Xan Gian (Fujian Supplement)

Xan Gian

Far to the south, near to the Gate of Winds at the bottom of the world, lies the large island of Xan Giang. It is connected to Fujian by an ice bridge some fifty miles long, safe to cross only in winter. The seas around it are icy and treacherous, infested with whales, great squids, the fearsome kraken, and other behemoths that lurk in the deep water.

Along the eastern coast of Xan Gian are the cities of the settles, numbering more than a dozen but less than twenty. Come from the civilized lands, they are a motley mix of loners, criminals, exiles, and prospectors. The coastal cities fish and hunt. They trade with the native human tribes for whale bone and oil, and for coveted sealskin. Lonely trappers and hunters operate by themselves, or merchants trade with the ice elves for pelts, horns, and exotic plants found only in the bitter arctic climes. Many settlers and natives alike die on the ice each year hunting for that most prized of all trade goods, the pelt of the white bear. Inland, on the taiga and tundra, live the ice elves, a group of political dissidents who left Mahasa some three hundred years ago. In the central range of mountains, a nation of secretive dwarves make their home.

The History of Xan Gian

The first settlers came to Xan Gian three thousand years ago. A group of refugees fleeing the War From Below left Ogun's Fangs, traveling south, and south, and south, braving the treacherous seas to land at last upon the coast of Xan Gian. They did not stop to plant flag in the ground, fearing the army at their heels. They let their ships drift away, to be consumed by the behemoths that lurked beyond the coastal shelf. Fleeing inland, they suffered mightily. At last, they reached the cluster of mountains in the center of the island. Three years passed there as they eked out a pitiful existence. Then a discovery was made. A party of hunters had found a system of caves. The dwarves eagerly made for them. Their first night in the caves, they were attacked. Not by goblins, but by shrieking, winged creatures without eyes or hair. A lesser race would have fled, but not the dwarves. They had not fled this far to then be driven from the caves (clearly a gift from the gods) by mewling aberrations. Instead, the dwarves, starving and cold and desperate, purged the caves of the winged monsters, and made themselves at home.

Of course, to expect that things would be easy from there on out was foolish, as everyone agreed in retrospect. The winged creatures were not the only inhabitants of the network of caves, which stretched on seemingly forever, under the whole of the mountain range, and deeper, deeper. Like an iceberg, the mountains were only the tip of something much bigger. It took nearly two hundred years of nigh-constant warfare, but at last the dwarves stood as undisputed masters of the upper caves, from the peaks of the mountains to a full three miles below the ground. The giants and ogres shivered on the slopes, the goblins perished, race after foul race of aberration was exterminated, and the flesh-eating xoxometettcha were driven from their grand halls to lurk in the dark deeps and plot bloody revenge. The dwarves set to building their new home with renewed frenzy. They built grand palaces beneath the mountains, all bedecked in gold and gems. Temples to bring a tear to a deity's eyes were erected in the deeps.

The southern dwarves, with their stores of lore and artifice from the height of dwarven mastery, were not content to rest upon their laurels. They were driven to improve. Great forges and manufactories, arcane workshops and alchemical wonders flourished. The dwarves sunk several shafts deeper than any surface race had been. The strange, almost incomprehensibly alien races that dwelt at the roots of the world traded with, taught, and learned from the dwarves. The brilliant dwarven craftsmen studies stranger and ever greater techniques and magics in their lust for creation and artifice. Great, terrible magics, pacts with entities long forgotten, mechanical wonders to stagger the imagination, all of these emerged from under dwarven artistry.

It was some time before the dwarves noticed that humans had come to Xan Gian. Who and where from came they, short, stocky, leathery and dark of skin and eye, in their dugout canoes, none now know. They soon settled along the whole coastline of Xan Gian, and named it thus. In their tongue, it means "Harbor of the Gods." According to their legends, Xan Gian was where the gods' navy came to roost before they overthrew the Ancient Ones. The humans, who had many different tribes but no overarching designation for themselves as a race, worshiped the stars, the behemoths of the deep sea, and spirits of animals and plants. They paid praise to the Lord of Dreams, who they named Mun, and to Nu, the Old Sailor, who they knew as Fen San.

