Previous history
(To give the players the proper background for this scenario, I gave them The Tale of Uman the Hunter and the Feast of Four Stones.)
The tribes of Mannut have mined the original veins of copper for thousands of years, off and on. One tribe or another attempted to extract useful ore from the site until the lode was played out. That location is now long abandoned, because the clan, now called the Evanu, haven’t the technology to remove copper from ore. They did learn the basics of mining, which taught them how to search chalk beds for flint, and how to mine for salt.
Salt, of course, has many uses, and must be found everywhere that humans settle. These tribes use salt as a meat preservative, and use salt to consecrate the graves of their dead. It is, however, much easier to gather salt along the sea, for the sea also provides food. The tribes gradually moved away from the mountains and onto the plains.
The priesthood class has become powerful, backed by the warriors — the two classes which received the gifts of the necklace and the spear-point, and told to guard the secrets of the tribe. Now they must deal with the changing environment, as the seas rise, and old hunting grounds vanish. As the plains of the north become ever warmer, game becomes smaller, and the larger game moves to higher (colder) elevations in search of food, and many tribes follow behind.
A small tribe of hunters, the Swift Hand clan, has encroached upon the salt mine of the Spirit Fox clan, who are righteously horrified. You were extracting minerals without a medicine man? Are you trying to cause earthquakes?
The Spirit Fox clan, mighty and numerous, has decided that the Swift Hand clan must be punished for their crime, and exiled. They are given two choices: we will exile you into the Stony Pass, where only the phantom trees grow, or we will seal you into the Tomb of the Silver Serpents, where the caves go on forever and only the suncap mushrooms grow. Each of you will be allowed to take one animal of your choice, male or female.
The Locations
In the Stony Pass, high above the plains (and therefore out of the hair of the Evanu miners) grows the phantom tree. Phantom trees are magic-wielding plants that, during the blooming season, use illusion to project delicious fruits, fragrant blossoms, brilliant colors, and whatever else it can do to attract bees, birds, insects and the like. When it is not in blossom, the illusions disguise the trees so they cannot be found, either projecting false images of trees or shielding the trees to appear as stones. They are fruit-bearing and surprisingly nutritious.
In the Tomb of the Silver Serpents, caverns deep under the mountains, grew the suncap mushrooms. Suncaps are thaumovoric fungi that consume ambient magic and produce heat and light as waste products. They only grow in areas of high magic concentration, and they can be toxic to any magic-dependent creature such as the silverhead, a snake that hibernates inside solid rock, near geothermal vents, by transforming itself into a a vein of silver. The light produced by suncaps is sufficiently close to the brightness and cycle of sunlight that surface plants can grow in it — in fact, many plants already grow in those caves.
The Animals
Keerfoxes are small, black-furred canids that hunt at night. Their fur gives off a faint magelight, about equivalent to bright moonlight, visible only to those who have Magery. It is quite intelligent. Generally they eat small prey, such as birds, rabbits, rats, and vermin (plentiful everywhere).
Rock goats are large, slow-moving goatlike beasts with thick, almost metallic wool. They are difficult to hunt with bows or spears, have almost no nutritive value, and few predators. Their use to the tribe is as a pathfinder, because they possess the ability to turn the inedible edible. Rock goats graze on sand and gravel, but their droppings are almost pure rich loam, perfect for frming. Within days, often, plants will grow from the droppings, seemingly spontaneously.
Slime boars are tusked pigs that excrete their waste through their skin as a foul-smelling, slippery goo. Not surprisingly, few predators try to bite them. The slime boar’s wonderful trick is to cause a rapid healing effect in the things it eats, animal or vegetable; it can graze for days on one small patch of plants, which regrow only to be grazed again.
There are five offenders: two men and three women. Their names are not important here, except that there are two with Magery (one man and one woman), two (or three) hunters, and a toolmaker (or two). The Magery-talented woman also hunts; the Magery-talented man also makes tools.
I presented the players with two questions:
1. Where will the people be exiled to?
2. Which animals will they take with them?
What The Players Decided
The first thing the Players wanted to know was whether I was asking them to pass judgment on these people. Were they guilty? How could they possibly argue against a tribe that had been caught red-handed? What were the rules of law?
I clarified: the offenders had already been declared guilty, and all that remained was to decide upon their punishment.
They then turned to various ways they could break the rules, and offer the offending Swift Hand tribe a little extra help. They could sneak some additional animals into the caves later, perhaps.
It occurred to them that perhaps after all the trouble they'd had to introduce mysticism back into this tribe, perhaps it would better serve the culture to enforce the rules fairly. They then turned to ways they could merely bend the rules.
"Do we have to send five of the same animal?" they asked.
No, you could mix and match. One animal for each exile, that's the rule.
They talked it over and realized that, at best, they could send two species: a male and a female of one, and a male and two females of another. Even then, the breeding would be pretty thin. Two males and three females of one species would be a stable enough breeding population. Even more genetic diversity could be squeezed out of the animals (bad metaphor!) if they sent in females that were already pregnant.
The keerfox, the Players said, would be useless underground. Its primary benefit was to cast light for those people who already had magical sight; in the caverns, light was already provided by the suncap mushrooms. The mountain pass with the phantom trees didn't appeal. By elimination, they ended up exiling the Swift Hand clan into the caves in the company of five rock goats.
Joe the Leader had one final trick up his sleeve. "So they got exiled for mining without the company of a shaman, right?"
Yes, that's true, I said.
Joe nodded. "Then I ordain one of them. They've got to have a priest."
Results
The most immediate result for the exiled Swift Hand tribe was that they would easily survive the supervolcano explosion in Round 4. If they took on any adaptation from animals, as the half-human half-aguen did, that animal would be the rock goat. In the tiny confined spaces of the caverns, where their suncap lighting was limited to high-magic caves, they would be able to grow crops on a limited scale. Their religion would be perpetuated, in some form, because Joe had made certain to ordain one of them as a new shaman. If only they hadn't been so enthusiastic about prosecuting the letter of the law and reinforcing the tribal custom of exile...
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