The Neeugs

An empty strip of land near the hills to the south is known as the **Neeugs**. It's populated exclusively by walking pieces of living men made out of wood, their leader being a famous pirate and thief that used to terrorize the west.

Strangers who are unaware of the existence of the mannequin-like people feel quite disturbing when entering Neeug cities. The Neeugs themselves usually stay in place and don't move while fleshy beings are around, but one can always feel himself being watched while traveling the lands of the Neeugs.

## Origin

Many decades ago, an impoverished carpenter, in mouring due to the death of his child and his wife during birth, created a human replica out of wood, to try and replicate the son he never got to have. However, unbeknownst to him, he had crafted the figure out of a magical tree, blessed by the Goddess of Life, and it miraculously became alife. Thanking the heavens, the carpenter took the figure as his own son, taking care of it and making him have as normal of a life as possible, despite his obviously artificial appeareance. However, the wooden creature did not appreciate the humbleness of the life of his father. He quickly learned that his unnatural appeareance would make him the target of witchhunting in his small isolated town, and thus hid from everyone. But his lust for excitement mixed with his apathy towards the rigid morality of the fleshy beings, things like "good" and "evil" being to him as artificial as he himself would've been to any human. After years of ever more dangerous psstimes, and the ever increasing warnings of his caring father, he decided to abandon the town in search of adventure and excitement. Despite his father's pleas to not abandon the town and live a simple life of isolation and peace, the wooden man had become tired of this old man's ramblings, and beat him to near death. He stole what he could get and ran away. The last thing he saw of his town was the townspeople getting together to burn his father, accussing him of wizardry.

The wooden man became a dark legend wherever he went, keeping himself shrouded in secrecy to protect his identity, becoming a famous pirate, thief, assassin and slaver. Every port had rumours of arsens, murders and thefts done by this wraith in the shadows, always chased but never found or caught.

His greatest heist was the robbery of the capital ship of the kingdom's navy, gathering a mass of mad and deranged pirates and turning them into an effective fighting force, skilled and ruthless enough to burn the entire port, steal the ship and gut all of the guards and sailors. Legends say he still roams the seas, pilfering every unsuspecting ships, in the hopes of finding enough shipments of the same magical wood that spawned him. His true purpose for this, are unknown.

Many wanderers have made the connection of the mysterious wooden man to the ones that live in the Neeugs. Rumours are, that the wooden man retired in forests and plains unclaimed by man to the south of the Ettin Range, in order to become a carpenter like his father before him, and he carved many men in his own image. For these men were carved out of mysterious trees of life, giving life to the sculptures the wooden man had carved. Slowly, the newly built Neeugs -as they eventually were known, due to the region they inhabited- gained consciousness, and the wooden man taught them to be weary of anything made out of flesh, igniting their hatred towards life itself, slowly but surely..

### Trees of life

Nobody really know where the mysterious trees of life come from. Some religions believe they are blessed by the **Goddess of Life**, after breathing cold air from the highest mountains and sneezing, spreading her blessing throughout the land and carried by the wind. Others think they are the spawn of vengeful demons and forest spirits, to try and get vengeance on those who enter the forest to chop their homes. Whatever its true origins are, this exceptional trees are said to bring to life whatever item created out of their wood. This not only makes them act like living beings, even giving them limited movement and flexibility, but also a limited conscience, becoming more and more sentient the longer it lives. However, it is said that the beings born out of this magical wood lack a certain spark, either becoming wrathful and vengeful or losing all sense of empathy. Many wizards advise against creating items from this magical trees, least their creations become the undoing of their creators.

Also, the trees of life are not a singular species of trees. There's been reports of trees of life coming from near every single species of tree in the world, albeit the cases are extremely rare. To make matters worse, there's no external difference between a tree of life and a regular tree, so you never really know if your creation will come to life...

The wood of the forest of getting lost is coveted and traded all throughout Giantstep, for it is strong, hardy, durable and resistant to disease, and above all beautiful with many tones from reddish to pale.

