Orjana

The breadbasket of the north, Orjana is a cool to temperate land of hearty farms, mystic forests, warrior lodges and witchy powers. It’s a multi-ethnic region divided among multiple groups, including humans, elves, dwarves, borzoi and mingits. Orjani culture is a difficult blend of homegrown traditions and centuries of absorbed foreign imperialists.

Common History

Ethnic Ekovians originally came from beyond the wolflands to the north, among the marshes, forests and meadows. Originally, the northern humans referred to the area as Ladoga and themselves as Ladogans.

The Borzoi dog-people lived south of the humans, across the wolflands and what is now Ekovia. Though the two races matured side by side, the humans’ shift towards a belief in a humanlike god who hunted beasts caused friction, making the Borzoi refuse to help Ladogans when their northern neighbors, the Ormjurin invaded.

The Ormjurin were a militant people with a strong warrior culture who made multiple forays down the local rivers into Ladoga to raid or extract tribute. Several Ormjurin chieftains stayed. More and more Ormjurin moved south over time until the distinction between their lands blurred.

Despite having a stronger martial discipline, the Ormjurin didn’t have a strong sense of culture and dissolved in the locals rather than vice-versa. As the ethnic groups gradually merged, the greater region became known as Orjana, after the conquerers. The humans became known as the Orjani by their neighbors.

The Orjani people have also had to deal with incursions from the south. Though they were protected from the worst of Zul Kiran war bands by the difficult badlands and Borzoi forests between them, High Griffons and Leturians have sailed around the side of the continent, to try to establish a Lilist apartheid. About two hundred years ago, a Griffon commander backed by Leturians almost succeeded in taking most of Orjana. A late alliance of the Orjani, elven and dwarves clans eventually forced back the Lilists.

However, their leaders paid a high price for victory by committing several mundane and magical war crimes with lasting repercussions. The winter grove in Mytos K’unn ruptured, allowing the Spirit of Winter to run amok, almost exterminating the elven and gnome clans. Several Orjani detachments had also snuck around enemy lines and slaughtered many women and children in their settlements. Fueled by blood, the Spirit of Winter rampaged across the land before being overcome and dumped into the ocean. The Zamenhof, a cold whirlpool soon emerged, beginning to draw cold currents from the northern oceans and chilling the coast around it.

Some of the choices made during the conflict severely angered the Mytossi witches, who have sealed off the deep woods and turned hostile to all interlopers, stripping the human lords of an important source of political counsel. Furthermore, because some Mingits and Dwarves practiced a different form of the Lil, they ran into pogroms and intolerance, suspected of helping the invaders.

Despite their repulsion, the Lilists left Orjana with a great deal of culture and several major cities that flourished when the locals fused the concepts found in Lilism with their own family-based hierarchies. Trade also grew in this period and though the mostly land-locked Orjani have no major port access, they provide an important interior trade route and are a major source of basic produce and natural resources for the northern continent.

Common Culture

Orjana isn’t a single country and its multiple tribes, clans and ethnic groups, all have their own customs and traditions. Nonetheless, commonalities exist among the children of the Ormjurin, Cheremosh and Ladoga.

Cities as large as Krajiv are a recent development in Orjani history. Most people, be they human, dwarf or canid, are used to living in log holds and farmsteads, banded together as fortified villages. Some, like the Ladogans, spent their history in the shadow of one or another invader. Others, like the Ormjurin, often were the invaders until cultural assimilation erased hard boundaries between the two.

All of this contributed to the rise of militant, self-reliant warrior-cliques protecting their chosen brothers, families or holdfasts. During the worst of the Lilist troubles, by Orjani tradition, a father would approach his newborn son with a drawn sword or axe, cast it to the ground and say “I cannot leave you any land. All that you shall have, shall you earn with this blade.”

Warrior Lodges

The best fighters in the land assemble in warrior-lodges, sometimes called Druzhinas or Brotherhoods. A Druzhina may contain anywhere from a dozen fighters to over a hundred, in which case it’s called a Host. The Skorzenitsa Host is one notable example. The lodges are run as barracks and social clubs simultaneously, lacking the rigidity of most armies. Individual heroism is valued highly and Druzhina members are encouraged to take quests, whether practical ones that involve conquering or protecting a piece of land or epic ones, which involve slaying monsters or retrieving special treasure. Some lodges maintain rivalries and relish fighting each other.

Hero Worship and Ley Empowerment

Besides religion, there is a strong tradition of hero worship in Orjana. Famous conquerors, people of epic achievements and other paragons of society (sometimes, questionable paragons), are held in high regard. In the past, to be a hero through one’s achievements was to invite the auspicious attention of the Spirits of the Land, who draw power from people’s collective beliefs. The heroes would then be quite literally empowered through their soul’s improved resonance with the surroundings, gaining feats of strength, speed and sometimes even magic.In recent years, this phenomenon has declined severely, believed to be due to the witches removing their matronage and sealing off the Mytossi ley line nexus, deep inside the primordial Cheremosh.

Hero worship requires good bards, which is why the storytelling and musical professions are in constant demand. Sometimes due to the lack of bards, many warriors will train themselves to sing, play an instrument or tell tales.

Religion

Most Orjani have several simultaneous belief systems. On one level, they revere the totemic Spirits of the Land, who have real power over souls and the elements. These spirits are also major power figures for the elves and gnomes of the land.

