Much of Shajung is covered by wastelands, ruins, and cities where roaming bands of outlaws have made their home. The Reliquary Runebladers have pulled back from the continent’s interior to the port cities of the coast. They have made it their mission to hold these bastions of civilization against the lawless legions. Word has reached the Runebladers of a tarantula-king lurking beneath the ruins of Shajung , whose Druids of the Green Inferno are uniting the disparate factions of outlaws to form a nation of the dispossessed.
The Champion Undying
The civilized countries, called the Citadels of Shajung, rose under the brains and blades of Jakraz the Champion Undying. He journeyed into the desert known as the Runeblade Expanse and returned bearing a dragon-quill runeblade. The Expanse was littered with the petrified quills of Primevals. Burned into the runeblade’s runes were flowing spidery etchings; from these etchings came green-skinned jungle djinn and sorcery that exsanguinated the land’s mana veins. Empires of vengeful elder land wurms fell under the blades of the traitor they once called their Champion Undying.
Skamuri incursions have driven Jakraz into the ruins from which the elder land wurms once ruled Shajung. He believes that a study of his land’s ancient history will give him a better understanding of what motivates the Skamuri. Critics of his plan frequently reminded Jakraz of the diseases and illnesses that likely persisted in the elder land wurm ruins; for the ruins are the preserved corpses of dragons large enough to have been Primevals, it is from these that the wurms gained their magical talents.
Others more militant toward the Skamuri encouraged Jakraz, offering him supplies and soldiers for his expedition. In Jakraz’s absence, those who opposed his pacifist’s stance toward the Skamuri began scheming to hire out mercenary companies from across the plane to assist in eliminating the Skamuri and seizing their behemoths.
The Druids of the Green Inferno
Led by a renegade from the Jungle Shrine – a piece of the landbridge that once connected Shajung with Eberrai – seek to eke out an existence in a magically-barren wasteland. While many of the Druids believe that the tarantula king’s ageless wisdom will help them survive amid the wurm-haunted ruins, only the leader of the Druids realizes that the tarantula king is little more than a primordial throw-back from the plane’s genesis; a curiosity crafted by a Primeval Dragon to be used as a wager in the card game that led to the plane’s incidental creation.
Dealing in Infinity
Shajung history tells of the Shuffle, when the many realms were as poker decks shuffled and played by the Primeval Dragons. Lesser realms and races were the chips with which the Primevals made their wagers.
The Green Inferno
A name given to the realm from which the Druids conjure their beastfolk. It is analogous to a playing card in a casino’s deck. Mages in tune with the natural world and their baser instincts may access the Green Inferno and its denizens.
The Beast
The Beast is a title given to the renegade that founded the Druids of the Green Inferno. Hailing from the Jungle Shrine and its behemoth-centric culture, the Beast fled his home when foreigners from Eberrai began taking advantage of his peoples’ desire to access the lost lore scattered across the ruins of Shajung . Ptera-mounted psychopaths, roaming djinn, and murder-crazy gangs kept the inquisitive Skamuri from acting on their desires.
The Eberrai mercenaries entranced the Skamuri with tales of wonderous reptilians found beneath the plane’s surface. These kavu could be persuaded to join one’s cause for the right price. The mercenaries knew that the kavu would be interested in the Jungle Shrine’s dragonlike behemoths. So, the Eberrai demanded a tribute of the behemoths in exchange for the service of their kavu.
The Beast opposed the Eberrai, leading the Jungle Shrine into a civil war, the end of which saw the Beast fleeing the Jungle Shrine. Alone in the wasteland he forged a connection to the Green Inferno through his use of savagery and predatory cunning. Returning to the Jungle Shrine with his beast-folk allies, the Beast gained followers from among the Skamuri that suffered with the loss of their behemoth-centric culture.
The Kavu
Kavu – the kavu are a subterranean race of reptilians whose defining features are their cloven claws, tusks, and broad, flat, blunt snouts. The kavu of the plane are the progeny of Vaku the Kavu Monarch. Within their underground worlds, the kavu use their magic to warp the terrain to their liking. This, in turn, produces sudden changes in the kavu that cast the terrain-altering spell. The kavu are omnivores whose diets consist of other kavu, including the plants and fungi found growing on their defeated kindred. Kavu hunts take the form of territorial struggles – this instinct is a throwback to the earliest kavu and their draconic ancestors.
While the kavu appear to be a vicious, self-destructive race to outsiders, their tendency to kill one another for territorial gains is offset by their rapid reproductive rates. The kavu are sexually dimorphic, which allows the dominant kavu to impregnate the kavu that survive a territorial struggle. Among the surviving kavu – those that yield rather than fight go on to tend to their newly hatched kavu while those that were mortally wounded send signals to their spawn that cause the baby kavu to attack and devour the dying parent.
