Skyfell Geography: Burati

 

Skyfell Geography: Burati

I’ve been blogging the sessions for my Dungeons and Dragons homebrew campaign that I call Skyfell. I've also written a lot of background information for the setting. There is a brief description that provides a taste of the setting's general ideas and mood. I wrote up this for new players to the campaign. There are posts providing social, cultural, geographic, and political information for the various continents in the setting, including Akima Prime, >Doraku, Piruna Fields, and Teskos. Two more posts (Guilds of Highwater and Organizations of Highwater) go into more detail about the city of Highwater on Doraku. This installment is about the continent of Burati. I hope you enjoy it.

Burati Major and Burati Minor

 

Overview

Burati is a binary continent south of Doraku in the Trina Skies. It's largest landform, Burati Major, is littered with the remnants of a pre-Cataclysm civilization known as the Burati Authority. Its crumbling, stepped pyramids and sunken plazas are occupied by clans of yuan-ti that still worship the ancient serpent gods who once reigned there, including Dendar, Merrshaulk, and Sseth. The smaller of the landforms, Burati Minor, is in many ways a much wilder place with little trace of that ancient civilization remaining. The few gnolls who have not taken to piracy and slaughter on the Open Skies settle in ramshackle villages tucked into the jungle canopy. The yuan-ti routinely venture into Burati Minor to "thin" the gnoll population by either enslaving those too weak to resist or slaying those who are too unruly to be easily subdued and controlled.

Lake and Surrounding Jungle on Burati Major
Source: Pixabay

Little is really known about the yuan-ti culture, their social structure, or their gods. Some believe them to be the direct descendants of the dead Burati Authority civilization. This theory is most strongly championed by Sora Norixius, a professor of history and race studies at the Kalraka School of the Weave on Doraku. She has launched a handful of expeditions to Burati with varying degrees of success. Others believe the yuan-ti are all that remain of a cursed people that betrayed Tescalain at the time of The Cataclysm. Their mutated humanoid/serpent bodies are the scar they and all their descendants must bear for that betrayal. Still others believe the yuan-ti are an unfortunate byproduct of the dark ritual magics with which the ancients once flirted. The idea is that those unleashed forces contaminated the regional fauna. The yuan-ti, then, are the results of mutations among the local snake populations. (Gnoll, bullywug, grung, and lizardfolk origins are explained in a similar way.) The only fact that the outside world is sure of is that the yuan-ti loathe the gnolls.

Yuan-ti Warrior
Source: Monster Manual, 5e

Only the very academic minded would make a distinction between the gnolls living on Burati Minor and the gnoll reavers that hunt the Open Skies. The most obvious difference is that those on Burati Minor live in makeshift shacks in the trees while the reavers live in makeshift vessels in the deepest parts of the Open Skies. Otherwise, both are feral, vicious, humanoids cursed with the demon lord Yeenoghu's thirst for blood and hunger for flesh. The few adventurers who have tried to penetrate the dense jungles of the Burati Minor to find out more about the gnolls have brought back reports of gory rituals designed to summon grotesque demons into Skyfell. These stories have only fed into the already universal fear of and hatred for gnolls. The constant hunting parties that the yuan-ti send to Burati Minor are, therefore, seen by many as a service to the rest of the Known Skies.

Gnoll Warrior
Source: Monster Manual, 5e

For most, Burati conjures images of sunken yuan-ti cities and gnoll reavers stalking the jungle. There are, in fact, other groups of humanoids living on the binary continent. These populations might be as numerous, or more so, than the yuan-ti but they are too busy with intra-tribal squabbles to mobilize themselves into any sort of power that might challenge the dominance enjoyed by the yuan-ti. Some would suggest this situation is part of a larger yuan-ti plot to maintain their power.

Several bullywug tribes eek out a living in the more remote swamps and marshes of Burati Major. These communities live in the shadow of their yuan-ti neighbors, both fearing them and respecting them. While these tribes try to avoid all contact with the "snakefolk," it's not uncommon for ambitious individuals to turn over rivals in an attempt to gather more power for themselves. The yuan-ti gladly accept these "gifts," and not just because it would be ludicrous to turn away a free slave. As long as the bullywugs are fighting among themselves, they cannot pose a threat to the yuan-ti.

Bullywug Warrior
Source: Monster Manual, 5e

The bullywugs claim the swamps and marshes of Burati Major as their domain, but the grung tribes see the upland jungles as theirs. Their preferred habitat has kept them a safe distance from any major yuan-ti settlements as most of the "snakefolk" reside in the lowland. That distance has spared them the sort of yuan-ti intervention with which the bullywugs must contend. (To be sure, yuan-ti do not shy away from raiding grung lands. It's just more convenient to harass the bullywugs instead.) Rather than encouraging grung unity, however, their relative isolation has caused them to dig deeper into their own tribal rivalries and they squabble over territorial boundaries.