This had led to some serious deforestation in the past centuries, and it is believed that the many druidic circles which today stand around it's borders were originally created by people who sought to protect it from the ancient empires and their endless need for resources. Some have even said that the forest of getting lost once covered almost the entirety of Giantstep.

One of the strangest quirks of the wood of the forest of getting lost is that the furniture built from it sometimes... moves a little. It's not much, and in fact many people say that the idea that furniture moves on it's own is pure hogwash, among them the best wisemen of the Citadel, who have studied the matter many times and all their experiments came to the same conclusion, it's false. And yet, even the emperor of the azure throne of Azan feels like his prized lostwood drawer is an odd inch or two to the left of where he wants it whenever he enters his bedroom. Nobody has ever actually seen lostwood moving, but when they leave it for some time alone, undisturbed, it's not exactly in the same position when people come back.

Most pieces of lostwood are never able to move more than a little, but reports of entire pieaces of furniture disappearing with no trace has led some conspiracy theoriest to believe that a few select lostwood planks are capable ot achieving full sentience and moving freely. Nobody knows where they go, but some Joois merchants claim to have seen a land to the far south full of pieces of lostwood furniture. Ridiculous stories like that is why I never trust Joos myself, honestly.

## The Mystery of the Neeugs

The small strip of land between the Onyx Mountains and the jungles of the Chakobsa is a seemingly unassuming land, with an environment full of prairies and small forest patches. However, all who travel there will immediately feel the unnatural silence reigning in the plains. After a while of pondering what’s wrong, they will realize that the silence is caused by a near total lack of animal life. There are no creatures above the size of beetles: no birds, no rabbits, no horses, no bears, no wolves, no deer… Even the alchemical creatures from the Strange Meadows tend to avoid the land, though they are slowly populating the eastern parts of the Neeugs. Travelers who cross the Neeugs will also realize that there are many towns and cities, all devoid of life. The empty streets and houses are, nevertheless, well maintained, and do not show any signs of disrepair. Those who do not know what dwells in these cities will enter them to explore the strange phenomenon of seemingly disappearance of the entirety of the human population. If their curiosity beats their sense of self-preservation, they will stay the night to avoid camping in the wilds. And by the time dawn breaks, many of them will have disappeared, never to be seen again.

Those who do know what dwells within the cities of the Neeugs will try to warn the foolish explorers, though their strange stories may sound foolish or even insane, at best a creative plot of the locals to try to keep away strangers from some sort of treasure. The tales of the towns near the Neeugs are filled with stories about the abandoned cities, only they are not abandoned. The strange beings that inhabit them are not spirits or creatures of flesh and blood. The inhabitants of the cities are the seemingly ordinary items around them: walls, statues, benches, store signs, doors… The strange sightings of living items are attributed to the existence of the trees of life, spread at seemingly random patterns throughout the world, and undistinguishable from regular trees until it’s too late. That in of itself it’s not the mystery, however. While a nearly unknown phenomenon for the layman, most wizards and alchemists will know the stories about the effects of the living trees, though the effects of the divine wood are rarely seen, even by experienced wizards. The question then lays in the obvious: who built the cities? And why beings of living wood group there? And how?

The sightings of the cities has given the experts little to no clue. From the outside, the cities look completely normal, with an architecture reminiscent of the idyllic towns of sidarian lands. And yet, the sidarians swear they are not the builders of the cities, and that they avoid stepping on the borders of the Neeugs as much as possible, only entering when hunting down a particularly dangerous alchemical creature. Many dark tales surround the Neeugs’ empty towns, and there have even been attempts to burn down the settlements, only for fate to intervene in one way or another to stop the would be arsonists. In particular, the biggest town in the Neeugs is **Rah-Peece**, named that due to the many boards with strange writings all over the settlement, with the only intelligible part being its name. At the center of a great plaza, full of flowers of many colors, lies a massive wooden structure, pyramidal yet at the same time hollow, which reaches the height of many of the world’s greatest castles. What the significance of this structure is, we do not know to this day.