The Ffolk of Erland · The Erlands

The original human inhabitants of the realm of Erland call themselves the Ffolk, or simply "the People." While they are known to the invading Northmen as Erlanders (Foreigners), the Dwarves and Elves of the region refer to them as the Fianna. Historically, the Ffolk were organized into a collection of small, often bickering kingdoms loosely unified under a figurehead High King. They are primarily a pastoral and agricultural society, valuing tradition and a peaceful existence, though they are capable of fighting with savage ferocity when defending their homes.

That peaceful history was shattered by the arrival of the Northmen from the distant north. The Strawheads viewed the Ffolk's ancestral worship of the Powers of the Earth as dark and amoral, and during their conquest they systematically targeted the spiritual heart of Erland, throwing down the standing stones and toppling the stone Idols that had dotted the landscape for generations. This widespread destruction created the region known today as the Valley of Broken Idols, a place where once-hallowed monuments now lie in wreckage. The Northmen believe these sites have been purged of their old power, though the Ffolk remember them as the true pillars of their heritage.

The spiritual backbone of the Ffolk is the Bard. When the standing stones were thrown down and open worship forbidden, the faith of the People did not die; it went into their songs. The Bard is at once historian, entertainer, and hero, a "favored son" of every community, but beneath that public role lies an older and more vital duty. The Bard is the keeper of the sacred ballads, and it is through their lyrics, sung in the old tongue and half-veiled in metaphor, that the rites of the Powers of the Earth and the names of the spirits of the land pass from one generation to the next. To the Northmen these are merely the quaint songs of a conquered people; to the Ffolk they are scripture. The old Druids have not vanished entirely, for a few still keep the rites in hidden circles, but theirs is a diminished part now, the open leadership of the faith long since broken and its survival entrusted more to the song than to the priest. Upon death the dead are return to the earth, buried in the old way, given back to the Powers from which all life rises.

Following the conquest the Ffolk have largely adopted the religion of their conquerors while quietly melding it with their own. Public worship may center on Northman deities such as the Earthmother, but private devotion lingers on the spirits of the land, a synthesis that lets the People keep their identity while living under Northman rule. The bridge that makes this possible is, fittingly, oral tradition itself. The Northmen hold their own Skaldic heritage sacred, and like the Bards, Skalds are students of history and legend who travel between communities to celebrate great deeds. Because the conquerors so honor the power of song, they have never thought to silence it, and so the very tradition the two peoples share has become the vessel in which the Ffolk preserve everything the Northmen tried to burn.

Other Races

A Dwarf: "The Fianna? Aggressive little buggers, always bickering over this and that. We had centuries of solitude before they built their little mud huts, and they've been pushing against our borders ever since. Better than those Strawheads, I suppose; at least the Fianna keep to themselves for the most part. But they are still far too loud and far too short-lived."
An Elf: "Humans? In my backyard. Outrageous!"
A Northman: "Just don't turn your back on them and you should be fine."
A Skald: "There's much to learn about them and their ways."

The Northmen of Erland

The Northmen are a strong and vital race who believe they were specifically chosen by the Futurus, the New Gods, to inherit the realm of Erland. They call themselves the Rotharings, after Rothari, the first Man to hear the New Gods and lead the people to the land promised them; in their law books and rune bound histories the learned render the name as Rotharingi. Rothari was the first Fylkir, the Priest-King who held both throne and altar, and he was succeeded by his son, Gorm the Old. But Gorm's sons and grandsons all died before him, and at his death the Fylkirship ended, never to be filled again, leaving the Northmen the scattered jarls and warlords they remain today. It is the Dwarves and Elves who know them as Northmen, and the conquered Ffolk who name them Strawheads. They crossed into Erland by land, a grueling migration that tested their endurance and solidified their belief in their divine right to the territory. That overland crossing remains a foundational part of their cultural identity, for they hold themselves a people of the road and the settled land, wary of deep water and the open sea.

Upon their arrival, the Northmen viewed the Ffolk's ancestral worship of the Powers of the Earth as dark and amoral. Believing the spirits of the land to be malevolent or primitive forces, they sought to purge Erland of these influences through systematic destruction, throwing down the standing stones and toppling the stone Idols that had stood for centuries. That act of conquest created the region now known as the Valley of Broken Idols. While the Northmen believe these sites have been cleansed by the light of the Futurus, they remain wary of those who still cling to the secret, "dark" ways of the Earth. They give their dead to the fire rather than the soil, that the rising ashes may journey to heaven and dwell with the Gods who chose them.

