In-Depth Look: Clanners
OLD WAYS
Ahmahdee, blazing disc of fire, life giver and father of all people, stood at the zenith and smiled down on his creation. The surrounding sky blazed in the intense blue that marks especially dry and hot days. Here on the plains to the east of the cragged Westdarfur Mountains, that was no rare occurrence. Beyond the zigzag line on the horizon, a dark cloud front towered, lightning flashing silently, uniting heaven and earth in tremendous discharges.
Chisulo listened to the quiet, waiting for the thunder, for the beat of the heavenly drum. However, there was only the soft whispering of the grass, a sea of blades as tall as a man, swaying in the rhythm of an unheard melody. The air was shimmering with heat. Insects chirped. A concrete pipeline parted the green ocean like a sea snake, only its cracked back breaking the surface. The proud Masai sat on its crest, savoring the quiet and sublimity of this place. With eyes closed, he gazed inwards onto a chaotic mix of burning passion, indignation, and pride. His eyelids twitched, and searing hot tears welled up. His soul cringed in shame and uneasiness, fighting through a maze of old traditions, searching for a way out that thousands before him had not found. For a moment, his spite gained the upper hand and washed away his desperation, luring him with a tricky way to freedom: fleeing to the Anubians in the East or to the Neolibyans in the North with his beloved. They would never find him. They would not want to find him. He would be disgraced, as would his wife. His mother, who had always looked kindly upon her third son, would spit on him and turn away. She would not be able to shave his head in the Eunuto ritual, would not see her son become one of the elders.
Once again, the decision was made. The thin braids he had fashioned his long hair into trembled with the rhythm of his breathing. The sun had not yet touched the mountain range in the distance when an athletic young man clad in red cloth and adorned with colorful wooden beads and knotted cords returned to his village. Clutching his spear made of light birch wood tightly, he carried his AK 74 strapped to his back. He gazed straight ahead. Back to the community to which he owed everything.
SURVIVORS
The Eshaton killed indiscriminately and forced those it spared into the shelter of bunkers, basements, and caves. There, they waited. Those who wanted to survive stayed with their families or joined a group: loners stood no chance. “You only have two eyes, and they are both looking to the front”, the elders said. “You need someone to watch your back.”
The people closed ranks. They gave up their old lives and allowed their instincts to take control. They looked to the fire, used the day, and hid by night. They listened to the stories of their elders, became trappers, and learned how to use lead pipes against opponents. Primordial cries sounded through the ruins.
The individual lost ground and became one with the Clan. Everyone had a role to play: in the first years after the Eshaton worth was dictated by ability, later, when the cultural decline began, by birth and sex. Those who wanted to make an exception endangered the Clan. Survival was hard enough, why bother trying to deal with deviants? Punishment was both quick and strict. They survived the Eshaton, HIVE, the dark decades, and the era of the beast. They had reached the lowest point of civilization, tasted the waters of Lethe, and yet had risen again.
The Clans grew. They allowed themselves to create value systems, at first only directed toward survival and their Clan’s strength, later incorporating the weak and the old. Cultures crystallized around these ideas. Faith and ideology were not far away, distinguishing themselves from other Clans and strengthening the links within their own group through religion and worship.
The Clanners no longer saw themselves as survivors. That was such an old word. In the meantime, they lived. They had left the dark so far behind. Those from Toulon now considered themselves Touloni, a family with a long tradition working as smiths called itself the Steel Masters, a Clan that was harvesting stones in the ruins called itself the Masons. People got their identity and their names from their place of birth or their work.
NOMADS
Right after the Eshaton, dust covered the land and roiling black clouds chased across the sky. The vegetation had suffocated, ash-covered tree stumps only sporadically peeking through the layer of dirt. The people searched the ruins, climbed into old warehouses, and looted canned goods. They wandered on when the region had nothing more to offer. Only nomads could survive those days.
Many Clans still wander the land. In East Borca, they follow giant herds, separate young animals or hurt old ones and hunt them to death. One cadaver will feed the Clan for weeks, and its fur will warm them for months.
