TROIKA! Background: Homo Algus

They are frightened of you, the little dry ones. They fear your long face and your long limbs. They mistake your little lights for cruel will-o-wisps. They mistake your attempts to deliver food and medicine for attacks, and drive you off with torches and peat knives. You would have spurned the dry ones long ago, were it not for the fact that you seem to know them. You remember them from a time long, long ago, before you were born from the mud, and they were even littler.

If they would just stop running away, perhaps you could ask them what they mean when they call you a "bog body".

Possessions

• Lots of Algae
• Even More Algae.
• Excessive Amounts of Algae!
• Favorite Pebble (perfectly round)

Advanced Skills

3 Swim

2 Herblore

2 Sneak (4 in Wetlands)

1 Acrobatics

1 Climb

1 Spell - Light

1 Strength

Special

You may enter a state of suspended animation known as the "Swamp Hunch". During a Hunch you sit perfectly, deathly still for up to a week at a time. During that time you do not need to eat provisions, and others must Test their Luck to recognize you as anything other than a very misplaced sculpture. It takes 1 hour to enter or leave a Hunch, as your joints pop and your metabolism adjusts.

More photos of the original exhibit by Sophie Prestigiacomo.

Arbor Day Deforestation Special.

Everyone knows that druids and forests go together like peanut butter and jelly, trial and tribulation, death and taxes, or college and regret. Forget their deep and murky history as elite members of Insular and Continental Celtic societies at odds with the imperialistic writers of early history- trees are where it's at! That's been their thing for well over forty years of tabletop-related fantasy, and for almost four centuries of suspect Romantic scholarship.

But what about when they're not?

What about when we delve into the realm of 3rd edition splatbooks or Pathfinder class archetypes, and search for an overarching logic behind the diverse yet isolated and independent groups of druids operating in different climes and biomes? You'd probably get a wealth of different arguments and answers from actual research, but for the purposes of this post we're going to pretend there's only one answer.

Nature and its method of selection tend to promote competition between organisms and species who occupy similar or adjacent niches. No living thing is exempt from this. Environments, able to shrink or grow, possessing good or poor health, and adapting by way of the sum of all of their evolving parts, are also living things in this grand competition.  Just as "classic" druids are advocates for and protectors of the forest and all its denizens, other ecosystems can (or even must) have their own sapient defenders to ensure that they grow in strength and size and are not encroached upon by other upstart habitats.

Which brings us to peat bogs.

Swamps and other wetlands tend to get a bad rap in fiction. They are nasty and unpleasant, if not depicted as actively evil and dangerous to all outside life. Monsters, witches, and worse things abode in them, and they are the ideal place to find an ancient, sunken temple which would have been pretty difficult to build on that site to begin with. There is some logic to this, since stories tend to be told by humans who in pre-modern times were fearful of or struggled to deal with the weather, diseases, and pests found in many wetlands.

More recently we've been able to realize that they are all tremendously important to the health and diversity of our planet. Peat bogs in particular are havens for unique species of plant and animal life, and the properties of all that ancient layered dead plant matter allow a bog to eat up massive amounts of harmful free carbon in the atmosphere. They are valued to the point that, in some circumstances, it is good for the environment to cut down a forest and then flood it.

Of course the magical wardens of the bogs wouldn't be thinking about the big picture when they cut down the eves of forests or wet the edges of prairies. Just like the forest druids planting saplings or murdering farmers and loggers, and the desert druids promoting rapid aridification of grasslands, they are another force of nature given thought and reason with which to be even more wholly committed to their cause- a moving part in a great big natural machine, kept in check by the other forces opposed to it. Out of this chaotic equilibrium, we get Bog Druids.

Bog druids are believed to be the most isolationist, misanthropic druids in the world because they live so far away from other humanoids in such inhospitable places. Bog druids would counter that they are isolated because other folk are too afraid or can't be bothered to adapt to life in a more neighborly area.The misanthropic part is a little harder to argue against, given their generally sullen demeanor. You'd have one too, if you woke up before dawn every day to chant over a stagnant pool and then spent the next sixteen hours wrangling serpents, chopping up felled wood, and walking around on stilts.

Their style of dress often sets them apart from other denizens or wanderers of bogs because of how specialized it is. Besides a fondness for bronze accessories given heavily to patina, bog druids are noted for their unorthodox skill in waterproofing. Generally, the more waterproofed their clothing is, the more outlandish it looks. Overcoats of near-transparent intestine glued together with rendered bone, rigid cloth painted in tree rubber, grass or leaves woven together and thickly oiled, or plain old animal furs tend to dominate their choices in fashion, with little uniformity between groups of bog druids, or even individual members.

