Punting and Fronts #2 and #3: The Tazitta Death Cults and the Terrors in the Thursewood

Everyone can probably hardly resist commenting on current events after Saturday and the dishonest response from the regime about it. I’ll refrain—mostly—and just defer to quoting a small portion of the Z-man’s post from this morning.

Sensing that this was not good for their side, the regime rolled the dice and sent Biden out to “address the nation” from the Oval Office. It is the habit of the regime to cry out in agony as they attack, but when that tactic fails, they go for a different version. They attack then call for peace before they think the other side has a chance to respond. For close to a decade they have been calling for the death of Trump and his supporters, but now all of a sudden, they think it is time to put aside our differences and come together as brothers. Note that there was no remorse in Biden’s call for unity over the weekend.

Imagine you are walking down the street, and a guy runs up and smacks you in the head, a thing common in coastal cities. Just as you are about to respond, he starts yelling, “Why can’t we just get along, bro?” Then a crowd forms up demanding that you accept the guy’s offer of peace and reconciliation. It is absurd, but it is how the progressive mind operates. These are people with no scruples and no self-awareness, so they are incapable of remorse.

It is a hollow gesture, and the regime will soon be back to anathematizing Trump and everyone associated with him. When they call Trump an “existential threat to their democracy” they mean it and they are correct. What they mean by “their democracy” is rule by the semi-permanent ruling class of credentialed experts and policy makers who hide behind the democratic process. If the voters back populist candidates like Trump, then the system loses its legitimacy.

It is not that Trump will usher in revolutionary change if elected. It has never been about that for the regime. They could have cut a good deal with him at any time. It is what Trump represents that terrifies them. What these people fear is a system whereby elected officials compete for public support and then have the power to pass laws they think are popular with the public. They hate this idea for the same reason they were scandalized by the overturning of the Chevron deference.

This is one reason why there will be no going back. This is the new normal and will remain so until one side destroys the other side utterly. We have been in a cold civil war, as John Derbyshire has called it, for a long time. The war has gotten hotter over the last decade and it got very hot over the weekend. It may cool down a bit over the next few weeks, but by the time the Democratic convention rolls around, Joe Biden will be threatening drone strikes on your town again.

Of course, demographic reality plays a role. Trump is symbolically the voice of white America right now. Parts of that shrinking heritage America were radicalized when they saw Trump rise like El Cid from the stage floor. It was not so much that the scales fell from their eyes about what is happening, but that they were reminded of the basic truth of what it means to be an American. It is not the Bravo Sierra that comes from creepy weirdos [and fake Americans, - ed.] like Ben Shapiro. What it means to be an American is when the bullets start flying, you run toward the shooter.

That is when the battle is joined. Until now, the cold civil war has been a one-sided affair, because white people did not know there was a war. They told each other that the actions of the regime were for money or power. Now they are starting to sense it is about something else. The “existential threat” is not against “their democracy” but against heritage Americans. If the regime thinks killing Trump is funny, they will have no qualms about killing you and your family.

Assassinations are often triggering events. The most famous was the assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand. That kicked off the Great War. The assassination of Kennedy kicked off the cold civil war that still rages today. Perhaps in time the failed assassination of Trump will be seen as the turning point in the cold civil war, the point when the good guys finally figured out that they are under attack and begin to organize a resistance against the gathering darkness.

Anyway, I’m actually punting still and now doing my Front #2 and #3 (because I don’t have a lot of images to go with Front #2.) If Front #1 is meant to embody the entire Hill Country region, fronts #2 and #3 were always meant to embody the two constituent halves of it, Northumbria and Southumbria. Although, as my boundaries shifted and changed during the development of the setting necessary for the front itself to develop, it turned out that the threat is really to Southumbrian regions all along; the northern Southumbrian region of the Copper Hills which are near the Umber River, and therefore (technically) the line between the two regions, and further south where the Thursewood threat would actually threaten very southerly cities like Burham’s Landing, Roanstead, Willow Springs and possibly even Barrowmere itself, or at least the surrounding rural areas.

Front #2, The Tazitta Death Cults refer to a threat arising on the strange hinterland that is nominally claimed by Northumbria, but realistically they have never controlled it at all. The Tazitta Tribes, an ancient leftover population that predates the arrival of the Hillmen, but are just a scanty remnant deep in the badlands and the thickest forests, are attempting to rally their people. The Prophetess is the harbinger of their strange cultic religion, and she’s reluctantly wrangled, harangued or bullied the war drums to beat in the Tazitta lands. Raids against settlements in the Copper Hills region and the more settled part of northern Southumbria between the Umber River, the Copper Hills, the Chokewater Forest and Waychester Bay (sometimes called informally the Northwoodshire) are on the rise, and the countryside is burning. Ampelius Pictor, a sorcerer from Lomar who’s been playing a mild-mannered Zobnan academic by day, but by night is secretly a cultist sympathetic to the Nyxian cults is also involved. Both the Tazitta tribes and the Nyxian element of Lomar’s population are trying to purge the land between Lomar and the Chokewater Forest of Hillmen and Zobnans and establish a new empire. (No word on what they will do about each other once they get to that point. Maybe they’ll get lucky and realize that they’re both being manipulated by the same ancient Heresiarch sorceress who created both of their cults. Heresiarchs being extremely powerful ancient sorcerers much like Glen Cook’s Ten Who Were Taken.) Maybe they'll even travel to her castle in the Shadow Realm... although I most certainly don't recommend it. 

Pictured are the Prophetess and Ampelius Pictor, and Jairan Neferirkare, the Heresiarch. She’s one of the dark but beautiful ones, like Soulcatcher or The Lady herself. 

Front #3 has to do with the Thursewood. Not only is there an old serial killer and sorcerer in the woods, who just raided a caravan in search of the missing pieces of turning himself into a lich before he dies of old age, but the thurses have increased in population under the leadership of their tribal chieftain Gorthos and his shaman Morghox. The raid on the caravan was undertaken mostly by unscrupulous mercenaries; Cesan Dughlass is one. He’s also taken a hostage, the young teenage girl Joan Wilmere, who’s the only child of a prosperous, wealthy landed gentry from the Northwoodshire mentioned above. Pictured below are the sorcerer, Jareth Grym, the mercenary Cesan Dughlas, the damsel in distress, Joan Wilmere, and the two thurses, Gorthos and Morghox.

Also while in the Thursewood, the PCs will likely come across a caravan of orclings moving north. This is meant to be kind of a nuanced moral dilemma. Nobody really likes the orcling crossing their land or settling in their hometowns, but the majority of them are trying to get to Chersky Island in the Darkling Sea, which is becoming a “new” orcling homeland. And although they’re orcs and goblins, there are at least three sympathetic and even admirable NPCs among them, Balogh, Cryn and Heren.

Finally, there are two more challenges in the Thursewood; the witch Eigyr Gwynn, and then the Erlking, an Elf Lord who’s hunting them a la The Predator.