The Deadies
Hello, friends!
Today, I’m going to talk about a collection of people wandering the world known as dourfolk.
The dourfolk–or the Harrowed, as they prefer to be called–originate from the mountains of the southern continent. A great calamity occurred in their ancestral home, forcing many to walk the world as nomads or refugees. As a way of coping with the harshness of these times, they underwent a transformation led by Vezedi, a powerful necromancer. Now they exist in a state between life and death–frail, thin, and tired, but never aging.
Though protected from the ravages of time, few of the Harrowed exist for more than a few centuries, as they succumb to the slings and arrows of an uncaring world. Faced by persecution and violence everywhere they go, most Harrowed choose to remain on the move in caravans, but those who live in the vast lands of the Solis Imperium are forced to stay in ghettos within the greater cities.
Distrust for the Harrowed has grown from stories about them robbing graves and stealing people’s souls. In truth, they use a Rite of Reaping to harvest latent anima from the bodies of the dead. The anima is then used for the Rite of Sowing, which is the only way that Harrowed women can bear young. This process is harmless and cleans the body of energies that may later be used to magically animate it, but explaining as much to a superstitious peasant is never easy.
To complicate matters, Harrowed families carry long traditions of working much deeper in the arts of necromancy, allowing a few to live up to the darker stories about them. For every angry villager looking to burn down the Harrowed’s wagons, there are five cowering in their homes for fear of a reprisal involving the walking bodies of their dead loved ones.
“Dourfolk” is one of the more polite terms used by outsiders, coined in reference to the Harrowed’s weary demeanor and aversion to both bright lights and color. Most avoid the sunlight, and it is rare to see them wearing clothes that are not in shades of black and gray. Even their wagons are black, giving a Harrowed caravan the appearance of a funeral procession.
Harrowed have many curses for the oppressive daylight, but some speak of a time when their people lived in caves deep underground, deeper still than even the Wathi. Most Harrowed avoid caves now, worrying over some great and ancient evil that might find them there.
On religious matters, Harrowed share little more than bitter laughter. A few continue to venerate the mad gods who long ago abandoned them, but most are quick to turn their noses up at any form of spiritualism. Rhanna and other spirits are not worthy of veneration more than any other creatures in the world. Anything and everything outside the family is a potential source of trouble.
Only one permanent settlement is known to exist where the Harrowed live with full autonomy, and that is in the ruins of Ritvek far to the North. Once a shining jewel of a city, and the seat of the great northern king, Ritvek was leveled by bombardment from Dynasty warships on their way to attack the holy island of Laerta. A population of Harrowed who were well tolerated in the city soon found themselves to be the only ones capable of surviving in the cold and hungry aftermath.
Today, Ritvek remains an insular no-man’s land to outsiders, guarded by the grand necromantic Skullspire that has protected the city from invasion since well before its fall. They also maintain the Pale Fleet, a diverse collection of naval vessels crewed by the undead that patrol the waters leading to the Far East.
That’s all for today! Hope 2020 is treating you well.
