Gobkind: The Utagdroog

The north of Western Lankhmer is a wasteland comparable only to the Badlands of the Daemons. It is a wide and deep land of rocky barrens, heated unbearably by the sun. Flinty crags rise high above the ground, all the elevation made of flat ground or sheer cliff walls. Grasses exist only as weedy shrubs, often with thorns, and soil is rare enough for them to grow in. Sandy stretches can be found very sparingly. Otherwise you can find flat, dusty stone or fields of sharp gravel stones for countless miles. Water most frequently comes from springs, jutting out from cracks in the hard earth. Frequent tectonic activity opens and closes these reservoirs, which can be fed at times by the twice-yearly rains.

This place is called the Utagdroog by its inhabitants, or the Utagdroog desert by the humans that border it. Utagdroog means Place of Stone to the Gob, whom make their home in its confines. They refer to the Utagdroog as their sacred home, a place that is revered in all their stories. The many clans of the desert tell stories of many of his still-standing features, and of features that exist there no-longer. Many worship spirits, or local gods that impact their daily lives. Each tribe seems to hold its own gods, and sometimes these ideas are traded, kept, lost, or renewed. The forms of faith in the Utagdroog seem to defy the patient whims of any scholar trying to count them. Histories also vary, being carried by word-to-mouth. The gob, gobkin or gobkind as they are known to humans, forge particularly strong memories in their society - as they cannot be bothered to learn to write, or keep constant supplies of writing material that are easy to access. Still, variance in their local histories slowly adds up over the centuries, and into the millennium.

No known history claims to make an assumption of the earliest gob society, just as none can hope to record the earlier human societies than Monor (save perhaps the secretive elves). The earliest recorded histories are those of Quen, wherein they record their battles with the gob chieftain with plain familiarity - as if it were common enough to mention in passing; the only difference is that the Quen named the varying sorts of gob with a primitive system that noted eighteen different types - largely drawing superficially off of different tribes.

The gob of the Utagdroog would remain unchanged for millennium. They would be savages to the north throughout history, with humans largely ignorant of their sapience. Even now mankind struggles to come to terms with this. Many human nations in the north openly treat gob as second class citizens, driving them to avoid cities and keep to rural communities where they can isolate themselves or personally form relationships with less socially conscious folk. In the southern kingdoms, they experience the same freedom as men, some situations better than others. In Sabbaht, gob are explicitly slaves, and treated worse than all others; worse, their slavery is tolerated by most of their neighbors.

The Utagdroog has been host to bizarre weather patterns, tectonic activities, and disasters of recent, driving many of its peoples into moving consistently, some finding transport in human lands to take themselves to the other continent.