Tiny Steps All Regions Oh God Oh Fuck

Southern Regions (The Scholar’s Redoubt, Black Fields, Red Fields, Marauders’ Agreement, Sea-folk, The Magnates, Domains of Cooperation, Giants’ Forest)
The Scholar’s Redoubt:
The Scholar’s Redoubt is one of four current major powers in the known world, a status received due to a combination of careful military alliance and scholastic insight. It has a military council, composed of quite a few types of bugs but primarily composed of the well-organized and well-armed black ant and red ant countries in the area, who after years of fighting like their neighbors the Red and Black Fields, decided to sign a peace treaty and ultimately ally together. It also has a center of scholarship which hosts some of the brightest minds in the known world, scholars responsible for things such as mechanical engineering, advanced magic, and architecture – which has resulted in a stone fort in center of the region, paralleled only by the Walled Quarter, which is the Scholars’ Redoubt from which the region derives its name. This combination of militaristic alliance and technological superiority have allowed the Scholars’ Redoubt to remain remarkably secure, especially against the Marauder’s Agreement which forced the bugs here to come together in the first place.
However, the large population present in the Scholars’ Redoubt combined with the lack of agricultural knowledge means that food must be imported to maintain the region, primarily from the Bees’ Fields and Tin City regions. The eponymous scholars of the area failed to make a deal to learn the secrets of agriculture from the Noreast Villages or the hives of the Bees’ Fields, or a deal for better metallurgy with The Smiths, and so the scholars have taken a recent dip in prestige, but nonetheless the structures of the Scholars’ Redoubt remain in place, for they are credited by the leaders of the region with its prosperity.
This is the region where the player group starts.
Black Fields:
This is one of the two constantly-warring neighbors of the Scholars’ Redoubt, in a decades (and therefore generations) long war between black ants and red ants. The Black Fields, so named because they are the black ant battlefields, are the home to the secular, highly professional, military, and officer-based black ants, and though they are still winning due to larger numbers and stronger cities than their red ant adversaries, the constant war has taken a terrible toll. The Black Fields once extended far to the west and east, and to the north – but parts of the region broke off into other regions, such as the northern half of the Scholars’ Redoubt which signed peace and fused into the Scholars’ Redoubt. Though the black ants are highly organized and well-trained here, they have failed to gain the support of other bug countries in the area, and thus are rarely able to complete large projects.
Red Fields:
Naturally, the other side of this eternal war is the Red Fields, home of the red ants, whose method of internal structure is a careful internal religion, where the tenets of said religion focus on the internal structure of each red ant city as something sacred and necessary to red ant existence. This has tilted them towards studies of magic, especially light magic, and though it allows for internal structure that rivals that of the black ants, it has created an insularity between cities that, along with their lesser numbers, has been seeing them finally start to decisively lose the Ant War. Though the red ants don’t openly disdain the other bugs in the Red Fields, they have remained aloof, which hasn’t helped. Much like the Black Fields, the Red Fields used to be larger, portions of its territory being subsumed by the Scholars’ Redoubt and the Domains of Cooperation. Both the Red Fields and Black Fields keep a chilly but not violent attitude towards the Scholars’ Redoubt, seeing them as both traitors and kin.
Marauders’ Agreement:
The Marauders’ Agreement is an informal pact of raiders formed when the raider groups (primarily nomads like flies and mosquitos) in the region grew to dominance and agreed not to raid each other in lieu of softer targets. During the first decade and a half or so of the existence of the bug-people, they were one of the two most fearsome and powerful blocs in the known world, stretching down to the sea and east into ant territory, the many raiders putting out a constant pressure that could not be individually defended against. In recent years, though, their fate has thoroughly changed. Not only the formalized and military cooperation of the Scholars’ Redoubt and Domains of Cooperation has thoroughly stopped their conquest there, with the Domains of Cooperation driving into their territory, but the arrival of the Sea-folk from across the sea has seen their south rapidly conquered – even the mercantile Magnates have been taking land from them. They’re still a pest, but not much more, and perhaps not for long.
