Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==Carthagia==

'''Icons''': The Manipulator-General

Land of the Dark Saviour, Carthagia is a grim, mountainous land to the north of Naseria and the Indigo Marches.  To its east lie Huron and the north Drakkath; north and west stretch the unforgiving Wasteland and the Wreck Shores that cling to the Wasteland's southern edges.  This is a land of ancient refugees and exiles, a people led through the worst tortures and trials imaginable to find a new home.  Outsiders generally see the Carthagian people as reflected in their domain - high mountains and sheer crags, rugged valleys and steep hills, rushing rivers and cascading waterfalls that pour down gorges to the lowlands around.  It is an unforgiving land with bitter weather, a hostile landscape and wild creatures roaming amidst the peaks, but the Carthagians do more than just survive - they prosper.

The true origins of the Carthagians are hazy, lost to time and trauma during the Dawn War.  Their homeland is believed to lie somewhere in the Desolation, the expanse of ruined landscape north of the vast Myrmec desert that was reduced to its current state during the War; unfortunately, even Carthagian records are poor as their culture, at the time, had little to do with the written word in preference for aural history traditions.  During the War, faced with their annihilation if they remained, the Younger God Toran led his people in search of a new place to live.  They suffered the worst excesses of the raging War and then, even worse, the harsh embrace of the desert itself; it is believed that around nine in every ten Carthagians perished during the journey.  Eventually, they passed through the warring, collapsing Huron provinces and pushed further to the unclaimed mountains where now they dwell; after the perils of their journey, Carthagia seemed welcoming and its threats paltry.  This Great Journey has left scars on the national psyche of the Carthagians and has shaped their culture greatly; they are a toughened, resilient people who have undergone the worst and lived.  There are rumours that some enclaves of the Carthagian people survived in the north, although most people discount such a possibility.

At odds with the plight that it once faced, Carthagia is an incredibly rich country.  The mountains and highlands of the nation are abundant with mineral wealth, and the ores and metalsmithing of Carthagia are one of its greatest assets; it is so metal-rich that men and women of the warrior-caste are known for their heavy plate armour, making up the intimidating warbands of armoured infantry that form the body of the Carthagian military.  This is combined with the creations of the Manipulators, the institution of flesh-twister magi who craft and shape bizarre creatures for a myriad of purposes and trade them on to outsiders who are willing to pay great sums for the privilege.  As such, Carthagia is a major trade power in the region, particularly with the western lands, Huron and the White Bay.  This prosperity is reflected in the homes and practices of the people of the nation; they take great pride in not wallowing in the luxuries that they have won, but rather prizing them and appreciating them greatly as the rightful earnings from the Great Journey, torn from the earth with hard toil and determination.  Although outwardly imposing and grim, the bastions and settlements of Carthagia show a different side in their inner chambers, often richly decorated with tapestries, stonework and metal goods.  Carthagian art and song tends towards the mournful and the abstract - dirges for the dead of the Great Journey and memorials for the great suffering of the nation that served as its backbone for a new power to rise upon.  Glory is in serving one's vassals, one's lieges and the nation with duty and honour, not in making the ''individual'' great.  Every Carthagian stands on the shoulders of the dead.

Carthagia is ruled by a King (currently Colchis Toranshannur, or Colchis IV) - never a Queen, due to traditions surrounding Toran's sacred role as the First King.  Because the royal bloodline is hereditary, this has caused certain practices to deal with situations where the heir is a woman.  In such cases, the female heir undertakes a ritual to officially become a man, and must take on the culturally approved roles of a man - they will marry a woman, and so forth, although liasons with men are approved on the basis that there needs to be a new heir coming from ''somewhere''.  This practice has trickled down through the tiers of the Carthagian castes, wherein women can, if they desire, officially become a man and be treated as such legally and culturally from then on; currently, this is acceptable amongst the royal, noble and warrior castes, and only rarely amongst the lower castes (where it is considered an oddity).  The reverse is not true - men cannot become women, except for in a particular branch of the Toranite church where all castes are acceptable.  These practices are generally considered a one-way trip, but a folk hero of Carthagia is Carlovargus the Twin-Bodied, a warrior and slayer of horrors who switched between being male and female some seventeen times in their life - finally, if the legend is to be believed, receiving a blessing from Toran that let them ''physically'' switch between male and female at will, leading to a series of tales wherein fools who treated a stranger badly because of their apparent gender were undone upon realising that the stranger was in fact Carlovargus.

