Redcap

Squat, iron-hard, and leather-skinned, the Redcaps are never seen without the woolen cap that gives them their name. They cultivate the story that it is dyed in the blood of the slain. The truth — that the dye is ochre clay out of the Bloodmoors, and that the cap is a practical piece of cold-weather kit — is one they take considerable pains never to correct.

They are the largest standing military force outside the Kingdom, and the reason the Queen's generals speak of the Outer Wilds with more caution than their public statements suggest.

Appearance

Short, immensely dense, with skin like tanned leather and hands disproportionately large. A Redcap is roughly half again the mass of a Sylph at two-thirds the height, and hits accordingly.

The cap is worn from arrival to metamorphosis and is never removed in company. It is also a rank marker, a unit marker, and a document: the weave records which muster you came up through, and a Redcap can read a stranger's service off their headwear in about a second.

Attuned Magic

Iron — the one substance that troubles Faerie magic, and the only attuned element that is a material rather than a force. A nascent Redcap can find ore by touch and keep an edge from dulling. A powerful one can forge weapons that dampen glamour in their presence, ruin a spell mid-cast, and make an attuned Faerie feel the way a Faerie feels in thin air.

This is why the Kingdom's official histories describe Redcaps as savages and its quartermasters describe them as a procurement problem.

Life

Turf halls and hill-forts on open, treeless upland, heated by peat and heather, with the wind never stopping. Work is bog-iron: gathering from the ochre streams, the bloomeries at Ochrewater, and the drill that fills the rest of the day. The food is bad and everyone says so.

Names. Given at first muster by the muster's own officers, and generally descriptive of something you did badly on day one. A Redcap who has changed their name has done something significant enough to be renamed, and the renaming is a formal act.

Arrival. A new Redcap is enrolled — fed, capped, and put in a file — before anyone asks them anything. Enrollment is not conscription and can be quit at any time, and almost nobody does, because it is warm, it is fed, and outside it is the moor.

Terms. The province's defining institution and its most misunderstood: disputes are settled by arranged combat on ground set aside for it, with terms negotiated beforehand and honored afterward, no pursuit and no reprisal. Redcap children learn the terms before they learn the drill.

Society

Martial, blunt, and surprisingly legalistic. The Bloodmoors have hosted nearly every large disagreement in the Wilds for as long as anyone can recall, because the ground is good for it and because the Term-Keepers' rulings hold. Iron Jarl Gorrach is Marshal of the Great Hunt as well as lord of the Barrow.

Currents

The Jarl's Muster. The standing force: drilled, provisioned, and available to the Hunt on demand. Also the province's employer, court, and road authority.

The Term-Keepers. Judges of arranged combat, independent by design and backed by Gorrach in practice. A Term-Keeper's ruling has never been successfully defied.

The Bloomeries. Ochrewater's smith-houses, who set the price of iron and therefore of war, and who sell to whoever pays — including, through three intermediaries, the Kingdom.

The Unsworn Bands. Redcaps who have not taken the oath and hire out individually, including for jobs in the Kingdom that a Faerie cannot be seen doing. Tolerated as a pressure valve.

Relations

Loyal to the Goblin King, and the backbone of his claim. Wary of the Pukwudgies, who have never sworn to him. Contemptuous of the Hobgoblins, who took service with humans instead of fighting — a charge the Hobgoblins consider both unfair and beneath answering.

Playing One