Plebians of Jakalla

There are various lists of clans for Tekumel, but I feel they tend to emphasise the upper end of the social scale, while my games are ones of gritty low clan struggle. If you are following the classic 'off the boat' start you are not going to hob nobbing with the Joyous of Vra and Golden Sunbursts from the get go, you are far more likely to run into the kind of working class clans detailed below.

 

Low Clans

The Swaying Tree

A long established Pe Choi clan that has been recognised by the Imperium for over a millenium and who live in cities all across Tsolyanu.

They provide a long distance courier service and have way stations at many major cities of the Empire and even beyond. They are not as fast as the Imperial couriers but they are a lot cheaper and are available to the general public. Their Jakalla office is down at the Sakbe road interchange, but their clanhouse is in the foreign quarter.

They have a reputation for being extremely reliable, at least compared to the alternative which is to entrust your letters to a merchant caravan; if they ain't your own clan they are going to treat mail as a low priority and have their own routes and timetables. The Swaying Tree guys will go out of their way to get your letter to a clanhouse off the beaten track (for a fee), and make a big deal out their heroic couriers running through wild animal and bandit ambushes. They will also run messages across the city, getting their cute Pe Choi kids to do the local jobs. 

 

They are noted for their use of wooden leg splint-cum-boots. Pe Choi have more delicate feet than humans more suited to walking on mossy forest floor and climbing trees than pounding hard stone pavements. Their odd woooden shoes have padded linings and are more like stilts attached to their shins and lower pair of arms enabling them to run for miles along Sakbe roads on all fours.

They favour the temples of Thumis and Hnalla, but still worship the Father of Nests at their own clanhouse.

White Skull

The White Skulls are a Sarku worshipping clan who specialise in the manufacture of palanquins and sedan chairs. They also hire them and their bearers out on a daily, hourly or even per trip basis in a number of cities in Tsolyanu.

The White Skulls do not do the carrying, they own slaves to do that, but they may personally assist by preceding the planquin shouting the customers name and lineage, blowing trumpets and using a swagger stick to get low clan foot traffic out of the way.

In Jakalla their hire depot is opposite the Palace of Mruthri, the upper class hostel in the Foreign Quarter, where they have two-slave-power sedan chairs, four-slave standard palanquins and an eight slave limousine quality palanquin with proper cushions, an awning, privacy curtains and an optional refreshment slave to make you chumetl while on the go.

Their carriers are always well turned out with shaven heads, white loincloths and white skull face paint, and their palanquins are clean and painted in the clan's white andblack livery.

They are quite sniffy about their competitors. The Lordly Domicile of the Hand of Hrugga have their own in house crew who are overweight, unfit and slow in the White Skull's opinion, and the 'democratic' wretches from the Serene Company of Bearers, Porters and Watermen are just unspeakably awful.

Most of the business is within city limits, but they can, for a pretty considerable fee, do intercity runs along the Sakbe road

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Blue Lamp 

The Blue Lamp are found all over Tsolyanu and Mu'ugalavya as city and market police, Sakbe Road guards and prison warders, as soldiers in the Marine and light infantry Legions, and as lower level civil servants in the courts of the Palace of the Realm. They favour the Temples of Avanthe, Chegarra and Hnalla.

They are loyal servants of the Petal Throne always, but their clan network amongst the lower reaches of the law enforcement apparatus means they can sometimes get cases dropped and sentences lightened for a suitable inducement and for the right kind of sympathetic perpetrator. Their annual 'Feast of the Blue Lamp', a festival in aid of police and guards injured in the line of duty and the dependants of those killed in service to the Emperor upholding his laws is always a far grander affair than you would expect from a low clan and attracts some quite interesting and occasiopnally quite high ranking patrons.