The circle of the seasons, the routes of the herds and the strength and virility of their women and men determine the Clans’ life. The Clans know how to interpret the wind and the clouds and read the future from a dead bull’s innards. They consider Bygone letters a sort of magical language that only a few chosen ones may know – usually the Clan’s Shamans. They treat special places and items with careful respect, for who knows if good or evil spirits inhabit them? If a Chronicler would make St. Elmo’s fire burn across his pauldrons and preach the global conflagration to the Clans with his Vocoder blaring at full blast, they would consider him a god.
If only they knew.
SETTLED DOWN
From Noret, wild wheat has been spreading in the Rain’s riverbed. Every few years, it conquered another distributary, and the billowing gold stretched further into the land. It was a blessing for the people. They harvested the corn, ground it to flour, or sowed it in fields next to the riverbed. Then, they settled close to the fields.
The wheat was highly resistant and undemanding, thriving in the cold close to the Ice Barrier just as well as in Pollen’s dry climate. The Spitalians tried to analyze the strain and found similarities to the Bygone Triticale, but nothing conclusive. The Rain wheat was something special, something new. They didn’t like that. For it could only mean that it was a Primer aberration, and almost everyone was eating it. However, all tests proved that even though spores could afflict Triticale its basic form was spore-free. Finally, the Spital certified the Rain wheat.
Hundreds of sacks are sold to faraway places as seeds every year. Tired of wandering and oppressed by the Cults, the nomads try their hand at farming. They settle next to bodies of water or close to aqueducts, staking their claims and working the land. Others gather around legendary Bygone buildings or become powerful by occupying some old warehouse. Some unite and found villages. Smiths, potters and weavers settle down. Dynasties arise.
Rules of succession are devised, laws are made. Rules and prohibitions steer life. “You want to marry a Ferropolite? Forget it, son.“ Welcome to civilization.
SAVAGES
In spite of all efforts, common decency is rare in the wastelands. It can only be found where Judges or Hellvetics have tread paths in the dust. Beyond them, in the unexplored territories, anything is possible. For centuries, Clans whose grasp of humanity has suffered dearly through ongoing incest have been living in the shadows of civilisation. For the Spitalians, these wild Clans could make an interesting field of research, for they still retain some Bygone blood undiluted by inbreeding with a large gene pool for generations.
However, these savages do not cooperate.
Instead, they are very dangerous. Their Shamans, Chieftains, or Founders are hulking figures who can unite the whole incestuous Clan into one group bristling with weapons with one shout. They kill anyone who approaches them and devour the bodies. They are like animals, greedy and wild, unfettered by any cultural values. They sleep with rats, snarl at Gendos, and determine their ranks through bloody battles. They are not good neighbors. When they are hungry and leave their valleys, the good settlers bar their huts, call for the Anabaptists and grab their spears. None shall escape!
The settlers’ outlook is biased by centuries of conflict. Every Clan knows its own stories of cannibals, screaming savages whose skin is painted white with dirt and who carry glass daggers. The savages broke into huts, slashed women’s faces and throats and stole children. The elders still weep when they talk about the village warriors’ retribution and how they found only bloodstained spits next to burned campfires and gnawed bones. No one begrudges them a certain distrust towards strangers.
Only very few of the savages are cannibals, though. They are all marked by their distance from the large civilizations. Some have lived for centuries unmolested by Judges and Spitalians, having seen nothing but their valley’s steep slopes and their ancestors’ bunkers. They were happy with the isolation. However, others watched the large cities’ sea of lights and smoking chimneys from the hills, pressed tightly to the ground. They were afraid. The people down there were aggressive and too quick to draw their weapons. Their language was gibberish, they usually shouted strange words as they waved their pointy metal sticks and their fire-throwers in their direction. The savages retreated to convene and wait. Only great need or great injustice would turn their fear into hatred. Then not even the greatest of cities would be safe anymore.
POWER AND INFLUENCE
The Anabaptists started out as a small group of faithful gathered around the alleged Messiah called Rebus. The Judges started out as a handful of simple people following in the footsteps of a man who wanted to bring some justice back into the world – over the years, the Cults gathered followers, infected the masses with their ideology, and shuddered under attacks that made power structures creak and hierarchies grow. The pains of growth have long since passed.