That was the state of things until the arrival of the elves, some five hundred years after the first dwarven ship had run aground. The elves were a faction of cultural dissidents who had abandoned their Mahasan fellows in disgust. They felt that elven civilization had grown soft and decadent. They struck out on their own, crossing the ice bridge as the humans had done a hundred years before. Moving past the coasts, inland to the taiga and tundra, they at last decided that this was a fitting place for them. The cold elves, as they began to identify themselves, regressed technologically and culturally. They adopted a strict family-based hierarchical culture, and a cultural maxim of near-celibacy, in stark contrast to their democratic, promiscuous forest-dwelling cousins. The cold elves began to hunt the caribou that roamed the plains, adopting a nomadic existence to follow their herds of prey. Seven families adopted a sedentary existence, dwelling in the forests at the foot of the mountains to hunt the mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and other beasts there. They traded the furs to their nomadic relatives, in addition to exotic herbs and other things. Eventually, a dwarf merchant contacted these elves, and struck up a trade relationship. The elves would provide the dwarves with trophies from the ogres, trolls, and giants who roamed the mountains, and in return the dwarves gave them metal swords and axes, to speak nothing of ingenious dwarven traps. The human tribes remained blissfully unaware of all this, as the elves had not seen the need to strike up a relationship with the "primitive apes."

Fifty years ago, the second wave of settlers came. These were a mixed bunch, predominantly human with the occasional halfling and half-elf. The dwarves, without a hostile army at their heels, didn't have the stomach for the naval voyage and close proximity to the sea the settlers had to undergo. The tieflings found it too bitterly cold for their taste, and the elves had no desire whatsoever to leave their forested home. They came without a real goal at first. Very soon, though, they realized the potential of the fur industry in Xan Gian. They traded with the native tribes and to an extent with the cold elves (or hunted and trapped for themselves), sending the pelts of beaver & snowy hare, the antlers of caribou, sealskins, and the bone and oil of whales back to the mainland in exchange for food, lumber, and metal items. The most prized of all the trade goods is, without doubt, the pelt of the white bears. A single pelt can fetch as much as one thousand gold pieces in the Great Bazaar, and up to three times that in the auction houses. The hunter who killed it will see perhaps sixty coins' worth of that.

The Settlers

There are somewhere around a dozen settlements along the eastern coast of Xan Gian. None of them have more than a hundred inhabitants. The largest (and second-oldest) town is Iceport. It is usually the first and last stop of the ships that travel up and down the coast, gathering trade goods and bringing them back to Iceport, where caravans will carry them across the ice bridge to Fujian, and cross again the next winter, bringing back last year's payment and this year's supplies.

Recently, a series of cannibalistic killings has shaken this town. Normally a hard place, it's gotten even harder as residents are on their guard. What has most people shaking their heads is how anybody could be as successful as they have been in their killings. A goodly percentage of Xan Gian's settlers are criminals fleeing the law, and the weak do not survive long in the far south. There are whispers that the murderer or murderers is not human.

The Natives

There are around one hundred native human villages dotting the coastline of Xan Gian. Only those on the east coast have had any substantial contact with other humans, and they have taken all of the resulting prosperity. The average village has at most fifty inhabitants, usually divided among three to four families. Each village will have at least one shaman, and many have two, usually servants of differing powers.

The natives of Xan Gian are a hardy folk. They average five feet seven inches in height, and are wiry and tough. Their skin is the color of teak, and the predominant hair colors are auburn and dark red. Their eyes are thin, and curve downwards at the outer tips. Noses tend to be sharp and thin, as do lips. Albinism is universally abhorred, and the rare albino childen are carried inland and abandoned on the tundra. Most die, but a very few are raised by the ice elves, who suffer their human peculiarities with strained patience. Deformed or damaged children are cast out into the sea, for resources are scarce. The elderly or infirm form a full two-thirds of the domestic industries, as they spend their days mending nets, making spears and fishooks, canoes, weaving baskets and making clothes, and preparing food. The remaining one-third of the domestic labor force is made up of married women, who are either tempermentally unsuited to hunting or fishing, or are with child. The natives are a hard folk, and without pity for the weak.

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