The Gray Coast

The Gray Coast
''Ahhh to sail the open seas! To feel the spray on our scaly skin! To warm our crests in the sun! What good is gold compared to a life of adventure? Sure, a few coins in the pocket makes for an interesting shore-leave, but its the drive for adventure that pushes us, not wealth. Come sail with us up the Dark Coast, and around Northpoint where the blue faeries dwell, or west past the Lowmen into the dreaded isles of the Ogres! We'll take on their fleets for the glory, not the spoils!''

Summary


The Gray Coast is a jungle nation, peopled by a race of highly intelligent lizard men, whom make their living mostly as sailors, pirates, and fishermen on the seas. This land does not play much into the national affairs of the Mainlund, being isolated and hard to reach over land, but comes into play as a staunch ally of the men of The Footlands. The mariners of the Gray Coast control the seas to the south east and east of the Mainlund (not that there's much interest in these waters). Their people are full of life and the spirit of adventure, preferring to travel around rather than build permanent structures, and as such, there are few major cities in this area that last long. Rather, it is populated with a collection of temporary flotillas that make up its urban environment, which can change based on bad weather or strange tides.

Geography
The Gray Coast is a lush, swampy jungle based around the river delta of the GreatRiver system (needs collective name) as it flows out into the ??? Sea. It is unbearable hot, humid, and riddled with pests and disease by human standards. The "land", if you can call it that, is mostly marshy swampland, extending deep into the interior of the Mainlund. Within several hundred miles of the coastline, the land becomes almost impossible to travel over, as it changes from soft earth to mud to freshwater in an endless puzzle. Part of the land's isolation comes from the fact that overland travel, say from Ashtar down to the coastline, is incredibly difficult, if not impossible during the rainy season. The climate is extremely tropical, and any travelers not prepared for it are sure to perish.

Racial Distribution


The Gray Coast is people almost entirely with Tyrazyne, who are a warm-blooded offshoot of lizard men. The Tyrazyne have lived in this area for longer than even the oldest human or elven societies elsewhere on the Mainlund, making the Gray Coast the oldest continuously occupied society in the land. Even though the nation did not get its current title until the late Parthian Era, the people of the Gray Coast have been living much the same lives as their ancestors prior to all written history. Given that the race is uniquely suited to the jungle environment of the area, virtually no other race of intelligent beings live in the Gray Coast in any large numbers. Humans, dwarves, elves, etc would have to radically alter the landscape of the interior of the country to live there (draining swamps, damming rivers, etc) and they have never had the reason to do so, nor the army to fight off the Tyrazyne who would inevitably come to reclaim their land. Likewise, along the coastline, no human port cities have been erected because the local Tyrazyne do not take kindly to permanent settlements within their borders, and also because it was (up until recent times) so far isolated and removed, that such human cities would run out of supplies.

Travelers within the nation are welcomed with a great hospitality in the more cosmopolitan coastal areas, and with a touch more suspicion in the rural sections.

History
The Tyrazyne are not overly concerned with ancestral records of their past, and as such, how they came to dwell in this region is a bit cloudy. The region in general is swampy, and has always been full of "standard" Lizard Men, but at some point in the Ancient Era, the Tyrazyne emerged as a separate lineage of this race, and were able to carve out a swath of territory near the coastline. Early records from Gruthar indicate that the ogres knew that these Lizard Men were different from their primitive cousins, with more advanced cultures and technologies, even in the Ancient Era. The shear isolation of the Gray Coast, with its forbidding jungles and twisted rivers, keep the Tyrazyne locked away from much contact with other races for many centuries. It was only in the years right before the rise of the great Parthian Empire that the Tyrazyne came into regular contact with humans, whom had settled the swamps of the eastern Footlands by that period.

During what is known as the Parthian Era, as that empire controlled much of the central & northern Mainlund, the Tyrazyne people and their human neighbors in the newly formed nation of The Footlands put aside their minor territorial squabbles to remove a shared threat: the ogre controlled islands just off their main coastlines. They embarked on a joint military venture to force out the remaining ogre outposts in the region and did so fairly successfully. Gruthar did not make much of an effort to retaliate deciding that these jungle outposts weren't really providing anything much of value to their empire, aside from a few random caches of Tyrazyne or Lizard Man slaves.

