Culture Focus: Hive Moskitia

[Username17]

This is the long delayed ninth installment of the Culture Focus Series.

Hive Moskitia: One Man's Treasure
"The workers leave and return. It is the Queen who is the slave."

The Moskitian hive is an ocean-going society who trade and raid with equal facility. Their dwellings are usually temporary, and they travel long distances from the one major city on journeys of pillage and commerce - often at the same time.

Lay of the Land

The northern reefs are scoured regularly by storms, and the silty sand bars at the mouth of the Kleksit shift position with every season. And yet it is that the fertile yet salty soil sprouts new life in the bright tropical sun. Plants and birds leap to colonize each hopeful mass of land a it crests over the waves only to be scattered or destroyed again with the next storm. Permanent islands are rather rare in the area, and are mostly the results of volcanoes past and present creating rocky crags jutting incongruously from the shallow and stormy ocean.

One such volcano is Chtit Island. Legend has it that a thousand years ago the island was cone shaped but one day it exploded, slaying everyone for a hundred kilometers in any direction and eventually leaving the region open for Ormigan settlement. The island is now shaped like a letter C when seen from above, and the water on the inside edge is noticeably hotter and at a higher water level than the water outside, creating a continuous surface current pushing out of the one break in the cliffs.

Major Cities

Chtit Island is the only city with more than 10,000 inhabitants in all of Moskitian territory. The horseshoe shaped mountain is beset on all sides by thunderous waves, and the surface itself is honeycombed with caverns. The residents themselves do not think of the island as being a single city, though visitors find it truly opaque where one district begins and another ends. The outer rim of the island is called The Fortress, and much of the architecture is built into the caves - though some overbuilt wooden structures clamped onto the outside of the island are also present. The shanty town inside the caldera is built much more haphazardly and is called The Trading Post. There is also an area on the northern end of the caldera which is entirely contiguous with The Trading Post and is called The Foundry. The sole entrance to the the caldera from the ocean is guarded by a tremendous solid-water gate that is sometimes lowered. When this happens, the water level inside rises quite perceptibly, and it is for this reason that most dwellings in The Trading Post are raised on stilts out of the black sand or mere tents that can be picked up and carried off. All told, there are about 80,000 inhabitants of the island total, with the considerable majority living in The Trading Post.

Other habitations are referred to as "camps" whether they are physically built out of quasi-permanent huts, cloth and pole tents, or sampans. Some of the sampan camps can get quite large, with hundreds of boats lashed together encompassing thousands of inhabitants. However, the Moskitians view these dwellings as both temporary and expendable.

Economics

The temporary sand bars of the northern reefs produce tremendous amounts of vegetation in their brief existences, and so it is that when they rise out of the sea it is not unusual to see Moskitians rush to them to harvest the quick growing grasses and fruits, as well as to hunt the birds come to do much the same. Much fishing is also done in this region. The Moskitian Hive also creates and manipulates the much coveted solid water, of which the greatest ships are formed. Though the majority of boats are still made of reeds or wood, the solid water vessels travel much faster and are held in high esteem.

But the largest portion of the economy of Moskitia comes from other nations. Moskitia trades openly with its neighbors in a haphazard and unregulated fashion and individual family vessels conduct piracy on nearby settlements without fear of repercussions from their own society. Taking things by force is considered to be fully as reasonable a course of action as trading for them in barter, and this attitude extends to labor as well as goods - slavery is legal though not enforced. An escaped slave is simply free to go with no hard feelings unless and until they are captured again by the same or different slaver and forced into servitude again.

The main economic unit of society is the "family" - a term that has a meaning to Hive Moskitia that is different from its meaning to other hives and tribes. All of the children to a particular Ormigan Queen belong to the same family, as do all the siblings who captured the Queen in the first place. But the queens themselves do not, because no Moskitian would ever induce the queen transformation in their own children. The creation of a queen always involves kidnapping the grub of another family and forcing it to eat royal jelly. If a family succeeds in holding a grub long enough to transform it into a queen, that queen becomes property of that family and it is assumed that the original family would not want it back. This assumption has often proved to not be true when the grubs were kidnapped during raids on other hives.

Those captured by a Moskitian Family can join that family by demonstrating that they have a useful skill. And so many members of major Moskitian Families are not even Ormigans. Families are judged in wealth by how many boats they can field and the quality thereof.

