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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 678081" data-attributes="member: 63">If you missed round one, you can see it <a href="http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39708" target="_blank">here</a>.  For round two, we're going to take what we ended with in round one, run it forward several hundred years, and enter the agricultural age.The Cresians, descended from the plainsfolk, have settled in a coastal area, on the southern edge of the continent, something akin to southern Italy in the Meditteranean.  The Cresians live in a fairly lush area, ranging through a large river delta to the coast, including several small villages and one large town.  Their largest town has grown to three thousand people, and is situated in the middle of many square miles of cultivated farmland.  Throughout the entire basin, there are probably twenty thousand people.The religious center of these people is a temple town in the northern reaches of their land, in the middle of a wide plain where they revere the continually reincarnated avatar of the Dog God (always female).  They have gotten over their fear of fire and now they use it like any primitive culture, but they still view fire as a destructive force.  Once the current reincarnation of the Dog God gives birth to a new litter, all the male children are burned as an offering for greater fertility for the land.The culture's focus on animalistic power has also spread to plant-life, and priests are trained to wield plant-based magic, such as crop-growth spells and woodshaping magic.  Priestesses learn the majority of animal-based magic, including recently the ability to conjure creatures from realms unknown.  Warriors are not as revered as they once were, but there is a small cult devoted to taking on animalistic aspects, and their champions gain the ability to transform into huge, savage dogs on the full moon, when the land is believed to be most fertile.  The experience of becoming a beast is said to be exilharating, but because of how dangerous these beastmen become when they have nothing to kill, now it is highly regulated, with those capable of such a transformation being locked in thickly-walled rooms during the full moon.  They are able to see the moon through an open roof, but the walls are too high for the person to escape.  Once per year, near the winter solstice, the shapeshifters go on a ritualized hunt on the full moon, turning their savage tendencies to the benefit of the people by killing enough game for dozens of people.Only rarely have humans been killed in this ritual, and this past winter, a strange foreign man's body was brought back from the hunt.  Since the beastman could not recall the hunt, he doesn't know who the man was or where he was from, but he was somehow able to hurt the beastman before being killed.  This is the first time a champion of the warrior dog cult has been injured in a hunt, since they are normally impervious to most injuries. In early summer, a foreign fleet lands on the southern Cresian coast, off-loading several hundred soldiers, who slaughter all the inhabitants of a fishing village and start marching toward the heartland of the Cresian delta.  They fight in organized groups of twenty men in a line, holding wooden shields and fighting with bronze swords.  They seem to have only three skilled magic-users with them, each of which is always accompanied with a half-dozen bodyguards.  They do not make up part of any of the larger formations, but instead travel quickly into smaller, fortified areas that the formations are not useful against.  Their magic-users have the unusual power that their song seems to empower their fellow warriors, making them very effective against small groups in enclosed areas, while the sheer force of numbers in the formations can handle any attempt to fight them on open terrain.The Cresians have not been attacked by outsiders for longer than anyone's memory, so they only mount an awkward defense, fighting with barbed fishing spears made entirely out of wood, or occasionally wood-chopping axes or skinning knives made of soft metal.  Through sheer force of numbers they finally manage to stop the advance of the foreigners.  After losing about half their men and one of their magic-users, the foreigners retreat, leaving two days before the full moon.The Cresians wonder if these foreigners will return.  How will they be better prepared if they do?</blockquote>

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