Yet the Northmen have not always followed the New Gods. Before the Futurus were taken up, the people of the north kept their own spiritual guides, the Shamans, who communed with the unseen and warded their kin against malevolent forces. Most Northmen now regard these old ways as superstition long outgrown, and the Shaman has become a fading figure, tolerated in the remoter steadings and viewed with unease by the Futurus faithful. That the Northmen condemned the Ffolk's reverence for the spirits while a shadow of the same practice yet survives among their own is an irony lost on most, and a perilous thing to point out to the rest.

The Northmen are a lettered people, and their learning is carried in the Runes, a scholar's script mastered only through long study in the halls of the learned. Runic is the medium of law, history, and scholarship: the clerics keep the codes and judgements of the Place of Judgement in it, and the Skalds set down the deeds of heroes and the wisdom of their land crossing ancestors in bound books, copied and kept so that no great tale or precedent is lost. To be rune-read is the mark of an educated Northman, and the libraries of these writings are largely closed to the Ffolk or other outsiders.

Northman society is organized into a hierarchy of Jarls (nobles), Karls (freemen), and Thralls (serfs), and they value personal honor, hospitality, and the strength of the blood feud above all else. In battle they prefer to ride before dismounting and continuing with foot combat with axes, spears, and hammers, supported by a shield wall, and a significant portion of their warriors can enter a Berserker frenzy, a state of mindless battle rage in which they ignore fear and receive unnatural strength from the Lord of Battles.

Other Races

A Dwarf: "Strawheads. Loud, grasping, and far too fond of the sound of their own boasting. They came down out of the cold convinced the whole valley was a gift left out for them. At least they build in stone now and again; I'll grant them that much, and not a word more."
An Elf: "Wonderful louder humans. The forest grows smaller every season."
A Ffolk: "We bow our heads in their halls and sing the New Gods' praises loud enough for them to hear. What we whisper after, in the dark, by the broken stones, that is ours, and they will never have it."
A Bard: "Cruel hosts and generous enemies, all in the same breath. But by the Powers, they know how to keep a tale alive."

The Elves of Erland

Long before either the Ffolk or the Northmen set foot in the realm, the Elves kept to the wild and watery reaches of Erland. They were not always so withdrawn. In ancient days they were many and far less wary, until the Goblin wars fell upon the valley and devastated them, breaking their strength and scattering the survivors. Out of that ruin the Elves emerged divided into two peoples who have little to do with one another to this day.

The Wild Elves are those who withdrew into the deep woods and the trackless fen and never truly came out again. The greatest of their tribes dwell among the drowned farmlands and reed choked meres of the great fen, where they have served as caretakers of the wetlands since before the memory of any human kingdom; others hold to the dense forests and shun all outsiders entirely. They patrol their borders mounted on giant owls, carrying lanterns lit with a pale, continual green flame, and they keep a careful distance from the humans who fish the marsh-edges. A Wild Elf encampment is led by a Speaker, who is as often a keeper of the old nature rites as a warlord, and the tribe's memory is held by its singers, who preserve in verse the deeds of every hunter and every loss. Their warriors are hunters first, archers and trackers who know the wild the way the Ffolk know their own pastures, and a roused tribe can field a startling number of them when its borders are threatened.

The Urban Elves are those who chose instead to live among the humans. Where their wild kin fled the world, these made their peace with it, settling in the towns and cities of the valley and dwelling there alongside the Ffolk and, later, the Northmen. They are a small folk now, long lived strangers in human streets, keeping their own counsel and their own quiet rites, yet woven into the life of the cities in a way the Wild Elves would find unthinkable.

Rarer than either are the Half-Elves, the issue of the long melding of Elf and human that began when the first Elves took up life among the Ffolk. Little of pure elven blood survives in them, but it surfaces now and again down the generations, a strain that marks them as neither one people nor the other.

To the Wild Elves, both human peoples are unwelcome latecomers, the Ffolk merely the first and the Northmen the louder of two evils, though even they recognize in the Ffolk a genuine reverence for the land that the Strawheads, with their broken stones and toppled idols, have done nothing but squander. The Urban Elves, generations settled among the humans, are not so quick to judge.

Other Races

A Ffolk: "You'll not see them unless they wish it, and they rarely wish it. But cross their marsh and you'll catch an arrow."
A Northman: "Ghosts on owls. We came for the land, not the swamp, so let them have their reeds and their fog."
A Dwarf: "Tall, proud, and forever sulking in their bogs. We don't trouble them, they don't trouble us. That is the whole of our friendship, and it suits us both."
A Bard: "They were singing the old songs ten lifetimes before the first of us was born. I would give a great deal to hear even one of them whole."