Very Low Clans

The Serene Company of Bearers, Porters and Watermen 

A clan unique to Jakalla, this clan are the product of an administrative initiative by a governor of the 14th century. He licensed the business of river transport; to run one of the numerous small boats that take passengers across the Equnoyel river and run packages from the ports and goods up river you had to have a license. A nice earner for the city and for barbarian Nakome who could make a coracle or canoe an actual legal way of running your own business in what can be a pretty tough city.

 

Eight centuries later the watermen have an actual clan and the licensing system has been extended to sedan chair and planquin bearers, and members will do pay-by-the-day portering too. There are only so many licenses in circulation and they have become hereditary heirlooms of the Company. They exert pressure in the Communal Clanhouse to stop the governor from issuing any more, and take anyone who infringed on their rights to court. They lost in the case of the White Skulls and the bastards got an assignment of a dozen precious licenses, and there has been rancour ever since.

 

Being a clan that formed out of an eclectic group of Nakome and tribals the Serene Company still have very little status. They often look a bit different from the typical Tsolyani, being descended from a mix of Pakalan, Chakan and Salarvyani immigrants. They also employ Ahoggya, at least on the bigger barges they run upriver, which many find repugnant, and they have a pretty flat almost democratic structure with a large council of 'Captains' as they call the license holders.

 

You will find Serene Company carriers and their black sedans and palanquins hanging about outside most temples and the Palaces and in quite a few marketplaces, and if you can't see a ride waiting, check the nearest wine shop. They are an ecumenical clan, but of late the Ksarulites have been using the aspect Eyun the Knower of Skills to recruit Company members by encouraging them to think of their trade as a skilled craft. The Company pride themsleves of their knowledge of the streets and alleys of the city and claim they can run a passenger to any back street clanhouse by name alone.

 

Chequered Lizard

Tekumel does not have rats, it has a bunch of insectoid, molluscoid, avian and reptillian vermin like qigekh, kurgha, kuruku, aqpu, gerednya and some uncharitable sorts would include Pygmy Folk on this list.

Mere dogs and cats cannot handle most of these and in severe cases of infestation the Clan of the Chequered Lizard will step in. Their clan was actually a tribe from the Gilraya forest but now live in clanhouses in villages and small towns all across south east Tsolyanu, mostly making leather from lizard hides.

In Jakalla's foreign quarter they have a shop selling lizard and snakeskin belts, pouches, sandals, and bundles of cured lizard pelts for the armourers shops. But they also have a body of pest controllers who use tamed Maraibo lizards to hunt down vermin. These are scavengers somewhat like a small Therazinosaurus about three feet in length. They have a keen eye, large clawed hands for grabbing prey and a beaked mouth for crushing it.

The Chequered Lizard clan are aware that some outbreaks of the larger vermin can be traced to the Tsuru'um and have some knowledge of how to get down there and how to navigate to under a client's house to deal with the issue.

 

 

Adventure Hooks, Rumours and Other Nonsense

• The Swaying Tree have been asked to take a message to Thayuri Isle by a noble client and couldn't really say no. Trouble is that it's over the sea and they are all Pe Choi and scared of water and of going on a boat. They are entrusting the honour of their clan to hirelings who they expect to be as conscientious about getting the message through to the right person as they are. 

1. The PCs are to take it, they must swear to some wierd piece of white wood that they will do so faithfully. If they are blase about it, they find that the Pe Choi's abstract deity has some abstract demons to gee them up.
   
2. Letters to Thayuri and the other Isles are usually taken by ships of the Red Flower and they are miffed by the snub. Expect shenanigans, the Red Flower have friends in every port in the islands.
   
3. The message out goes fine, the one they are supposed to return to Jakalla is a well wrapped package with a note. Of course the Swaying Tree would never dream of opening any mail they were entrusted with, but the handover by a one eyed Pakalan at a semi-ruined villa on top of a cliff over a sea cave has 'dodgy' written all over it...
   