The potent smell of all of that aforementioned clothing tends to be the second distinction to smack outsiders in the face.

Bog druids don't generally have a strict hierarchy. More experienced members have some measure of seniority, but because each commune tends to be so small, every member is expected to be able to make and carry out decisions on their own. Group decisions tend to regard large threats to the bog, interactions with outsiders, or grand discoveries and portents gleaned from the peat. Outsiders can come to them for a variety of reasons. Most often they come to lodge a complaint about some blight or plague of insects that they think was unleashed from the bog, but other times they come to trade, pay for flood information or access to water reservoirs, or to drop off one of their own who has gotten the peculiarly wild hair up their person to study and join the commune. Most don't last very long, but those who stick around long enough are eventually considered to be new peatkeepers.

Most of the druids don't know magic, and those few who keep animal companions or perform divination generally rely upon more mundane means for both. They do have access to such a tremendous wealth of rare reagents and ingredients that their chemistry often looks like magic, however. More than a few potion-makers have risked everything in order to gain access to such reserves, even going so far as to gamble away their precious apothecary alligators.

Every bog druid is handy with a hatchet, saw, and shovel. They use them to shore up or expand the edges of their homeland, as well as to defend themselves from anyone who might have a problem with that. Bloody skirmishes between rival ecosystems are commonplace, with the dead often left feeding new growth or moldering beneath the turf for ages.

The druids of the peat are above all enigmatic, keeping much lore to themselves in their sodden lands. Why would we name them something as geopolitically inappropriate as "druid", if we knew what they prefer to be called?

Some rumors about them may be true, or nonsense, or a bit of both.

20 Things That Might Be True About Bog Druids
1	They are lobbying to either outlaw or control the construction of turf houses in the entire region.
2	Most of them are actually symbiotic hosts to a sentient fungus.
3	The latest logging campaign is the escalation of a disagreement with the nearby forest druid grove over leaving written accounts and doctrines.
4	The group is a front for a highly erotic and comically phallic snake cult.
5	Peat can be necromantically raised to create miles-wide Turf Golems.
6	The druids occasionally hire their members out to oversee sacrifices or judicial procedure.
7	A high-ranking member of the order is actually just a very lost botanist.
8	The druids have a very strong tradition of poetry and music. Just don't mistake one for a bard or filí.
9	They have no idea where that myth about scimitars and wooden armor came from.
10	Will-o'-the-wisps are a bog druid conspiracy.
11	They hate being confused with the Pyromancers of the Great Swamp.
12	The order was formed by a mystic with severe wood allergies.
13	Each bog druid cuts off a finger upon initiation and wears it with a necklace of woven hair.
14	... There is no official rule that the finger and hair have to belong to the druid.
15	The self-styled environmentalists are actually just trying to corner the market on bog butter production.
16	... They've already done so with the extraction and forging of bog iron.
17	They are the original Soggy Bottom Boys.
18	Topographic peat hags formed by soil erosion regularly come to life as literal hags and witches.
19	Layers of peat are meticulously cut out and studied by peat archivists to offer a rich history of the area's vegetation, pollen, spores, and animals.
20	The druids are guided by a reanimated peat mummy, strangled and sacrificed to the bog in the name of a long-forgotten god centuries ago.

Going Downhill: The Pem-Pah, Part 1.

[In a remarkably short period of time, Roberick Bertrum Litte's already haphazard subscalanean office/dormitory has become even more disheveled. With no one to man the half-door to the utility closet during Litte's extended archaeology leave (all two days of it so far), its discount stationery and other discreet acquisitions have been ransacked by his usual customers. For the most part they haven't intended to disturb his personal effects, but when the wooden board nailed to the half-door was bumped into during an entry, the makeshift desk was nearly torn free, and all of its contents scattered across the minority of the floor which was not already taken up by shelves and a bed. While many papers have been looked over for "thesis seeds" by desperate freshmen, this sheaf of unpublished papers is the only one which has been read through with any amount of interest so far.]



"It is the well-known law both domestically and inter-communally that the possession of this volume of taboo metals and gemstones is strictly forbidden. You are fortunate I am not also charging you with intent to smuggle or sell."
- Ortej Tella, customs officer of Quibgyal Commune.

