Calçan Rangers

As the "lost province" of Calça undergoes a fair amount of turmoil, the rangers have increased in number and responsibility over the last few years.  For many years, an unofficial corps of volunteers who patrolled the land, the rangers have had to rapidly evolve into a much more professional outfit due to the increased incidents of bandits and refugees streaming in from (respectively) the east and the north.  Many rangers are now full-time, sponsored by wealthy patrons, or by the villages and hamlets that they represent.  Their level of skill and training have also vastly increased; former military scouts from Terrasa and elsewhere having been brought in to develop more rigorous standards.  Most importantly, the senior rangers have been taking on apprentices at a furious pace, and churning out new recruits.  The ranger corps in Calça is now relatively young, but relatively skilled and strong.  It's also offered a more advantageous and realistic outlet for the more adventurous youths than any that the region had before, and for those who can't stand the thought of a lifetime of farming or simple village craftsmanship, it's a somewhat romanticized new occupation.

Within the ranger corps (not yet with capital letters, but if it continues to grow in prominence, importance or size, it may well be soon) there are several roles or specializations that have developed.  The entire outfit is, at most, a few hundred members in size, and many of these specializations only have a dozen or so members who work on them.

Sherrifs

These are rangers that are assigned permanently to a specific county.  For very large or troubled counties, the sherrifs might have one or more deputies to assist them in their duties.  The concern of the sherrifs and their deputies is enforcing the peace and dealing more with local issues.  By far, the majority of the rangers are sherrifs.

Bounders
Bounders are not tied to a specific county for their responsibility, and are free to mobilize and move around the entirety of Calça as needed.  Usually messages are sent to bounders, who often have "day jobs" and do their ranger work as "reserves", when there is a specific need for temporary numbers to deal with a problem.  Some bounders operate beyond the borders of Calça entirely, keeping a wary eye on areas where problems may develop that will spill into the heartland.

Shadows
The smallest branch of the ranger corps are the shadows, highly skilled and experienced hunters of supernatural threats which accompany the immigrants, or which linger from ancient days in the land, long before the arrival Terrasan settlers.  Disquieting and alarming to most of the populace, the shadows are seen as necessary, but nobody likes to be reminded of that fact.

The Calçan rangers are based, in part, on my long-time love of the concept of the Texas rangers, the Dunedain from Lord of the Rings, my love of the ranger class in various editions of D&D, and most recently my brush with some YA fiction that I've tried to get my son to read, The Last Apprentice series (called The Spook's Apprentice in the UK) and The Ranger's Apprentice series.  I tried to listen to both series myself as audiobooks during my commute, since my son seemed to be somewhat reluctant, even though the books seemed to be right up his alley. I had to agree that the execution of both was somewhat lacking--they're slow moving and not terribly interesting; but the idea of them both was solid.

In addition, I'd like the DARK•HERITAGE setting to be expansive enough to allow for different kinds of stories, possibly set in different regions.  Calça is already a kind of cosy, country atmosphere--kind of like the Two Rivers from the Wheel of Time series, or The Shire from the Lord of the Rings--yet one that's threatened by encroaching darkness and problems, ringed about with shadows.  Despite the fact that I want the setting to be expansive, I also want it to be consistent after all, and that means the use of plenty of horror elements lurking in the background.  The cosy backcountry areas of the DARK•HERITAGE setting (at least in Terrasan settings) tend to resemble the Eastern European countryside of Dracula, or the English moors of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and The Wolfman (either the 1941 or the 2010 one--the mood was very much the same.)  Or perhaps the French film The Brotherhood of the Wolf, which gamers seem to be really enamored of, for some reason.  At least once you dig a little bit past the cosy "Shire" take on it.

Baix Pallars is another rural area full of small hamlets and villagers, but that one is more specifically mimicking Arkham Country in fantasy drag.

