The Silt-Braided Basin

An immense inland labyrinth of emerald waterways, shifting mudflats and seasonal floodplain across the north of the Veldt, fed by the overflow of the Everflow. The river Odo Oya — everyone calls it the Mami Wata — defines the place, and the Orisha live on it rather than beside it.

The Land

Sluggish river fingers divide and re-converge over deep nutrient-rich clay. In flood the waters swell into a mirror-sheen expanse broken only by stilted mangrove archipelagos, water-lily shallows and colossal silk-cotton groves anchored in prehistoric silt.

The flora is specialised and largely carnivorous: pitcher-reeds that snap shut on drowning insects, floating mats of flowering hydrilla, hollow-stem papyrus that whistles in the warm breeze. Dog-sized lungfish and territorial catfish patrol the benthic mud while dragonfly steeds and wading water-striders carry goods between bamboo boardwalks and floating reed-bazaars.

North the Basin meets the Everflow, whose outflow makes it; south, the ground rises to the lip of the Great Rift.

The Orisha

River people in the strictest sense: their villages float, and an Orisha who sleeps on dry ground twice in a season will be asked, kindly, whether everything is all right.

They hold that the river is a living entity owed respect and reverence rather than merely gratitude, and their water magic is bound up in that belief — protective, restorative, and applied to the Odo Oya itself as often as to any person. They venture into the surrounding wetland to hunt, fish and gather, and return to the water to sleep.

Encounters

Roll d100. An inland delta with two personalities: the low water and the flood. Roll the season first. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.