The Tujanci wastes

The Tujanci Wastes are a vast desert, nearly inhospitable, with few oases and fewer fertile grounds, but life does persist there nevertheless. The Tujanci are a fierce warrior people, known for their skill with the spear and with their long knives, and for their incredible fieldcraft in the desert. They are mysterious and taciturn, and rarely converse with anyone, even when they're trading. Under normal circumstances, aside from the occasional raid or perhaps some skirmishing over water rights, they wouldn't be much trouble to anyone.
Insofar as Paganism goes, the Tujanci are still wholly pagan, whereas it is only tacitly tolerated in Berkukha and Kurtiye. The remnants of the pre-Dessian religion in those countries are still around, but most of them have been folded into traditions and holidays acceptable to the state's Dessianism.
You can think of this sort of like large portions of various pagan holidays like Yule and so on and so forth being folded into the Christian Christmas. They didn't want to just ban these traditions, but they needed to reconcile them with the new religious hierarchy somehow.
In a similar fashion, Bocanadessia doesn't care (or, probably even know) about various pagan subgroups. Thus her clergy can simply coopt their rituals, traditions and beliefs when necessary to smooth things over.
The problem is Gezo. A narcotic resin which seems to seep up from the rocks in the Tujanci wastes, Gezo is a powerful drug and extremely valuable, and it only seems to grow in the Tujanci lands. The stuff is worth bundles and the Tujanci refuse to sell it — they actually prefer to let the resin seal up the cracks and stop flowing, they call them "Gezo-Wounds," and seem to see them as some sort of injury to the land itself.
Obviously this has led to war. Many wars. The Berkukhans gave up trying ages ago but the Jenoesans have a never-ending supply of colonists and volunteers from foreign lands to fill their ranks, and they are thoroughly determined to make a profit off of the stuff. Wars in the desert are not their forte, of course, but they're learning. The Tujanci are very skilled warriors and can maneuver through the desert like ghosts on the wind, but numbers are against them and they lack heavy armor and firearms. The conflict could go either way at this point, only time will tell who is master of the desert, those who live there, or those who desire its riches.
Rumor has it that there is an oasis somewhere in the depths of the Tujanci desert that is alive, and hungers. Those who rest near it sometimes go missing, and those who taste its waters report the flavor to be strangely sour.
For this reason, the Tujanci have a practice of never sleeping too close to an oasis. They set their camp a few dozen yards away.
Category:Wild lands
Category:Tujanca