Wildhome

As close to a gateway into the Verdant Expanse as Sear will likely ever get, the shifter Households of Wildhome stubbornly assert their collective control over the wellward regions of the continent, though the internal borders shift endlessly with the ebb and flow of inter-Household warfare. Most outsiders consider them to be little more than dung-scented barbarians, though the veracity of that statement varies.

History

Once, the land that would be Wildhome was home to primitive tribes of humans, planted there by Liphan as he did with so much else of the world. What they did in the intervening centuries between then and the beginning of Wildhome is of limited interest. The humans survived in these lands, not thrived. They lacked the strength to do much more than that and if the goblinoids of the Verdant Expanse wished they could have wiped them out.
Eventually, the Year of the Mooncursed arrived, and therianthropes started to pop up en masse all across Sear. It only took a bit of accidental slaughter before the therianthropes became ostracized or outright hunted. Those who weren’t killed or dissected under the enchanted knives of the Archons made their way across the Great Funnel, where people were unwilling to pursue them. Most drowned when their makeshift rafts capsized in the currents, but a lucky few made it across. Though the exact cause of the Year of Mooncursed is unknown, studies of shifter and goblinoid folklore suggest that there has never been a case of spontaneous therianthropy in either living or ancestral memory. Interestingly, the Verdant Expanse appears to generate fewer therianthropes than the rest of Sear. Some suggest that the stagnant nature of ambient magic in the Expanse is somehow unconducive to such transformations, but a worrying trend of scholars 'getting lost' investigating this has stalled further research.
How the therianthropes managed to successfully integrate into the indigenous human population of what would become Wildhome is lost to history. The earliest mention of werecreatures among the human tribes comes from the lore of a goblinoid tribe known as the 'Breezebeech Tree' who described a combined hunt alongside what is now Household Mehalko, hunting a Tyrannosaurus Rex which had slain members of both groups.

"When into the clearing we stepped, the moon waxing full above, one among our companions then began to recompose his own self into the vicious likeness of a leering wolf, though no shaman was he. To the whooping cheers of his fellows he hurtled towards the beast, which gnashed and chomped the howling manbeast to seemingly no avail."

Excerpt taken from the bonfire recollections of the Shaman of the Breezebeech

As the goblinoids of the Breezebeech Tree learned, even the most dangerous creatures of the Expanse can do little to a pure therianthrope, which is an undeniable edge when most of the land's dangers come from hungry beasts. By the turn of the 18th Century, Wildhome stood on relatively equal footing with the forests of the goblinoids, even coming to a long-term 'peace' with their sourceways neighbours. Which is to say, they will not destroy one another for being Outsiders but anything else goes, from decades-long alliances to genocides, all determined by the individual tribe or settlement.

