Anauroch

The Spirit Kingdom of Anauroch is a primitive human kingdom situated on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a remote and heavily forested archipelago that remains largely unknown to the outside world. The islands are rugged and tropical, covered in dense rainforest, with narrow, winding rivers and rocky coastlines battered by the monsoon winds. The people of Anauroch are divided into scattered, isolated tribes, each with its own customs and traditions, bound together under the rule of a spirit-chosen chieftain who claims divine authority over the land. It covers a land area of 5.8 hexes, with a population of 19,808.

The kingdom itself is not centralized, as there are no great cities or monumental structures — only hamlets built of wood, thatch and palm fronds, tucked beneath the jungle canopy or raised on stilts above the coastal waters. The lone urban center of the Spirit Kingdom of Anauroch is the settlement of Anauroch itself, a city with a population of 3,001, founded in 751 BCE. Unlike the scattered villages of the surrounding islands, Anauroch is a place of permanence and spiritual significance, serving as the ceremonial and political heart of the kingdom. Located at a strategic point along the coastline, built along the hills and ridges overlooking the sea, Anauroch is designed to withstand monsoon floods and provide a secure vantage point against seaborne threats. The city is composed of wooden longhouses, thatch-roofed communal halls and raised earthen paths that wind through dense jungle growth. At its center stands the Spirit Hall, the kingdom's largest structure, a sacred sanctuary adorned with carvings of ancestors and jungle beasts, where the rulers perform divinations, offerings and spirit-walk rituals to ensure the kingdom's prosperity.

Culture & Religion

The people of Anauroch are a fiercely independent. Their distrust of strangers is deeply ingrained, reinforced by generations of raids, incursions and encounters with foreign traders whose presence is seen as a spiritual risk rather than an opportunity. Survival in the dense jungle and along the unforgiving coastline has made them masters of their environment, relying on poisoned arrows and intricate traps that turn the very land itself into a weapon against those who do not belong. Even within their own kingdom, loyalty is first and foremost to family and clan, with allegiances shifting between tribal leaders.

Religion is a shamanistic and animist, arguing that spirits exist in all things — the wind and waves, the roots of the jungle, the fire that brings life and the darkness that swallows it. Every tree, river and beast is said to have its own will, its own soul, and to disrupt the balance is to invite catastrophe upon oneself and one's people. These beliefs are not merely passive reverence but active engagement with the spirit world, where the unseen forces of nature must be appeased, bargained with or even feared.

At the heart of this order are the Keepers of the Ancient Traditions, a caste of shamans, diviners and spiritual warriors who have held dominion over Anauroch since the founding of the city in 751 BCE. Their word is law, their interpretations of the spirits' will are final, and to defy them is to defy the ancestors themselves. It is the Keepers who determine what knowledge may be passed down, who may trade with outsiders, and who is permitted to approach the sacred monoliths, relics of an age so old that even the Keepers claim only partial knowledge of their origin.

Monoliths and the Spirit Realm

Throughout Anauroch and its surrounding islands stand weathered stone monoliths, covered in intricate carvings that predate all known history. Some are marked with spiraling patterns, others with depictions of spirits, while a few bear symbols so eroded that their meaning has been lost to time. Legends say that these stones are not merely relics but gateways, markers of an ancient passage between the mortal world and the realm of spirits.

Rituals are held at the largest of these monoliths, performed only by the highest-ranking Keepers, who claim that through trance and sacrifice, they can walk the path between worlds. It is said that on certain nights — when the wind carries the right omens and the sky is thick with mist — the boundary between the realms thins, and the souls of the dead can be heard whispering through the jungle. Some who seek forbidden knowledge or wish to commune with the ancestors are allowed to stand before the stones and listen. Others, either by choice or punishment, are led there never to return — offered to the spirits as guides or sacrifices, depending on what the Keepers have foreseen.

Even the common people of Anauroch treat these places with deep reverence and fear, leaving small offerings of carved wood, shells and food at their bases to appease the unseen forces that dwell beyond them. To defile a monolith is to invite wrath and misfortune, and those who have done so are said to have met grisly fates, their bodies found twisted and lifeless, as if something had taken them from within.

Thus, Anauroch is not just a kingdom of people — it is a kingdom of spirits, a place where the line between the living and the dead, the mortal and the divine, remains perilously thin.

Trade

Trade in Anauroch exists in a limited and secretive form. Some islanders engage in barter with passing Malay, Burmese and Bengali traders, exchanging exotic hardwoods, rare shells, and jungle spices for essential foreign goods such as iron tools and cloth. However, these dealings are infrequent and shrouded in ritual, as many tribes hold firm to the belief that their ancestors watch over the islands, forbidding excessive contact with outsiders.

Foreign merchants are never allowed to venture inland, nor are they permitted to remain long — they are met at preordained coastal sites, where trade is conducted swiftly and without unnecessary words. Even those islanders who trade with outsiders often purify themselves afterward, fearing that exposure to foreign hands might bring spiritual corruption upon them. It is said that some traders have vanished without a trace, having unknowingly violated an unspoken taboo, their presence judged unacceptable by the Keepers or the spirits themselves.

Despite this isolation, commerce has a spiritual dimension in Anauroch. Some villages hold elaborate rituals before and after a trade has taken place, believing that the act of barter itself carries consequences beyond the material world. In these ceremonies, the dead are honored, and the fate of the kingdom is said to be guided by visions and omens, delivered by shamans in trance-like states. If the omens are inauspicious, a trade will be abandoned and the islanders will disappear into the jungle before an outsider ever realizes the deal has been refused. To an Anauroch islander, profit is nothing compared to the will of the spirits that guard their land.