The Frontier

> *Inspirations: Frontier Adventure, Adventure Zone: Dust, Something Wicked This Way Rides, Attack on Titan*
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## Frontierfolk

Some leave the towers seeking a life with more freedom. Some hope to strike it rich in a gem mine or longhunt and find their fortune. Some just want some peace and quiet. All manner of folk may "come down" from the Towers and try to setting in one of the small settlements nearby, or to claim some of the vast stretches of land at the threshold of civilization.

### Duskin

Vampires, lycan, and ghosts are chief among the peoples collectively known as Duskin. It's said that nearly 20% of Frontierfolk are Duskin, seeking opportunity, peace, or simply more fertile hunting grounds. Of all Frontier Duskin, less than 10% live in openly-Duskin communities. For many, it keeps life simpler and quieter to conceal their Duskin demographics. The Duskin communities that do live openly may grow large over time, collecting more refugees of the Towers or absorbing smaller communities, until they are self-sufficient and even vie for power by \_\_\_. These large communities are called Estates, and they are very exclusive; usually one must belong to the same Dynasty to find a home there.

## Rustlers

> *Rootin' tootin' toil n' shootin'*
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> *Fire burn and cowboy bootin'*
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> *Eye of newt and spicy beans*
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> *Toe of frog and denim jeans,*
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> *Whiskey, grits, n' demon spittle*
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> *tossed into my iron griddle*
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> *With the tannin' of our hides,*
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> ***Somethin' wicked this way rides***
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Rustlers are a mysterious and misunderstood fixture of the Frontier - and many of them like it just so. Cowboy Witches. Potioncrafters and wandslingers of every gender, living off the land and its lifemagic, bonded closely to a steed. Some favor the leather wide-brim, some a patched and pointed affair. Chaps and a vest or black robes. At the end of the day, practicality reigns. Whatever fits the the territory.

Rustlers are adept with lifemagic, the magic of living things. They craft potions and spells to move and manipulate that lifemagic, always using ingredients and artifacts of life - wood, bones, organic matter. By this virtue, their magic is less flashy than arcane magic, but is cleaner and less disturbing of the natural order. While many Frontierfolk use wands as tools for survival and protection in the wild lands outside the Towers, rustlers show true mastery of wands. Their steeds are partners in survival, and a rustler and their steed will roam a territory for long stretches without encountering civilization. Any creature big enough to ride may make a fine steed, and the dire beasts of the Dire Band offer a range of options that might otherwise be too small:

* Hawks, ostriches, horses, buffalo, basilisk, great horned sheep, giant toads, giant bats, giant squirrels, boars, narwals

#### Wands

* Charged/pwrd How?
	+ Created in the frontier because of the magical interference in the Towers. Less chance of explosion if you harness a pure prairie thunderstorm or crashing rapids, without all the city magic
* Why aren’t they used everywhere?
	+ Haywire
	+ Usually created outside the city
	+ Laws against them. Can people get permits?
	+ Are there more officials wands, or are they all tools of the frontier
	+ Duels? Dueling wands?

* Potions?????

## Biomes

There are no bodies of still water in Racedis. No oceans, no lakes. Only rivers, great and small. And all rivers flow toward the Towers. From the smallest trickling creek to the widest, deepest river, they all flow toward the Towers. Where they meet the Towers, the surface seems calm enough but the currents underneath are tumultuous, and the few curious naturalists that have endeavored to discover why the Towers are still above-water have come up short.

Dire Animals are a fixture of the Frontier, especially in the "Dire Band": the outer border between the Frontier and the unexplored wilderness beyond.

### Desert

* Bedouin tent/yurt settlements
* True Dust Devils
* Cactus people
* Dire Tortoises with shells big enough to live in
* 2 headed Rattlers
* Using kites for things; windsurfing, generator stuff
* Owls (beasts of burden, steeds)
* Living cacti networks under the sand that can lash out with spiny segmented tentacles
* Sand Worms
* Insectoid Dragons
* Kangaroo
* Anti-sauna: a cool place dug wayyy down into the sand. Burying themselves up to the neck in cool undersand

### Prairie/Plains/Savanna

* Thunderbirds
* Grasshopper steeds
* Burrows
* Hot air balloons; probably just one to a community.
	+ Hang ropes from it and group-moon-jump

