Pony people of Zara: The Pony people of Zara

North and west of the Iceclaws, beyond the domain of the Frost Giant Jarls, is the great step of Zara. This vast chilly grassland is home to a civilization of Child sized humanoids, with hairy limbs and keen reflexes.   A hardy race, these people make a living as the tenders of large herds of wild and semi-wild ponies that live on the steppe.

These nomads have in recent years discovered a reliable pass through the Iceclaws, down into the peninsular. As a result they have opened the first land Trade route  between the east and the peninsular, which has brought tremendous new wealth to Highmarch, the Halflings and the kingdoms of the continental north west.

Halfling

The term halfling is the usual term used by these people to describe themselves, it means Free-People, and has strong positive connections with their nomadic life style, their refusal to engages in arable agriculture (which they distain), and their adherence to the Path of Freedom, their non-theistic religion.

It is, by coincidence, a term in several of the closely related languages of the northern peninsular that even though it has no recorded use before the arrival of the Halflings, sounds like it should be applied to them, as a description of their diminutive stature.

Culture and Religion
The Halflings as a culture do not worship gods, and in fact, they considers the idea that people believe in them at all somewhat quaint. That does not mean that they lack a religion, however. They are strick adherents to the Path of Freedom, a non-theistic religion which blends an ethical code, with economic theories and anarchist philosophy. The Path of Freedom is non-hierarchical and has no priesthood.

Laws are to followers of the Path of Freedom, a form of blasphemy; the idea that they should submit to accept the rule of another goes against the entire nature of the Path. Yet, the pony people of Zara experience no more and no less violence against the person or theft than most people living in the law bound nations of the peninsular. They are as a group largely self governing. While they have no central government or ruler, the people of Zara, are uncommonly communal. While they have a good deal of personal property, they do not accept the ownership of natural resources or land as a legitimate concept, for the Path of freedom asserts that the ownership of land is fundamentally impossible, and those who claim to are tyrants. This has caused more than a little social conflict between them and the humans of the penicular, as the people of Zara have travelled further into their lands.

Sex and Gender

The halfling are very much more sexually dimorphic than humans or elves. Males tend to be about six inches shorter, considerably more slender, and skittish. Their eyes tend to be further set appart, and their ears about half a big again as females.  Females tend to be stouter, tougher more gregarious, and less easily startled.

Before the formation of the way of Freedom, Halfling society was one of totalitarian rule by a now dead religion that enforced concreate gender roles and selective breeding in the Proto-halflings. Males are born to be scouts and craftpeople, while females defenders of hearth and home, as well as the hunters of large prey.

The pressures that once were placed upon the species, may no longer be present, but the gender roles of their society, are so deeply engrained as this point that it is rare that anyone within the society questions it. Despite a significant imbalance of power within the society, favoring females, the society is relatively benign and stable.

5e Setting Building: Making Orcs matter; or how to improve on Genocide FTW.

The border marches are about tough choices. Orcs don’t represent a tough choice. When I say Orcs here, I am in fact using them as a stand in for all sentient monstrous species who are bipedal, social, land dwellers. Creatures such as goblins, kobold and gnolls, as well as orcs.

The traditional approach to dealing with orcs and their ilk can be summed up as "committing war crimes against a sentient species because you happen to be in resource competition with them; while not considering it evil, because they are evil because we happen to want the same thing as us and happen to be less good at killing us than we are at killing them", or as I like to put it for brevity “Genocide, FTW.”

There is a school of thought that, orcs and other such social sentient humanoid foes should be treated as bad guys and that critical examination of their role in the game should not be undertaken because, as Charles Akins , author of the Dyvers blog puts it, “It's not that complicated. The monsters are evil because we're the good guys and fuck 'em because they're not us.”

That approach is fine. If people want pure escapism, and aren’t interested in examining such elements and the ways it mirrors the behaviour of European colonial behaviour by dehumanising and demonising indigenous populations, that is cool. There is for many people, a lot of fun to be had in that.

But what this approach to orcs certainly does not involve is tough choices. You turn up, you kick their butts and you save the village, everyone it totally okay with the massacre because they are the bad guys and that the end of it.

Not my idea of fun.

For great social justice (and you know, fun).

Clearly, Orcs and their ilk, need to be handled differently if they are going to be useful for the bordermarches.

For one thing, the whole turning a blind eye to Genocide FTW thing kind of urks me. There are those who will genuinely claim that it is morally good for characters to kill communities of orcs in games, because they are “evil”, and the PCs are good. There have been plenty of points in earth’s history when one group of hairless monkeys have massacred another such group with almost exactly such an argument. Ignoring that annoys me.

So what to do with them instead? The most obvious approach would be to not include them, but frankly I have included two whole-dimension for weird species of monster to inhabit, and such creatures run deep in DnD lore. A second approach would be to focus on developing orcs as a rich and vibrant culture, to challenge the way that people the players interact with them. But, honestly, if the players are going to choose to commit war crimes for fun and profit, getting them to face up to their characters actions is going to be much easier if their targets are humans, (or at least without the baggage of traditionally evil species.)

What is the best way to change this? Create a different story model for orcs, one that allows for the fun of a dungeon crawl, but adds interesting questions.

 

Orcs are the symptom, not the disease.

 

By Antoine Glédel CC BY-SA 3.0

In the border marches, orcs are fey creatures created as the by produce of underlying conflicts in the physical world. Wherever communities turn against themselves or their neighbours, orcs are spawned in the feyrealm. This process starts as a cave opening up into the depths beneath wilds. From these caves, known as orc blights, pour out scores of orcs, brutish and terrible, spilling across the fey realm, and from there into the material world. They are forces of id and low cunning, not truly sentient, but capable of cruelty and violence as the result of instinct.

This plague continues so long as the underlying conflict affects the community. Given the hidden nature of these conflicts, it is often difficult to resolve an ongoing orc incursion. No matter how many are killed, the problem persists However, adventurers who delve into the fey realm, are able fight their way into the heart of an orc blight, down into the caverns. There in the dark and rot, they may find the Blightheart, a physical object, from the material world, which signifies the underlying conflict. Blighthearts can be used to identify the cause of the conflict and overcome the orc blight.

Orcs have pig snouts! No, they don’t.  

As fey creatures, the exact details of the appearance of orcs vary wildly. Their tends to be consistency within a blight, but between blights there can be drastic differences. Their skin tones can be almost any colour, they can have pig snouts or tusk, they can appear oddly human. No two are exactly alike, and not two blights are the same. However, they always appear large and brutish.