dailyadventureprompts:Setting: Ouskuat, The Land Beyond the Clouds“Kings in Palaces, Mages in
dailyadventureprompts:Setting: Ouskuat, The Land Beyond the Clouds“Kings in Palaces, Mages in towers, I swear, it’s like the higher up you live the more you feel like you’ve got to condescend to everyone who lives below. “- Trolfi Toffybarn, Hafling Satirist Setup: Known as the Empire of the Ascendant, or the riders of the hurricane, the People of Ouskuat have faced many tribulations in their centuries of existence, having learned early that a willingness to adapt is the foremost virtue of a cilization that values its history. The greatest of these adaptations came a little over two centuries ago, when Ouskuat was one of a great many empires clashing for territory in a great equatorial jungle. Driven by foolish rulers hungry for expansion, and buffeted by plagues from a neighboring land, a cascade of disasters saw the previously land hungry empire abandon many of its frontiers as their enemies chased them into the mountains. Surrounded by enemies and sickness, the gathered conclave of Ouskuat shamans performed a miracle to save their people; unmooring their sheltering mountains from the earth and setting them adrift among the clouds, exiling the warleaders and their loyalists to the ground below to their deserved fate of carnage. Having escaped war by flying high into the sky, the conclave set about reorganizing Ouskat society, using the same ingenuity their people had used to farm in the resource poor jungle to transform the newmade archipelago into an ingenious network of revivors and hanging gardens. Free from the threat of warlike neighbors and unburned by the need for sudden expansion, the Ouskuat are now a predominantly isolationist nation of spiritualists, architects and cultivators. The Ouskuat live in close proximity to numerous species of feathered drakes, once the symbol of the shamanic conclaves and later adopted as a sacred animal by their people. While their leaders attempt evoke in the grace and magesty of these creatures their raiment, the true honor rests with the Sojourners, a class of daredevil ornithologists who rear, care for, and partner with the drakes in order to go exploring, mapping the landscapes their cloud-veiled home drifts by, or setting out on drakeback to meet and catalogue the peoples of the earth. Adventure Hooks: After clashing with some great airborne predator, a Sojourner and her mount crash outside a village they were surveying from a far. Few of the locals have ever heard of the Ouskuat before, so now the Sojourner is stuck trying to explain to a bunch of terrified peasants who can’t understand her why they shouldn’t kill the injured dragonkin that’s invaded their territory. Perhaps the players could intercede on her behalf? For centuries the Land beyond the Clouds was out of reach of any other civilization, save for a few curious explorers capable of flight on a personal scale, which the Hurricane-Riders hosted with a lofty hospitality. Now however with the invention and popularization of airships, a policy of true isolation seems less and less tenable. With no fixed location and swarms of drake mounted warriors, the floating archipelago is primed to seize control of any number of profitable trade winds, and the emerging powers of the air are interested to know whether that control would be military or mercantile in nature. Similarly, while a strict traditionalist faction currently holds sway in the shamanic conclave, several more enterprising subgroups consider trade and traffic with the outside world to be an increasingly legitimate option. -- source link