Our Truths Our World

## The Ironlands

Ironlands Map by Shawn Tomkin

We came to this place but we did not do so as a free choice. We were driven away from our homeland. The tales are varied and confusing and often contradict each other but the reasons that are given to us by our elders, who heard it from their elders, are as follows:

## Why We Left

Many believe a great illness swept the lands we came from, driving out those who would move to survive. Others claim we were invaded by a people called the Skulde and that they drove us from our homes and lands. The oldest and most knowledgeable of our peoples still sometimes refer to the tales of The Great Dying when the earth would no longer produce useful amounts of edible food. They say the soil itself blew away in great dust storms. Nothing would grow and all that stayed perished, as far as we know.

## Why We Call This the Ironlands

Whatever it was that drove us from that place must have been truly awful. Why else would we have moved to this place? It is so cold and windy and miserable that only those with wills and bodies of iron could possibly survive here.

## What We Found When We Arrived

Our forbears tell us that when we first arrived in this place no one lived here, but they had. Remnants, some recognizable as the works of people not unlike ourselves and others like nothing any of us had ever seen or imagined, dotted the landscape. Whether familiar or strange these ruins are ancient and worn by centuries of past time.

## How We Live

While there are still many who live in roving bands or small temporary structures that move with the herds those people feed on most of us have now settled into Circles. A few families or even a few dozens of families gathered together behind ditches, ramparts and palisades for warmth and protection from those creatures or people who would do them harm.

Each Circle is governed as those within it, or those who control those who are in it, wish and as such they vary. Some are run by councils, some by strongmen and some by self proclaimed kings and barons who control several Circles and fight amongst themselves for others.

Because of this each Circle provides its own militia and security as needed. This usually is no more organized than a group of citizens armed with torches and daggers.

## Mysticism and Religion

Mysticism and Religion vary widely in the Ironlands. There are those who still follow the old ways, believing in auguries, portents and omens. Others believe magic to be rare and yet others are convinced that every stone, plant, tree and other part of the natural world holds within it the nearly infinite power of the unknown.

Likewise religion varies as well. Agnostics live cheek by jowl with those that just go through the motions and there are even a few true believers who await the imminent arrival of their Gods or Gods.

## Rumours

Rumours seem to be a part of the Ironlands. Ever since our forebears arrived there have been hints, stories and tales about the previous inhabitants of this place. Ruins tell us of a people so unlike us that they cannot have been human and they are of such an age that they seem to grow from the bones of the earth itself.

## Beasts and Horrors

Beasts of many forms wander the lands. As we develop our Circles and the land around them these creatures are being forced back into the wilderness. Reports from the hinterlands speak of wolves as large as bears and bears as large as roundhouses but even these beasts are said to fear the Horrors that haunt the darkest and most unknown corners of this place. It is said that in the most corrupt areas even the dead do not stay that way and that, if disturbed, they swarm and feed upon the living.