Society

Much of Wildhome’s culture is derived from their neighbours deeper into the Verdant Expanse, including their hatred of Outsiders, but some significant differences do exist. For one, leadership of a Household - the Wildhome term for any sort of community beyond one’s immediate family - may only be held by a true werecreature. It works much like the entrenched system of nobility in the Wards of the Archons, but in Wildhome there is a tangible property to one’s lineage and adoptions are more 'comprehensive'. The rest possess beastblood to varying degrees, a good portion of cases being diluted enough that they are functionally just humans with stronger base instincts.
There is no real consistency in how Households are managed, though there is a cultural bias towards those with martial might. This is perhaps unfair, but when the land you live on is more than ready to spit out creatures straight from the depths of Archon Nichelas’s fantasies on a whim, it becomes difficult to determine where necessity ends and bias begins.
Unlike goblinoids, who are known to establish multi-Tree confederacies appropriately called 'Forests', the Households will do no such thing, each preferring autonomy in all things and rejecting even nominal responsibility for the troubles of other Households. It is uncertain how the practice began, but in the present day it is mostly kept around out of pride; many Households will frequently make temporary alliances, but never frame it that way. The only time two Households unite is when one is being subsumed by another, and only after a hard-fought war that ends with the losing therianthrope leaders either dead or baring their necks in submission.
Another quirk of Wildhome is their reverence of silver. It would be easy to assume that a people who hold therianthropy in such high regard would detest the one natural material that can harm them, but that is in fact the exact reason they admire it so. When Households fight one another, their respective rulers will inevitably cross blades. Because not even their own claws and fangs can penetrate their impervious hides, silver is the only readily available way to make a fight between such individuals a duel for the ages and not a strangling contest. Additionally, the few demons summoned into Wildhome by deluded cults are more often than not vulnerable to silver. This has enshrined silver as a symbol of equality and justice in shifter culture, for, as far as they are concerned, it cut all things equally. Besides weapons used by the Household's best warriors, silver is used in charms, decorations, and is the only sort of coinage accepted in the barter-driven economy of Wildhome.
Views on Magic
Unlike many cultures that place a great deal of emphasis on martial prowess, Wildhome lacks an animosity for the arcane. The stagnant magic of the Verdant Expanse will take any excuse to express itself, and even more so in Wildhome where the activity of Archons and Dragons stir up the sediment, so to speak. This manifests in the mercurial climate fluctuations; the forest groves that uproot themselves and walk away; the mushroom that spreads its heat-resistant spores through a spontaneous and fiery detonation. All these and more unusual effects acclimatize the denizens of Wildhome to the mystical and fantastical. Things that would make a Bond from the Wards gape in awe are regarded as naught but a shift in the weather to a child of Wildhome. The inherent danger remains unchanged by the difference in perception, but that is splitting hairs. Practitioners of magic hold a position of esteem in Wildhome. They are considered dedicated Household warriors, but otherwise where they fit into the hierarchy of the Household depends, like everything else to do with Wildhome.
Given their environment, one might assume that druids and shamans would dominate Wildhome’s arcane makeup, but though the prevalence Goblinoid shamanism has certainly skewed things, they are not a mirror of their Sourceways neighbours. For starters, all types of magic are considered 'natural' magic, rather than simply that which holds sway over flora and fauna. Propped up by what others might call a warped understanding of nature, the shifters believe that as long as the magic has nothing to do with aberrations, it is natural in the same way that a dam built by beavers is natural.
Nevertheless, the influence of the goblinoids is ever-present, and many Households place great emphasis on druidic magic and its practitioners, fulfilling the same roles as their Tree counterparts. As the only individuals with actual patience, they must also grapple with the egos of the Household's most prominent therianthropes in order to prevent them from starting a civil war, with a frequency no Hobgoblin shaman would ever think was necessary.
Bards are a distant second for overall political influence, but by no means lacking in acclaim from the masses. Much of Wildhome adheres to the goblinoid approach to record-keeping, hence bards have no shortage of work. The presence of both witches and the Fey has opened up another niche for these individuals, considering the importance of wordplay in the matter. These bards act as 'lawyers', called upon for anything involving witches or Fey, from interpreting pacts with covens, to setting boundaries with a pixie village in a tree stump regarding who they are allowed to prank in a particular Household.
Though it is often hampered by a lack of their own written language, there exist quite a few wizards among the Wildfolk, especially when compared to the Wards where the ideal wizard population is considered by the Archons to be 'zero', excluding themselves. What they may lack in codified, organised education, they make up for in access to a surfeit of research ingredients and opportunities, where nature itself generates complex arcane phenomena to observe and document. This has led to many Wildhome-born wizards being grizzled veterans of magical trial-and-error, developing a sixth sense for when things are about to go wrong.
Finally, Wildhome has a unique relationship with witches, as the nature of Wildhome and the land it occupies in conjunction with a rather laissez-faire attitude to their existence offers ample opportunities to sustain their levy and powers. Every Household maintains a 'contract' with its regional coven or even individual witches should their power merit such attention. These contracts are often loosely defined to avoid either party trapping themselves into a one-sided agreement subtly enforced by the land itself latching on to the contract to give shape to its magic. As always, specific opinions vary, such as how some Households distrust the blatant compassion of White witches, but for the most part views on witches are as neutral as wizards. Indeed, only two kinds of witches, Far and Dark, tend to be shunned by the shifters, and this provides a showcase of how Wildfolk are likely to hold personal animosity above social taboo. Despite Far witches being gateways for aberrant energies, which should greatly offend Wildfolk sensibilities, they are not shunned or hated with nearly as much gusto as Dark witches. And not for moral reasons, no. Rather, when they appear in the oral histories of Wildhome, it is almost always as an antagonist to the Household whose stories are being told, and none so far have told any stories that run counter to this. So, Dark witches are hated more by loose association with a Household's ancestral enemy rather than moral compunction with the nature of their power.