The Razormaids

In a setting that's famous for its skullduggery; a setting where every urban center is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, it should be unsurprising that there are a number of organizations throughout the setting dedicated to the craft of assassination.  Many of these are quite infamous, including the Union of the Snake, the Black Cluachla--the "special ops" division of the original Cherskii Mafia organization, and others.  One of the most colorful, however, is the Razormaids.  Always a female-only organization, the Razormaids were originally founded in Terrasa itself, by the Queen some three hundred years ago, Reina Teodora Napoleona Albergo as a kind of secret service in place of eunuch guards, which were otherwise the fashion at the time.  Brutally and efficiently trained, they became fanatically loyal.  Later in a dynastic change, it was demonstrated to their loyalty was to the heiress of the Queen, and not to the state.  The organization was forced underground.

Even today, the controlling matron of the Razormaids is a pretender to the crown, although any claim to any throne has long-ago passed on and they have no intention or desire to pursue it.  Instead of a bodyguard and special ops role, the organization has become a premier hired assassin guild, and while the Reina (the title that the leader of the guild still holds, out of tradition) rules in splendor--without the overt political power, but with wealth and influence that even the organization's founder may well not have enjoyed.  The current Reina of the Razormaids is Sobeyrana Viars d'Guizas.

Although assassins (and their various dependents over time) are extremely privileged and well-treated by the organization, the start of the career of an assassin is usually quite harrowing.  Many young girls have been kidnapped over the years; most recently, they have been bought as slaves in the markets of Sarabasca as youngsters--usually no more than 8 years old.  Their initial training regimen has harsh and long; not unlike that of the Spartan warriors from history in the real world in many regards.

One side effect of picking up so many girls in Sarabasca is that the ethnic and cultural trends within the organization have gradually taken on a patina of Qizmir influences.  The Reina, who reigns in Terrasa, is infamous not only as a master of assassins of high repute, but also as a matron of some of the most exotically beautiful girls in the city.  Not that their identities aren't strictly confidential, of course, but rumor and reputation often run wild in the absence of facts.

The City of Terrasa

While Terrasa itself is larger than just the city of the same name, clearly the City of Terrasa is the most important in the region, if not in the entire Mezzovian Sea area.  Terrasa is firmly in the homeland of the Terrasan nationality, and even widely scattered and culturally divergent people like the far northeastern settlers of "North Qizmir" recognize Terrasa as a home of sorts.  Even if their ancestors came from the region hundreds of years earlier and they haven't set foot near it since, and their language has drifted to the point where they can no longer understand spoken, standard Terrasan, and their political loyalties lie more with Qizmir, all of which are true of the North Qizmiri common folk.  Terrasa is seen as the center of Mezzovian culture, and pilgrims, supplicants, and even just plain tourists pass through it in great numbers every year, to marvel at its architecture and splendor, to view the site where so many famous events of the past happened, or to meet with important secular, commercial or religious figures who make Terrasa their home.  Terrasa sometimes claims, and not without merit, to be the City at the Center of the World.

Terrasa is a sea-side port, located at the eastern end of the Tolosa Bay.  Although it slopes down to the sea, most of the city itself is built on higher ground, for the ground slopes sharply to a bluff, where the palace and the city proper is located.  It is surrounded by tamed and cultivated farmlands, olive orchards and cornfields, mostly, although hay, alfalfa, beans and even rice are grown not far from Terrasa itself, and many agricultural satellite communities, like Sènt-Gaudenç, Cambrils, Malgrat da Mare, Os Molins, and Sorollera fall under Terrasa's orbit, and provide crops, beef, mutton and more.  And of course, there is a large fishing industry throughout the area, and a vast fleet of fishing, crabbing, shrimping and other boats set out from Terrasa's harbor every day.

More livestock, as well as game, lumber, furs and other goods come from the Romeu Mountains which march almost directly southwards from Terrasa, as well as from the lodgepole pine and cedar woods of the Follà Forest to the southeast.  To the east, the land drops precipitously into the Coloma Swamp, a mangrove salt water swamp that gradually fades into fresh water marshlands.  The swamp is also inhabitated, but the Terrasan's have little to do with the swampies, and prefer not to see them or think about them too much.

The Tolosa Islands are also a contination of the Romeu Mountains, only this time with their feet underwater.  Terrasa's location is at the pivot point of the Tolosa Bay and the Chistau Sea, with easy access to most of the Mezzovian waters as well.