For some Clans, they are yet to come.
Extended families in the wasteland unite, groups with similar ideologies join. They seal their pacts with a shake of hands, a marriage, or a toll. They grow and take shape in the Cults’ slipstream. Their influence grows as they expand their territory. It is not blood that unites Clans anymore: they share common goals or kneel before the same god. They dislike the word “kin” now, seeing themselves as a Clan. The Cults meet this development with skepticism.
For them, a Clan is nothing more than a new token in the battle for domination, to be won over and controlled by flatteries or resources. Already some speak of an era of rebirth: the rebirth of the Clans.
BORCA
Western Borca is clutched in the firm hands of the Judges, who have expanded the Protectorate with hammer and gunpowder and erected their Judgement stones in every settlement and farm. At the same time, the Anabaptists’ aqueducts crisscross wide areas, speaking of Cathedral City’s dignity and benevolence. In the Alpine foothills, the Hellvetics have dug in, guarding the trade routes as they have for ages. The Clans ruled by these Cults have tolerated the paternalism for a long time. The Judges and Anabaptists chased all the scum from their territory to a place where no hails of lead and no walls of blades awaited.
Before, those who fancied themselves dressed in Justitian fashion took hand-rolled medicine globules and thanked Rebus the Baptist for every healthy downpour. The people looked upon their settlements with pride, saw themselves as Ferropolites, Earfielders, Leadfielders, Liquans. The young ones pined for Justitian, dreaming of being legal citizens of this vibrant metropolis. They scratched lichens from the Judgement stones and brought a soup made of boiled roots to their local Judges on a daily basis until the fat and lazy Judges walked next to their mares because they couldn’t mount them anymore. They listened to the Judges’ breathless accounts of giant battles against the Cockroach Clan and heard them scoff about the foolish Exalters who still drank water from their poisoned wells. They even laughed at the bad jokes. They did not listen to their elders anymore.
Now, something is stirring. The Cockroaches never disappeared. They only fled deeper into the Bygone tunnels. They lurk again in the shadows of the seas of debris, attacking as swift as lightning only to disappear back into the underground with their prey. The Exalters confront Justitian as they did before. The Chroniclers had to use their full repertoire of infamy and underhanded tactics to keep the Enemoi Clan away from ancient stores of knowledge, but suddenly the Judges are tied up in the battle against the Cockroaches and harshly sweep aside the technology-obsessed Cult’s pleas for help.
Praha’s fall does the rest. The Clans and kinsmen remember their roots, find their way back to their old pride. The elders’ words are listened to once again. They have never needed Justitian, and they never will. Revenge is such an ugly word, such an uncivilized feeling. Even so, just look at those complacent blubberbutts with their dusty waistcoats and floppy hats…
The Hellvetics had not fared much better. The Clans in the cantons rose up, raged against their former compulsory allies in neighboring cities, and lost themselves in endless trade wars. Hellvetica watched this for years. Couldn’t the people have marched into a blessed future thankfully – and more importantly, together? Would that have been so difficult?
The Commanders of the Territorial Region convened. They had seen enough. There was no need for discussion anymore. They called their soldiers back into the mountain, leaving the thankless bunch to reality. Reality was happy to oblige, for it had always been lurking at the fringe of perception on snow-covered peaks and passes. Like an avalanche, it hit the lowlands in the shape of the hordes of expelled valley Clans and mountain tribes. The people in the Swiss heartland had to fight for their homes for the first time, forced to arm themselves with pointed spears instead of harsh words.
The cities hate each other and have largely turned into military camps. However, they do not attack each other. While the citizens of Bern, Lyss, and Worb are united by a tradition of animosity, the enmity towards other cantons runs much deeper. However, the savages from the mountains are even worse. Maybe they all have more in common than they care to admit.