In recent decades, a small bubble of prosperity has come to the Gray Coast, in the form of a trade in rubber. The Gray Coast is the only land in the area which produces rubber trees, and the milky sap is collected by Tyrazyne farmers and sold, primarily to Calcovian merchants, whom need the rubber that is produced from the sap to supply the growing need for stretchy materials within the Calcovian Army's hot air balloon brigades.

Political Relations
The Gray Coast's closest ally is the Footlands, with whom they share a sea-fairing culture. Merchants from the Footlands are permitted to sail up-river into the heart of the jungle to trade metal and mineral supplies in exchange for the leather/hide, medicinal/herbal, and food-related products that the country produces. They are the only such nation to be allowed to do so. Historically, The Gray Coast has had the most direct conflict with Gruthar, the ogre lords whom occupied some of the islands within their natural territory. While the Gray Coast celebrates their victory over the ogres with much panache and fanfare in a series of holidays, the ogres themselves barely remember the conflict, and regarded the islands they lost as not particularly valuable anyway.

The Gray Coast is constantly harassed by low-level violence coming from the primitive human barbarians known as the Puushtani who live in the river systems in the northern portion of their official country boundary. These aggressive humans are quick to charge to war, but lack the cohesion needed to form a real threat to the Tyrazyne nation. They do make for troublesome pests for the northern communities with the nation, as they will attack Tyrazyne villages seemingly at random, then fade away back upstream as quickly as they came.

Culture & Customs
The Tyrazyne of the Gray Coast have become master astronomers. It is their culture that really refined the science of charting sea vessels by the position of the stars, and their star charts have been spread across all sea-faring cultures off the Mainlund (having been sold for a handy profit by Footlands merchants). Likewise, these lizard-men have pursued the study of pure mathematics far beyond what the other cultures have done, and have such advanced concepts as algebra and basic physics relating to gravity.

Having nothing in the way of classical religious pantheons, the Tyrazyne instead worship the living incarnation of their Mother God, who inhabits the body of the first-born female of each generation of the Royal Clutch, a family line descended supposedly from original Mother God, who was in the first egg hatched after the universe was created. There is only one incarnation of the Mother God living at a time. The lineage is passed down when the first clutch of the current Mother is laid. At that moment, she secess being the Mother God, and reverts to her other/actual self. The eggs are watched closely by clerics, and as soon one hatches and is female, the mantle of godhood is planted upon the infant crocadilian. Should the young Tyrazyne die before she can lay her own Royal Clutch, then the godhood is transferred through an orderly set of rules onto another nearby relative.

Any other eggs in a Royal Clutch asside from the Mother God that hatch and survive to adulthood join a special caste in the Tyrazyne society wherein they practice non-violence, eat only carrion meat or scraps, avoid contact with the outside human world, and paint themselves ornate colors daily. These "Royal Clutchers" to everyone form the closest thing the society has to a priest caste, and the members of the group are not known to use their positions improperly, however this might be because their position does not grant them any actual power to begin with. The Clutchers are approached for something akin to a mixture of financial advice, fortune-tellings, and acting lessons. They are the self-help gurus of their area, and sometimes amass dozens or hundreds of followers and cohorts. Some degree of chicanery is expected from such a role, and so long as they don't fleese their swamp-dwelling bretheren too much, they are politely tolerated by their communities.

The heart of the land, upstream into the deep swamps off the main shoreline, house massive reptile farms, where giant turtles are kept for their eggs, meat, and shells, along with a few species of dog-sized insects (beetles, mostly) whose parts are used in magical, medical, and alchemical pursuits. The nectar of various jungle flowers are highly prized for their aromatic qualities, and the hides of the several large crocodilian species native to the swamps are very sought after as a high quality leather product. On the coastline itself, bountiful seafood is pulled from the ocean, salted, and then shipped out from the area as a valuable food commodity.