It’s not unusual to find one or two kavu among one of the plane’s many mercenary companies. The kavu lend their magical talents in exchange for the corpses of the defeated. No one is certain what the kavu do with these corpses. Some speculate that the kavu sense an evolutionary link between humans and the dragons and seek to avert a repeat of the kavu-dragon war from ages past.
The Quetzalku
The Quetzalku
These serpentfolk are best described as brutal conservatism disguised as progress. This species derive pleasure through the pretense of healing what they perceive as being broken: transferring their memories of a great, cosmic genocide into the minds of their victims, inducing a kind of psychic self-flagellation in the victim that makes them ripe for implantation with their egg-fetuses. The chemicals released by the victim's body in response to the psychic attack nourishes the egg fetuses. Offspring hatch from the egg fetuses, devour their host, and the cycle continues. Pleasure and new life spring from their parasitic notion of justice - this is the primal impulse that drives the Quetzalku.
Identity: They have a pretense of identity in that individuals may identify themselves by hisses, the rattling of their tails, and the ruffling of their vibrant hoods. It is mostly done by the individual alone, though the individual usually does not acknowledge its kin's own self-designated identity.
They are serpentine, velociraptorlike with one set of arms and another set of atrophied appendages with membranous tatters suggesting vestigial wings. These atrophied appendages are hints at this reptilian species's evolutionary connection to dragons that live in the galaxy's scintillating, rainbow-colored nebulas. The majority of them are vain where their self-chosen deformities are concerned.
It is notable that some newborns of the species attempt to remove the vestigial wings. They're killed by the parents and thrown out of the nests. Humans living near the mountains where these make their home have found the crippled offspring, and from them, built their own backwoods cultures, religions, and schools of magic.
The Cosmic Genocide
This is unique to the Quetzalku and analogous to the Skamuri concept of the Dealing in Infinity.
In the long period known as The Dark, the kavu warred with the atogs, while the dragons continue their celestial struggles for territory, and more recently, mates. Dragons that took note of the kavu’s destructiveness and decided that a new means of procreation would keep the kavu confined to the shard of plane from which they had come crawling. Among the warring dragons, five believed that continual fighting would create more like the kavu – and eventually lead to the extinction of the dragons. The five, styling themselves as Primevals after having embraced the deepest depths of their race’s casual cruelty in the interest of a greater good, used their resolve to join the demon arms race.
Dragons had begun using their ambition to create beings of pure magic – demons – which were weaponized in their eternal fighting. The demons created by the Primevals were turned against the other dragons. The Red, Green and Blue Primevals went behind the back of the Black Primeval and the White Primeval, using the same style of magic that gave rise to the demons to create magical failsafes from the dying dragons and their corpses: the spirits and the efreeti. Both of these sorcerous creations were extremely temperamental, but held an abiding hatred of the demons. The three Primevals decided to unleash their creations upon the other dragons.
Dragons besieged by these creatures came crashing down on the plane where the atog and kavu fought over the dragon graveyard. The kavu were winning through their ability to warp the terrain and adapt their magic to the changing field. When both races went for the wounded, dying dragons, efreeti and spirits erupted from the dragons’ wounds. They attacked the atog and kavu, sensing a connection to the dragons they’d been conjured to kill.
The efreeti and spirits drove the kavu back into their underground world and the atog back into their temples. From the atog temples came constructs made from dead dragons and magic that bound the spirits to shrines of dragon’s bone in the temples. The spirits had a very strong affinity for dragon’s bone. Efreeti fled the atog en-masse. While the kavu hid in their tunnels, the atog went into their sanctum and sent out calls to the Primevals.
When the Primevals came they found disappointment. The Black and White were sad that the atog still embodied the worst of the dragons. The Red, Blue and Green Primevals shared these feelings, but were more concerned that the evidence of their failsafes were still present, albeit bound to the bone-shrines. While the Black and the White attempted to sway the atog from their present course of genocide against the kavu, the Red, Blue and Green went to the kavu. Meeting with Vaku, it was decided that the kavu would use their magic to trigger metaplasia of the shrines and bound spirits in exchange for the dragon’s graveyard.
At the meetings’ end, the Primevals decided it best to wipe out the atog: they were too crafty and wild to weaponize as the Primevals had done with their demons. While the atogs fled their destruction, Vaku and the kavu rose from the underworld and began working their magic on the shrines. After the genocide, the Primevals appealed to the kavu’s underlying hatred of the dragons and the wingless worms that tried to oppress them. Vaku, the Kavu Monarch thus forges the kavu tribe into a weapon to be wielded by the Primevals in their quest.