Military

Fighting is, as one might guess, important to Wildfolk. Households were initially the same as the goblinoids, where the able-bodied members of the community were assembled into an ad-hoc army when conflict erupted, but the renowned exploits of Tybalt Yhen, a warlord of the now-dissolved Household Serato, managed to inspire a sort of mass military reform among his people. This is mostly due to Households' desire to emulate the man rather than any real desire to organise themselves. The leaders of the Households expanded their personal retinues into small armies, dividing them into individual 'Claws' as Yhen did, itself an idea borrowed from the Vortigernii. Their society is not capable of comfortably supporting standing armies, even ones as small as a Household’s Claws, hence a portion of them are always abroad, fighting for wealth and glory to send back, again, in an attempt to mimic Tybalt Yhen. This has contributed to what the shifters refer to as the Great Diaspora, where whole Households uprooted themselves and sought better prospects abroad. This has, whatever the fate of the original pioneers, spread the Shifter race all across the two shells, though never in the quantities one can find in Wildhome. They even made it to Sedden, centuries before the founding of the Sterling Fox Airway company that many 'Freeclaws' now work for as security in exchange for passage.
Deed-Names
Among mortals, there will always be those who feel the lure of ambition more than others. In Wildhome, this translates to a thirst for glory and personal honours, for these are synonymous with power in a society held together by the individual characters and reputations of their leaders. Few things in their society signal one’s achievements to others like a deed-name. Deed-names are given in the wake of momentous events, either by the master of a Household or the mass acclaim of one’s fellows, in the same way that bards tell tales of heroes' trials and triumphs, spreading their names far and wide. When the bearer of a deed-name speaks, people listen. For example, a warrior bearing a deed-name given for deeds in battle will often have several claws who revere her, and so a commander may delegate those forces to her to lead while they focus on other parts of the fight. Deed-names are essentially a representation of one's fame and reputation within Wildhome, that most valuable of currency - at least to them.

Founding Date

1000AF - 1200AF, depending on the source

Type

Geopolitical, Tribe

Demonym

Wildfolk

Government System

Tribalism

Power Structure

Autonomous area

Economic System

Barter system

Currency

While disinterested in minting their own coinage, they are always willing to accept silver coinage, valued by its mass.

Location

The Verdant Expanse

Neighboring Nations

• The Wagadu Forest

Housing Mechanics

Demand: Low
Land Quality: Squalid - Modest
Possible Dock: Water
Special Rules: The great importance of esteem and reputation in Wildhome decreases upkeep by increments of 25% for every level of renown above 'Unsung'. Those of 'Legendary' renown will receive 25% of their lands' upkeep as income in the form of tribute from those enamoured with their legend and those trying to get on their good side. Furthermore, those of at least 'Recognized' renown who build the 'Lodgings' building attract warriors drawn by your reputation who will help defend your land, who are Tribal Warriors as per the Monster Manual. Each 'Lodgings' building will provide a number of warriors equal to the number of ranks above 'Unsung' the character is, and for every 10 warriors, one becomes a Berserker as per the Monster Manual, as more experienced warriors begin to trickle in.