Tribal Stuff (Patreon)

There are a lot of tribes living in the northern forest, but they are all quite small and spread out. I want to say there are 1000 tribes, or thereabouts, ranging in size from 30 to 1000 members. Smaller than 30 and they tend to fail or get absorbed into a larger tribe, and tribes bigger than 1000 members tend to split. The tribes do have a secret tradition that passes down knowledge of [Territory Status] among the Shaman types, so each tribe has its own traditional [Professions]

Politically, each tribe is independent, but they all answer to the Tribal Council which handles disputes between tribes, and interaction with outside groups. Its authority is total, but strictly limited to those areas. So outsiders have a somewhat biased idea of how important the Council is.

The Council is composed of an Elder from each tribe, but it would be difficult to get 1000 Elders to meet regularly. Instead a complicated system of Proxies is used. Each tribe crafts a ring, about 10cm across. This ring is enchanted and decorated to be unique and represents the tribe, and carrying this ring means that the Elder doing so is the Tribal Council representative.

When passing a proxy on, the ring is linked to the receivers ring (this is part of the enchantment). It’s common for say, five tribes to pass their proxies on to one person, who in turn passes his proxies over to yet another. It’s traditional for the top Elders in this chain to carry a staff with their ring attached to the top, and all the other linked rings flowing down like a metal vine.

Proxies can be re-assigned at any time, and of course when your ring is removed from the chain, the downstream links go with you. This forms the basis of a very complex system of shifting alliances that will go right over Kandis’s head. Really, it's only of interest to Elders and the poor foreign diplomats trying to get a consistent answer out of the Council. The fact that the membership of the Council can change based on what the agenda is… well it makes things complicated.

This may come back to bite Kandis, but it is a general principle that agreements already made are honoured. So though she doesn’t know it, her quick acceptance of the deal has helped her a great deal. For a treaty which Lattorra might take six months to ratify, that’s time enough for the isolationist Elders to rustle up some proxies and get on the Council.

I should say the main basis for the conflict between the Forest and Latorra is that the Empire that Latorra used to be part of extended much further north than the current Latorran border. During the collapse, the inhabitants of the region weren’t able to keep up the magic depleting rituals required to keep the forest from spreading south.

The tribal position is that they go where the forest goes, and it’s here now. Latorra feels that it is one of the inheritors of the Empire and should match its old borders as much as possible. The two sides have been largely talking past each other, when they weren’t fighting, for about 50 years.

What else…. Oh! Tribes are generally composed of a single kin type (wolf-kin, rabbit-kin, etc), but about 20% of them are some sort of symbiotic pair, where each type covers a weakness for the other. Bat-kin often pair with other tribes, for example. There are also a few tribes (about 10%) that are explicitly a mix of any type. These tribes can have members that are other races as well, the other tribes can make exceptions, but generally aren’t open to other races.

There are a wide variety of terrains within the forest, and the tribes are nothing if not adaptable, so there are actually a wide variety of styles of living. The Latorran stereotype is that they they all live in treehouses, which is common, but depending on conditions, tribes may live in caves, underwater dens, refurbished Empire ruins… many different options.