Geroni

The Geroni are one of the native peoples of Canarque, the western continent that most of The Empire calls the New World. After the ship Imperius returned in 289 AVD with news of the continent, the port city of Aquila was founded there, colonists flocked to the Canarque route, and relations with the native Inran and Geroni peoples continued to be established.¹

The Inran and Geroni use entirely different calendars.² The natives of Canarque also have pantheons of their own.³

In Yeni Dünya

In the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"), the Geroni are said to come from the south of the continent and to live in independent city-states.⁴ Each city-state acts on its own: the chief consul of Avlor Aten says that they are one nation but are not ruled from one centre, and that his people's ancestors came from the west, without crossing the sea.⁵⁶

History and faith

What Fauna learned from her family and from an old Inran is that the Geroni cities keep to themselves. They were once something like a theocratic union under a common faith, until a rationalist revolution about a thousand years ago pushed religion into the background. The highest of their old gods are remembered as a triad, the Mighty Father, the Merciful Mother and the Wise Child; it is said that their true names were struck from the records, in the belief that names give power. The Geroni share an alphabet with the Inran, though not a language. More is told under Geroni religious tradition.⁷⁸

Neighbours and outsiders

The Geroni trade with the tribes but do not admit anyone who is not Geroni to their cities. Tribespeople whom they take are sometimes released unharmed; others never return. Some tribes and some cities are nevertheless on good terms.⁹¹⁰¹¹

The chief consul spoke of an imperial agent captured in another city, and of a powerful mage from a Geroni city-state in the mountains that was thought to have fallen, who has been urging the cities towards war; not every city has followed him.⁵¹²

Learning and work

According to a Geroni consul, the first simple automatons, set to work in the fields, freed time for learning. Children go to school from about the age of four until about ten, and teachers are respected; they learn mathematics, algebra and the study of nature, and those with the gift learn magic. Defensive automatons belong to the city-state and the other costly ones to the rich, and the cities have their poor and homeless. See also Automata of Avlor Aten.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The tabaxi

In the consul's people's stories, the cat-like tabaxi were first born on this continent, and nomadic tabaxi tribes took in and saved the Geroni during their migration. He dismisses as unreasonable the rumour that the tabaxi bear few young because of a curse on their souls.¹⁶¹⁷

He describes the tabaxi as skilled metalworkers who live in moving settlements, some of them in the wide desert belt south of Aquila, and whose caravans carry, by his reckoning, some sixty to seventy parts in a hundred of the trade between the cities. Those seen in a Geroni city wore copper bracelets, kohl and leather of a natural look, and most went barefoot.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