On Arriving...

[RogetThesaurii]

The Origins of the Gornrog People

Edited May 8 by RogetThesaurii (see edit history)

[RogetThesaurii]

The Gornrog people are spread across the vast plains of their namesake grasslands, a barbarian people, mostly nomadic, following vast herds and travelling with the seasons. They are a tall, broad people, towering over most humans they encounter, such as the native Lisezians and Pidduppi-Hammaddi peoples, as well as the various folk of Lai-Not. The Average Gornrog stands at nearly 7' tall for males and females only slightly shorter at 6'6". They are muscular and densely-packed muscle lends them power beyond even what their larger size and mass would equal.

The Gornrog people feature hair of every natural shade from red-head to blonde to brunette. They are a universally pale-skinned people but growing up in the open soon darkens their natural coloring to the burnished tan more often associated with them. Men grow prodigious, nearly dwarven levels of body hair, though many shave their hair and extremities. Both women and men feature intricate braiding of head hair, and men of facial hair.

Now found in cities and towns across the continent and still the dominant folk of their namesake plains, the Gornrog people are non-native humans who hail from an ancient and generally unknown event in the history of the world. One tied to the deepest levels of elven secrecy and the natality of the WitchQueen Carmen. Over thousands of years they have fallen far from their origins.

 

Originally, the Gornrog were a star-faring race, traveling across the universe via wormholes. While traveling near this particular planet, an anomaly in space-time disabled their craft and forced them into a crash-landing. The survivors found themselves in the north-center of a strange continent on a stranger planet. Though scout craft were sent out to divine where they were and what their options might be, a bare handful returned, and none without damage.

Native fauna, aerial winged lizards, both smaller versions with stinging tails, and larger ones that blasted electricity and fire from their mouths, like mythical beasts, attacked several of the scout craft. Others encountered far stranger things. Most never reported anything, simply disappearing. The last scout ship disappeared shortly after identifying what it considered humanoid dwellings amongst trees on a large island far south and east of the crash site. The scout went back for a second pass, reported confirmed humanoid sightings, and then went silent forever.

Over the first few centuries, plagues and a general lack of knowledge of their new world decimated the population. Only the hardiest survived. As technology broke down, the original command structure collapsed until the hunter-gatherer specialists of the group claimed higher authority, since it was they that provided most for the group, kept it safe, and fed. Tribal leadership evolved as the humanoids studiously avoided encounters with other humanoids.

Early oral histories of the Gornrog speak of being born from the heavens as falling stars that became men and women when they crashed to earth on the Gornrog plains. They tell a tale that is fraught with attacks from beasts, and raving savages, and the very land itself. Scholars point to these early tales as evidence of the Gornrog being blocked from westward expansion by first green, then grey savages which likely were early goblin and orc tribes. The way south and west was blocked by swamps and badlands ending in high desert, indicating the Ispepan swamps and bogs and what is modern-day northern Pidduppi.

All the grasslands were free of other humanoids, and it was here the Gornrog scattered into small hunter-gatherer tribal groups that would eventually come to encompass the great tribal masses that now dominated the plains, in small and large groupings. The only center of permanent encampment lay along the rim of the great canyon splitting the plains in eastern and western sides. There, all tribes are welcome.

The Gornrog no longer recall their space-faring past, more than ten millennia behind them. They have forged a new identity here, as the largest humans, with great strength and endurance, a distinct difficulty in killing them. And they still evince a fear and distrust of magics, particularly arcane magics. Among their own, most spellcasters are earth-priests and naturists, with the majority of others being priests of beast cults. Rarely, sorcerers grow to prominence, but these are usually outcasts from their communities, cultural pariahs.

This distrust of arcane magics is generally laid at the feet of the wizard-kings who ruled Pidduppi before Amer's jihad united into an empire. The Gornrog became popular slaves for the wizards, and many slaving expeditions visited the plains, kidnapping the youth and capturing the adults. Eventually, Gornrog bodyguards were common among the wizards. When the jihad freed them, most died in defense of their masters, and Pidduppi's continued slaving has often found subjects on the plains to the north. There is little love between the Pidduppi and Gornrogs.

The most prominent tribes among the Gornrog are The Great Pride, lion-cult worshippers and the largest tribe; the Golden Grass Lords, great horsemen of the eastern plains, near the far side of the Dragonwall; Wind-watchers, the farthest-roaming tribe; the Rim-walkers, a smaller tribe but very spiritual, who dwell only along the rim of the canyon; and the Everstars, red-and blonde-bearded reavers and ravers from the far northwestern plains, near the Hollow-Hills and the artic circle south of the Wolves Teeth Mountains.

Edited May 10 by RogetThesaurii (see edit history)

[RogetThesaurii]

In Game Terms, the Gornrog barbarians were in a space ship when they exited a wormhole near this planet, which is how they traveled. Upon arrival in this galaxy they immediately detected, then endured a temporal-spatial anomaly that disabled their ship and started it into what would become a crash. The Xashi Cataclysm, traveling as a wave backwards in both space and time, slammed into their wormhole-hopping ship's drive and blew it right to smithereens. The ship careened through space until gravity grabbed it and slammed it into the ground here.

This allowed for most of the people aboard to safely evacuate, because there was time to organize, but the ship itself was lost. The Great Canyon is evidence of its impact and crash and detonation. The elves record this bright light and disturbance in their earliest annals, spurring their first colonial wanderings deep into the mainland.

The last Gornrog scout ship actually found the elven isle, and was circling, looking to figure out if it was still inhabited, by whom, etc, when the elves shot him down. Its a big secret that humans ever walked on the elven isle, and the WitchQueen Carmen unearthed this state secret during her own investigations of her clandestine organization. It was very X-Files.

Most of the Gornrog landed in evacuation pods in the eastern Hollow Hills, right at the edge of the plains themselves. They wizard cabal that rules there now actually use the assembled pods as the main structure of their dwelling. Most outsiders do not realize it is not one single structure, but many individual ones, strung together and engineered into a base camp. Encounters with goblins and orcs kept them from advancing west into the mountains and forests and deeper into the hills. The swamps of Ispep and the badlands and rough desert of northern Pidduppi kept them traveling the plains for survival. They were driven from their crash site by repeated attacks from orc raiders and goblin thieving/harassment. Over twelve millennia later, they no longer know their own origins, but those wizards do, ironically.

The Gornrog are modeled after a variety of different 'barbarian' tropes. The Golden Grass are Mongol horsemen, the Everstars are germanic-style berserkers. The Wind Watchers are like plains indigenous North American tribes (the Sioux, for example). The Great Pride are kinda like the Zulu. The Rim-walkers are Australian Aboriginals. They are, as variant humans, 'blessed' with a +2 to Str and a +1 to Con. They do not add +2 to any ability score, like other humans. They can also qualify for a feat that allows them to use over-sized weapons of the melee variety without penalty. Gornrogs roll with Advantage when making Death Saves.