The Sahel
Where the Veldt's savanna runs up against the Emberwaste, the grass and the hot desert meet and make something neither: a semi-arid transition zone of thorn scrub, acacia and baobab. The Aziza live in the groves, know every plant in the region, and sing more or less constantly.
The Land
A hot semi-arid steppe with a long punishing dry season ruled by desiccating north-easterly winds, broken by a brief volatile monsoon that yields sparse and highly variable rain. The ground is flat-to-undulating sedimentary plain, sun-baked clay hardpan and ancient fossil dune, punctuated by lateritic crusts, eroded sandstone bluffs and isolated granite inselbergs.
The flora is drought-resilient and thorny — deep-rooted acacia, desert date palm, hardy tussock grasses that bloom and seed in days when the rains come. It supports heat-adapted nomadic ungulates and the predators and scavengers that follow them, and its seasonal wetlands are a migratory corridor for birds in numbers nobody has counted.
East lies the Red Sands; north, the lip of the Great Rift; south and west, the thorn and pine of the Briar Barrens, which is the same country under a different flag.
The Aziza
They live in communities within the sparsely spaced acacia and baobab groves, and their mastery of herbalism is the deepest in Everdew — medicines, poisons and a wide grey category between, made from plants that grow nowhere else and prepared by methods they do not write down.
They sing near-constantly: hollering across the grassland while they work, chanting in unison to the ancient spirits, and carrying their entire history in song because nothing written survives the dust.
Their nearest neighbours across the border are the pukwudgies of the Briar Barrens, who are also knee-high, also herbalists, and also sell the cure and the poison without editorial comment. Neither people finds this coincidence as funny as outsiders do.
Encounters
Roll d100. Thorn scrub between a savanna and a desert. The dry season and the wet season are two different tables in one. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 2d6 Aziza hollering across the grassland at work, who will trade cure or poison | — |
| 10–16 | 1 migratory bird corridor opens: 2d8 travellers, traders and hangers-on follow it | — |
| 17–23 | the dry wind sets in for a season, and every water source on the map is provisional | — |
| 24–30 | 2d6 thrips on tussock grass that bloomed and seeded in three days | ¼ |
| 31–36 | 1d4 crickets in an acacia grove, and a Pukwudgie listening from the border | ¼ |
| 37–42 | 1d6 fire ants off a hardpan nest | 2 |
| 43–48 | 1d3 tiger beetles on lateritic crust | 2 |
| 49–54 | 1d2 antlion larvae at a fossil dune's foot | 2 |
| 55–60 | 1d4 bullet ants on a baobab trunk road | 4 |
| 61–66 | 1d3 camel spiders over open steppe, faster than anything you ride | 4 |
| 67–72 | 1d2 bark scorpions under a granite inselberg's flake | 4 |
| 73–77 | 1 assassin bug in the thorn, beak first | 4 |
| 78–82 | 1d2 greater camel spiders running down a mounted courier | 6 |
| 83–87 | 1 anole on an inselberg, motionless in the sun for an hour | 6 |
| 88–91 | 1d2 shrews working the scrub, which never stop | 7 |
| 92–94 | 1 fence lizard on an eroded sandstone bluff | 10 |
| 95–96 | 1 caracal-form hunter out of the scrub — one leap, no warning, no second attempt | 18 |
| 97–98 | 1 hyena-form scavenger pack of 1d3, following the herds and the sick | 16 |
| 99 | 1 hawk over open steppe with nothing between here and the groves | 20 |
| 00 | 1 fox at a waterhole in the last light | 24 |