Runaan Ashlands

The **Land of the Runaan** is a harsh, volcanic land with the scorching ash dotted by rocky outcrops and yawning chasms. There are skeletons of huge dragonic creatures scattered all around.

The "**Ashland Desert**" looks hellish at first sight. However, beneath the barren, lifeless surface is a vast tunnel and cave system that delves deep into the rocky under-layers, making it the only way to cross this land into the Seltovia Freestate.

The Runaan are a most savage tribe that detest sunlight, making their homes out of the labyrinthian caves deep in their volcanic lands. They are a tall, carnivorous, bipedal reptile species. Their scales are hard as rock, making most physical attacks against them pointless. The Runaan also like making crude jokes with their victims, despite not being a talkative bunch.

The Runaan have come up with a self-made security system - gongs are scattered around their caves, and when rang, they indicate the presence of intruders. When the Werewolf kind of Ketlovia migrated to the east, fleeing the mighty Gnolls, many of them fell prey while crossing the ashlands, still being kept as slaves deep in the Runaan dungeons.

They are ruled by a High King and worship a god known as Leptys, who is referred to as ‘bringer of night’ and ‘father of the Runaan’, who appears in the form of a great bird. The Runaan often organize gladiator fight inside large, underground arenas. It's said that their current Champion has never lost a single fight, and is favoured by Leptys himself.

The only hospitable part of the ashlands is its southern coast, where a small colony of Drunigzarians have set up a small colony.

## The Ashland Desert

In eastern Giantstep, many tales surround the ebony **Ashland Desert**. Indeed, many traders and explorers have crossed the lands and gotten caught in the desert storms, appearing without warning and swallowing whatever gets in their way in dark clouds of ash. The region is home to many active volcanoes, which keep a small but stable of stream of cinders and ashes. This covers the entire landscape, giving the area its distinctive black hue. Adding to that the scant rains (which, due to the pyroclastic emissions, are highly acidic) and the strength of the winds, and no plants can grow there. The only thing that’s able to survive there is the Whickraz, a strange mix of mushroom and tuber that can somehow move its body up or down depending on the weather. And even then, the whickraz is highly poisonous due to the composition of the soil. This makes the Ashland Desert a place to avoid at all costs.

Underground, though, it is another story. The constant volcanic activity has created a massive series of underground caves and tunnel. In these, life has evolved to thrive on the thermal energy from below ground: thermophile organisms such as fungi, worms and masses of moss-like beings grow and thrive in the caves, in either near dark or by the glow of the flowing magma. And feeding on those, a full ecosystem of insects, mollusks and reptiles making the underground their home.

Below the Ashland Desert we can find immense mineral wealth: veins of gold, silver, diamonds, copper and iron can be found in the deep, and this has attracted a lot of attention from the nearby nations, all interested in the underground riches but unable to extract them themselves. The underground tunnels are also a way to traverse the lands safely from the harsh outside. The deep tunnels connect the extremes of the Ashland Desert, making for a great way to avoid the desert above. The Ketlovian Kingdom once tried to establish a permanent outpost in the Ashland undergrounds, to connect the kingdom with the lands at the other side of the desert. However, the harsh reality of life underground made it impossible, and quickly abandoned the idea.

## The Runaan

The **Runaan** are the native inhabitants of the Ashland Desert’s underground. They are a tall, bipedal race of sentient reptiles. They can measure up to 2m meters tall, but in general they will walk hunched, not used to stand to their full height. They are very flexible, capable of contorting their bodies to ludicrous degrees, a useful ability to explore the narrow tunnels of the underground. Their bodies are covered in thick, flexible scales, capable of protecting them from abrasion and heat, and the runaan constantly shed them, keeping their skin in perfect condition.The runaan have a powerful tail, nearly half of their total height, which they use as an extra appendage, and to detect the vibrations of the area. The runaan could, in theory, survive the harsh desert above thanks to their resistance to heat, sand dust and poison (they do collect whickraz as food during the night), but their eyes are highly sensitive to sunlight. The runaan apparently are very sensitive to ultraviolet light, and do not enjoy to be under the sun for longer periods of time. It does not help that their eyesight is very dull, used to the darkness of the underground, so daylight can easily disorient them. To compensate for this, the runaan have a great sense of hearing, boosted by their sense of touch: they can detect and perceive infinitesimal vibrations, and some even say they use some form of echolocation to move around, but this has yet to be confirmed.