The Rite of Rebirth

The Rite of Rebirth is the Elven ritual of reincarnation, a transcendence open to all Elves by which an Elf sheds the mortal body and is reborn as an immortal Nature Spirit.

Performing the Rite. This is a 9th-level ritual. The Elf must first undergo a spiritual purging at a major Place of Power, such as an ancient grove, prepared at a cost of 200,000 gp, with a further 200,000 gp spent on the rare sylvan essences the Rite consumes. At its culmination the Elf must make a saving throw versus Death. On a success, the body dissipates into sylvan energy and the Elf is reborn as a Nature Spirit. On a failure, the soul is obliterated, beyond the reach of any power short of a miracle or a wish.

The Nature Spirit. An Elf who survives the Rite becomes an Incarnation, an enchanted creature no longer bound by mortal limits. Its lifespan is indefinite, and it need not eat, drink, or sleep. It sees in lightless dark to 90 feet, possesses permanent telepathy, and may become incorporeal at will. It is immune to mundane damage and to poison.

Sustenance. A Nature Spirit lives not on food but on devotion, and must consume arcane or divine power equal to 6% of its XP value each day. A spirit that goes unfed loses 1 Hit Die per day, sinking at last into a deathless, incorporeal torpor.

Advancement. Freed of the Hit Die limits that cap living Elves, a Nature Spirit advances without ceiling, gaining power either by earning experience in the ordinary way or by consuming surplus divine power at the rate of 1 XP per 1 gp of value.

The Spirit's Form. The Judge sets the spirit's final shape according to the deeds and character of the Elf in life, and it must take one of three forms:

Animal. A great predator or noble beast, such as a great wolf or brown bear. The spirit fights with the animal's natural attacks but keeps its own Hit Dice and class powers.
Magical Animal. A legendary creature of the wild, such as a pegasus, griffon, or unicorn. This was Valarian's path.

Sentient Tree. A mighty plant-creature, such as a galdrtré or treeherder. It takes a tree's appearance and its bonus to surprise while rooted, yet may tear itself free of the earth and move when it must.

The Dwarves of Erland

The Dwarves are the eldest of the realm's peoples, and they will remind you of it. More than two thousand years ago a great Dwarven kingdom spanned the mountains that wall the valley. It was no enemy from without that broke it, but the Dwarves themselves: a long and ruinous civil war over the Kingship of the Mountain tore the clans apart, and when the goblins later came down out of the Wyrmsmokes in their wars, they fell upon a people already shattered into feuding holds. Though that realm is long fallen, its bones endure: the roads, the bridges, the deep cisterns, and the dawn-road causeways that humans still travel without ever wondering who cut them. The Dwarves who remain are no longer that empire, nor even one people. They are of two kinds. The Hill Dwarves keep a scattering of hillocks in the mountain foothills, a hillock being a lesser hold or hamlet, trading with the valley folk when it suits them and keeping their own counsel the rest of the time; the holds of Hammerfast are theirs. The Mountain Dwarves hold to the high and the deep, fewer and far more secretive, the truest heirs of the old kingdom and the buried halls it left behind.

A hold is ruled by its clanlord and defended by elite household guards, with a wider militia of axe-bearing warriors and clan-priests that can be mustered when the mountains stir. Their wealth is in stone, metal, and the matchless work they call Craftdwarfship, and their halls are far richer than their isolation would suggest. Among every clan there is a stonesinger, a keeper of lineage and lament who sings the deeds of ancestors much as the Bards and Skalds of the human peoples do, one more thread in the realm's shared reverence for the spoken word.

The Dwarves regard both human peoples with weary tolerance. The Ffolk they consider loud, short-lived, and forever crowding against ancient borders, though at least content to keep to themselves; the Strawheads they trust still less, for all their boasting and grasping. A Dwarf will trade with either, fight beside either if the threat is large enough, and forget neither slight nor debt for a hundred years.

Other Races

A Ffolk: "Hard folk, and fair in their hard way. Strike an honest bargain and a Dwarf will hold to it long after you and your grandchildren are in the ground."
A Northman: "They build well, I'll grant the stunted beggars that. A Dwarf-made bridge will bear a longship's worth of warriors and never groan."
An Elf: "Always digging, always counting. But they were good neighbors once, in the years before humans came, and the memory of that is not nothing."
A Bard: "Ask a Dwarf about the old kingdom in the mountains and watch his eyes change. There are whole histories buried up there that no human will ever sing."