Sea-folk:
The Sea-folk are not native to the known world and seem to have managed to sail across the rapidly-flowing sea to the west with boats (a capability the Driftwood Coast is feverishly working to attempt to replicate). They don’t have regular traffic back and forth, the journey still being quite difficult, and instead came across in a large pirate fleet five years ago… which meant that they were a large military force, which promptly conquered a large portion of the Marauder’s Agreement. While not as rigid and formal as the Scholars’ Redoubt or Domains of Cooperation, the foreign members of the Sea-folk have tight bonds between crews and fight very effectively together. They bring strange naval technologies and trinkets… and because the ones they invaded are the Marauders’ Agreement, who everybody hated anyhow, the Sea-folk see little hostility with other neighboring regions, which led to several flourishing trade agreements, especially with the Magnates.
The Magnates:
The Magnates are a thoroughly mercantile region who conduct a large amount of trade with almost everyone around them – after all, that is their specialty. The Magnates don’t have quite a central governing body like the Scholars’ Redoubt, but instead their cities are mostly headed by wealthy patricians, who have collectively formed a trade league that operates together in manners of war and trade. The Magnates’ trade web allows them not only to trade their resources, but to facilitate trade between regions like the Scholars’ Redoubt and Driftwood Coast that might otherwise have difficulty making the journey, something that has made the Magnates very, very rich. Though their military is not the most overwhelmingly powerful one in the known world, it is powerful enough to take on the rump state of the Marauders’ Agreement, securing a trade route to the Scholars’ Redoubt through the Land of Plains and even taking some land from the Marauders.
The Domains of Cooperation:
The Domains of Cooperation are another one of the four great powers of the known world, with an origin similar to that of the Scholars’ Redoubt. In early years, what are the Domains of Cooperation were instead a set of smaller entities that did not fight but largely ignored each other – small termite nests, red ants in the north from what were once the Red Fields, mantises, mosquitoes, and other nomadic groups. However, constant predation and attack from the Marauders’ Agreement forced the group together over time – and without need for a peace treaty and fostering civilian cooperation, difficulties the Scholars’ Redoubt initially had, these communities got very, very close. Nowadays, the Domains of Cooperation are a purely militaristic organization, operating through a strict hierarchy of many different bug militaries, sometimes mixing and sometimes remaining separate, carefully and formally built to benefit all in it, leading to a strong discipline and strong camaraderie among the forces of the Domains of Cooperation, making them a force to be reckoned with. Ironically, they do not have a strong relationship with the Scholars’ Redoubt, as their internal cooperation does not translate to external friendliness and they fiercely guard their resources, leading to a constant cold standoff.
The Giant’s Forest
This area has no houses and is instead very heavily wooded – meaning the bug population here is not very urban and operates in a different way because of it. The people here (and there aren’t many of them relatively, the area is relatively sparsely populated) live among the trees, in what is a fairly idyllic if difficult lifestyle composed of large amounts of gathering… and climbing, as the trees are utterly giant for bug-people, hence the region’s name. There isn’t much organization here; groups of gathering and hunting groups here occasionally cooperate and occasionally fight, but there simply isn’t enough population and enough resources for robust organization. The Giants’ Forest is pretty much completely isolated from the world – The Mystics have no intention of bothering them, and the Domains of Cooperation find themselves unable to effectively operate in the thick woods of the area, and the groups of The Giant’s Forest are quite happy to be left alone to focus on their survival.


Western Regions (Driftwood Coast, Walled Quarter, Termite Ruins, Three Lakes Hermits, Home of Frogs, Land of Plains, Banner Tribes, Fishers)
Driftwood Coast:
The third of the world’s four great powers, the Driftwood Coast can be referred to, perhaps, as “aspiringly naval” – they have one of the best harbors in the world in their territory, and they got their name from the incredible amount of driftwood that they’ve either collected or traded for from the Magnates or their effective vassals the Fishers… it’s just that they haven’t yet managed to make ships that can survive the Flowing Sea that the Sea-folk managed to cross. Nonetheless, all of the wood has made the Driftwood Coast into a powerhouse of construction, and probably the only world power that reached its position for its economy. It is significantly less formally organized than the Scholars’ Redoubt or Domains of Cooperation, and instead maintains a sort of urban peace – the various cities of the region were at first merely a trade league like that of the Magnates, but during the era of dominance of the Termites, they were forced to band together to build defenses and enlarge cities, so that they could take them on if the Termites ever struck – which, in the end, the Termites never did. Now, the need to keep trading and keep constructing both to maintain their economic dominance and to try to one day cross the sea keeps the Driftwood Coast together and strong, with very careful schedules of construction and agreements kept between the cities of the Driftwood Coast.
