The Interior is the name outsiders give to the trackless blue desert that forms Vaarn's heart. It is a harsh and inhospitable landscape, and has claimed the lives of many travellers over the millennia, but there are peoples and monsters and marvels to be discovered in the vastness. The Interior is traversed by wary trade caravans, terrorised by laughing Cacklemaw warbands, and inhabited by the Faa nomads, to whom this desert is not the Vaarnish Interior but rather the world entire. The deepest deserts also play host to Vaarn’s most spectacular and regal inhabitants: the gigantic sandworms, which strike awe into the hearts of all who are lucky enough to witness them.
The Interior is a land of extremes, where the days are searingly hot, while the desert nights can grow cold enough to induce frostbite. The region receives even less rain than Vaarn’s parched southern badlands, and water is such a precious commodity that to spit upon a Faa nomad is to honor them.
No accurate map has ever been drawn of the Vaarnish Interior: the territory seems to defy rational organisation. This is a place without borders, the horizon between blue sand and blue sky no longer a stark dividing line but rather a molten membrane that swims and drifts woozily in the sun’s wine-red heat, the land making and remaking itself just as a lizard sheds its skin. The blue sands retreat from the wind, revealing structures that have lain dry and deathless and undisturbed for aeons, and then those same restless dunes shroud the ruins once again, before a living soul can name them. This is a country vast and blue, as deep with secrets as the ocean and twice as capricious. No welcome here for adventurers, but rewards might be won amongst the sands that defy human imagination.
Simply put, the Interior connects all regions of Vaarn to one another; the quickest route from Gnomon in the south to the Lazul Mountains in the north will always be directly across the sands; likewise a traveller from the Wall who wished to reach Ikor Quag or the Mooncradle Mountains would be obliged to charter a wind-barge and cross the deeps of the desert.
There are also reasons to make the Interior a destination in its own right. Most of Vaarn’s noteworthy ruins and vaults are located in the desert - the vastness and shifting nature of the place allows creative referees to place whatever kind of structure they can imagine in the Interior, without having to further justify its obscurity and isolation. There are also unique cultures that exist predominantly in the desert. Players who wish to locate a certain Faa nomad clan or Lithling scholar will find that they must brave the sandstorms and heatwaves in order to speak with them.
Campaigns that focus on the Interior should revolve around movement, exploration, and discovery. If your players find the trading city Gnomon too claustrophobic, then give them an opportunity to enlist as guards for a merchant’s caravan, or let them come into possession of a small wind-barge and enjoy sailing wherever fate takes them. Other adventure starters in the Interior could include rescuing an important prisoner from a Cacklemaw warband, hunting down a notorious caravan robber in order to collect a bounty, or searching for the ruins of a biotech laboratory in order to discover the cure for a virulent disease.
The travelling people of the great blue desolation. The Faa have roamed the desert since the Titans were young (or so their songs say). Generations ago, the ancestors of the Faa bestowed upon their children genetic adaptations to the harsh conditions of the Interior. The most obvious of these changes is their flesh and hair, which have taken on a blue hue that matches the sands of Vaarn. Combined with the blue robes the nomads wear, they can swiftly become almost invisible amongst the azure dunes and rocks. The Faa also boast an impressive modified metabolism that allows them to survive for weeks without taking in fresh water, as their sweat and urine are collected and purified by sub-dermal biomechanisms and recycled into their bodies. Even the eyes of the Faa have been sculpted to survive in the desert: they possess a second set of translucent eyelids, which protect their vision during sandstorms. The nomads are also famously unable to produce tears, another modification that privileges water retention above all.
In truth the Faa are no single culture, but a mosaic of families and clans who share these genetic adaptations and a lingua franca known as the Faatongue. Faa groups are wildly varied in their beliefs and lifestyles. Most are nomadic, but some Faa make permanent homes in the foothills of the mountains or around a valuable water source. Some clans are feared slavers and warriors, but others are sworn to the Pale Faith of Amun-Oh and may harm no living creature. Some Faa are legal citizens of the New Hegemony; other clans are bitter enemies of the true-kin empire. Some Faa ostracise cacogen, synths, and newbeasts, while others welcome them. Faa nomads can be found everywhere in Vaarn, from the shadow of the Great Wall to the markets of Gnomon and the fortress monasteries that speckle the heights of the Lazul Mountains, and in each place there is no concordance on what it means to be Faa.