Beyond the Reaper’s Blow in East Borca, the shockwaves rushing outwards from Praha’s fall can be felt much more strongly. Nomads still roam the conifer forests and follow the giant herds on their north-south route. However, large Clans are moving towards Praha from the north. Everyone wants to see the city that has been hidden from the public eye for so long, and once they are there, they might as well just grab something as a recompense for the long journey. There have been non-stop skirmishes and full-blown family feuds tearing apart the land ever since the city’s fall: Praha seems to have become much more dangerous.
For a long time, Osman was considered untouchable. The Jehammedans stuck together and tilled the land wisely and justly. The farming Clans had no reason to complain. The unrest now comes from another direction. Over the centuries, the Osmani had an army of foreigners, the Janites, that now consists of hundreds of militarized Clans. They ride out every day to cull the savages in the area in bloody skirmishes. They die for Osman, giving their lives in the grim knowledge that by doing so, they buy a place in the Janites’ ranks for their children. However, the Iconides mistrust them. Praha has taught them a lesson.
FRANKA The Frankan Clans live far away from large Pheromancer strongholds like Souffrance. Many families returned home years after the Eshaton to rebuild what was rightfully theirs. Those estates in the overgrown or swamped ruins are now several centuries old. Many of the venerable buildings are still in good repair, but others look more like a cavern. The floors have collapsed under the weight of time, and ivy and grass cover the cavities. The Clanners make the best of it. They fight the humidity with campfires, cut down the brush, and live on fish and damp grasses. All of them can survive in the swamps with nothing but a spear. They use lakes and rivers to hide from swarm and Pheromancer alike.
Some Frankan Clans have retreated to the rivers. They live on rafts or boats tied together and watch the Aberrants’ movements from a safe distance. They do not need to fear ant swarms or the storms of wasps. It seems that perhaps pheromone markers cannot travel through the air over running water.
Few Clans stay clear from the conflict with the Pheromancers. Fewer even have this option. Those who still can fight the intruders – anointed with Marduk oil they creep into the Ziggurats and breeding chambers to destroy the Queens or blow up the methane vents. The Spital helps them by getting EX, other drugs, and detonation cartridges into the frontier settlements. Smuggler Clans transport them inland.
In Briton, the situation is desperate. The Anabaptists’ and Spitalians’ supply trains are not coming in, so they lack food and personnel, while termites are busy building vent after vent. The doctors have been training Clans who have lost their homes to the Pheromancers as deputy Spitalians. They carry Splayers salvaged from the bodies of fallen Famulancers’ and are given bag-like gas masks from local stores, for which they are called “Grenouilles”: frogs. They see their home trembling under masses of insects, watch the vents growing on their territory. No one fights harder than they do.
The gases heavy with pheromones drift to the northeast, into the Stukov. They cover the desert, sink in, and change. Under the salt crust, new life grows – the engine of evolution starts. Here, the Clans eat Dust Worms and Desert Clams, creatures the Spitalian probably wouldn’t find even in their textbooks. Their hunters are as implacable as the climate, but still they deal with the Spitalians, exchanging Flying Leeches, Stukov Scorpions, Rift Centipedes, and Husk Spiders for drugs and weapons.
POLLEN
The constant change of the environment, the withering tundra, the ever-present gossamer, and the cold all force the Pollners into eternal wanderings. Wherever they stop, they fight the ground for food: they catch insects in pits, they scratch mosses from rocks, or they dig roots from the ground. Anything that can be cooked is edible.
However, for some years now, the land has been changing. The rock underfoot trembles, snow is melting in circular formations, the ground is feverishly hot. Spore fields rot, replaced by gaudy green vegetation growing along fractal paths. Fruit hangs fully and seductively from the trees of this awakening paradise. Danger lurks, though: One tiny scratch and they burst and cover the plucking hand with a hot, grainy sap. Some Clans go looking for those Fractal Forests. They harvest the fruit and sell it to the Anabaptists’ emissaries at the Alpine passage of Ternitz.
The Apocalyptics have witnessed this game long enough now. Pollen has always been the Mother of Raven’s pasture, and she cannot remember having given a concession to these Clans. Strictly speaking, she has never given a concession to anyone. But what does that matter? The migratory birds are gathering. When they come across a Clan in the Fractal Forests, they descend upon it like a murder of hungry crows. However, the Pollners have been stoically chewing lichens for centuries, have defied the cold, the Spore Beasts, and the Biokinetics, and they do not plan to run. War cries echo from the woods – the battle between primal and trained brutality has just begun.
