Torksash
"Huge in size, standing at roughly nine feet tall, these gargantuan variants of their species hold immense strength, and are yellow in colour." Coastal and organised: "Mostly found within organizations along the coast, these vicious people have taken to the extortion of lesser defensible communities."
The extortion houses are the wealthiest thing the species has, run on protection, salvage rights and harbour debt, and the Kettletooths are the model. A Torksash does not raid a port; he insures it.
Body
Roughly nine feet and seven hundred and fifty pounds. The shape is worth noting, "with their massive teeth and ever-starved appetite are bulbous in size, and far less muscular," so a Torksash is heavy rather than cut, and soft over the plate.
The ever-starved appetite is a real fault of the gut, which absorbs badly and runs a body of that mass on a permanent margin, and a hungry Torksash is the least patient animal on the coast. The strain compensates with a salt gland on the tongue that lets them cross open water for days, which is how the extortion reaches islands nobody else bothers with.
Society
Mostly found within organizations along the coast, and the organisation is the point. Protection, salvage rights and harbour debt are the trade, and the money it makes is the money that buys the coats, the gold and the council seats the whole species now wears.
House Kettletooth is the model and the wealthiest Torkan house in the world: three shipping concerns under other peoples' names, a crest that is a kettle, and a first fortune made boiling captured crews alive in ship kettles and selling the fat back to the ports as lamp oil.
Regard
The Sserrin are the one people the Torksash houses will not cross, since a sea-serpent people that holds the shipping lanes can end a coastal extortion house in a season.
The two have an arrangement that both call an alliance and neither trusts. What actually holds it is that fresh water ulcerates a Sserrin and salt water is no place to wait in the mud, so neither can invade the other, and both have known it for a thousand years. The Sserrin also buy every drum made from Torkan face domes, which is the only trade between them that either will discuss.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which coasts and harbours the extortion houses hold
- What the arrangement with the Sserrin actually says, and what breaks it
- How the houses divide a coast between them, and what happens when two want the same port
- Whether any kingdom has ever put a Torksash house down for good