Tiny Steps Central Regions

Central Regions (Red Path, Bird Raisers, Bees’ Fields, Tin City, Wasp Hell):


Red Path:
The Red Path has a large red-ant population, and indeed at one point could simply be considered red ant territory, if luckily separated from the main ant wars – the result of the merging of a preexisting red ant colony in the area and a ragged group of refugee red ants. The Red Path has a very interesting relationship with the highly organized red ant religion; the fused red ants never entirely agreed on how to implement it, though the indigenous ants did accept it, and the two groups together weren’t truly large enough to dominate the area – which meant that, in the end, what was a very societal and limited religion ultimately became a proselytizing religion, accepting those nearby whether or not they were actually red ants. The Red Path faithful now accordingly make up a whole region, with this group including all sorts of other bugs, even including a few black ants! The Red Path is in some ways remarkably tolerant, and its somewhat acephalous but self-reinforcing and thoroughly unified hierarchy has allowed it to wage an excellent defensive war against the Banner Tribes, even taking a small portion of the land. On the other hand, it is fairly unlikely to interact with its neighbors unless they convert.

Bird Raisers:
Much like the Land of Plains, the region of the Bird Raisers is a rural one with no house-cities to be found, and again much like the Land of Plains the Bird Raisers themselves have made this into an advantage. In contrast to the Land of Plains, which only has stumps and saplings, the land of the Bird Raisers has a lot of trees – trees not as large as those of the Giants’ Forest, but when you’re a bug that hardly makes a difference. The Bird Raisers are careful animal husbands and metaphorical shepherds of birds, and they ride these from tree to tree, on their missions of gathering food, and in recent years combat. The Bird Raisers, though not as friendly and trusted as the people of the Land of Plains, make good bargains for their birds and are highly skilled in their use – this means that they can fight from the treetops where most foes have little chance of dealing with them, and with the resources from bird sales on top of this, the Bird Raisers have managed to prevent any Banner Tribe incursion from making any significant, lasting impact. However, it is true that they’re barely organized, even in comparison to the Land of Plains – the bugs here are united more or less only by their antipathy towards aggressors, and they operate as small, independent units, primarily of friends.

Bees’ Fields:
The residents of the Bees’ Fields got extremely lucky. At the time of the transition from bug to bug-people, the inhabitants of this place found that A: they were mostly bees, B: there were quite a lot of them, and C: they were near a fantastic patch of meadow. This resulted in the Bees’ Fields being a tightly populated region with a lot of well-organized formerly-hive bugs (bees), something which immediately worked in their favor. With plenty of fertile fields in them, the bees became a fair agricultural power, growing crops of, for example, dandelions, and selling these out to groups that needed to purchase food... and this only more became the case with the rise of the Scholars’ Redoubt, as the increasingly densely populated region needs a great deal of food. Being tightly populated, bee-led, and being one of only two regions understanding the secrets of agriculture made them extremely rich and prosperous, especially with the rise of Scholars’ Redoubt, which buys heavily from them, and they used this to expand well-northward from the rich field in the south corner of their land. This bit them though, in the end – having never really established a meaningful military and having simply relief on their wealth and being almost entirely concentrated power-wise in the south anyway, the Banner Tribes have been rolling them over.

Tin City:
The “Tin City” doesn’t in fact just consist of one city, but it’s a tight little nut of a trade network center primarily over just three cities, from which food flows outwards not only to the whole region but to the world as a whole – but which gives these three cities effective political and economic dominance over the region. This trade arrangement is because these houses have vast rooms of cylinders of tin and ancient, massive tools of unknown use, including blades themselves bigger than two bug-people from head to foot. These archaeological troves to contain an absurd quantity of food, which seems never to go bad within their tis cylinders. Theories abound about just what these rooms were left there for, but among the Tin City, the largest theory is that these must have been warlords of human society feeding their armies. The bounty here is so vast that it’s both fed the region and provided a mostly steady flow of export for thirty years – even the early Marauders couldn’t deal with them, as their forces were steadily fed and well-funded, though the bugs in the area have been interested in little other than protecting their tin motherload. Exports have been declining out of the Tin City recently, however and the only reason they’re still the equal of the Bees’ Fields in terms of food exports is that the latter are having to divert their resources to deal with the Banner Tribes – and they don’t seem to have a backup plan.

Wasp Hell:
The interestingly named “Wasp Hell” had been a warzone for twenty-six years, since the very start. It contains an abundance of different formerly eusocial bug societies, which had somewhat quickly organized into cities, but which had been unable to find a way to deal with each other. These four bug societies were red velvet “ants” (really wasps rather than red ants), paper wasps, hornets, and black ants. A confused no-man’s land ended up descending into war as the black ants of the region shortly joined their compatriots and began to push into the region, causing what was initially a fight between wasps and ants… until the brunt of the black ant mega-group ultimately shifted elsewhere after a drought to the east, much shrinking the ant presence and leading to the war collapsing into a four-sided one. As the fight ground on over the years, the worse off the region was – to the point that when a red ant official visited the bloodied country, he dubbed the place to be “Wasp Hell” – a name that proceeded to stick thoroughly onto the place, to the chagrin of its occupants. However, with the rise of the Scholars’ Redoubt, the inhabitants of Wasp Hell, long tired of war which had brought them nothing imitated their successful neighbors… and put in a peace treaty to finally, finally put the embattled land at peace. Still, the peace of Wasp Hell remains a tenuous one, and Wasp Hell relies on the Scholars’ Redoubt to provide occasional help and advice to keep its inhabitants from potentially tearing themselves apart once more.