Moskitian trading groups are viewed with understandable suspicion by other nations, but so long as forces appear to be sufficient on both sides to cause unacceptable losses, Moskitians are happy to trade rather than take.

Metal of any kind is scarce in Moskitia. However, even weak water crafters can sharpen water until it holds an edge roughly as well as a bar of tin.

Law and Order

Outsiders view law in Moskitia as a laughable concept. The Moskitian tendency to take things at sword point, their casual acceptance of armed robbery, murder, and slavery leave many onlookers wondering what could possibly constitute a crime in Moskitia. However, there are things that the Moskitians find unacceptable. Taking things by force is OK, but stealing or lying to acquire an object is not. Killing someone in a fight is perfectly fine, but killing someone in their sleep is totally off limits. Justice is handled by elders from three families when possible and by the captain of a ship when not. Punishments are normally handed out in the form of beatings, with more severe punishments being lethal beatings.

Magical Traditions

Moskitians are mostly trained in Water and Life magics, with Water powers being by far the most respected. The truth is that the abundance of productive yields of the transient island ecologies is in no small part due to the intervention of the life magics of Moskitian seed singers. But these skills are socially denigrated in favor of those who can drag a ship through the sea or make persistent solid water tools.

The greatest of these works are done in The Foundry, where special blends of water from the caldera are used to make full sized ships of unsurpassed speed. The two and even three hulled ships of Hive Moskitia are distinctive and are substantially superior to the fat bellied ships of the mainland.

Government

Moskitia is divided into a number of major and minor Families. A new Family can be made at any time by having any group of any size declare themselves to be a new family, getting themselves a boat, and then kidnapping a grub long enough to transform her into a Queen to make a new generation of children for the Family. Ultimately, every Family started that way, and new Families are created and destroyed every generation.

Ownership of major points like The Gate and the Foundry are essentially by acclimation, and it is not unknown for a Family to rocket up or down in importance as the result of a short string of particularly successful or disastrous raids.

[Judging__Eagle]

Awesome, so now we have as magic types:

Water, Life, Void (Iron), [whatever the naked mages on the Mesa use], and.... I'm not sure what others.

[IGTN]

Awesome, so now we have as magic types:

Water, Life, Void (Iron), [whatever the naked mages on the Mesa use], and.... I'm not sure what others.

Air, Death, Earth, Fire, Life, Void, Water, if I remember right. I think the Jarbah are water, too, just differently; they need dew to be able to negate their need for nourishment.

[Grek]

How do the boats made from water float in water? Is it magically warmed in order to make it less dense than outside water, or is it ice, or does it float with water magic?

[violence in the media]

I'm envisioning the water magic looking like some of the effects from The Abyss. Does that sound right to anyone else?

[name_here]

It could work like the merrow shapewater from lorwyn/shadowmoor, where it's telekinetic manipulation of water, in essence.

Or it could work some other way.

[IGTN]

How do the boats made from water float in water? Is it magically warmed in order to make it less dense than outside water, or is it ice, or does it float with water magic?

I imagine that it would be boat-shaped, and use the contained air to help it float.

[Username17]

I'm envisioning the water magic looking like some of the effects from The Abyss. Does that sound right to anyone else?

Sounds right to me.

-Username17

[baduin]

This setup seems very similar to the German/Slavic tribal system. If so, in order to keep it stable you need to borrow a few things from those tribes:

1) Divine law and priests/judges who memorize it and arbitrate (but do NOT enforce it)
2) Kinship system of revenge and weregild. Something of the kind is necessary to keep some sort of peace.
3) Moots/tribal gathering as the ultimate source of authority. In the society of that size, only heads of families would get to participate. Moots also enforce penalties for the breaking of public laws. Eg killing somebody is the private matter between families, but breaking the guest law, or attacking somebody during a moot is a public crime, with penalties enforced by the entire moot. The usual penalties are fines or exile. Death penalty is very rare, mostly for cowardice in combat.
4) War-kings or chiefs with their housecarls (mostly recruited from exiles). There would be probably only one chief king in the Hive Moskitia. Such a king has no "governmental" duties as we understand them; he is interested only in war. As he usually cannot gather taxes, he must support himself from his personal wealth or from loot or tribute from outsiders. If the king is strong enough, he can impose the tribute on his own society, but this meets a lot of opposition.