### Tundra

* Dire moose; mounted palantir-style, 10 archers to an antler, riding it like a siege engine
* Radial igloos/hide yurts with a central fire (or other heat) and each family gets a spoke. Whole community in one building.
* Meat, preserving (smoking, etc)
* Mildly psychedelic herb that they hotbox in the tent and tell stories

### Mountain/Valley

* Mines and underground Estates
* Houses jutting out on stilts, with vine agriculture underneath the jut (call the huts "juts"
* Settlement so deep in a hidden valley that they need a big reflector to get sunlight
* Volcano settlements: Lava tunnels; live lava-casting to create new structures under new lava-flow
* Physically close communities

### Jungle

* Dire Toad steeds
* Stilt-building settlements.
* Mushroom Farms
* Very perilous local flora
* Vine-swinging races

### Oak Forest

* Ravens as pets and herding animals like dogs, but for herds of avian livestock.
* Woven gorilla-style b\_\_\_ of vinesslingshot.
* Maple syrup hunting/production

### Deep Pine Forest

* Ewok-style tree houses with rope bridges networked between
* Root-tunnel settlement burrowed under the grandest tree
* Exploding pinecone projectiles for slingshots.

### Canyon/Badlands

* Settlement built into canyon-side, overlooking the river below, hopefully above the floodline
* Deep canyon river ports in horseshoe bends
* Little fishery in a bend in the river
* Smoking
* Ziplines and swings

### Swamp

* Elevated settlements, built on poles
* Some sort of arcane purification process - looks like a witch's hut, Hocus Pocus house (?)
* Toad stew!
* Summa that Avatar Swamp bender flavor
* Halloween???
* Swamp dances, half submerged in ghillie suits

### Hills/Bluffs

* Hobbit holes
* Hidden settlements nestled into horseshoe bluffs
* Bluffs top-and-bottom settlements, with big lifts between the 2 halves, uses that drop for its potential energy
* Turkey and dressing
* Euchre
* Hunting
* Controlled burns in cool patterns (fire show?) On hillsides while the community watches from another hill
* Quilting parties

### River Coastal

* Underwater settlements made of (stained) glass (lots of access to sand)
* Cured waterweed-slime or frogspawn-slime; lumpy bubbles streaked with green.
* Toll crossing (punter, bridge, ferry)
* Fish fry

### Exotics

* Mushroom
* ? Underdark
	+ Dire bat steeds
	+ Bat milk
* Nether
* Feywild

## "Frontier" Notes: Wikipedia

* Frontier stretches in all directions: everything not in The Towers is frontier
	+ Literally unending? Flat plane, infinite earth?
* Ranger Lodges could hold significant power!
* Power - both social and magical - is different out here. Something always pays the price.

* There's an old anti-Towers sentiment in the older Frontier settlements, passed on the the older generations (who would need strong reasons to leave the Towers)
	+ Newer generations have less of that prejudice, and also some outsider mystique about the Towers (like Iowa kids looking at NY or LA)

* psychological sense of unlimited opportunity.
	+ This, in turn, had many consequences such as optimism, future orientation, shedding the restraints of land scarcity, and the wastage of natural resources.
* English, French, Spanish and Dutch patterns of settlement were quite different.
	+ French: Tahari,? Elves
		- Only a few thousand
		- Established stable St. Lawrence riverside communities
		- Trappers forayed deep into the watersheds, but generally didn't settle. Few small villages
	+ English: Dwarves!
		- Leapfrogged west
		- More unified policy of colonization
		- Focus on cultivation
		- Typical settlement compact and quite small, most under 1 sq mile
	+ Spanish: Minotaur
	+ Dutch:
		- Set up trading posts in river valley,
		- Patroons (?) who brought in tenent farmers, creating compact permanent villages
		- Westward expansion halted by their defeat by English
* "Garrison mentality" in Canadian frontier: not expanding the frontier, as much as expanding the border of civilization
* Daniel Boone
* Lands awarded for military service
* Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Country, Mexican Cresson
* Railroad land grants
* Pop Culture
	+ dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier
* free-spirited than in the East because of its lack of social and political institutions.
* Frontier was a core defining quality of the US, & A place where 2 cultures met.
* Australian frontier was the border between "inside" and "outside", the civilized and the unexplored respectively.
	+ Some might call themselves "outsiders"
	+ The word "Frontier", because of certain news publications, took on connotations of violence, esp between black and white.
		- "Native Police", funded by taxes on squatters
* South America:
	+ "Destruction of the 7 Cities" creates a frontier, La Frontera
	+ Well developed line of forts on one border