Chotrangi

The north coast of Numaire is barren rugged mountain country from which gelid gales blow angrily. Hail and rainfall patter the thatched roofs of whalers’ hovels, and wall icicles reach horizontally. Wedged between the terrible stormy sea and the cruel, chill mountains there is the remote municipality of Chotrang, where the royal banner of Duke Vammerid flaps half-mast and threadbare. Here the locals, who are so far sundered from any known race of humanity they are classified by their micromanaging, bureaucratic government as “second degree abhumans” whatever that means.
They are, by all means, identical to humans. Chotrangi are tall, broad-chested with defined temples. Their foreheads jut out so far that their squinty eyes are obscured by their shadow on sunny days. Umbarosque, the anthropologists say, was the primordial home from which their ancestors arrived. The reason behind the government’s particular categorization of the Chotrangi stems from a particular trait they possess which seems to benefit them very well considering their homeland’s climate, and that trait is ursine hirsutism. All youths by the age of fourteen are covered with a long shaggy coat of brown fur, and there is no skin left bare save for that around the eyelids and mouth.
Chotrang’s presence is distinguished in the kingdom of Numaire at large by stuffy bureaucrats who take for granted the municipality’s profuse contributions of bone meal and whale oil to the kingdom. Very few have ever seen a Chotrangi, as they have little interest in the wider world aside from what material wealth they can acquire from it, thus those who have seen have only seen their merchants, who oft rolling into town in a birch cart stacked high with frostbite-warding talismans and candles. They return to their hometowns bearing souvenirs ranging from trinkets to bruises and partially fabricated stories of urban rough-and-tumble.
Their capital is the crude city of Kor-Immed. Here there are thousands of low thatched houses built haphazardly around a towering fortress of spruce palisades and rough-hewn boulders, where howling bonfires, seven feet tall, in courtyards melt the thick frost and icicles which grow overnight. By late morning there is no stink stronger than that of whale blubber, burnt ashes, and rotting fish.

Culture

Common Etiquette rules

Though to many Numaireans this hairiness carries connotations of barbarity; of animalistic inhumanity, they are far more hygienic and meticulous with their fur than most Numaireans are. They spend much time grooming each other with whalebone combs as they huddle up to hearths, the fires of which are fuelled with whale-blubber and the occasional clipping, while they braid and ornament their full body beards with carven whalebone beads. As you could tell, they rely much on the blubber, flesh, and bone of whales, for which they set out on their modestly caulked balingers.

Common Customs, traditions and rituals

Whaling trips in the icy waters off Tringavid Coast are done with gratuitous gusto – once they surround any given whale they go, for lack of a better word, ape. They beat drums and blow horns. Ferocious roars silence the tossing of the waves, and the wine-dark sea is incarnadined thereafter. The moment they step ashore the whales are dismantled, and once the necessary butchery and salting is concluded, a most raucous feast commences. The warehouses are fattened once more.
The whalers set out and the shamans at home practice their time-tested ceremonies of fire-worship. A form of animism is practiced among these people. They revere countless ancestor spirits and patron deities, headed by a benevolent and maternal fire-goddess, who does battle against cruel nature spirits led by a cohort of unwholesome ice-demons.