Primal Sword & Sorcery

Category: The Kartonga

  • The Lie of the Eastern Border

    The Lie of the Eastern Border

    East of Kartonga, the so-called border with Varduun is a fiction; an absence of warning, law, or meaningful transition. The Kartongan wastes, for all their hazards, taciturn outland slavers, swaggering bravos with naked females on chains and freshly blooded steel on hip, the constant commerce of suffering, are still lands of sharpened barter & dangerous sneering bravado, ruled by appetite but anchored in something resembling a code.

    Varduun is the antithesis. There is no frontier, no fort, no marker or ancient stone to signal entry into the Hyena Lands. One stumbles across, or is taken across, and the realization comes too late: all rules, even those of predation, become unreliable.

    In the wastes, a lion may keep his sword sharp, his mind keener, and negotiate his way out of trouble or into power, but these old games die in Varduun. The hyenas eat everything—body, mind, and custom. Some bands are slavers, trading wretched lives to whatever kingdom or caravan will pay; others are feral packs, utterly mad, snapping up even their own kin.

    Some are simply monstrous: sick with parasites, flesh warped, drooling, cackling, and yet keen enough to sense the scent of an outsider, to know how to bait and break a traveler. There is no shortage of fresh horrors in Varduun. Hyenas rut and feast without conscience or law, their alliances shifting, their minds as fractured as their bodies. Nothing survives long that is not hyena, and even that is no certainty.

    The catastrophe is not just ecological but spiritual. No one warns you. No post stands, no trader utters a caution, no scent changes in the wind. The hyenas know, and they wait. Kartonga knows, and does not care. For any lion—indeed, for any outsider—caught on hyena ground, there is only one wisdom: stay armed, keep poison handy, and pray you are never taken alive.

  • Tranga City

    Tranga City

    The coastal city that bears the same name exists in contrast to this interior decay, but not in contradiction. It has grown not by restoring the land, but by exploiting its condition. Built into the slope of a steep and stubborn hill, the city presents itself as a vertical accumulation of necessity rather than design. Its outer gates are heavy and deliberate, but once inside, structure gives way to density—layer upon layer of habitation, trade, concealment, and opportunism rising upward along carved terraces and half-collapsed foundations that predate any current occupation.

    It is within this inherited skeleton that the ratfolk of central Kartonga have established their hold, not as rulers in the formal sense, but as those best suited to inhabit a place where certainty is impossible. Their dominance is practical, not ceremonial. They do not cleanse the city of its dangers; they navigate them. They do not unify its districts; they map the fractures and profit from them. In Tranga, survival favors those who can move through layers—social, physical, and economic—without becoming fixed in any one of them. The ratfolk excel here not through strength, but through continuity of presence. They are always there, in the walls, in the tunnels, in the exchanges that occur before any formal agreement is reached.

    The city’s markets reflect this condition. The thieves’ quarter is not a district but a behavior that permeates every level of trade. Goods are not merely sold; they are circulated through hands that alter their value with each transaction, stripping origin and attaching new context. Poison makers operate openly, not because the city lacks law, but because the demand for quiet solutions is constant and widely understood. Their craft is not relegated to hidden dens but integrated into the economy itself, with mixtures tailored not only for killing, but for weakening, disorienting, or binding another to obligation. In Tranga, a poison is as likely to secure a contract as it is to end a life.

    Financiers of a different kind move through this same structure—those who deal not in coin alone, but in leverage. Debt in Tranga is rarely written and never forgotten. It exists as a network of favors, threats, and mutual compromise, enforced not by a central authority but by the collective understanding that betrayal here is costly in ways that extend beyond the individual. Assassins and spies operate within this framework as extensions of that economy, their services indistinguishable from other forms of labor except in consequence. Information is traded alongside flesh and weaponry, and often proves more valuable than either.

    The lower levels of the city, where the original structures are most intact, house the populations least visible to outsiders. Urchins move through these spaces with a familiarity that borders on instinct, acting as carriers of message, rumor, and stolen goods. They are not merely victims of circumstance but active participants in the city’s function, forming the connective tissue between its disparate elements. Above them, the trade in bodies continues with the same pragmatic tone that defines all else. Whores in Tranga are not set apart as a class of indulgence, but as another form of transaction within a system that values utility above all. Their position grants them access—to information, to influence, to survival—so long as they understand the terms under which they operate.

