THE HISTORY OF TAHNN
Courtesy CD Mjollnir

Most people seem to think of a desert as empty, harsh, lifeless. Well, harsh it may be, but lifeless it is not. The desert is full of creatures that have adapted to the extremes of the desert day and night, of months or years without water until a sudden downpour floods the sands with a carpet of life for a short while.

The ss'tiss are just such a race. Bipedal reptilian beings, the ss'tiss had the desert pretty much to themselves during the race wars; even the elves didn't want it, and the elves had the entire world. The ss'tiss settled in, warded the few half-hearted attempts to penetrate the desert (usually resulting in the desert sun killing the attackers without the ss'tiss having to do anything at all), and pretty much ignored the rest of the Race Wars.

The time since the Race Wars changed the ss'tiss very little. They remained a nomadic people, divided into clan groups which wandered from oasis to oasis, taking shelter from the bitter desert night in rocky outcroppings and shelters they'd carved from desert stone. They built the few cities that had ever existed inside the desert, and which still exist to this day, carved of the red sandstone found in Tahnn and sheltered from the heat enough to encourage some few springs to bubble to the surface. They paid very little attention to the outside world...until the Scourge.

The Scouge led to the invocation of a title that had existed since the creation of the ss'tiss, but had never been filled...that of Matriarch. The title bestowed on its holder the curse of not ageing, to ensure she survived long enough to fulfill her duties. She was the only one under whom the ss'tiss would abandon their clanlike ways and stand united.

Under the Squana banner--which depicted one of the most venemous creatures in the desert, a short squat lizard called a squana whose venom could kill in an eyeblink--the Matriarch who was chosen led the ss'tiss against the Dark Enemy. The battles they had are described elsewhere, but by the hand of the Dark Enemy the Matriarch was killed.

Her successor was a male. This shocked the ss'tiss...who knew well enough that males weren't good for anything. When the Dark Enemy was sealed away, and the Patriarch had led the clans home, he withdrew so as not to interfere with his peoples' matriarchal habits.

After the Scourge, the dwarves opened trade routes to the ss'tiss in gratitude, only to discover rich deposits were to be found within the desert. The ss'tiss would shrug, and point out that the shiny stones were pretty, but they would hardly help you survive in the desert. But the discovery led to an influx of human and dwarven traders, who quickly enriched the few cities the ss'tiss had. It was about this time that the Misharr were discovered...much to the shock of the ss'tiss, who had thought themselves the only sentient creatures in the desert. But the misharr tended to keep to themselves, and the ss'tiss agreed with that wholeheartedly. Despite sharing the lands of Tahnn, the two races rarely came in contact with each other.

But the contact between the humans brought its own problems. When the human race was struck by the Plague, the ss'tiss were affected too. In the heat, the plague spread like a wildfire, and many ss'tiss died. Luckily, the heat was also effective at killing the plague, and many ss'tiss groups were isolated from each other due to their nomadic ways.

Still, within the Firelizard clan rose a sect that would become a plague of its own. The Firelizards felt that the Sun had saved them from the mass deaths, and the idea spread from clan to clan. Within a generation, the Firelizard Clan had become the largest clan, and the one with the most priests of what was now called the Temple of the Sun. But the desert is the great equalizer, and the Firelizard clan soon lost its prestige when it became too large to sustain itself; still, the Temple of the Sun faith is followed by virtually every ss'tiss in Tahnn, much to the chagrin of the Church of Telgard.

The Church of Telgard spent many years vainly sending missionaries into Tahnn to convert the ss'tiss back to the 'proper' faith, but the missionaries were merely sent back...sometimes in pieces. This was the only time the Paladins of Dargotten refused a request of the Church to come to arms...the Paladins were the protectors of the Kingdoms, not a means to convert folk by the sword. Balked, the Church squatted in Korresh and stared bitterly over the border at the lizardmen, who proceded with their way of life blithely ignoring the baleful glare of the Mother Church.

Today, the Patriarch is almost certainly still alive. The clans still wander from dune to dune and from oasis to oasis, worshipping the Sun and ignoring the happenings outside of the desert. Survival is what concerns them most, what has always concerned them. In the desert, there is no mercy. The ss'tiss never forget that.