Walled Quarter:
Back in the brutal days of bug-kind’s youth, where the Empire of Termites and the Marauders’ Agreement dominated half of the world, the Driftwood Coast wasn’t the only group to turn to defenses to protect themselves. The Stonemasons, a group which painstakingly worked and shaped stones to works of art, found itself under attack by both. Ultimately, they turned to defending themselves at more or less all costs, turning their time and productivity to the purposes of defending themselves. Eventually, as both of the aggressive empires started to decline, the Stonemasons started succeeding – and they started building a wall around their entire region of the world. As of yet, it’s not really all that much of a wall, as the entire perimeter is usually only a few bricks high with higher walls in some areas, but they’re still working at. They’re notoriously distrustful, especially of large world powers, so while they do trade regularly with the Magnates, they maintain minimal contact with the Driftwood Coast. They’re a bit of an enigma to the other regions, as hard borders (like the kind the Walled Quarter in the most literal sense has) are something quite foreign to the rest of the world.
Termite Ruins:
In the first couple of decades after bugs turned to bug-people, one of the two mightiest regions in the whole world was the Empire of Termites, a terrifyingly mighty group of the large termite cities in the area. The Empire of Termites, though not actually ruled by a singular individual or government so much as a combination of termite polities brought together by their feelings of superiority, were infamous for their violence and domination, continually attacking and often conquering the bugs around them – and subjugating the ones who weren’t termites as perceived subject races. For some time, they seemed unstoppable (at their peak controlling what is now the Home of Frogs, the Three Lakes Hermits, the northern Bees’ Fields area, and most of what is now the Banner Tribes area), but they had set themselves up for failure – voracious and unsustainable consumption, combined with viciously subjugating the various other bug races that could have helped them produce, led to a precipitous decline, to the beginning of their cities collapsing, and then, just as of three or so years ago, total chaos as the subject bugs stopped taking orders and started attacking back. One interesting thing, though, is that mites are particularly prominent in this region thanks to the inaccessibility of its ruins.
The Three Lakes Hermits
One of the most recent regions to come into existence, the various bugs of the Three Lakes Hermits – primarily caterpillars, mantises, and sedentary mosquitoes, one of these around each lake – three years ago declared that they were no longer to be subjects of the termites, kicking off the series of rebellions the once-prominent termites are now consumed by. Though not the first group to separate from the termites, they are the first group in what was considered properly “termite land” to do so, having expelled the termites entirely from the collapsed houses that were once termite cities in the region, and now living in their own towns. As one might expect, the Three Lakes Hermits aren’t much for contact with the outside world, with their only major contact somewhat ironically being that of the Walled Quarter – the people in these regions seem to just understand each other instinctually. Otherwise, they take advantage of the fact that all of their neighbors either have no ability or no desire to attack them in order to live on their own, only very informally organized in an agreement of leaving well enough alone, and in agreement to try to enforce this thing called a border that the Walled Quarter has too.
Home of Frogs
The Home of Frogs is a region that existed once around the beginning days of bugkind, as the bugpeople there started to tame and bond with the frogs (which still are just frogs) in the region, then stopped existing as they were rather brutally conquered by the Termites, and then started existing again when they seceded from the weakening Termites eight years ago. They still love their frogs as much as they ever did, and they’re still friendly enough with the Land of Plains that frogs show up as mounts frequently there, but they’ve taken a significantly more militaristic bent this time around, turning their frog-bonding ways into making themselves extremely proficient cavalrymen. This, as it turns out, was a very good idea, as they are currently being relentlessly attacked by the Banner Tribes to their north. Unfortunately for them, though, the underlying lack of development and organization thanks to their former conquered status means that their cavalry skill is merely slowing their conquest.