    Related

  • Tranga

    Tranga

    South of Old Kartong, the region of Tranga stands as a transitional scar rather than a settled province—a place where the authority of the city dissolves into dust, and where permanence itself is treated as a liability. The land is marked not by borders that hold, but by the remnants of attempts to impose them: collapsed tent-lines hardened into brittle husks, trade paths that shift with each season’s wind, and low stone outlines of structures that were never meant to endure. What remains is not abandonment in the pure sense, but a thinning of intention. Tranga is not empty. It is simply no longer claimed in any way that matters to those who understand how power functions in Kartonga.

    The Cities of Tranga

  • Travel In The Kartonga

    Travel In The Kartonga

    Travel In The Kartonga

    INDEX

    BY ESSAY

    By Essay

  • Old Kartong – The Untamed City

    Old Kartong – The Untamed City

    Location

    Old Kartong rises in the central wastelands of Zhuru, east of the Yorozhian Hell Desert and south of the Crater Sea. Its position at the throat of caravan routes makes it impossible to ignore. Merchants, raiders, smugglers—all who cross the desert or skirt the sea must pass near Kartong’s shadow.

    Overview

    On a land that should command trade and dominion, Kartong festers instead. It should be a jewel of commerce: it lies astride the arteries that bind the grasslands of Rakwi, the kingdoms of Izhura, and the savannas of Varduun. Yet Kartong is no jewel. It is a scar, a wound that never heals, a ruin forever gnawed by predators who cannot keep it.

    The Tower

    Kartong does not sprawl—it climbs. The city’s foundations rise out of a black desert outcrop, and above them thrusts the ancient tower: a spiral of stone and steel older than the clans who squabble beneath it. Its angles are strange, its height defiant. No lion, no hyena, no gazelle remembers who raised it. The tower predates their chronicles. Some whisper of an elder folk drowned by cataclysm, others of god-folk who bled stone into the desert.

    Whatever its origin, it remains—an accursed spire sneering across the horizon, a beacon no caravan can ignore. When the desert ends and grass begins, it is the first sight, black against the sun, commanding the throat of the land. Even those who skirt it bow their heads, unwilling to meet its gaze.

    A History of Ruin

    Every folk has tried to hold Kartong. All have failed.

    • When the lions held it, the hyenas poisoned its wells until the streets stank of rot.
    • When the hyenas ruled, the lions marched in fury and left its towers burning.
    • When the gazelles dreamed of governing, they were robbed in daylight by hyenas and dragged screaming into lion dens by night.

    So it has gone for generations: conquest, collapse, conquest, collapse. No flag endures. No crown survives. Old Kartong always reverts to its natural state—feral, lawless, ruled only by hunger.

    The Maw

    At the city’s gutted heart sprawls The Maw, Toa Zokuda’s den of debts. Half gambling pit, half brothel, half execution-ground, the Maw is Kartong in miniature. Here stolen princesses are chained for sport, debts are collected in flesh, and cruelty itself is currency. What the desert sun does by day—burn, wither, strip bare—the Maw does by night.

    The Law of Old Kartong

    There is no king, no clan, no crown. The city is ruled by those who can hold a den for a night, a street for a week, a quarter for a season. Debt is its only law. Cruelty its only justice.

    Reputation

    Old Kartong is spoken of in whispers, half warning, half dare. Rogues praise its wealth: caravans always pass near, smugglers always dock. but no one leaves clean. Mercenaries grow rich there, then die there. Predators thrive because prey walks in willingly, thinking to cheat the cycle, but Kartong devours them all in the end.

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  • Kartonga as an Outland Nation

    Kartonga as an Outland Nation

    Kartonga, in its entirety, is spoken of across Vandyrus not as a realm among realms, but as a condition—an expanse where structure thins, law dissolves, and survival itself becomes the only recognized authority.

    Thus the term “Outland,” when applied within its borders, loses the clarity it possesses elsewhere.

    A city in Kartonga cannot truly be said to stand outside the bounds of civilization, for it was never fully within them to begin with. Even its most fortified settlements—Old Kartong among them—exist as temporary assertions against a surrounding truth that is older, broader, and ultimately indifferent to walls or crowns.

    What passes for a “city” in this region is often no more than a concentration of will: stone or timber gathered long enough to resist the wastes, trade routes held by violence rather than charter, markets that operate under shifting allegiances of thieves, warbands, and opportunists. Beyond those walls, the distinction collapses entirely.