The runaan are carnivores, feeding on the thermophile creatures that thrive underground. They feed their herds of underground crabs and worms with mushrooms and whickraz they collect, keeping them constantly on the move. The underground caverns are not particularly stable, and the runaan are constantly digging more tunnels, both in search of feeding grounds to their animals and to avoid being trapped in a cave in. This has made the runaan expert diggers, exploring the underground and unearthing many treasures from the deep. They have little use for them, but luckily the weird races from the outside have a liking for the shinning stones the runaan would have just thrown away as slag.

Contact with the outside world used to be sparse. The races from the outside world labeled the lizardry runaan as silent and stoic at one moment, and cackling with laughter at the next. They are quite trustworthy, though, always keeping their word, though they can be quite a headache to trade with in the first place. Even if runaan society has no use for most minerals extracted from their caves (except those used to create more mining materials), the runaan are not ignorant of the value of their treasures to the eyes of the outside world. They think the outsiders as silly people who would trade mere rocks and metals for valuable meats and foods, but they are not going to sell their products cheap. The biggest hurdle for doing that has been always the harshness of the area. It is not particularly easy to establish land routes with the Ashland Desert, even with the underground roads, and moving great quantities of meat and valuable metals back and forth needs a lot of supervision and vigilance. The area would be rife with bandits and thieves, but the runaan are infamous underground fighters, and no mere band of outlaws can dislodge them from their tunnels. Entire mercenary groups have been organized to assault the tunnels, only to be lost in the labyrinthine underground and assaulted back by the runaan. The prisoners were usually put to work in the harshest areas of the underground, where even the runaan are weary of crossing. The caravans of the Ketlovian and the Khenomeri were constantly under assault, and once both nations weren’t unable to defend the routes effectively, contact was broken with the runaan. It would be much later than the Kingdom of Drunigzar, in their search for wealth overseas, would create the colony of Megarotera, in the only beachhead protected enough from the volcanic ash and winds to allow the construction of a port. Trade with the runaan would then resume, this time by sea.

The Ketlovian and the Khenomeri used to trade with the runaan for their resources, in exchange of many kinds of meat. The runaan adore outside meat: pig, cow, horse, chicken, farm worm… it doesn’t matter, they consider them a delicacy, and will eat them with relish. Many speculate that the underground ecosystem is only able to produce just enough food to avoid a famine, and that this equilibrium is dependent on the seismic activity of the region.

The runaan are well known in the southeastern seas due to their love for comedy and black humor. The sense of humor of the runaan is seemingly reserved to themselves, as most races just find the interactions with them confusing and perplexing. However, we do know that they do enjoy jesting about situations other societies would find dire or distasteful. This can make them seemingly uncaring or even sadistic by those who have limited interaction with them, though in reality their intentions are nothing of the sort.

This is also reserved to the prisoners and slaves they have captured. The runaan actively partake in the business of slavery. The deeper and more unstable grottoes are dangerous even for the runaan, and so they actively seek to capture people to work in them as disposable workers. Bandits and would-be thieves are usually captured in the caves and put to work, but this is not always enough. They usually buy slaves from the contrabandists in Megarotera, or captured during the gnoll raids. Working in the deepest parts of the cave systems is one of the worst fates that can befall to a slave in the southeast of Giantstep. Deep in near pitch black caves, lacking oxygen, picking near indestructible magmatic rock, always under risk of an avalanche or a deadly magma flow and having no chance to escape by the intricate tunnels, ending up in the hands of the runaan is a death sentence for most. The runaan will try to keep their slaves alive as much as possible, actually taking as good care of them as possible given the circumstances.