Shajung
Much of Shajung is covered by wastelands, ruins, and cities where roaming bands of outlaws have made their home. The Reliquary Runebladers have pulled back from the continent’s interior to the port cities of the coast. They have made it their mission to hold these bastions of civilization against the lawless legions. Word has reached the Runebladers of a tarantula-king lurking beneath the ruins of Shajung , whose Druids of the Green Inferno are uniting the disparate factions of outlaws to form a nation of the dispossessed.
The Champion Undying
The civilized countries, called the Citadels of Shajung, rose under the brains and blades of Jakraz the Champion Undying. He journeyed into the desert known as the Runeblade Expanse and returned bearing a dragon-quill runeblade. The Expanse was littered with the petrified quills of Primevals. Burned into the runeblade’s runes were flowing spidery etchings; from these etchings came green-skinned jungle djinn and sorcery that exsanguinated the land’s mana veins. Empires of vengeful elder land wurms fell under the blades of the traitor they once called their Champion Undying.
Skamuri incursions have driven Jakraz into the ruins from which the elder land wurms once ruled Shajung. He believes that a study of his land’s ancient history will give him a better understanding of what motivates the Skamuri. Critics of his plan frequently reminded Jakraz of the diseases and illnesses that likely persisted in the elder land wurm ruins; for the ruins are the preserved corpses of dragons large enough to have been Primevals, it is from these that the wurms gained their magical talents.
Others more militant toward the Skamuri encouraged Jakraz, offering him supplies and soldiers for his expedition. In Jakraz’s absence, those who opposed his pacifist’s stance toward the Skamuri began scheming to hire out mercenary companies from across the plane to assist in eliminating the Skamuri and seizing their behemoths.
The Druids of the Green Inferno
Led by a renegade from the Jungle Shrine – a piece of the landbridge that once connected Shajung with Eberrai – seek to eke out an existence in a magically-barren wasteland. While many of the Druids believe that the tarantula king’s ageless wisdom will help them survive amid the wurm-haunted ruins, only the leader of the Druids realizes that the tarantula king is little more than a primordial throw-back from the plane’s genesis; a curiosity crafted by a Primeval Dragon to be used as a wager in the card game that led to the plane’s incidental creation.
Dealing in Infinity
The Green Inferno
A name given to the realm from which the Druids conjure their beastfolk. It is analogous to a playing card in a casino’s deck. Mages in tune with the natural world and their baser instincts may access the Green Inferno and its denizens.
The Beast
The Beast is a title given to the renegade that founded the Druids of the Green Inferno. Hailing from the Jungle Shrine and its behemoth-centric culture, the Beast fled his home when foreigners from Eberrai began taking advantage of his peoples’ desire to access the lost lore scattered across the ruins of Shajung . Ptera-mounted psychopaths, roaming djinn, and murder-crazy gangs kept the inquisitive Skamuri from acting on their desires.
The Eberrai mercenaries entranced the Skamuri with tales of wonderous reptilians found beneath the plane’s surface. These kavu could be persuaded to join one’s cause for the right price. The mercenaries knew that the kavu would be interested in the Jungle Shrine’s dragonlike behemoths. So, the Eberrai demanded a tribute of the behemoths in exchange for the service of their kavu.
The Beast opposed the Eberrai, leading the Jungle Shrine into a civil war, the end of which saw the Beast fleeing the Jungle Shrine. Alone in the wasteland he forged a connection to the Green Inferno through his use of savagery and predatory cunning. Returning to the Jungle Shrine with his beast-folk allies, the Beast gained followers from among the Skamuri that suffered with the loss of their behemoth-centric culture.
The Kavu
Kavu – the kavu are a subterranean race of reptilians whose defining features are their cloven claws, tusks, and broad, flat, blunt snouts. The kavu of the plane are the progeny of Vaku the Kavu Monarch. Within their underground worlds, the kavu use their magic to warp the terrain to their liking. This, in turn, produces sudden changes in the kavu that cast the terrain-altering spell. The kavu are omnivores whose diets consist of other kavu, including the plants and fungi found growing on their defeated kindred. Kavu hunts take the form of territorial struggles – this instinct is a throwback to the earliest kavu and their draconic ancestors.
While the kavu appear to be a vicious, self-destructive race to outsiders, their tendency to kill one another for territorial gains is offset by their rapid reproductive rates. The kavu are sexually dimorphic, which allows the dominant kavu to impregnate the kavu that survive a territorial struggle. Among the surviving kavu – those that yield rather than fight go on to tend to their newly hatched kavu while those that were mortally wounded send signals to their spawn that cause the baby kavu to attack and devour the dying parent.