Death and the Heartstone

Dwarves are creatures of stone as much as of flesh, and this shapes both how they die and how they may return.

Turning to stone. When a Dwarf is slain, his body turns to stone (this requires a save vs. Paralysis or any bladed weapon risks being trapped in stone as well). He cannot be brought back by restore life and limb; instead, Petrification must be cast upon him in reverse to call him home. Short of that, a fallen Dwarf still benefits from ordinary healing, such as cure light injury or a ring of regeneration.

The Heartstone. A Dwarf lives some 900 years. One who dies in his prime simply turns to stone, but one who dies of old age crumbles swiftly to dust, leaving behind a single large red gem where his heart once lay. This is a Heartstone, and within it the Dwarf endures.

Rebirth in a golem. A Heartstone can return its Dwarf to life, after a fashion. Set into a Golem whose Hit Dice equal the Dwarf's experience level, the Heartstone wakes, and the Dwarf lives again in the body of the construct. He keeps all his class features and goes on earning experience as before. He cannot, however, inhabit a Golem of greater Hit Dice than his current level; should he rise in level afterward, he may be moved to a stronger Golem in turn. A Heartstone will not wake a Golem beyond the Dwarf's current level even when a larger one stands ready, for the bond is bought with experience, not gold: the Dwarf must have earned the levels to command the body before it will stir for him.

Cost. The expense of the rite is the building of the Golem, made using the standard rules for designing and manufacturing constructs. Any Dwarf of 9th level or higher may build one. The base cost is 2,000 gp per Hit Die of the Golem, and so per level of the Dwarf, plus the cost of whatever special abilities it is given, with research costing as much again. A 9th-level Dwarf needs a 9 HD Golem, a 12th-level Dwarf a 12 HD Golem, and so on.

The Southrons

To the Northmen, Southron is a catch-all for every people that is not Northman. It once took in the Ffolk themselves, before the name Erlander stuck, and now falls mostly on the folk of the lands along the Wyvernwatch Mountains, among the Dwarven settlements, and in the greater Rothari city of Muntberg. They are chiefly of two kinds.

The more numerous are the Nabatu, who worship a vast company of gods and goddesses, foremost among them Duros, Lord of the Mountains. The Nabatu are fast friends with the Dwarves, who name them the only Mannish Dwarf-friends, and some hold that it was the Nabatu who raised the city of Red Rock. The Dwarves swear it is so, and will quarrel with any who says otherwise.

The others are the Oscani, a collection or urban tribes bound together in a loose confederation under an Assembly, called the Oscani League. They are the most warlike of the common Southrons, having beaten their neighbors and swelled the League by conquest, and of all Southrons they are the likeliest to be found selling their swords. The Oscani look on the Nabatu growing wealth as reason enough for war, but a long campaign in the mountains and deserts, with the Dwarves likely to take a hand, has stayed them for now.

Gnomes and Halflings

Two lesser peoples share the valley alongside the humans and the elder races.

The Halflings dwell in an isolated shire to the east of the valley. They are governed by a hereditary Reeve, whose authority descends from a now-defunct Jarldom that granted the Halflings their fief long ago, so that their independence rests today on the charter of a vanished overlord none remain to enforce or revoke. They are renowned vintners, and the wines of the shire are the finest in the region.

The Gnomes, or Petty Dwarves as their cousins call them, are one of the Seven Clans of the Dwarves. The Dwarves themselves stay mute on the subject, but from what humans have gleaned the Gnomes are something of an embarrassment to their more stalwart kinsdwarves.

The Languages of Erland

Fian — The speech of the Ffolk.

Drûic — An ancient ritual tongue used in the secret rites of the Powers of the Earth, though few who now sing it remember its true and terrible origin. Hidden from the Northmen and kept alive in fragments by the Bards, woven into the lyrics of their oldest ballads.

Norsk (Common) — Brought down out of the north; now the language of law, lordship, and the marketplace.

Runic — The scholar's tongue of the Rothari, mastered only through long study. The medium of Northman law, history, and learning, set down by clerics and Skalds in bound books. Known only to the educated and powerful.

Elvish — The ancient tongue of the Elves, old beyond human reckoning and almost never shared with outsiders.

Dwarfish — The clan-speech of the Dwarves, used for the true business of the holds. Dwarves trade in Fian but keep their own among themselves.

Gnommish - A cant spoken by the Gnomes.

Hobniz - The language of Halflings. Based on the Fian of the Ffolk.

Nabatu - The language of the Nabatu.

Oscani - The language of the Oscani League.