"N-Now tarry just a moment! Surely you know that the laws also state that a provision is made for the cultural folkways of all ethnic lowland-folk! And I'll have you know my grandmother was one quarter full-blooded Pem-Mih!"
- Junral Chyok, amateur peddler, clueless to the fact that Ortej was a matrilineal cousin of his.



It would be entirely remiss of me to suggest that the Pach-Pah community¹ is limited only to their ancestral mountains as well as a handful of border towns on the slopes to their north. Their ancient history was filled with pioneering folk, as well as those whose bravery and soaring imagination brought them down from the peaks of their birth. This led to the ethnogenisis of many inspired peoples who continue to exist in some capacity to this very day, not least of which among them being the Pem-Pah.

Pem-Pah is an exonym of highland origin, meaning "the people who went downhill to water". This is quite an apt description of the group's migration and eventual settlement along the southwestern coast. However, in everyday speech in their native dialect, the people known as the Pem-Pah refer to themselves simply as "the people". For the purpose of keeping the two groups distinct in my writing, I will continue to use the term Pem-Pah.

At some point in prehistory a group of people from the Pach-Pah Yul began to migrate away from the valleys and watered slopes of the mountain chain's interior, moving outward in successive waves toward the west and south. Eventually these waves of settlers pushed past the borders of the mountain range and the hills at its feet, into the lowlands and coastal regions bordering on the western sea. The highest concentration of people during these last settlement waves seemed to be in and around the Khaitom-po, a massive body of water fed by several rivers which has been described variously as a bay, estuary, or brackish-water lake.

As evidenced by the handful of digs which have been conducted outside of the Pach-Pah homeland, the ancestors of the modern Pem-Pah readily took to fishing here. This has inspired a cuisine vastly different from that of their cousin culture, as well as more than a few unique cultural points of view or folklore tropes. First the spear, and then the hooked line and net were used, after which developed the earliest boats and rafts known to the people in and around the mountain chain.

This is thanks in part to the relative abundance of wood found in the lowlands, compared to the scarce and carefully conserved pygmy forests of the mountains. Reedy grasses and palm trees unheard of in the highlands allowed for the construction of wooden vessels as well as buildings, alongside the tradition of stonework which--due to the Pem-Pah lack of involvement in the events leading up to the Collapse--was never forsaken. The settlers maintained their traditional forms of herding and weaving throughout, but also broadened and intensified their practice of agriculture to include and take advantage of the wider variety of crops which could not thrive in the mountains. Even jewelry which makes use of precious stones or metals continues to be made in Pem-Pah territory, much to the chagrin of those who were against the inclusion of Khaitom-po into the Communes with partial membership.

The people who would come to be known as the Pem-Pah proper are first mentioned in civil records from the imperial age of Pach-Pah Yul starting at about 400 years prior to the Collapse, and the death of the last Miqh Pach-Pah. These records are of trade and business transactions, suggesting that the Pem-Pah were already quite established as a culture and an economy, and that commerce and exchange between them and their upland neighbors was at least somewhat regular and normalized by that point. But because the Pem-Pah were not a part of the Pach-Pah empire and an effort was apparently never made to incorporate them, they do not often appear in official, imperial records. According to the reckoning of the Pem-Pah themselves, they were established no less than 1,200 years prior to the time of that exchange. This would make them contemporaries of the earliest incarnation of the empire, as well as the last of the pre-imperial petty-kingdoms. Little work has been done by uninvolved scholars on these old records however, owing to the extreme rarity of visits to the Pem'Pah homeland by outsiders.

This paucity of visitors is not from lack of effort or hospitality, however. Many travelers throughout the eras were known to have set off for the lands of the Khaitom-po, with few of them making it many leagues beyond the border markets.

By that point, they tend to either run screaming back home, or to collapse from need of urgent medical attention.



¹ I would also like to apologize to the Pach-Pah community for my varied and repeated mistakes in rendering its name. Being that Pach-Pah literally means "People of the Earth", it has been brought to my attention by thoughtful readers that all of my uses of the phrase "Pach-Pah people(s)" or the colloquialism "Pach-Pahs" have been erroneous and redundant. I will also make an effort to use the grammatically correct singular Pach-Mih, or simply mih² when appropriate.

² I would also like to point out to my uninitiated readers how mih is etymologically linked to--though very separate in meaning from--the old kingly title of Miqh. Mih is a person, while Miqh is a "great" person.