The Pridelands
The southern arm: tall grass, scattered flat-topped trees and rolling hills under a warm dry sky, with rains that arrive rarely and change everything when they do. Large herbivores move across it in numbers, and so do the Shah Numan, who are the only Cait Sith that hunt in company.
The Land
Warm and dry, watered by occasional rain that brings the whole plain up green within days. Waterholes are the organising fact of the landscape: the herds move between them, and everything that eats the herds arranges itself accordingly.
It is the easiest of the four crossings to travel and the hardest to travel unnoticed. The grass is high, the ground is open, and there is nothing at all to hide behind for anyone who is not already very good at hiding.
The Shah Numan
Golden and tawny, the males maned in brown or red, and unique among the Cait Sith for hunting as a group. The females do the hunting and hold the standing that comes with it; the males contest one another for status and breeding rights and are, by every other tribe's assessment, largely decorative.
The Shah Numan have heard this assessment. They point out that they eat more reliably than any other tribe in the Hedges, which is true.
Encounters
Roll d100. Open savanna, organised entirely around water. The easiest crossing to travel and the hardest to travel unseen. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d6 Shah Numan hunting as a pride, females forward, and they saw you first | 6 |
| 10–16 | 2d8 grazing herd-stock between waterholes, and 1d4 drovers with them | — |
| 17–23 | rain: the plain comes up green in days, and every route on the map changes | — |
| 24–30 | 2d6 thrips on a flush of grass flower, working fast | ¼ |
| 31–36 | 1d4 crickets in the tall grass, and nothing else audible for a hundred feet | ¼ |
| 37–42 | 1d3 grasshoppers crossing open ground in fifty-foot bounds | 1 |
| 43–48 | 1d6 fire ants off a mound nest — never alone, never retreating | 2 |
| 49–54 | 1d3 tiger beetles on bare pan between grass stands | 2 |
| 55–60 | 1d2 antlion pits at a dry waterhole approach | 2 |
| 61–66 | 1d4 bullet ants on a game trail: one sting, twelve hours | 4 |
| 67–72 | 1d3 camel spiders over open ground, faster than the mounts | 4 |
| 73–77 | 1d2 bark scorpions under a flat-topped tree's root flare | 4 |
| 78–82 | 1 assassin bug in the grass canopy | 4 |
| 83–87 | 1 anole on a sun-warmed stone, motionless for the hour before it isn't | 6 |
| 88–91 | 1d2 mice, wild, out of the grass, and legally game | 6 |
| 92–94 | 1 shrew crossing the pan, which cannot stop | 7 |
| 95–96 | 1 fence lizard at a waterhole, and the rock was never just a rock | 10 |
| 97–98 | 1 sparrow over the grass, with nothing at all to hide behind | 11 |
| 99 | 1 opossum at the waterhole after dark, eating anything | 17 |
| 00 | 1 hawk over open plain, which is the worst possible ground for this | 20 |