Land of Plains:
The Land of Plains, despite its proximity to both the Marauders’ Agreement and the pre-collapse Empire of Termites, has avoided devastation thanks to a couple of factors. One reason is that an extremely convenient river exists that made attacking the Plains an expensive proposition even for the Termites. Another reason is that it’s very difficult for the Marauders to actually raid somebody when their typical response is to ride away faster than the Marauders can actually reach them. A naturally friendly but fairly savvy people, the bugs of the Land of Plains have never really had the cities that more urban regions did, and so adapted a lifestyle of quickly moving around between various resources and communities, riding on rabbits and other small mammals for the largest part (though recently, they’ve branched out into frogs). Their friendliness and openness mean that a significant amount of trade goes into and through their land, keeping most of the bugs here quite happy. However, they do remain pretty unable to affect the world stage thanks to their rurality and lack of any meaningful organization. This isn’t an eternal status quo, mind – as more trade routes pop up through the Land of Plains, especially with the rapid decline of its old foes, the families here have been increasingly forming trade networks.
The Banner Tribes:
The Banner Tribes are the fourth and newest of the major powers of the world, and they are without a doubt the scariest. They popped up out of seemingly nowhere five years ago, as a charismatic and talented figure got many different nomadic groups on the edges of the falling Termite Empire to group together and make their mark on the world. Ever since, they’ve been expanding and expanding, fighting always with zeal, with unity, and then every so often with tactical brilliance. Their advantages are twofold: firstly, though the original uniter of the nomadic bugs doesn’t actually singularly rule the tribes, they’ve all gathered under the blood-red banner – a blood-red banner that represents an end to the dominance of highly urban bugs such as termites, bees, and ants, and the resurgence of the tribes making up the Banner Tribes. What this means is that there’s a shocking amount of cooperation and unity for such a bloodthirsty region – they may raze cities, but they never infight with those under the same banner, where even the Scholars’ Redoubt sees occasional skirmishes and spats, and they offer other rural bugs a chance to join them, which not all do take. Secondly, their founder is sufficiently respected that he can take control of military forces where he shows up, and whenever that happens his opponents usually lose. They have been steadily conquering the Termite Ruins, the Home of Frogs, and the Bees’ Fields, and are in more or less just a stalemate with who they aren’t conquering.
Fishers:
Last and, frankly, kind of least among the Western Regions are the Fishers. Though they’re not all that geographically connected to the West, the Fishers are incredibly connected with the Driftwood Coast, to the point that they’re more or less the vassals of the other coastal civilization. The reason for this is that the population density of the land the Fishers are on is actually incredibly sparse, with only a few coastal houses where the Fishers don’t really tend to congregate in. They largely instead just sit on the beaches, letting the Driftwood Coast have the driftwood there in exchange for protection (and the Driftwood Coast sees them like little brothers, so they hold up their end of the deal, which is why the Banner Tribes haven’t invaded), and they fish. And one thing important to note here is that fish are still much bigger than bug-people are, as it isn’t as if they’ve shrunk, so entire villages come together to work contraptions and nets in big productions that net them entire fish! Preserved, this feeds an entire village for days. The people in this area are largely mosquitoes, but there are other water-side bug-people too.


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.


Northeastern Regions (Land of Mystics, The Poets, Ghost Towns, Noreast Villages, The Smiths, The Brothers, Alliance Against the North):
Land of Mystics:
The Land of Mystics is a region that now enjoys a great amount of peace – they either have the respect or friendship of their neighbors, or otherwise their neighbors aren’t terribly capable of invading them. They have used this peace in order to deeply refine their craft, which is magic; they are some of the preeminent spellwrights in the world, along with the Poets and the Scholars’ Redoubt (both of which the Land of Mystics is generally quite friendly with), and their sharpening of magic is deeply rooted in mystical lifestyles and rituals that seem to provide some actual framework for their craft. The Land of Mystics has not always had peace, however – in the bug world’s early years, they often skirmished with the black and red ants when their war spilled over. Worse, the bugs in the cities of the Land of Mystics (incidentally, a very diverse bunch) never really developed any formal or even strong informal cooperation mechanisms; they only made on-the-spot agreements and kind of just found themselves on the same sides in battle. This is why they developed their magical expertise: without either numbers, gear, organization, or physical prowess with which to defend from the ant incursions, the Mystics ultimately decided to lean on magic-working tendencies, and make it into a true expertise – and it worked. Not only did they in the end avoid seriously being cut into, but they are today recognized as the experts, and they are a regionally prominent presence, if maybe not a true power.
