The Roan
A crescent of worn blue mountains along the far western edge of the Greenmantle and of the Kingdom itself — older than the High Forest, all deep valleys and craggy peaks under shorter trees. The Alseid live in the hollows, or hollers, and answer to nobody, including each other.
The Land
Old rock, softened by an unimaginable amount of time. The valleys are deep and narrow, the peaks are craggy and low, and the whole range is greener and quieter than the forest below it. Each holler is effectively its own small country, and the ridges between them are enough of a barrier that neighbouring families can go a generation without a serious quarrel.
The High Forest sits between the Roan and the Heartland, which makes the Alseid among the most isolated people in the Kingdom — and beyond the western ridges lie the Hollow Marches, a country of Faerie ruins that nobody in the Kingdom will discuss and the Alseid see every day.
The Alseid
They identify by holler and by extended family, rarely by tribe, and the question "are you Alseid?" tends to be answered with a family name and a valley.
Alone among the Faeries, they hold no race to be inferior to another, and extend this without irony to every animal, chrysalid and sprite in their mountains. This is not a doctrine they preach; it simply never occurred to them to arrange things otherwise, and they find the Kingdom's caste ladder both baffling and slightly disgusting.
Their independence borders on anarchism. They would rather do without any luxury in the world than be beholden for it, and since the Roan is three provinces and a forest away from anyone who might care, the Queen has never had cause to make an issue of it.
Encounters
Roll d100. Old, quiet mountains. The encounters are thin on the ground and the ground is the problem. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–10 | 1d6 Alseid of one holler, who will feed you and will not be beholden to you | — |
| 11–18 | 2d6 chrysalids and sprites of the holler treated as neighbours, which startles visitors | — |
| 19–25 | terrain: a ridge crossing that looked shorter from the other side, and dusk coming | — |
| 26–32 | 2d4 honeybees working a hollow's orchard | 1 |
| 33–38 | 1d4 crickets in the high grass, singing the valley's boundaries | ¼ |
| 39–44 | 1d3 jumping spiders on a rock face | 1 |
| 45–50 | 1d2 butterflies, wild, worth a fortune to somebody three provinces away | 1 |
| 51–56 | 1d4 ground beetles in the leaf litter after dark | 2 |
| 57–62 | 2d4 wolf spiders on the slope | 3 |
| 63–68 | 1d2 bark scorpions in a drystone wall | 4 |
| 69–74 | 1d2 mice, wild, in the holler's stores | 6 |
| 75–79 | 1 greater robber fly in the open valley air | 6 |
| 80–84 | 1 newt in a spring, slow, unbothered, poisonous | 5 |
| 85–89 | 1d2 shrews working the moss, which will not stop for anything | 7 |
| 90–92 | 1 frog in a hollow's pool | 9 |
| 93–94 | 1 mole up through a garden, blind and thorough | 11 |
| 95–96 | 1 songbird over open ground between hollers | 11 |
| 97 | 1 jay on the ridge, calling in a voice from a holler you passed | 13 |
| 98 | scouts out of the Hollow Marches, on the western ridges, watching | 8 |
| 99 | 1 opossum in the understory, eating anything and hard to finish | 17 |
| 00 | 1 fox through the hollers at dusk, and the Alseid will name it | 24 |