The Spitalians are somewhere in between. Their Preservists burn down the Fractal Forests wherever they can find them, decrying them as a strange Primer function. Neither the Clans nor the Apocalyptics can tolerate this.
Although the Ice Barrier devours several feet of land every day, some Clans have survived up north. None of them consist of more than 30 people today, but they likely all come from a Clan shattered some 300 years ago. Indicative of that fact, they all wait for the Horse Oracle, an enigmatic three-faced figure, to arrive. They hunt and dig for old stores abandoned by their ancestors. The Westja Clan is extraordinarily good at that, and the Clan actively trades with the Spitalians in snow-laden Danzig.
Resident Clans are rare in Pollen. The largest Clan is the Wroclaw confederation, led by the Piast and his Druschinniks. Dozens of Clans had to bend their knees to him in order to enter the inner ring within the city walls and profit from his Eternal Oasis. The Africans are using Wroclaw as a starting point on their hunt for Biokinetics and have stationed a Surge Tank next to the entrance as a show of good will and trust, so the city is considered unassailable. Still, Praha’s fall terrified the Wroclaw Clans. Where will the hordes go when there is no loot left?
BALKHAN
Balkhan’s people are strident and irritable, and the same is true for its Clans. They never liked the fact that strangers make trouble in their land. Spitalians blew up Dushani rock formations and thus brought screaming madness to whole provinces. The Jehammedans drove families away from their land and into their war against the Africans, armed only with hope and a rake. Palers milked villages until their inhabitants fled into the Voivodes’ arms, gaunt and wearing nothing but rags.
This stops now.
It began in Sofia, over two winters before the fall of Praha. A nameless man joined Voivode Wiktor’s henchmen, fighting his way to the top, and became his right-hand man. On the streets, the people bowed to him. When he reached the end of the career ladder, he asked Wiktor for a meeting. They ate together, and after the meal, the man approached his Voivode, embraced him, kissed him, and broke his neck. From this day on, he called himself Karakhan, the black leader. The Balkhani laughed about the boisterous name. However, they soon learned that sometimes a name carries a message.
Karakhan was a sensitive tactician. Within one year he had chased the Spitalians from Sofia, smoked out the surrounding bunkers, and made even the Jehammedans swear loyalty to him
Now, Karakhan and two other Voivoide Clans rule Eastern Balkhan with an iron fist. The Cults have become supplicants who must justify their every step to the Voivodes. Those who do not obey are sold into African slavery – a fact that has curbed the conflict between Balkhani and Africans.
Secluded from the eternal power struggles, there are still Clans living in the mountains: cranky, frugal people distilling their own Slivovitz, living in quarry stone houses, and welcoming every stranger as long as he shows respect. However, there is no peace here, either. Some of those Clans have been warring for centuries. One wrong word or a wrong name uttered in a merry circle, and the mood changes abruptly. Children learn young never to talk about their neighbors.
HYBRISPANIA
The Castilian high plateau is the heart of ancient Hybrispania. The Clans are just as old, and all insist on their counterparts knowing this. They cultivate their family trees and carefully mark the branches the African invaders hacked off – the people of conquerors bearing the counterattack with stoicism. The wind of pride blows through their castles.
However, many of the ancestral homes are empty, and even in the inhabited ones dust settles in many rooms. Again, the Iconides have incited the young ones with bluster and insinuation. “Do you know what the Scourgers do to your women? They take the children by the legs and smash them against the tree, so for them, it is over quickly. But the women…” No one can elude this without soiling the family honor. Young men and women march south at the side of the Swords of Jehammed to confront the invaders. For months, the fighters live in the jungle, setting traps, lurking, attacking, and retreating.
Over the decades, their tactics barely changed – until the Warpage arose and devoured Clans and Scourger units alike. Now, there are new rules, ones that do not necessarily help the Guerreros.
