Once you move away from the Maruto, past the tangled web of states and kingdoms and city-states, you reach the vast wilderness that fills so much of the Scavenger Lands. These lands are vast, pristine, and stark but one thing they are not is empty. Three different, distinct cultures of "Hill Folk" dwell in the lands of the Hundred Kingdoms, though few among the civilized folk know so much of their oft-forgotten neighbors. In the eyes of most, the Hill Folk are little more than Barbarians, primitive folk living dull dirty lives in the cold hills between the fertile lands around the Rivers of the East. One settlement is little different than another; one Hill Tribe is much the same as another.
In their own eyes, though, the People of the Hills are far from homogenous. Thousands of tribes lurk in the harsh wilds beyond the extent of the River Folk, each distinct and yet united in shared adversity. They have their own tongues, their own rituals, their own conflicts and legacies.
The hill tribes that dwell in the northern edges of the Hundred Kingdoms are perhaps the most well-known of the Hill Folk among the Scavenger Lands, their culture stretching from the edges of the Maruto and the Hundred Kingdoms all the way to the edge of Nexus and the Gray River where they watch the Marukani herd their horses. When folk in Nexus or Great Forks talk of the Hill Folk, they are usually referring to these pitiful wretches who live under poorly constructed huts with dirt floors and survive by herding and hunting.
Few settlements are larger than four or five families, but the Tribes stretch out for thousands of miles and all together there are slightly over a million of these refugees. The first age city of Dharrow was once prosperous, with a population in the tens of millions, but when the Great Contagion came the city was cut down and when the disease stopped and the Fair Folk were pushed away the Famine began. The survivors fled the city in droves, travelling hundreds or even thousands of miles. Entire groups were captured by more organized groups, impressed into slavery and turned to civil work, but others managed to huddle together in loose groupings that became tribes and eventually settled the lands they currently inhabit.
The people backslid into barbarism rapidly, those who couldn't make the transition dying or being taken by slavers, until today their dialect of Rivertongue is at first scarcely legible and only a few settlements even remember most of the secrets of agriculture or other lost arts. Those skilled at healing, smith work and other tasks are valued and the tribe as a whole devotes itself to hunting game and raising pitifully small herds of cattle. The aforementioned rude huts are shelter enough from the harsh winds and bitter winters, and are easy enough to take down when the tribe must pick up roots and move.
Roughly 400 years ago, the Silver God Tanochi Goldeneye led a number of the tribes back to Dharrow. Renamed Caer Dharrow, the ruin was converted into a holy place and site of pilgrimage. Even after the Wyld Hunt came and killed the Lunar Anathema, the Hill Folk remained in the withered husk of their former home, performing their rites and waiting for his return.
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