Steadfast Crag

One confederation of valleys¶

The Steadfast Crag is the largest Goetern polity and it speaks for perhaps half the Goetern in the world, on a generous count, and it has never once claimed otherwise.

Goetern villages are scattered the length of the mountain country and most of them belong to nobody. A valley with four hundred people in it, its own headwoman, its own bone garden and no obligation to anyone beyond the next ridge is the ordinary condition of Goetern life, not an exception to it. Some of these villages trade with the Crag. Some send hunters when the Crag calls. Most simply carry on, and would be astonished to hear themselves described as Crag subjects by a foreign clerk.

There are also smaller confederations, two or three valleys deep, that formed for one bad winter and never dissolved. None of them matter to anyone outside the mountains, which is exactly how they prefer it.

Vennhal is where the Crag's councils meet. It is a market town with a hall, and no Goetern has ever called it a capital.

Unyielding, and not interested¶

The Crag is a community of skill and discipline: hunters and farmers who take life only when necessary, trade carefully, and negotiate with a caution that outsiders mistake for timidity right until the moment it stops.

They want nothing from you. This is the hardest fact about them for any colonial power to swallow, because a people who want nothing cannot be bought, and a people who cannot be bought must be either respected or fought. Envoys arrive with the usual instruments: trade concessions, titles, protection against a threat the Crag had not been worrying about. They are heard politely all the way through, given a meal, and shown the road.

From what?

Crag answer to an offer of protection, delivered in full

Where the patience stops¶

When homes or people are threatened, Crag farmers and hunters do not become soldiers. This is the error that has ended more than one expedition budgeted for a village.

They go on being farmers and hunters, together, at speed, on ground they have walked their whole lives, with every ditch and deer path already known to them and to nobody else. There is no army to defeat. There is a valley, and it stops cooperating, and the expedition discovers that it has been fighting the terrain and that the terrain has been taking notes.

A bastion rather than a power¶

The Crag does not charter, expand or campaign. It endures, which in the colonial era is itself a political position and one that irritates every metropole that has tried to file it under something else.

Its faith is Verdantism, held in the domestic, restrained way of careful farmers, and its one warm relationship is with the Eldrin at twenty points above neutral. Two peoples who both measure a claim in generations and neither of whom is in a hurry turn out to have very little to argue about.

Meeting them¶

As a neighbour, the best kind: honest traders, reliable borders, no ambition pointed at you.

As an enemy, the worst kind, because they are defending the only thing they ever wanted and they know the ground better than your scouts ever will. Note also that beating the Crag does not settle the mountains. The unaffiliated valleys are still there, they watched what you did, and they are under no treaty at all.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.