    Shanties, tents, and ruin-fields sprawl outward in every direction, indistinguishable from the broader desolation except by the density of bodies and the immediacy of danger.

    To an outsider, these outer belts might seem the true Outland, yet to the folk of Kartonga, they are simply the next ring of habitation—no less legitimate than the city cores, merely less defended. In this way, Kartonga renders the classification meaningless: there is no frontier to cross, no boundary that marks the fall from order into chaos.

    The entire region is already that fall, stabilized only in pockets, never reversed. What remains contested, even within surviving records, is whether Kartonga was always such a place or whether it is the long echo of something broken beyond repair, its so-called cities being not foundations, but scars that refuse to close.

  • The Kartonga

    The Kartonga

    The Wastes of Old Kartong

    The Kartonga is a wound within Zhuru, a land so dry and desolate it rivals the worst of the world’s deserts. The ground is scarred with craters, the sky forever hazed with dust. At its heart looms Old Kartong, the spire-city, a jagged fang of stone carved into impossible angles. No one agrees whether it was built or grown, whether it belonged to beasts, reptiles, or something that came before them all. Some whisper of the insect races—the pre-mammalian lords of a hellish epoch, long vanished yet never truly dead. The spire is not ruin but scar, proof that something vast and wrong once ruled the continent.

    The Kartonga is not a kingdom but a midden. Outcasts and refuse from every other nation crawl here when all else has failed them. Thieves, mercenaries, warlords, and heretics congregate amid its shattered craters. Loose alliances form and dissolve in blood, for nothing is sacred, and betrayal is the only constant. Here there is no culture beyond survival. Honor is a lie, loyalty a fleeting bargain. Outsiders enter Kartonga at their peril, for here even the idea of law is mocked, drowned in skullduggery and backstabbing.

    New Entries

    Books on the Kartongaland Wastes

    Lurid Tales From The Scar of the World

    Map of the Kartonga Wastes

    Cities of The Kartonga

  • From The North Downward

    From The North Downward

    Travel in Zhuru, as any seasoned wanderer knows, is a journey measured as much in manners as in miles. To step onto the northern roads is to step, by degrees, into something like civilization—if one takes civilization to mean politeness enforced by old blood, tradition, and the certainty of one’s place. In the green lanes north of the River Ayrel, past the rolling grasslands and cold rivers, travelers find themselves entering the reach of Konara. Here, elk with white-tipped antlers guard the thresholds of walled towns.

    Their customs are clipped, their speech precise, and their patience as thin as the paper on which they record their lineages. Riffraff, wanderers, and traders hoping for southern bartering find themselves stonewalled by a cold courtesy—no rough handling, no threats, only a measured refusal and a tightly drawn door. “We are not in need of company,” they say, “but we wish you a good evening.”

    The message is clear: move on, and do not ask twice.South of the horsefolk’s reach, the air thickens, and manners become rowdier, voices louder, the road more crowded. Here, the world sheds its northern reserve. In these middle tracts, one passes through towns that bark their business from muddy doorways, where arguments are settled with thrown mugs and market disputes are measured in bruises and broken noses.

    Yet, for all the roughness, there is a kind of fellowship among the rude: a sense that every traveler is kin to the last poor bastard who lost his purse or his virtue to the road. The taverns are full, and hospitality is loud if not always honest.

    Keep south, and the mask slips entirely. The vulturekin make their eerie home in the spires that claw the sky on the edge of the dry hills—a race of sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued folk who build strange fortresses and mind stranger taboos. They speak little, watch much, and leave the world to wonder at their motives. To pass their gates is to feel the last brush of order before plunging into the wild.

    Beyond lies the Kartongaland wastes, where all that northern restraint gives way to raw appetite. The roads here are not roads but veins—pulsing with the traffic of vice and desperation, hungry for coin, flesh, or news.

    Townships squat in the mud, ruled by those who can take and keep, not those who can claim ancestry. Here, the slums breathe in the smoke of foreign fires, and the old tower at the city’s heart rises above it all, a beacon for those with nowhere left to run. In Kartonga, barbarism is not a pejorative, but a force—rolling in like thunder from the wastes, swallowing up every pretense of gentility. No traveler leaves unchanged; most lose something along the way, whether it be coin, innocence, or their old name.

    So runs the road: from the north, where the world is cold and closed, to the south, where it is open and unforgiving.

    To travel Zhuru is to travel a spectrum of civilization—every mile another layer stripped away, until all that remains is what one can carry, what one can sell, and what one can take.