Booklords

Overview

The booklords are, at least marginally, human, perhaps with some Night Orc or Grand or Shadow Lilithian ancestry.

Physically, they are usually thin, slightly less than average height, with thin, pale skin, straggly, colorless hair, and a blue tinge to their thin lips and long, spidery fingers. Their eyes are enormous and deep blue, and almost seem to glow in the darkness- their pupils contract to mere pinpricks in daylight; most distinctive of all, they are almost invariably covered from head to toe in writing- they tattoo great and forbidden books into their skin in ugly, gray-blue ink. Their senses are heightened beyond those of regular humans- they can read impossibly fine print, hear the faintest nuances of speech; and yet they have an ability to focus on a single task for impossibly long periods of time, ignoring all external distractions or physical sensations.

Their society seems based almost entirely around the preservation of literature- Soreau is as much a library as a nation-state. They have preserved within their halls almost the entirety of Xothu's literary output- including the foul codicies of the Bishop in Battle, the sacred texts of the lost religion of Abadra, and even, perhaps, transcriptions and translations of the long-forgotten Quuarmari Helioglyphs.

All works are transcribed and translated excessively, copies preserved in both the original and the Booklords' own language on paper and stone and iron, and in the dry, scratchy voices of the Booklords on copper cylinders, and in the synapses of undead slaves.

Breeding

Diet, Food and Eating Customs

Arts and Entertainment

Architecture

Crime and Legal System

Daily Life

Fashion and Dress

The booklords think little of clothing, seeing it as a distraction. They will drape themselves in swaths of gray linen when on the surface to protect themselves from cold and sunlight.

They wear their hair in styles which cover as little of the scalp as possible- mohawks and topknots are common, if it isn't completely shaven off to display their tattoos. They grow neither beards nor body hair.

Education

The Booklords feel little need for formal education- they have the entire literary history of Xothu at their fingertips at all times. Their children learn to read and speak simultaneously, and at a much quicker pace than humans- a two year old Booklord is, intellectually, on par with a seven-year-old human.

Foreign Relations

The Booklords have no formal relations with any other government.

Gestures

Government

Greeting and Meeting

Language

The Booklords speak an odd, pieced-together sounding tongue, full of disconcerting and unnatural harmonies- it has been described by the few who heard it as resembling the chattering of old bones in the wind, punctuated by the babbling of a brook- long strings of hissing, fricative consonants mingled with watery vowel-clusters.

Magic and Magicians

The Booklords are skilled in the arts of necromancy, perhaps moreso even than Quuarmar. On their rare appearances on the surface, they are invariably accompanied by half a dozen or so undead slaves- mortals who granted their bodies and minds to the Booklords for a period in exchange for access to their libraries in life. These undead are used for everything from menial labor, to recovering books from libraries about to be burnt on the surface, to actually storing backup copies of the libraries and catalogues of the Booklords- a sort of necromantic hard disk.

The Booklords themselves seem to lead unnaturally long lives; upon death, their skins are removed to preserve their tattoos. They believe- and it is entirely possible they are correct in this- that their dead can be contacted via these skins.

Magic and Technology

Manners

Medicine

Ethics and Values

Politics

Population

Religion and Philosophy

Rural Factors

Science and Technology

Social Organisation

Transportation and Communication

Urban Factors

War

A booklady of Soreau, looking particularly perturbed

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