Perhaps the only true commonality is that all Faa are fiercely independent-minded, and will leave their clan rather than submit to an authority they believe unjust. This may be the reason it is impossible to define what the Faa hold in common - whenever one way of living is pronounced ideal, there will be within that group a minority who instantly declare the opposite, and set out alone to prove it.
The Faa clans of the Interior are known for a deep understanding of sandworm husbandry, and their ability to ride the creatures, as well as methods by which the worms’ growth may be arrested, to prevent them assuming their enormous, aggressive adult shapes. The sandworms have deep religious significance to many Faa, as their secretions are used to brew the valuable psychoactive substance known as Amaranthine Sugar, an enormously potent drug that can awaken extra-sensory perception even in minds that were not born with such gifts.
They are newbeasts of a sort, although they disdain masks and seek no approval from humankind. In form the Cacklemaw are hyena-headed women, standing seven feet or more, with three-fingered hands and a terrible strength in their lanky limbs. The oaths that bound them as warriors in service of the Fallen Autarchy are long-since broken and these creatures are a blight upon humanity, killing and abducting at will and mounting daring raids into Hegemony territory. They respect strength alone, and perhaps they would have overrun the Urth by now if it was not for the constant intra-family bloodletting, as younger Cacklemaw challenge their elder sisters for status.
Two things stand out, aside from their love of violence: their mirth and their singular gender. On the first subject, the chronicler Markus of Dulcrest has written that ‘to the Cacklemaw, all waking activity is slaughter that descends into revelry; else it is revelry that descends into slaughter’. The creatures are famed for their screaming laughter, their love of practical jokes, and most of all for the grisly leather puppets they make from the remnants of defeated foes. Their religion is not well-understood, for rites are closed to outsiders, but it is known to revolve around a fool-capped puppet-demoness the Cacklemaw name ‘Grand-Mama Punch’, to whom they devote wild rites of bloodletting and clowning.
On the second subject, much has been written. Some theorise that there is an unseen caste of Cacklemaw males. Others claim the Cacklemaw are surely a clone race, emerging fully-grown from pseudowombs beneath the desert surface. Others still declare the bite of a Cacklemaw to be infectious, and believe human women are bitten by the creatures and painfully transform into new giggling monsters. Vaarnish maidens who laugh too long and too raucously, and are given to drink and loose behaviour, may be accused of having hidden Cacklemaw toothmarks festering on their bodies.
Cacklemaw swear allegiance to War Mamas, but these oaths are not binding and political support is won by the Mama who can best provide her daughters with food, drink, laughter, and violence. At present the dominant War Mamas are Mama Hecklehaw in the trackless Interior, Mama Gloatgrim in the southern badlands, and Mama Yawningfool in the Lazul mountains. Ageing matriarchs Nana Blacklaugh and Nana Rictus command small but devoted cadres of veteran fighters, who respect the older Nanas' tactical nous above the younger Mamas’ savage energy.
The Lithling are formed from a mesh of motile crystals, each shard attracted to its neighbours and animated by an energy field far beyond the understanding of Vaarnish scholars. They walk stiffly and ponderously, but have surprisingly dexterous fingers, and are capable of skilful manipulations of brushes, pens, and other delicate objects. They are fed by wavelengths of energy quite invisible to humanity and thus do not breathe, eat, or drink, a quality that makes them masters of the harshest environments imaginable. Lithling scholars have carried out extensive surveys of the toxic landscapes of Ikor Quag, and think nothing of spending years at a time submerged beneath the ocean or the surface of the desert, composing some treatise in their calcified minds.
The lithling life cycle is as alien to humanity as their bloodless bodies. Lithling are grown from a seed, which must crystallise and bloom in a deep bath of alchemical elixirs. After decades of maturation, they are deemed fully-moulded and allowed to awaken, as large and strong as they will ever be. They are inducted into the Lithic Lyceum by their kindred, and instructed in their duties as scholars.
Lithling have a scholarly, enquiring cast of mind, and are endlessly fascinated by the alien world of biological organisms they find themselves marooned on. The Lyceum is devoted to cataloging the minutiae of the natural world, and contains the life’s work of millions of long-dead lithling in its underground archives. Unfortunately, the records of the lithling are often of dubious usefulness to outsiders – their dissertations and essays tend to focus on the minutiae of data and experience while lacking the wider context that a human mind might find meaningful. One celebrated lithling study describes the movements made by generations of land-snails over a hundred year period, with the relative positions of each snail recorded by the second.