The Meadowlands
Most of the Heartland by area, and the most forgiving country in the world: rolling plains, slow water and wildflower meadow that changes colour three times a season. The Pixies farm it, and because farming it is easy, they spend at least as much of the year playing as working — the Meadowlands keep more festivals than the rest of the Kingdom combined.
The Land
At Faerie scale the grass is a canopy. A stand of meadow fescue stands eighty feet over the road, light comes down green and moving, and half of all navigation here is done by counting stems. The rest is done by windmill: every village raises one — part granary, part press, part signal-tower — and their sails carry over the grass for miles, so a traveller steers from mill to mill the way a sailor steers by lights.
Freshwater runs through all of it. Lakes, ponds and slow streams thread the plain, and they are not Sylph country at all — the Nixies hold them, an Undine tribe far from the Manywaters, who fish the water, keep the channels clear, and are paid in grain for both. The arrangement is old enough that nobody in either race treats it as remarkable, which is itself the remarkable part.
The dangers here are not privations but events: dewfall that drowns, the three-day nectar Gild that makes the whole province drunk, pollen storms that bury a road by morning, and rain that arrives like siege shot.
The Pixies
Agrarian, gregarious, and comfortably convinced that they live in the best place in the world, which is a difficult argument to counter. Pixie society runs on the festival calendar rather than the harvest one — the harvest is assumed — and a village's standing among its neighbours rests on the quality of its midsummer rather than the size of its granary.
They supply the Eternal City with most of what it eats, and hold, quietly and without much rancour, that this makes them the load-bearing race of the Kingdom.
Encounters
Roll d100. Most of what the open meadow produces is traffic, and most of the rest is weather. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–07 | 3d6 aphids on the move between clover stands, two Pixie drovers walking them | — |
| 08–14 | 1 nectar caravan: four harnessed rhinoceros beetles, 2d6 crew, behind schedule | — |
| 15–20 | 1d4 crickets out of a singing stall; the farmer is offering a reward and a meal | ¼ |
| 21–26 | 2d4 honeybees working a honeywort stand, prepared to negotiate over it | 1 |
| 27–32 | 1d3 grasshopper post couriers, in a hurry, carrying news worth hearing | 1 |
| 33–39 | 2d6 ladybird beetles raiding an aphid pasture; the guards are outnumbered | 1 |
| 40–45 | 1d2 jumping spiders in the stem canopy, who have already worked out the angle | 1 |
| 46–51 | 1 Nixie channel crew clearing a stream mouth, who want either help or privacy | — |
| 52–56 | pollen storm out of a dandelion stand; 1d6 travellers under a clover, waiting it out | — |
| 57–62 | 1d2 antlion pits at a dry crossing; the road has been moved twice already | 2 |
| 63–68 | 2d4 paper wasp soldiers on patrol from a nest three fields over | 2 |
| 69–74 | 1d4 wolf spiders running the grass floor, young riding their backs | 3 |
| 75–79 | 1 robber fly working the courier lane, taking fliers on the descent | 3 |
| 80–84 | 1d3 hornets at a split fruit and unwilling to share it | 4 |
| 85–88 | dewfall: 1d3 pendant drops hanging over the road, and someone already inside one | — |
| 89–92 | 1 dragonfly hunting the water meadow — the apex of the air, and it knows | 5 |
| 93–95 | 1d2 wild mice, unbroken, and legally somebody's property | 6 |
| 96–97 | 1 frog at the reed margin; the tongue arrives noticeably before the frog | 9 |
| 98–99 | 1 sparrow working the stems — the reason nobody flies open daylight alone | 11 |
| 00 | 1 hawk over the meadow, threading the fescue at full speed | 20 |