![]() Willsen is looking for some tough customers who can discourage this, as he finds all his patrons scatter when the guards show up. A lot of them run to The Cast Away, and that leads to enforcers turning up at all hours to haul their men back into line. JUST DESERTS Lots of expeditions have deserters, especially once they get further into the jungle. Cast-podders can make an easy living rowing exploring crews across the lake, a job any unskilled idiot can do. It’s also often where explorers give up and decide to go home, or at least drink away their fears for a few days. Around his establishment is a shanty town of those who have been cast out from Skeggi or are on the run from their captain or employer. The proprietor is the almost-spherically fat Willsen, a Wastelander who has lived on the continent for nearly sixty years. This makeshift harbour is overseen by a tavern and hotel called The Cast Away. Here grow vast pulse vegetables in huge pods that are easily turned into canoes steered by ‘podders’, but rafts, catamarans, and even steamboats are available to be commissioned. Explorers often turn here to explore the continent by boat. The Cast Away About a day’s march west of Skeggi, the jungle turns into a swamp that becomes a vast lake. Here, in the penumbra of the protective spell, live the things of the half-light. But this is the shallow end it is nothing like the enclosing terror of the deep forest that begins a hundred miles inland where the Skink settlements first appear. ![]() So it is that as soon as one steps a few hundred yards from Skeggi farmland, the branches close behind and above, the compass needles spin, and it is easy to lose one’s way or one’s life. This jungle is deeply enchanted, partially sapient, and personally vindictive. That leaves… hang on… five plus… no, wait, I can do this…’ - Ignor the Uncountable, Marienburg press-ganger All jungles are dark and deadly, but the jungles of Lustria are powered by a great spell to protect the Slann and their secrets. BEYOND THE CITY ‘For every ten men you send west, you lose two to the sea, two in the streets of Skeggi, and five in the jungle. The wary Skinks, for their part, have figured out that the tribe is a safe place to come to try to understand more about how the strange ones from across the ocean think, so occasionally they make an appearance, enjoying the lavish banquets and gifts they receive when they do. The tribe worships the Lizardmen as semi-mythic beings who are deeply in tune with the earth, and make offerings to them in the hope they will come and teach things to their devotees. But over the centuries, a small tribe of Humans and even a few Elves have formed a pseudo-society they call the Skinken, and have learnt just enough jungle craft to survive. Almost all of them die, because the Skinks guard their knowledge carefully. Some decide that the only way to survive is to learn from the lizardfolk and copy their ways. They could not survive the chaos and violence of the port, but the jungle will assuredly eat them alive. ![]() III 51 SKEGGI The Skinken Those who walk away from Skeggi are desperate.
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