Severos
I recently made my first character and, after toying with the idea of them being from the Dagger Isles, I eventually settled on Severos instead. I couldn’t find much in the book on the area or its people (from memory, about two paragraphs), so I made my own interpretation. I’ve decided that they are a trial people, with appearances similar to Maoris, extensive tattooing and all.
I know we have some very creative people in this community. What have your games decided about the Severosi and their wilds?
Severos hasn’t come up much in my games but our students did discover that they have a special kind of quarts that captures light in it’s crystalline structure and holds it there for some time. Clever members of the Doskvol Spectral Society have uncovered and old ritual that uses this quartz to bind the soul closer to the body and protect one from being hollowed out (at least by the way that the Dimmer Sisters do it).
And others use it to make lightsabers
I was about to say that someone in a game I’m in is using that same interpretation, then I realized it was YOU.
I had generally thought of Severosi as an equivalent to Mongols (mostly because I like Mongols) but I like your Maori version so much I’m probably going to steal it for future games.
Yeah, Severosi in my game are sort of mongols. But really, the absence of detail is by design to encourage you to fill in the world and make it your own.
In our game, Severos is very heavily Mediterranean-inspired, mostly Italy and Greece. The cuisine, the music.
I’ve kept the “Horse Nomad” thing going, but tried to build in a lot of variation into the the culture as it’s presented in game, so far mostly through historical Chinese analogies (Jurchin/Jin Dynasty,Mongol/Yuan dynasty). One character is “imperialized” and she represents a more settled group that’s assimilated due to the incorporation of Severosi mercenaries into the “proper” military, on the other end of the spectrum however is an outcast from the “traditional” clans. The Maori idea is brilliant, because while horse nomads, the areas of relative safety would be few and far in between, so competition between clans/families for those islands would be fierce…
I haven’t really done much with Sevoros, but I imagine it as a mix of various “Horse Nomad” things plus a Western aesthetic. If anyone wants cowboys in their Blades, I’d have them be from Severos, not necessarily Severosi but from that continent.
In my game we have multiple Dagger Islander PCs with a Maori asthetic, while the Severosi have been pulling from a range of horse nomad cultures.
James English​ Dagger Island had been my original plan, but another character in our group was from there so I shifted it to Severos instead since it felt close to what I was looking for.
An alternate thought for Dagger Isles might be to borrow (steal) heavily from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. All pirates and gothic magic. Or even mix-and-match, with the Maori-style native islanders in conflict with the more “continental” pirate bands. Heck, you can build a whole alternate campaign going that way.