Duat

Introduction

If there was a place where anarchy was truly extant above the waves, it would find its closest form in and among the roundish, beehive shaped hovels of Duatians, who appear to be impossible to describe effectively or accurately. They are not even a nation, despite having come up with a flag to fly on their stolen ships or hang on poles in their raided forts and hamlets. They are extremely intelligent people, with a highly developed language and are fully able to communicate and sometimes even do – usually in the native language of those they are speaking to.

However, they often simply don’t want to, and so they won’t. Or one might, and several dozen won’t. They don’t seem to have any kind of honor system or real values structure beyond ‘do what you feel like doing.” This seems to be joined by a kind of “hey, you want to go get some people?” or possibly “I wonder if that ship has stuff we can use – you wanna go check it out?”.

Envoys sent to watch and spy have always been found and captured, but often it was a circumstance where they had been found again, and had simply had a long talk with the people the first time. The best we have been able to come p with is that Duatians are a bunch of individuals who live together, play music and dance together, and then do whatever they want in groups or solo and without any real direction beyond whatever sounds good at the moment to those who follow or go along with a plan.

If they can be said to have a plan. There are no true leaders, merely people with an idea and a bunch of others who say sure and do their own thing, sometimes even working at cross purposes. Duatian culture is easily reduced to the precept of Do whatever you want and don’t worry about consequences. Duatians have been known to attack allied groups of Goblins and Imps and even defy Thyrs. They are wild cards, outside the realm and range of sense and understanding we have of the Foe.

It doesn’t help that Duatians at large are generally smarter, stronger, faster, meaner, bigger, and more unpredictable than any other peoples. Even the few remaining feral tribes of Merow – who often work with Duatians, are more easily figured out than this. Duatians do not take prisoners. They do not take slaves. They do not hold things for ransom. Their hovels, from the outside, are simple dirt, clay, mud and earth. No one knows what the inside looks like. They could have tunnels down there.

Duatians do not seem to have any kind of family structure or even track their heritage back to the time before the God’s War. We are not even certain how to tell their genders apart, or even if they have genders. While they all look similar, they are different enough to tell apart as individuals, but yet there is no record of them engaging in any birthing or other practices, and the closest they come to rituals is when one of them grabs a stick and acts as if they are playing a lyre while howling horribly. I would say that the best way to describe Duatians is that they are in it for the fun of it.

Attitude

This seems to be the closest, for the major things that Duatians do engage in during raids, besides random killings of those who get in their way or deny them, is they take all the metals. Anything metal. Everything metal. They don’t eat it that we can tell, as we seem them eating an assortment of thing – including people on occasion, but not with nearly the gusto of Goblins. They take it back to their homes, built in strange, wild clusters that look like hills of beehives all stacked and running together, climb up to the hole on top that is their entrance, and go in. The metals never come out and no one knows for certain what they do with it.

Grendels

Grendels are six limbed, large mouthed, antennae bearing, blue, furry, large eared, mammalian looking, usually around four feet tall, and bad tempered like a Honey Badger with a thorn in its rear end. Toss in a terrifying look, like a spider met a wild badger and got along, and you have an average Grendel. They grow as they get older, roughly an inch every year until they reach seniority, with the largest standing a full seven feet tall. Now give it a sense of humor that overrides everything. They are smarter, faster, stronger, and unpredictable.

They love metal — they will steal any metal they can, especially iron. They are said to have been made to be spies, saboteurs, and shock troops. They can climb up damn near anything, are fast, furious, and prone to being drunkards. They love music and are famed for holding vast feasts where the central feature is an adventurer run through with a spit and slowly roasted over an open firepit, stuffed with chestnuts and cheese. Grendels love to cook and will go to war to control spices. They are rumored to make Goblins seem downright tame and gentle beings.

A Grendel’s fur covers a black, rough skin. Their fur tends to be all within a narrow band of colors. The tips of their ears and other extremities will be black in color most of the time, with some individuals having a white or the rarest being a pale pink in color that extends to the tips of their hair around those areas.