The Poets
The Poets, much like the Mystics, are a group that despite having little in the way of organization between cities gained peace over time. Unlike the Mystics, however, their freedom from battle came not at all from their own actions, and it came earlier. The black ants had been significantly pushing into their land, pushing them back against an old human road, when a brutal famine hit much of the area – and though it ultimately stopped short of the Poets, it devastated the ant land to the west of them, causing the black ants to withdraw further western into other ant territory. Ultimately, the Poets didn’t move to retake anything, but rather withdrew into themselves. The society of the Poets is extremely urban, but much more fragmented than the Driftwood Coast, which is similarly urban – it is effectively a bunch of disjointed city-states with similar values. The people here have a strong distaste for rural bugs, and indeed for much of the outside world, instead taking an isolationist stance and developing both magic and new and intriguing forms of writing known as “poetry” – they’re some of the most skilled in the former and the inventors of the latter, which they do take rather a lot of pride in. The Mystics are about the only people that the Poets deign to interact with on a regular basis.
Ghost Towns:
The Ghost Towns were once the “rear” lands of the vast black ant empire, and possession of as much territory as the black ants held, including what are now the Ghost Towns made the black ants the dominant belligerent in the ant wars. They were a force to be reckoned with in the northeast, too – though they rarely engaged in sustained campaigns against the other northeastern regions, with the Poets an exception, their warring often spilled over into other areas. That’s when an unexpected famine brutalized the region – some of the primary sources of human-scavenged food abruptly burned down in a fire, and suddenly the ants here had nothing to eat. Ultimately, they withdrew into their more core lands to the west, and the Ghost Towns were left nearly abandoned. Nearly abandoned – many of the rural groups of the area still exist, and mites and parasites inhabit the remaining houses, but no real urban core exists to this day. And with the fact that there still aren’t many food sources, nobody has expressed much interest in retaking the area – it would be difficult and unrewarding. This has left it largely a void, sparsely inhabited by bug groups who are perfectly happy to be left well enough alone.
Noreast Villages:
Living in a very idyllic spot of the world (which is idyllic in large part because of the efforts of the Alliance of the North against the raiders that sometimes cross from, well, the north), the Noreast Villages have been free to pursue their lifestyle. Ultimately, this lifestyle is an exceptionally parochial one – having discovered the art of agriculture very early on, and mostly not consisting of hive bugs, the bugs in these areas largely grouped into rural villages, meaning the houses of the area aren’t terribly populous. Instead, there’s a great deal of farming that goes on here, and the farmers here are exceptionally peaceful, as the advantage that agriculture gives them means that prosperity is an easy thing. In fact, they produce so much food that they have a significant amount to export to their neighbors – despite the lack of real institutions tying the villages together, a myriad of agreements between individual communities tie them with their neighbors. The Noreast Villages are, in fact, what ties the entire far northeastern region together, as their food sustains many of the regions here, gaining services and friendship from them in return. The Noreast Villages thusly are quite important, despite the lack of actual direct power and something of a lack of desire to get involved with those farther than their current friends.
The Smiths:
Another one of the four regions that make up the core of the far north-east, the Smiths are exactly that – a set of largely unorganized cities and villages that practice and refine the art of metalsmithing, whether it be functional blacksmithing, metallurgy, or fine metalsmithing, one will find communities in the Smiths that have worked on that particular art in very great detail. The Smiths are not the only ones who can work metal – the ants and termites and Driftwood Coast all developed this capacity, and it’s spread to many groups, including the Scholars’ Redoubt, but the Smiths are undoubtedly the best at it. Benefitting from food from the Noreast Villages and protection from both the Brothers and the Alliance Against the North, the Smiths have been able to thrive (including naturally expanding southwards into some of the more intact areas of the Ghost Towns when they became, in fact, ghost towns, though this expansion has stopped) and to focus on their craft with every fiber of their beings. They aren’t as isolationist as many of the other northeastern groups, and they will happily trade much of their handiwork, which has found its way across the world as prized tools, ornaments and weapons, but as the Scholars’ Redoubt recently discovered, it’s extremely difficult to get them to actually divulge their techniques, which they feel possessive over.