Grung of the Jungle Uplands
Source: Volo's Guide to Monsters

Finally, a handful of lizardfolk tribes call the jungles of Burati Minor their home. These communities are often in direct competition with gnoll settlements, at odds over territorial borders and access to natural resources. Border skirmishes are commonplace. Raids are slightly less so, but by no means unheard of. Unlike the amphibious humanoids of Burati Major, the lizardfolk villages have been known to form alliances with each other especially for raids into gnoll territory. These alliances can quickly fall apart when yuan-ti missions invade Burati Minor's interior and tribes suddenly become more willing to turn on their neighbors to preserve their own populations.

Lizardfolk of Burati Minor
Source: Monster Manual, 5e

Geography

The Tamoxuacan Expanse, in the southern portion of Burati Major, is a massive area of lowland marshes and swamps interrupted by rolling hills covered in thick jungle flora. Scholars from the Kalraka School of the Weave believe this area to have been the capital of the Burati Authority, a pre-Cataclysm empire that dominated the region. Ruins of the ancient city dot the landscape and can be found submerged in its stagnant waters or smothered by its dense vegetation. Limited excavations have revealed that at least some of the "hills" in the region are really the crumbled remnants of stone structures. The majority of the yuan-ti in the Tamoxuacan Expanse occupy its ruins and farm its rich soils. They are gathered together by clan affiliation and organized into a rigid caste system supported by enslaved gnolls, bullywugs, grungs, lizardfolk, and others unfortunates.

Tamoxuacan Expanse
Source: Neverwinter Online

The Tangles is an area of particularly dense upland jungle blanketing the northern portion of Burati Major. Little is known about this impenetrable region other than several grung communities call it home. There are rumors, of course. It's believed that additional ruins of the Burati Authority, huge complexes that rival those in the Tamoxuacan Expanse, are hidden within. There are also legends hinting at a vast underground network of tombs and natural caverns where the ancient Burati Authority buried its dead. The yuan-ti say little about this place to outsiders Those who have regular contact with the clans have picked up tidbits here and there that suggest a more powerful people live there and have done so since before the Cataclysm.

The Tangles
Source: Pixabay

The Middens is a wasteland in the southern region of Burati Minor that scars dozens of square miles of what would be otherwise lush landscape. The region is denuded of all native flora and fauna. In its place is a vast dumping ground of material refuse mixed with decomposing biomatter. It is believed to have once been the garbage dump for the cities in the Tamoxuacan Expanse. Some say gnoll reavers still use it to offload what they don't want from their raids. Others worry that it is contaminated with the byproducts of the demonic rituals the gnolls are known to work. Regardless, the temperatures in the deepest parts of The Middens are much higher than anywhere else in the Known Skies. Its miasma spreads out for miles, contaminating everything with the heavy melancholy of death and disease. Those who have journeyed there return stinking of the place; some are never able to rid themselves of the smell. The yuan-ti use it as a waypoint and staging area for their kill and capture raids.

The Pit of Hungers is a ring of jagged peaks surrounding a deep sinkhole in the heart of Burati Minor. It's upper formations can be seen from miles away, stabbing into the Open Skies like a gaping maw full of fangs. The sinkhole drills into the deepest regions of the continent. Its honeycombed walls expose ancient underground networks carved out by the Burati Authority long before the Cataclysm along with other natural caverns. It is a sacred space to the gnolls, poisoned by their dark rituals and haunted by the horrors they both summon and worship. Some believe that Yeenoghu himself slumbers at the very bottom of the pit, waiting for the right moment to awaken and return to Skyfell.

Settlements

Azocxtoc is an ancient temple complex of the Burati Authority in the eastern corner of Tamoxuacan Expanse. It's part of the territory controlled by the Napocxta clan, one of only three yuan-ti clans that maintain any sort of contact with the rest of Skyfell. (And even that contact is very limited.) As such, it's one of the very few locations in all of Burati where the yuan-ti do not immediately kill outsiders as invaders of their land. There is an open plaza where airships are allowed to land. Nearby ruins are used as visitor accommodations. What hospitality the Napocxta grant is limited to a very small area around the plaza. Anyone caught wandering outside that area without a yuan-ti escort is as likely to be killed as to be enslaved or, in the best case scenario, returned to their airship at knifepoint and forced to leave Burati.

Azocxtoc
Source: Pixabay

Pocxuachitlan is a collection of Burati Authority ruins in the center of the Tamoxuacan Expanse. It is believed to be what remains of the capital complex of that ancient empire. It is composed of several large buildings that are used as residences and as community spaces by the Xipetla clan. There is a common area known as Alliance Plaza where other yuan-ti clans lease either semi-permanent or temporary spaces. It is here where the heads of each clan meet to discuss matters that affect all of Burati. There is an area in the plaza for outsiders as well. These visitors are expected to follow an even stricter set of rules than those in Azocxtoc. Another area in the plaza is set up as a market where goods from across all of Burati can be bought and traded, including gnoll slaves primed for service.

Pocxuachitlan
Source: Neverwinter Online

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