The Seven Mountain Tribes
Some five hundred years ago, the region that would one day become the southern reaches of the Hub was home to seven great tribes of the mountains and their foothills. They were tribes in the old anthropological sense - one or more central families that ruled, with lesser folk attaching themselves to the household and serving, in the main, to extend it. Whether each kept a totem or traced itself to a shared forefather is no longer known.
What is remembered is that they did not all behave as tribes are wont to. Where such peoples usually split apart under the pressure of their own growth, several of these instead kept growing, swelling to sizes reckoned strange for their kind.
The Known Tribes
Little survives of most of them, but two are well attested:
- The Bazani were the largest of the seven. They dwelt upon a range of mountains and at its feet, and that high seat gave them a commanding strategic advantage - one they used, when it pleased them, to hold terror over the other tribes. They were counted great warriors and impressive men of business besides, and many came to them to broker or to back ventures of weight.
- The Perzakati were the other tribe whose name endured, holding, with the Bazani, the lands around Sinope.
In time, the Sarranid Sultanate bound together five of the seven tribes beneath its rule in the south, while the Bazani and Perzakati kept the lands about Sinope. (The Perzakati would later be remembered, too, for their part in the wars of Kios and Swadia - the demon-worshipping raiders of the Maelstrom Attack - and were at last broken by the Swadian king Sutiras.)
The Disappearance
The deeper mystery of the seven tribes is what became of them. Over the centuries they faded from the world, and scholars have never fully agreed on why. The most thorough treatment of the question is the study Tribal Confrontations, and the matter remains a live one for historians such as the kenku scholar Maya Klinker.
Appendix
See Also
Sources & Attribution
- Primary lore: a DM one-shot record, archived privately; consolidated with the history of the Hub.