When the fighters attack the Scourger emplacements in the south, they have no room to retreat – the Warpage is at their backs, pushing them on. Only the bravest and craziest dare to go deep enough into this Pregnoctic phenomenon to shake off pursuers. The Jehammedans do not care. Those with faith in their hearts will find a way. They keep whipping up the Clans and driving them south. Should they give up their motherland that easily?
Some say yes. They live in the Warpage, unknown to Scourgers and Jehammedans alike. On the high plateau they have been erased from the chronicles, considered lost. It is almost true. They fled before they were ground between the Cults, mothers and fathers who did not want to sacrifice their children on the altar of war. They have explored their part of the Warpage, know places where reality flickers granulously and tastes of mint. Sometimes they help lost people, Africans and Hybrispanians alike, by marking their path back to the war with rocks.
They never show themselves.
PURGARE
The Filaments eat into the land and shatter space and gravitation. Creatures with needle maws beset by ticks and lice scuttle through the force fields. Suddenly, they open their blind eyes wide. War cries and the sound of horns greet them. People with swords and Spitfires come racing towards them, their eyes hot with Elysian fire. The final battle has begun, and Purgare is the battlefield.
This is not about emanations or faith anymore: The Psychokinetics are no abstract threat to tell stories about around the campfire, everyone laughing heartily afterwards. No. The Aberrants breed behind the Apennines’ mountain ranges. Night would have long since conquered Purgare if the Anabaptists did not give their lives on a daily basis.
Family after family has joined the Anabaptists, and the largest ones have divided Purgare amongst themselves. They aid the Orgiastics with scouts or give the basic means of life to their hordes.
Even if most of the Purgan families firmly back the Anabaptists, they have conserved their internal strife and struggles. They believe in honor and land. One disrespectful word could lead to a fight that starts a circle of revenge and counter-revenge. The heads of the families may stop these feuds via decree – as long as they can keep face doing so.
However, there are deviants, too. Those who do not cooperate with the Anabaptists are pushed to the fringes of society – and off the inhabited areas. The few independents retreat to the Apennines or take a chance in Western Purgare’s sulfuric deserts. They keep their distance from the Nox Crater, but they do not fear single Psychokinetics. Every family member knows what to do when encountering one: the younger children act as bait, the older ones determine the size of the force fields and Filaments with sticks, some light fires to chase away the swarms of fleas, while others hack their way to the epicenter and kill the Psychokinetic. Anabaptists unwilling to return to their camp without a prize are more than willing to buy the Aberrants’ heads.
AFRICA
The African Clans look back on a rich tradition. They are completely self-contained and live a life remembering their ancestors, far away from the coastal and oil settlements. They sacrifice milk and honey at rocks and trees to pacify the spirits, and they treat their white slaves well – nourishing food and a strict hand are enough.
However, the cities beckon with gaudy fun and adventure. Day by day, the tribes lose their young adults to melting pots like Tripol. The Psychovores get the rest. The elders resist. They involve the young people more strongly, let them lead the hunt, give them whites to beat, or concubines to enjoy. Old rules are re-interpreted and defended against the coca-intoxicated elders. However, even one dead sparrow hawk on the village square can be considered a bad omen and thus destroy any progress, lead a Clan back to its old ways, and ossify in tradition.
However, the loss of the young is not the only danger. The Psychovores spread and steal habitats from humans. Scouts report that the Psychovores make room for humans even deep in the jungle. Giant circular areas rot within hours – but who can tell if this vesicular decay is not merely part of the circle of life? Who knows what the next cycle may bring?
Some Clans have the courage to settle amidst the strange vegetation. They move on when the circle is closed.
Some keep going further south. No one ever hears from them again. Those who stick to the growth line can harvest Psychovore seeds and fruit that earn some good Dinars from the Scourgers.
Still, Clans organize a resistance. They burn down the Psychovore stolons and salt the burnt areas. The Spitalians who now reside in Qabis, examining the Psychovore wall’s route, think this is a bad idea. The Psychovores act like an organism, wincing when in pain but growing all the faster elsewhere, developing strategies, adapting. Every single area is freed at a high cost. Many Clans lose their homes.
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