Sarcophan Delves

Overview

Far to the south of the Bay of Catazaar, on the wide, winding delta of the Umshalla River lies the tottering ramshackle city of Sarcophan. More commonly referred to as the Delves, this great metropolis is said to be home to both the wealthiest, and the poorest, people in the world. The Bedelaar Huisbaas (usually rendered as 'beggar kings' in Imperial, or abbreviated to Bedelaar) of Sarcophan head great merchant families whose wealth is founded on the bounty they harvested from the tombs of their predecessors centuries ago. A relatively young nation, whose people see wealth as the highest aspirations, the Sarcophan have a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for ruthless pursuit of profit regardless of the cost.

Terrain

Surrounded by marshes and swamps, the air is often filled with clouds of blood-sucking insects, and is ripe with the stench of marsh gas and rot. The great city of the Sacrophan Delves, occupies the remains of a much older city, a great urban ruin of stone monoliths and sunken plazas, partially reclaimed by the swamps on one side and the sea on the other. The palaces of the Beggar Kings, the great guild halls and the Sarcophan markets are all constructed amid the tombs of an earlier civilisation, one whose citizens vanished centuries ago.

Outside the city itself, the poorest Sarcophans make their homes on shfiting islands subject to subsidence and erosion, meaning entire villages regularly need to migrate. Even settlements founded on drier land tend to look like open-cast mines, shored with warped planking and scavenged ropes. Rickety buildings lean against each other, while swaying rope bridges connecting settlements to the mainland. Most incongruous of all are the mud-stained icons and monoliths that loom from the marsh in places, watching over the looting of their dead peoples’ ancient places with uncaring stone eyes.

People

The Sarcophan people are all descended from a surprising array of immigrants, exiles and even colonists. It is a common saying in some parts of the world that "nobody is native to Sarcophan," although the Bedelaar Huisbaas might contest that. The swamp-city is not a welcoming environment, and it's people have a paradoxical reputation for simultaneously being sickly and healthy as oxen. Disease is rampant in the city, and the physically weak are likely to die unless they are rich enough to afford the best medical treatment. Unsurprisingly, the draughir and briar lineages are very common in this nation and their supernatural blood helps them to thrive in the festering atmosphere.

Some feral orc tribes live in the swamps and they occasionally become a real threat, but usually the Sarcophans have little the orcs particularly want and vice versa. When they become too problematic, the Sacrophans usually engage in a simple war of extermination until the threat goes away - the Sacrophans are not a slave-owning society and see little advantage in taking orc prisoners. Rather than slaves, the Sarcophan make great use of the ongelukkig; corpses animated through the practice of zielweven ('soul weaving') that perform tasks too dangerous or unpleasent for human labourers.

Poltics

The nation is dominated by the Bedelaar Huisbaas, the beggar-kings and beggar-queens of Sarcophan. Each of these merchant-monarchs leads a family founded on the tomb-banquet - the wealth claimed by the original settlers from the tombs and palaces abandoned by their predecessors. Each of the great houses has a seat at the 'great table' - a massive circular stone table that stands in the palace of beggars and is the heart of the nation. Every month the Bedelaars meet here for a feast, during which they discuss trade and decide upon matters that affect the nation as a whole. Three of the seats at the great banquet are not held by members of the great houses. One seat is left empty (for death herself, it is claimed); one is offered to the highest bidder each month at auction; and one is assigned by a public lottery, available to anyone with a silver coin to spend on a ticket.

Competition between the great houses is very fierce. Several times a smaller association has managed to overcome and consume the status of a larger house, claiming their tomb-banquet (the wealth in their vaults) and taking their place at the 'great table'. Outsiders often claim that Sarcophan is "one good meal away from anarchy" but their society has existed in its current form for over two hundred years; while there have been occasional outbreaks of violence and rioting, the great houses have always managed to restore order.

The 'great banquet and those workings of government that the Sarcophan Delves possess are overseen by the Bloedzuiger, the Sarcophan priests. Their role is largely ceremonial, and they are lead by the 'high priest' of Sarcophan, an allegedly immortal priest who ensures that the traditions of Sarcophan are kept alive and that no great house breaks the various unwritten rules of their society. According to some sources most of the Bloedzuiger suffer from disfiguring diseases, while others claim they endure a powerful curse placed by the former rulers of the land that is now Sarcophan.