Despite its prosperous overlay, Terrasa conceals a darker reality, though--the Empire is weak and ineffective.  The King of Terrasa, as well as the King, Count, Duke or other titled head of most of the other states within the Empire is His Majesty Esteve Gregorio de Galdames de Rossolló.  He is a weak king, consumed with personal pursuits and indifferent to his role as leader.  Corruption, intrigue, and occasionally outright and only semi-clandestine warfare between various nobles and other interests is the order of the day in Terrasa.  Various powers shift for influence, and many feel that the Empire itself is up for grabs.  And for the most part, they appear to be correct; His Majesty seems unable or uninterested in stopping these naked power grabs, even when he is aware of them, commenting dryly that the strong always seem to prosper; why fight that natural law?

In addition to those seeking to grab power within the empire are those who harbor separatist and nationalist loyalties, those who seek to further the influence of other nations entirely, terrorists, organized crime, and more.  The climate between Terrasan and Qizmiri agents more and more starts to feel like a cordial cold war, and one of the few tasks that Qizmir demands of its independent minded tributary Sarabasca is that it recruit potential spies of Terrasan ancestry but impeccable Qizmiri loyalty to serve in Terrasa itself.  Rivals from further afield, including the scattered states of the former Baal Hamazi empire and Kurushat also make sure to keep a strong presence within Terrasa.

And there's an even darker underbelly yet; Terrasa is also known informally--at least in some circles--as the daemonologist capital of the world.  While past kings have founded Inquisitions and witch-hunting organizations, currently those are weak too, caught up in power struggles and otherwise distracted from their tasks.  Daemonologists, witches, occult and forbidden lore--they are not hard to find amongst those who seek them in Terrasa.  Many of these foment in the slums of Bricktown, a neighborhood where the narrow streets between buildings have been built over with roofs, making the entire area into a de facto gigantic tenement building.  Entire generations of poverty-striken criminals, beggers, or menials live and die their entire lives without seeing the sun.  The Watch rarely goes into Bricktown, where life is as cheap as it can be in the Mezzovian region.  As well as being the haunt of criminals and gangs, necromancers, witchs, daemonologists and other illegal occultists, rumors fly fast and furious about a number of supernatural predators who live in Bricktown (although who occasionally leave it on dark nights to haunt the rest of the town too): vampires, specters, cannibal cults and more.

Wise travelers and the experienced visitor to Terrasa will tell those who ask to keep your head down in Terrasa; watch out for dark, shadowy alleys and neighborhoods, stick to the well-beaten path, do your business quickly and don't linger where you shouldn't.

The Terrasan "Empire"

The Terrasan Empire is the most important polity to feature in a majority of any action that takes place in the DARK•HERITAGE setting.  However, I haven't really explained much about it yet, have I?  It's a kind of shadowy entity that hovers just out of sight while I explore regionally a bit more in depth, or talk about other polities on the fringe of the Terrasan orbit, such as Kurushat, Baal Hamazi, Qizmir or others.  It's probably time to rectify that a bit.  Before diving into the content proper, how about a little context and meta background?  OK.

When I first envisioned the Terrasan Empire, when it was part of a different setting called--unimaginatively--first Dark DnD and the later--more tongue in cheek--Leng Calling, I saw it as similar to the late Roman Empire.  A formerly powerful empire that was fading to decadence and impotency, but which still had some life left in it yet.  I transcribed that notion as is to DARK•HERITAGE when I first brought it over, but have since re-envisioned the empire as an altogether different type of thing.  I now see it as similar to the so-called Aragonese Empire, more properly called the Crown of Aragon.  The Crown of Aragon was never a proper Empire.  It started, of course, as the modest Frankish kingdom of Aragon, and as it expanded due to warfare with the taifa states as well as its rivals and to dynastic union, it grew to encompass the Kingdom of Barcelona (including the county of Provence) then later Valencia and Majorca.  This large coastline as well as an eastward looking Mediterranean outlook eventually brought, at various times, the rest of the Balearic Islands, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, briefly Corsica, Naples (which at the time really meant the lower two-thirds of the Italian boot) and the duchy of Athens, which included large portions of the northeastern Grecian coastline.

