The Expanse

The Expanse

The northern third of the province: sun-bleached plateaus and rugged scrub frontier rising from prairie grass into sandstone mesas, deep arroyos and jagged foothills. The Boitatá range it on centipede-back, herding what can be herded and wrangling what cannot.

The Land

Terrain defined by dramatic elevation change. Wind-scoured plains are cut through by sheer cliff edges and dry river washes, then give way to red-rock bluffs, towering escarpments and high scree slopes where thorny scrub and hardy pine cling to cracked granite.

Water is rare and violent, carved deep into limestone slot canyons and subterranean flash-flood channels. A wash dry for a year will run in minutes and take everything with it.

North the tablelands meet the Pridelands; south-west lie the Red Sands, south-east the Ashlands.

The Boitatá

Vaqueros: cattle-drovers' pragmatism welded to a deep animism. Warm orange-to-copper skin marked with geometric ash, broad woven hats and ponchos of shed rattlesnake skin against the midday sun.

They ride giant desert centipedes and horned lizards, corral wild micro-beasts and armoured isopods with braided copper lassos, and keep a stoic code of range honour that outsiders find both admirable and exhausting. Their fire magic is rustic and restrained — heat as the lifeblood of the campfire and the spiritual flame of the Great Fire Serpent, not as a weapon. They ride in the service of the Desert Rose, which they would describe as a professional arrangement.

Encounters

Roll d100. Range country. Most encounters are somebody else's stock, and the rest are what follows it. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.

d100 Encounter CR
01–09 1d6 Boitatá vaqueros on centipede-back, moving stock and short of riders —
10–16 2d8 armoured isopods in a corral, and one drover fewer than there should be ½
17–23 flash flood down a dry wash: minutes of warning, and 1d4 already in it —
24–30 1d4 grasshoppers in the scrub, riderless, skittish, and wearing tack 1
31–36 1d6 fire ants off a mesa nest — never alone, never retreating, fighting with chemistry 2
37–42 1d3 tiger beetles on the hardpan, running blind and stopping to look 2
43–48 1d2 antlion pits at a wash crossing, one with a wagon already in it 2
49–54 1d4 bullet ants on a scrub trail: one sting, twelve hours 4
55–60 1d3 camel spiders covering open ground faster than a mount 4
61–66 1d2 bark scorpions beneath a scree flake at a waystation 4
67–72 1 assassin bug in the thorn scrub, beak first, drinking what it liquefies 4
73–77 1d2 greater camel spiders, which run down mounted couriers as a matter of course 6
78–82 1 anole on a sandstone bluff, waiting out the heat and everything else 6
83–87 1d2 deathstalker scorpions working up out of the Ashlands 8
88–91 1 wild greater centipede, unbroken, and the Boitatá would very much like it caught 10
92–94 1 fence lizard on a mesa shelf above the trail 10
95–96 1d2 lesser snakes in the arroyo shade 14
97–98 1 opossum in the wash country: eats anything, hard to finish, and playing dead 17
99–00 1 hawk off the escarpment at speed, over ground with nothing to hide beneath 20