Carthagian society is highly feudal, in that every level is built from the personal relationships between people.  The highest of the noble caste are the king's vassals; the lower nobles are the higher nobles' vassals; and so on down the great pyramid to the lowest levels of society.  This tight network of personal duty binds the entire nation together in a web of mutual responsibility and reciprocation.  The warrior caste are something of an oddity, in that they are a special caste maintained at the expense of patrons (usually the nobility) but who do not themselves possess vassals; they are entirely subject to the requirements of their lords without any other duties or responsibilities diverting their attention.  Unfortunately, this means that sometimes warrior-caste Carthagians end up unable to find a new master in the wake of an old patron perishing or rejecting them, and these masterless men and women can turn to banditry or mercenary work to keep themselves alive.  Caste mobility is possible but generally a slow affair involving the acceptance by figures in the new caste; a warrior-caste cannot simply decide to take up trading one day, as the merchant and administrative caste will not take kindly to dealing with him or her and will not accept the once-warrior so easily into their ranks.  In their view warriors should keep to matters of battle, not bead-counting.

Carthagia is a highly fortified nation due to the dangerous landscape and the threat from outside.  All sorts of creatures are a threat within the Carthagian wilds, including goblins, servitors and several identified dragons; the Wasteland is an ever-present source of more migrating creatures.  Even the least of villages or quarries is walled and guarded.  More than that, the Carthagian military is a surprisingly well-oiled machine for such a feudal arrangement, capable of calling together hundreds or even thousands of heavily-armed warriors remarkably quickly, forming serried ranks in their distinctive dark armour.  The lower castes also serve as soldiers under certain circumstances, generally skirmishers or light infantry, serving for pay from their liege; only small numbers of lower caste serve permanently as soldiers, most often as scouts.  These forces are buttressed by the Manipulators, who provide battlemagi and terrifying flesh-twisted creatures, and the Church of Toran - the churches host a great number of elite temple guard, as well as the infamous Fleshtearers, blessed beasts of Toran wrought by the Manipulators and made sacred by the temples.

The patron deity of Carthagia, Toran, is venerated to a level unmatched amongst other national patrons in other countries.  Toran led the Carthagians to survival, and they love the Dark Saviour for his own ultimate sacrifice.  A grim deity associated with strength, endurance and battle, Toran's temples and churches are grand but intimidating structures, intended to show power and strength rather than ostentatious wealth - for such a rich nation, the shrines to their beloved god are generally bereft of adornment.  The Carthagians see this as a sign of respect, rather than trying to buy Toran's favour with the very wealth that his death, and that of their ancestors, bought for them.  Ancestor worship is an equally important part of Carthagian faith as well, although often without involving any physical remnants of the dead - perhaps in echo of the thousands of bodies left to wither and dessicate on the desert sands.  The rest of the High Host are worshipped in Carthagia, and their shrines are widespread, but they definitely take second place to Toran, King of the Host.  The Church of Toran is immensely powerful in both social and political terms, as well as maintaining large numbers of temple troops and great treasuries of wealth; all castes of society are encouraged to donate to the church and the noble caste in particular see it as a duty of their status.  The savage templar zealots of the churches are terrifying foes, filled with fervour and fanaticism, and there have been times when it was the Church, not the Crown, that truly ruled the nation.

The Manipulators are perhaps the best-known face of Carthagia outside its borders, not because they travel but because their handiwork is so highly prized.  The flesh-twisters hold several fortified bastions throughout Carthagia, within which their arcane laboratories and training halls produce the next generation of mages - and the next generation of their biothaumaturgically engineered creations.  The Manipulators breed a dizzying array of horrors, from minor alterations to common stock animals (like horses grafted with more muscle or hounds with rows of shark-like fangs in their maws) to entirely new species.  They breed augmented draft animals, pets, war-beasts and the like, as well as a number of strains of strange plantlife.  These they sell on to the people who desire such things, usually for vast sums of money - Huron, in particular, has been a major market for flesh-twisted creations in the past decades.  In turn, the Manipulators need great volumes of resources for their work, including alchemical ingredients, test subjects and animal parts.  The Fleshtearers, divine warriors of Toran, are constructed from a patchwork of parts in Manipulator labs; drazhikar claws are needed for their talons, and hence a high fee is payed for anyone bringing in a drazhikar, preferably alive (a very difficult task indeed).

Of course, before the Carthagians, these ancient mountains stood tall and strong for a long age, and there are still signs here and there of past masters of the landscape.  Several ancient Umbral ruins have been thoroughly looted and picked apart by Manipulator teams and, during their delvings into the mountains, miners have regularly come across strange subterranean spaces - some just small constructions of a few chambers, others vast galleries and networks that stretch for miles.  Some of these finds have been placed under lockdown by the Manipulator-General and the Church of Toran; whatever they may have found down there remains under lock and key for now.