The Phoenix Highway: Angwat

Cities of the Angwat

The Saurians do not live on the road. Aggression is a necessity in the jungle: a giant mosquito isn’t attacking you when it bites; you are if you try to kill it before it bites. They do use the road for travel, however, and they will conduct negotiations on the road. If they rescued one or more of the captured Saurians, time will have slipped for them just as for the characters. The Saurian will think they’ve been missing for a few weeks; they’ll have been gone for a few years.

The buildings of the Angwat look like drip-sand castles, very reminiscent of the temple of Angkor.

The Saurians do not pay much attention to what goes on outside the jungle unless it directly affects them; the wastelands are too dry, cold, and open for civilized habitation. They have no coinage; they trade through barter of goods and services. The only coins they will have are from the City to the east or from the Sumerian-like civilizations to the north, but most of their trade with the outside world is in the form of barter. The silk and dyes of the jungle are much-sought-after.

Most Saurians speak their own language, but the ruling class also speaks Latin, which they call the tongue of the road (because it is).

All of their cities have several parks with mudswamps above slow wells that make them less dangerous than the rest of the standing water in the jungle. They’re still not drinkable water, but they are used as spas. The parks are decorated with large, tall, flowering plants.

Angwat: Angwamin

Their largest city, Angwamin, is just about at the center of the jungle, about four miles north of the road. The path to their city is marked with a conical pillar that looks like multiple rings of stone and beneath the cone, the face of a huge lizard. Angwamin has about 2,000 saurians living in and near it.

Angwat: Food

The Saurians eat bugs, giant and small. They also eat some squashes, some taro root, durian fruit, jackfruit, and bananas. They do not eat the flesh of animals such as other lizards or mammals.

Angwat dig special wells lined with charcoal and allow the swamp water to seep in, for their water. Creating charcoal is close to the only thing that the Angwat use fire for.

Angwat: Music

The tablet of music was stolen from them eons past, and lies in the court of the lizard king in the lost city of Luputac. They don’t have words for music, but if instruments are mentioned, they will recognize drums and gourd trumpets as the magic of Aatu. Music is the magic that Aate stole from Aatu and hid to create the world.

If the party wants to make music, they’ll need to make a willpower roll to do it. The saurians won’t know what to make of it. It is the magic of Aatu! If they fail the roll they will be unable to find their rhythm or melody. (Skill in music will be a bonus to the roll.)

Angwat: The feast

Not a bad idea to have a feast while they’re there. The feast can be a feast of the catch, which they should have every couple of months, or a feast of the fruit. The feast of the catch will be the most memorable. The first step of the feast is going out and gathering the catch. They will need many insects: giant beetles, giant moths, and giant weta, for example. And the prize of the feast will be a couple of giant centipedes. All of them will be strung up raw and chittering on silk ropes for eating.

The second step of the feast is to have the feast. It won’t be obvious at first, but if they spend all night with the cavorting lizards, they’ll notice that the Angwat have no music. The saurians will make noise; they will pound on stones arhythmically, and everyone will yell to the treetops. They will have mock fights on all fours in the marshes. They will, as they become more intoxicated, start daring each other into climbing the trees and going into the wide open above the canopy. (If the player characters haven’t yet seen the two moons, assume that the feast happens when both moons are in the sky.)

The saurians have two intoxicating drugs. Durian fruit is cracked open and allowed to ferment; it is only slightly alcoholic but they’ll drink enough over the night to have an effect. Durian fruit on its own has a unique odor; fermented durian fruit is one for the player characters to remember.

There are also hallucinogenic flowers; they do not eat the flowers directly. They feed the flowers to the giant weta for days before the feast, and then eat the intoxicating flesh of the weta. This modifies the effect to be more like a strong marijuana buzz.

Both fermented durian and hallucinogenic weta will affect humans.

Angwat: Fights

Saurians are wary of non-saurian strangers, unless they’re on the road.

Saurians of this jungle usually use hand axes for weapons; some warriors will use swords. Because Saurians are large creatures, their hand axes do d8, and their swords d10.

Clothing and other products

The ropes and the clothing of the Angwat are all made of silk, harvested from special large moths. Player characters from Highland will likely never have seen such fine thread or such strong, light rope.

The dyes of the Angwat are equally amazing. They use insect dyes for bright reds, metallic greens, and shiny obsidian-like blacks. Some items are lacquered with a strong shellac also made from insect resin. Wooden bowls and utensils are lacquered, as are furniture; and the paintings of the Angwat are often lacquered when completed to protect them from the warm moisture of the jungle air. Shellac does not yellow as it ages, and the lacquered art of the Angwat will last for millennia.

The Angwat do not have ores in the jungle, nor do they use fire much, so they acquire all of their metal through trade. Metal swords are much sought-after, and are stored in protective oils for safe-keeping. Metal rusts easily in the jungle; metals that do not require an edge are often thoroughly cleaned, dried, and lacquered.

The most likely items of trade that the player characters have that the Angwat want are metals and jewelry; the Angwat trade amongst themselves in stonework, woodwork, oils, food, and dyes, and various colors of shellac.

Other geographical features and names

They call the Solar Mountains the Solar Mountains; they have no word for it in their own language.

Angwat: The circus

Ubeñu, an old man in one of their marsh parks, can tell them about going to the circus outside of the jungle when he was fifteen or sixteen. He’s 182 years old now, although the Angwat don’t keep track of years as we do, so he’ll only give an “about 180 years”. That’s about 90 years old for a human, since saurians live twice as long as humans.

Angwat religion

In the beginning, the deadly sky enveloped the earth. People crawled with the animals because there was no room between earth and heaven; the sun roamed the land burning whatever it touched. Aahim the swamp, Aatu lord of the dead and keeper of the tablets of knowledge, and Aate the snake argued over how to make the world more livable. Aahim was adamant that nothing be changed. Earth and Sky are the order of the world. Aatu argued that Earth and Sky should be killed, whereupon the three could divvy up what remained among themselves. Aate maintained that they should convince, or failing that, force, Earth and Sky to move apart.

War raged between them. Aatu stood against the swamp; Aahim was defeated and sent away by the pounding of Aatu’s gourds. Aate stood against death. He stole Aatu’s spell tablets and hid them away in the temple of the sky (Apuiporo), some say, or beneath the lost city of Luputac. Without the power to create his gourds, Aatu was helpless against Aate. Victorious, Aate grew the sharp plants until the sky moved off slightly from the earth, then he grew the great trees to push the sky further and further, making a wall that the sun is forbidden from crossing. Nor have any recovered the tablets of Aatu since.

The central tower of Apuiporo was built by Aate to buttress the canopy and hold the sky aloft. It was at one time the center of their jungle empire. It is no longer the center; Angwamin is. The elite see the temple as part of a made-up religion, a place for liars and charlatans. They worship only their own institutions. Most of the rest of the saurians go along with that viewpoint, though there are a few who hold to the old gods.

“It’s alright in the abstract to believe in the divine. But when you start roping down the gods to specific places, that’s hubris. To claim that any one place is the source of truth, that’s hubris or lying. It’s just a tower. We abandoned it long ago when the swamps shifted.”