4. The village on the address label is not apparently on Thayuri Isle and none of the locals know where it is - except one old guy from the Thumis Temple who says it is on an Engsvanyali wall painting he knows of. Turns out it sank into the sea millenia ago and currently lies somewhere in the channel between Thayuri and Burru isles. Who sent this letter? Were they a ghost? Isn't that wall painting one of the dubious ones that includes a nexus point?

• The White Skulls allegedly have a special palanquin for high mucky-mucks of the Temple of Sarku with actual M'rur bearers. They keep it in the underworld and the M'rur plod along this network of underground passages by way of short cuts. One of the guys from the Chequered Lizard saw it, though what he was doing down there he wouldn't say.
  
  
• The Serene Company want some deniable adventurer types to do a jailbreak on the slave quarters of the White Skull bearers. But do the slaves actually want to go? They are well fed, they even have a gym and an on site masseur and make up artist to ensure they look and work at their best - sure beats being on the run and living in ditches.
  
  
• One of the Serene Company's more eccentric Captains has passed away and rather than leave his license to the Company council to reassign he has decreed a competion for it; run a palanquin loaded with a dozen live kaika round five sites in the city as fast as possible and you get the precious plaque, and the event is open to ambitious Nakome in memory of the origin of the clan. The White Skulls are putting a team in to grab the license of course, various desperados at the Tower of the Red Dome are building palanquins including a very fit looking N'luss team, some Ahoggya want a go, various jokers are planning to drop Tiuni from windows along the route onto the flocks of birds to add spice to proceedings, and what is the route anyway? The mad old coot wrote in some cryptic poetic code that presumably only someone with 'the Kowledge' of Jakalla's streets would understand.
  
  
• The Chequered Lizard have bitten off more than they can chew. Qigekh in the granary of the Palace of Murthri were a regular job, but the chnelh in the wine cellar getting drunk were new. That hole was bricked up, but the scruffy apes now had a taste for alcohol and pitched up in various foreign quarter wine shops. Drunk apes rioted one night and killed a city policeman with tiles thrown from a tenement roof and the Palace of the Realm haver hired the whole Chequered Lizard clan to find them. The Clan of the Blue Lamp also wants revenge. Chequered Lizard hunters have fought skirmishes with the bastards and trapped a few using beer kegs as bait. They are sure there is a veritable town of them down there somewhere and when they and their Nakome adventurer allies find it the Blue Lamp have said they will get a legion of cops together to grab the whole flea-bitten tribe for drunk and disorderly.
  
  
• The Blue Lamp are coming up in the world. One of the young ladies of the clan is marrying Purusa hiJonel of the far higher status Glory of the Worm clan, though people are noting that Purusa is not happy. What is going on? Is this the Blue Lamps price for getting a Glory kid off the hook for some crime? Who and what crime was that? Is this some scheme cooked up between his long suffering family and the Blue Lamps to put a cop in his very bedroom to stop some of his wilder ways?
  
  
• Some years ago a friend of the PCs got in one of those hire palanquins while drunk, and it turned out to be bigger on the inside - it was a portal to a Bethorm! It was honestly like a palace inside, and practically deserted. He went to bed in an upstairs room but a couple of huge demons woke up and threw him out the behest of a small man wearing a robe and skull cap.
  
  
• All kinds of stuff gets left behind in a hired palanquin...
  
  1. A PC hires a palanquin from the Serene Company to run him across town, and on the way realises that there is a scroll tube knocking about under the seat... What is it? Papers from the Palace of the Realm? A magic scroll? Instructions from the OAL that will self destruct in five seconds?
     
  2. The White Skulls have found a baby in one of the palanquins. It has been a busy day, runs all over the place, and kid seems to have sleeping soundly until they got the planquin back to the depot.
     
  3. It's a spider! It is crawling up your leg, and its definitely one of those horribly poisonous red ones from Penom that doesn't like loud noises. Did some bastard leave in in here to kill you? Or has some assassin's little helper managed to get out while he was on his way to a job? Either way calling out to the bearers doesn't look .like a good idea, and lets hope they are sure footed types who make no sudden twists and turns.