It’s not unusual to find one or two kavu among one of the plane’s many mercenary companies. The kavu lend their magical talents in exchange for the corpses of the defeated. No one is certain what the kavu do with these corpses. Some speculate that the kavu sense an evolutionary link between humans and the dragons and seek to avert a repeat of the kavu-dragon war from ages past.
The Quetzalku
The Quetzalku
These serpentfolk are best described as brutal conservatism disguised as progress. This species derive pleasure through the pretense of healing what they perceive as being broken: transferring their memories of a great, cosmic genocide into the minds of their victims, inducing a kind of psychic self-flagellation in the victim that makes them ripe for implantation with their egg-fetuses. The chemicals released by the victim's body in response to the psychic attack nourishes the egg fetuses. Offspring hatch from the egg fetuses, devour their host, and the cycle continues. Pleasure and new life spring from their parasitic notion of justice - this is the primal impulse that drives the Quetzalku.
Identity: They have a pretense of identity in that individuals may identify themselves by hisses, the rattling of their tails, and the ruffling of their vibrant hoods. It is mostly done by the individual alone, though the individual usually does not acknowledge its kin's own self-designated identity.
They are serpentine, velociraptorlike with one set of arms and another set of atrophied appendages with membranous tatters suggesting vestigial wings. These atrophied appendages are hints at this reptilian species's evolutionary connection to dragons that live in the galaxy's scintillating, rainbow-colored nebulas. The majority of them are vain where their self-chosen deformities are concerned.
It is notable that some newborns of the species attempt to remove the vestigial wings. They're killed by the parents and thrown out of the nests. Humans living near the mountains where these make their home have found the crippled offspring, and from them, built their own backwoods cultures, religions, and schools of magic.
The Cosmic Genocide
This is unique to the Quetzalku and analogous to the Skamuri concept of the Dealing in Infinity.
In the long period known as The Dark, the kavu warred with the atogs, while the dragons continue their celestial struggles for territory, and more recently, mates. Dragons that took note of the kavu’s destructiveness and decided that a new means of procreation would keep the kavu confined to the shard of plane from which they had come crawling. Among the warring dragons, five believed that continual fighting would create more like the kavu – and eventually lead to the extinction of the dragons. The five, styling themselves as Primevals after having embraced the deepest depths of their race’s casual cruelty in the interest of a greater good, used their resolve to join the demon arms race.
Dragons had begun using their ambition to create beings of pure magic – demons – which were weaponized in their eternal fighting. The demons created by the Primevals were turned against the other dragons. The Red, Green and Blue Primevals went behind the back of the Black Primeval and the White Primeval, using the same style of magic that gave rise to the demons to create magical failsafes from the dying dragons and their corpses: the spirits and the efreeti. Both of these sorcerous creations were extremely temperamental, but held an abiding hatred of the demons. The three Primevals decided to unleash their creations upon the other dragons.
Dragons besieged by these creatures came crashing down on the plane where the atog and kavu fought over the dragon graveyard. The kavu were winning through their ability to warp the terrain and adapt their magic to the changing field. When both races went for the wounded, dying dragons, efreeti and spirits erupted from the dragons’ wounds. They attacked the atog and kavu, sensing a connection to the dragons they’d been conjured to kill.
The efreeti and spirits drove the kavu back into their underground world and the atog back into their temples. From the atog temples came constructs made from dead dragons and magic that bound the spirits to shrines of dragon’s bone in the temples. The spirits had a very strong affinity for dragon’s bone. Efreeti fled the atog en-masse. While the kavu hid in their tunnels, the atog went into their sanctum and sent out calls to the Primevals.
When the Primevals came they found disappointment. The Black and White were sad that the atog still embodied the worst of the dragons. The Red, Blue and Green Primevals shared these feelings, but were more concerned that the evidence of their failsafes were still present, albeit bound to the bone-shrines. While the Black and the White attempted to sway the atog from their present course of genocide against the kavu, the Red, Blue and Green went to the kavu. Meeting with Vaku, it was decided that the kavu would use their magic to trigger metaplasia of the shrines and bound spirits in exchange for the dragon’s graveyard.
At the meetings’ end, the Primevals decided it best to wipe out the atog: they were too crafty and wild to weaponize as the Primevals had done with their demons. While the atogs fled their destruction, Vaku and the kavu rose from the underworld and began working their magic on the shrines. After the genocide, the Primevals appealed to the kavu’s underlying hatred of the dragons and the wingless worms that tried to oppress them. Vaku, the Kavu Monarch thus forges the kavu tribe into a weapon to be wielded by the Primevals in their quest.
Dunes of Zairo
SHANDALAR
Innistrad - The Darkest Night
~THE RAVNICAN CONSORTIUM~
A Community Set
Commander: Allies & Adversaries