Magic

The magicians of Sarcophan are experts in the ritual magic of Spring, Autumn and Winter; they have little interest in or propensity for the magic of Day, Night or Summer (beyond a few rituals which protentially increase the profit they can glean for the great houses) and practitioners of those realms are apparently quite rare. As with many other elements of Sarcophan society, the magic of the Delves is directed toward wealth and profit. Magicians are encouraged to be merchants. While every great house has some magicians, several distinct guilds, separate from the great houses, peddle their skills to the highest bidders.

The most influential of these guilds is that of the zielweven - the soul weavers - who bind spirits to corpses to create the ongelukkig workers upon which a fair amount of Sarcophan trade depends. These animated corpses labour in mines and swamps, but they also man the oars of the great Sarcophan galleys that ply their trade all over the known world. Tireless, requiring neither food nor water, but requiring regular attention from a zielwever, these useful tools seem to have more in common with the Urizen ushabti than the husks created with rituals such as Quickening Dead Meat.

A lot of Sarcophan magic has a distinctly funereal feel. Many of the cultures upstream of Sarcophan believe in putting their dead on the Umshallah river to be carried to some afterlife. The Sarcophan Bloedzuiger gleefully harvest these floating corpses and pack them in special stone chambers filled with sacred molds and apothecary preparations. According to the Bloedzuiger, flesh prepared in this way can be consumed to transfer the memories and even the skills of the person being devoured to another, creating a popular - if gruesome - narcotic. This substance is especially popular with the large draughir population of the Delves.

Religion

The Sarcophan are not a religious people Their 'faith' such as it is seems to be based around the idea that the wealth one amasses in life ensures one a place in a shadowy afterlife they call the houses of silence. Most Sarcophans would be considered blasphemers by Imperial priests - they believe that only the poor and indolent reincarnate, because they have not amassed enough wealth in life to purchase a place in the afterlife. Efforts to communicate the Way to the Sarcophans have largely failed, although there are a few congregations who have embraced the teachings of ambition and prosperity they are very much in the minority.

Sarcophan priests usually wear ornamented death-masks when they are performing their ceremonial roles, and their hooded vestments resemble burial shrouds. The priesthood concerns itself primarily with ceremonial functions, especially funerals and marriages, and with also fills a role similar to that of the Imperial civil sevice (although on a much smaller scale, and prone to a great deal of corruption). Most Sarcophan people give little thought to spiritual matters, considering the soul to have little relevance to the day-to-day struggle for survival against their inevitable mortality. "Death claims everyone," is a common saying, usually accompanied by a shrug.

Especially distasteful to many outsiders is the institutionalized practice of ritual cannibalism as part of funeral services. It is traditional for a dead body to be cooked and prepared, and consumed during the memorial service by the family and friends of the deceased. These cannibalistic wakes are usually accompanied by the finest food and drink the family can afford, and many rich Sarcophans in their declining years scour the known world for exotic consumables to accompany their funeral feast. The living remember the dead person, but they also strive to take some of their strength and character into themselves by eating their flesh.Dying in a way that does not leave a body behind - or worse, being forced to sell ones body to the zielwever - is seen as a tragic circumstance by most Sarcophans.

Another area that the priesthood concerns itself with is warding off death. Many priests are also physicians and apothecaries, and are experts at treating and preventing the many diseases, infections and parasitic infestations that plague the people of Sarcophan. While not all surgeons are priests, those who are not adopt the same ceremonial death-masks that the priests wear, although usually without their shroud-like vestments.

The Sarcophan Delves

Built among the tombs of a dead civilisation, on the edge of a fetid herb-rich swamp, the Sarcophan Delves serve as the gateway to an unknown southern continent.

Languages

The dominant language in the 'Delves is Sarcophan, represented by Dutch. This is the language of the original settlers of the region, and most official documents and all trade takes place in this language. Due to it's status as a trading city, many residents also speak Imperial (English), one of the Asavean dialects, or the Gemeinsamesprache of The Commonwealth. An influx of refugees from the Sumaah Republic has seen a marked rise in the number of citizens conversing with the languages dialects of that distant nation..