Karruk

Karruk is a culture and not a people, and the word means flesh-eaters. The tribes of the Barren Lands hold humans, orcs and half-orcs together and a few besides, and what settles a person’s standing among them is not the blood in them but whether they are Karruk. The orcs are the greater part and the older part: the culture began with them, in a country that grows almost nothing, and everyone else in it has come round to their way of living rather than the other way about. Half-orcs do best of the three. Humans of any size struggle through long days with no food, orcs are squat and rarely clear five feet, and a half-orc can run well over six and still go a long while on very little.

What the land gives is reptiles and insects. Water and the few patches of workable ground are worth fighting for, so the tribes fight for them, and the country is at war with itself as a matter of course.

Eating the Dead

They are cannibals, and this is the one fact about them everyone west of the Barren Lands knows and the one they understand least. Hunger is real there, but hunger is not the whole of it. A body prepared and eaten is a spirit set loose, its strength taken up by those who take the flesh, and its due paid. A body left uneaten is a soul shut inside rotting meat, and what comes out of that is a shade or a wraith. To cook the flesh of a thinking creature is worse than either: it is held to destroy the soul outright and shut the dead out of whatever follows, and a family whose kin was served cooked will generally reckon itself owed a killing. Fallen enemies are eaten on the same terms as fallen kin, and the rites differ from tribe to tribe according to the kind of honor being paid. They drink the warm blood of animals they have killed, which is what most outsiders hear of first, and it is the smaller custom.

What they hunt for meat and hide, besides, is the Triaxians of the southeastern forests, whose pelts they value for clothing and whose flesh they value for its taste. That is the whole reason the Triaxians live hidden.

Tribes are led by khans who take the place in blood. A ruler’s death is how the office changes hands, and it is not always malice: a tribe will sometimes give an old khan that ending as a courtesy. Shamans stand beside them and carry everything else, the simple medicine, the working of leather from their own dead, and the metalcraft, which reached bronze and stopped.

The Great Horde

About every fourth generation, when there are more Karruk than the country can carry, a leader rises with the strength and the voice to take all of them out of it. Such a leader is called the Great Kaan, and what they lead is the Great Horde: a mass exodus into the surrounding kingdoms to take spoil, land and anything else that can be had by slaughter. It has come round roughly once a century for as far back as anyone reaches.

Every horde has broken in the end. Nothing of them was written down, so no Great Kaan has ever been able to study the last, and most Karruk do not know that what they are doing has been done before.

One horde is the exception, about a hundred and ten years ago. It killed on a scale none of the others matched, reached further than any of them, and then did the thing none of them managed, which was to hold the ground it took. Kijinxi traces its founding to that horde, remembered since as the Dawning Horde. Only one gathering has been attempted after it, under Helcrask of the Wildfyre tribe, and the scholars will not grant it the name: too small, they say, and its Kaan had drifted from the true Karruk way of living, which is the same charge leveled at the people of Kijinxi. It never marched at all. Verex of Kijinxi met Helcrask in an honorable duel before the preparations were finished and settled the matter there, and a good many Karruk hold the honor of it spoiled by the magic he won with.

The Ashlands

Verex has since turned south onto the Barren Lands themselves, which he has taken to calling the Ashlands. He has been invading them, massacring in them, subjugating what he takes and building fortresses to keep it. What has come of that is something the country has never produced before: tribes uniting for a cause that is not a horde, in order to hold their own ground. They are learning modern war because they must, and they have begun to forge steel.

The Arms They Carry

Karruk weapons are copper, bronze, stone and bone, and they have been dangerous with them anyway.

• Half damage: a weapon of these materials deals half its bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage, reduced before resistance or any other effect applies.
• Fragile: on a natural 1 on an attack roll with a fragile weapon, make a DC 10 Dexterity save or the weapon is damaged and deals half damage from then on. A damaged fragile weapon that fails again is destroyed.

Campaign Updates

Nobody in the company has met a Karruk. The name still reaches them, usually as Karak, and always at second hand.

Koa had it from the Free Folk before he ever left them: a far-eastern people, humans and orcs and half-orcs together, who drink the warm blood of what they kill and who now and then take work in a Free Folk band. In a burned river thorp on the way east, a villager told the party that the Karak eat the liver of the slain to take the strength in it, and thought they should do the same to Orsugo once they had him. Hinta of Draazstone sold Koa a heavy sledge and called it a canabo, a studded club of the Karak, whom she described as the blood-drinkers of the far east with martial styles of their own. She was wrong about the weapon, and working at the same remove about everything else.

Yara is the nearest the company has come. She trained in the Barren Lands and brought its rites west with her. When the ring of fire in the valley needed explaining she reached for the Barren Lands pyres: oil-soaked and enormous, built to wake the gods and the spirits, and needing a great many hands and days or weeks of work. Whatever raised that ring, it was not raised the way she knew fire to be raised. In Haudh-Gwenn she burned three wraiths out of a man with silver, blood and a boiling pot, and spoke the rite over it in what those present called the Karak tongue. Their language is Tanjun. Whether Karak in a westerner’s mouth names the people or their speech was never settled.