The Brothers:
The Brothers have long been a fairly marginal presence on their own in the region – though a martial group of peoples, comprised of a varied mix of urban, village, and nomadic communities with little direct commonality, they never competed with the black ants because they never would have been able to, instead mostly just keeping to themselves and practicing arts of combat that they never found themselves using. Then, however, the Great Fire that ravaged the ants came to then, too, and so did the famine that came with it. The bugs here were on the verge of death, not having anywhere to really flee to without dissolving totally, when their neighbors intervened – the Noreast Villages provided them with food, and the Smiths helped them in rebuilding. The bugs here did not forget this kindness: in fact, it caused something of a reformulation of their identity, a debt they swore they’d forever repay. Rechristening themselves the Brothers, they gave themselves a purpose, now: they are bodyguards and friends to the people of the Noreast Villages, the Smiths, and to a degree the Alliance against the North, dedicating themselves to the protection of the people that saved their lives, even a generation down the line.
Alliance Against the North:
The Alliance Against the North is a region with a very, very specific purpose. The peoples of the north are very dedicated raiders, living and idolizing a lifestyle of hunting and raiding and fighting… during the very earliest years of the world, though they did not cross in sufficient mass to conquer, they were a constant threat, raiding and attacking the communities of the northeast constantly. Ultimately, the bug communities on the edge of the human road that separates the known world from the North decided that enough was enough. They did not band together in hierarchical or economic or political structures like much of the rest of the world, or even the very formal military networks of the Domains of Cooperation, but rather the leaders of the communities (like much of the rest of the northeast, urban and rural and nomadic) came together and created a very strict and simple alliance: they would, no matter what, work together to repel the invaders from the North. They have settled into this grim duty and performed it admirably – the people of the Alliance are very hardscrabble, doing what they have to to not only survive but to win. They are, thankfully, supported in this task: fed by the Noreast Villages, equipped by the Smiths, and aided by the Brothers, who are all quite aware what the failure of the Alliance would spell for them if it ever happened, the Alliance Against the North has remained competent in the task it has assigned for itself, precisely-focused and dedicated.


Tiny Bugs:
Mites:
A commonality throughout the entire bug world, mites are one of two classification of the kinds of bugs so incredibly tiny that even now, turned human-like, they only manage a few millimeters in size. Compared to the other bugs, who are usually a couple of inches tall, mites (and their counterparts, parasites) are so small that they fit on bugs’ shoulders! They usually eke out existences mostly separate from other bugs, building villages in little niches that other bugs can’t reach, but there are so uncountably many of them (in many different types, though larger bugs don’t often realize this) that it’s still far from uncommon to see some unusual mites hanging around larger bugs’ societies. They encompass their own little cultural milieu, with political and military relations of their own, trading and fighting and loving and building and working, but because they’re so small, and so isolated into villages, it’s very rare that these things ever see any sort of prominence in larger bug society. Usually, mites are just seen as little friends and assistants that kind of flit in and out. However, there is a feud that is widespread enough that even larger bugs know about it: though it isn’t universal, many mites and parasites are known to fight bitterly.
Parasites:
The reason that mites and parasites fight so bitterly is that parasites are often (though not always) the more malicious and bitter counterparts of mites, and the only other group on the level of mites, in their little world of micro-bug politics. Having been separated completely from the lifestyle of, well, parasitism, but initially still driven by some of these impulses, many parasites became thieves, often shooed out by larger bugs or even killed like pests – these impulses, as with near to all bugs, have faded and instead become baked into societal makeups and relations, and the parasites still often feel unwelcome both among the larger bugs, who view them as pests, and most mite societies, who view them as mortal foes. There are oases of peace out there where mites and parasites get along, as both mites and parasites make up large and diverse categories not only of bug types but also of cultures –in fact, this is true to a degree that puts even the diversity of the larger bug world to shame—but for the largest part the parasites face an embattled and marginalized life, only really eking out life peacefully in their own little nooks when they’re not fighting mites or being chased away… and then they, in turn, often steal relentlessly and maintain what hostilities they can out of both a need for survival and a sense of spite.