the Utterends’ swamps. Typically, communities organize their members into small militias to defend their own people. In addition, citizens may volunteer (or be selected by lots if volunteers are insufficient, though this is rare and unenforced) to spend up to a year at a time serving as guards for various facilities such as the Chafa Temple or the great smithies. A year spent as a guardian is a common cultural practice for Guivoren and is a highly respected occupation, especially for young adults. It is a rare able-bodied Guivoren who has the luxury to “get soft” and cease daily battle drills or turns taken on watch for the community.
For national defense, there is the Guild of Protectors. Those who choose to dedicate their professional lives to the safety of Guivo may join this guild, which organizes regular patrols of the wilderness and borders throughout the Guivoc regions of the Utterends.
The various Guivoc military units are the only places within Guivoc culture where individuals may hold a great deal of authority over other individuals in a strict hierarchy. However, even here many rules are in place to prevent corruption or power-hoarding, and military rank is often determined by election or consensus, and relatively easy to strip from officers. A centralized command is authorized with unilateral decision-making abilities only when a threat to the Utterends is deemed to be of emergency status. During such a time period, a high duke (usually an experienced veteran with a reputation for tactical and logistical skill) is empowered to command all Utterends’ warriors for a clearly pre-determined, finite period of time. When the threat or duration passes, the Utterends’ military returns to its more typical localized state.
Major Threats
The Utterends themselves are extremely threatening, packed with monsters and things that can poison a person. This alone is enough of a threat to keep the Utterends eternally on its toes. Another threat would be the way the Xha’en Hegemony is sometimes able to harshly curtail travel and trade between the Utterends and the outside world. If this were ever to take place during a major crop failure, thousands of people could find the insular Green Warden elves the only thing standing between themselves and starvation — a chilling prospect indeed.
Should the Utterends’ chike population ever be convinced to organize and rally behind a single, clever leader, the Guivoc nation would be hard-pressed to defend its many tiny, mobile communities. Fortunately, the chike have thus far always been fragmented and — albeit wily — predictable in tactics, in much the way clever pack hunters can be. Their passing alliances with evil beings in the past have yet to extend all the way to obedience or loyalty.
Finally, one thing that would shake the Guivoc nation to its foundations would be the death of the Lord Dragon, for any reason. This is perhaps another reason why he prefers to make himself so hard to find.
Wilderness and Adventure
Due to the harsh environment and high prevalence of monsters, the Utterends’ population is unusually small for so otherwise healthy a community. Even humans seem to breed more slowly here, with mothers rarely producing a child more often than once every four to five years, for reasons only partially understood. Because of this, nearly all of the Utterends is wilderness, the only exceptions being the nation’s few permanent structures, and wherever a group of nomads is currently camped.
In general, the traditional nomadic routes are safer than other parts of the region, both because no population of monsters can gain a deep foothold there, and because the Guild of Protectors keeps the traditional routes better-patrolled than other parts of the Utterends. The most dangerous areas of the Utterends are the northwest and the coast.
The northwest region of the Utterends sees a larger influx of monsters wandering down from The Cauldron into the swamps and is also the area of highest chike concentration. In addition, the Mudspit Peninsula is partially submerged for half of each year, such that all the peninsula’s water is brackish and foul, and travelers unable to drink saltwater (as the Utterends’ species of chike are able to do) must pack enough water along to make the hundred-plus-mile trek across it.
The Utterends’ coast is bathwater warm for much of the year, but in addition to being muddy and stirge-infested, it is also quite popular among young gray dragons, for reasons unknown (especially since gray dragons typically prefer coastal hills and mountains to mud and muck). It is commonly believed that the Lord Dragon comes to shoo such interlopers away on a semi-regular basis, but no one knows why they keep coming back. Some believe there must be a large gray dragon population in The Cauldron, or even some heretofore undiscovered island off the coast that is covered in gray dragons. Whatever the cause, the Utterends’ coastline has a recurring baby dragon problem. Thus far, few juveniles or young adult dragons have been spotted (and none older), but even the little ones are dangerous.
Region
The Utterends
Controlled Territories
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