Ladogans believe in the duality of Avir, the father sky-god and Mara, the mother-goddess of hidden places and secrets. In a way, a great deal of their religious philosophy can be described as the struggle between the masculine and the feminine aspects of existence. Currently, the followers of Avir have the upper hand.

Ormjurin have an Avir-like figure but place more emphasis on his children, a pantheon of gods whose mission is to hold back the relentlessly coming Endless Winter at the behest of a betrayer figure and his army of outer monsters of the cold. The betrayer is sometimes portrayed as a soot-colored dog, who will swallow the sun if allowed to get close to it. These gods always need stout warriors to join the fight – hence why being a mighty hero is so important.

The Griffons and Leturians also left a Lilist legacy, despite their attempt to use it to justify racial subjugation. Lilist monasteries sprung up around the land, to contemplate the more mystical aspects of the discipline and some of the land’s most revered elders – male counterparts to the Mytossi witches, have recently emerged from such institutions.

People and Places

Krajiv

Krajiv is the closest Orjana has to a capital and center of civilization. It’s a broad, sturdy city with a reinforced wall that has survived many onslaughts. Originally, Krajiv was simply the biggest warrior-lodge in the land but as invaders from the south tried to lay claim, the Orjani people had rallied around it. Today, they say the city has over a thousand roofs, and growing.

The city and it surrounding farmland is ruled by a Knjaz, a title similar to Grand Duke in Arangoth. Because of the prestige of working for the Knjaz, Krajiv has the best Druzhina or warrior-band in the land, attracting the finest fighters to join. Despite being urbanites, many residents of Krajiv have a small home or patch of land in the countryside and circulate between their city and country dwellings regularly. Marketplaces are held in the city.

Besides its Druzhina, Krajiv has a large peasant militia ready to be mobilized in its defense.

Skorzenitsa

Named after Bogdan Skorzenko, Krajiv’s biggest pain in the arse, a charismatic leader of the second largest warrior-lodge. Skorzenko was a war hero to the Orjani in the fight against the Lilists but after the war ended, he decided to stay a raider and rebel instead of settling down and pledging his sword to the Krajiv consensus. He was declared an outlaw but no knjaz or barin in Orjana had the manpower to catch him and Skorzenko lived to a ripe old age before he fell in battle.

His warrior lodge, known as the Skorzenitsa, is the preeminent druzhina for restless wanderers and brigands who like hiring out as mercenaries, living freely off the land or taking other people’s goods as tribute.

Dwarves and Mingits

Two great dwarven clans, the Seg and the Boru live in the north. The dwarves are Orjani in many ways – they have guild-clans similar to warrior lodges and live in similar habitations to humans: sturdy log cabins and a few small fortresses carved into cliffs. But they also have some Najjira customs in their religion and family life, which they picked up through trade. Both the dwarves and the Mingits who live among them form the merchant class of Orjana.

The Seg are the only seafarers in mostly-landlocked Orjana. They are based at Orjana’s single port of Vodgorod or “Watertown” and the surrounding coastline. They have a small flotilla of slow trading sloops, which can negotiate coastal waters and impact with ice but not the open ocean.

The Boru live mostly inland, within neighborhoods in human cities or in private holds with their own farmsteads. They buy goods from the Seg and the Xiunlans and sell them throughout Orjana.

The Mingits serve as agents and brokers, helping find fellow Mingit trading partners abroad. They mostly live in ghettos throughout human cities and in an enclave in Vodgorod.

Cheremosh: The Fey

The Cheremosh is the name of a forest that covers a good part of Orjana. Much like the Soranion, the woods are run through with powerful ley line grids, giving the forest an arcane presence and enabling the habitation of faeries. Certain elven and gnomish clans make their homes here as well. They prefer to keep to themselves and only allied with the humans when the Lilist incursion seemed hopeless.

Mytos K’unn

Deep in the Cheremosh are the four sacred groves of Mytos K’unn. Each grove is suspended in spacetime during a different season: eternal spring, eternal summer, eternal fall and eternal winter. The forests are watched over by the Mytossi witches, several clans of elves and gnomes and a handful of “spirits of the land” – massive totemic animals and walking trees that carry the ley nerve-endings of the forest and the soul-templates of its animals. How the witches are trained or whether they’re mortal is unknown. By ancient tradition, the big majority has been female.

During the final Lilist incursion, an elven lord performed a terrible ritual, summoning the fey spirit of winter into himself and his warriors. Though they won their battle, they soon died and the spirit, freed from its constraints and fed on violence, became a living blight that was barely overcome and thrown into the ocean. For this and for all the bloodshed, the angered Mytossi witches sealed their realm and started killing everyone who comes close to any of the sacred groves.

Borzoi dogmen

The Borzoi live among the highly elevated Wolflands between Zul Kiras and Orjana, as well as throughout certain Orjani forests. They are fully sentient bipedal hounds, covered in shaggy fur of varying colors. They can’t transform into wolves or into humans and are born having only one shape all their lives. Human-Borzoi reproduction is impossible.

The humans of Ekovia and Orjana and the Borzoi have known one another for centuries. Dog-men sometimes served as hired muscle in human lands but otherwise keep to themselves. Both extended clans and separate nuclear families of Borzoi have been encountered by travelers. The Borzoi have an ancestral hatred of orcs, having weathered many orcish incursions into their forests.