However, for the most part, these various polities were only united in the person of the King of Aragon, who also simultaneously held the titles of Count of Barcelona, King of Sardinia, King of Majorca, etc.  They were never united into a single polity with a single administration and a united national front; rather they were separate countries who just happened to be ruled at the same time by the same single person.  And my new version of the Terrasan Empire is more like this Crown of Aragon; Esteve Gregorio de Galdames de Rossolló is the King of Terrasa, as well as being the King of Alcàsser and Segrià, the Duke of Razina, the Tolosas, Posada and Feronia, and the Count of Iclezza.  The King of Sènt-Haspar is a sworn vassal of the King of Terrasa, which brings him into the orbit as well.

This means that the politics of the Terrasan Empire are a bit byzantine and bizarre, especially as King Esteve is not a strong or particularly engaged king, being more concerned with the pursuit of his mistresses and his sports, the Empire is run by competing nobles, royals, and bureaucrats.  Each individual state within the Empire has more autonomy than at any time in the past--a development that worries those who support a strong empire--fears of total dissolution and break-up are both commonly voiced and not without merit.

Culture and language across the empire is also not consistent.  Many of the regional polities have their own culture, their own governmental traditions, their own religious persuasions, and more.  Perhaps more importantly as an impediment to unification, they have their own languages, although it is a matter of public policy to refer to all of them as regional dialects of the Terrasan language rather than to recognize the true level of diversity.  In the real world, before the advent of strong, nationalist states and mass-produced media, linguistic diversity was very strong in Europe, and even now, several generations after the advent of those features, there are a lot of minority languages floating around out there.

For simplicity's sake, I've consolidated the dialects of the Terrasan Empire into three big name lists, and I represent them with a mix of Portuguese and Catalan on for the southern shore, Italian for the northern shore and Romanian for the more easterly dialects.  In reality, a number of other more or less closely related languages should be in there two--the southern languages should be represented by a good dozen or so languages like Leonese, Portuguese, Catalan, Aragonese, Asturian, Occitan and others, the northern shore by another dozen or so languages like Sardinian, Sicilian, Piedmontese, Venetian, Corsican, etc. and the eastern dialects should show similar diversity.  Of course, in reality, it's hard enough for people wanting to find names and phrases from a region to deal with the simplified version as it is; making it as complex as verisimilitude demands it to be would be impossibly difficult.

Despite these vast differences, most of the peoples of the Terrasan Empire have a cultural link, being descended from settlers, soldiers, conquistadores or merchants who set out from Terrasa in the distant past.  While they may not have necessarily seen this expansion as a nationalist pursuit, pan-Terrasan patriotism is a jingoistic sentiment that some have attempted to cultivate and exploit amongst the constituents.  Of course, this is a dual-edged sword--some of the peoples of the Empire are not descended from that cultural and linguistic group, and strong separatist Balshatoi sentiment is a major concern in the north, and in some parts of the east, the people identify almost as much with Qizmir as with Terrasa.  Other expatriate ethnic groups within the borders of the empire also view some of these developments with trepidation.

Because of cultural and economic links, all of the Terrasan "countries" have always maintained strong political and economic ties, and intermarriage of their royal houses--which led to the state of dynastic union that exists today--had always been common.  Despite this, nationalist sentiment with the various "Terrasan" nationalities is still strong as well and demonstrations, riots, coup attempts and other civil unrest is not terribly uncommon, especially when the tax-men come around, or when Imperial soldiers start bullying the locals.  As Terrasa's strength has waned and faded, parts of the empire have either quietly gone their own way, like Calça, or been quietly influenced in the direction of a rival, as Sarabasca and a vast (and mostly unpopulated) stretch of backcountry gradually became Qizmiri, or even like Porto Liure, where an revolutionary city-state was able to force Terrasa to a military stand-off and negotiate its autonomy and independence forever.

Next DARK•HERITAGE specific post: details of the city of Terrasa itself.