The Dusterinos: Cultural Profile

Introduction:
    The Dusterinos are a hardy, independent folk who are renowned for their mastery of survival in the Sea of Dust, one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet of Tero. Every year, the Dusterinos endure a brutal dry season without rainfall, and then an equally as brutal wet season with afternoon thunderstorms that bring flash floods, high winds, and even hail and tornadoes. Dusterino culture celebrates logic, observation, and knowledge of the natural world, seeing these as the three most important things one can take into the desert for the annual season of wandering. The dry season is spent in small, independent towns and villages built around springs and oases that can provide fresh water through the sedentary season. This traditional lifestyle is a part of an ascetic religious philosophy within the religion of the Dusterinos, Dusterism, which overtook and unified the Dusterinos around 1,000 years ago. Today, the Dusterinos seem mostly content to live without the conveniences of advanced magic and technology, although there is a small, growing movement of Dusterinos who wish to live a settled life and trade with the merchants from the First Empire for various comforts. This new movement is still small, but it has the support of the merchants, themselves all too excited to start exploiting the Dusterinos for cactus water which is sold as a health drink in the First Empire heartland.

Magic and Technology:
    Much like their Convergent Wanderer forebears, the Dusterinos seem to have little use for advanced magic or technology when they spend about half the year wandering and they need to pack light. Unlike the Convergent Wanderers, though, the Dusterinos spend half the year in small towns built around the few reliable sources of water in the Sea of Dust. This allows the Dusterinos to build some permanent infrastructure and produce things like steel tools and weapons to make the season of wandering easier. By the same token, some Dusterinos use the settled season to study and practice magic, with enchanted items and spellcasting having a minor presence in most villages. Despite these material and magical practices all going back thousands of years, the small population of Dusterinos and cultural tendency to wander, even before it became a religious mandate, has given these developments a certain focus.
    Technological progress has always been hyper-focused on developing technologies which can help people survive in the Sea of Dust. Portable shelters which can be set up and taken down in minutes and which are large enough to shelter up to 8 adults while being light enough for a single person to carry have been around for a long time. The weapon of choice for the majority of Dusterinos is something that was brought over more recently with some of the Ashmount Herder exiles, the rifle. By utilizing mines close to some of the villages, the raw materials for new rifles, bullets, and gunpowder can be easily obtained during the dry season. The rifles produced and used by the Dusterinos for both hunting and warfare are known as dusterifles. Dusterifles are breech-loading, bolt action rifles which can hold and fire a single bullet, equivalent to a real-world 9mm round, before needing to be reloaded. Some Dusterino gunsmiths have experimented with higher capacity dusterifles, but these have not caught on. Outside of these well-developed tents and weapons, Dusterinos are happy to use more basic knives and tools, in line with the ascetic lifestyle their religion demands.
    Like their technology, Dusterino magic tends to be focused on what is useful for desert survival. Spells and enchanted items which help people find and purify water are the most common, followed by magic to heal people and mend objects. These magics are usually passed down to the next generation from older members of the Dusterino community. Most never bother to learn, but there are always a few students learning from their elders during the dry season. More powerful magics are generally seen as a waste of time by the Dusterinos, but there are a few lone individuals who have chosen to leave dusterino culture entirely to study magic deep in the desert. These wizards usually act strange and eccentric due to their lack of social contact, but each of them seems to have found a different obsession, researching and developing magic solely related to that. This has resulted in a rather negative view of wizards in Dusterino culture, the stereotype being that of a mad hermit living in the deep desert, so detached from reality that they believe their mastery of obscure and specific magic will let them take over the world. This is not wholly accurate, but Dusterino wizards do tend to be a bit strange.

Society:
    Dusterino society has spent the last couple centuries in a self-imposed state of theocratic anarchy. About 500 years ago, the leaders of the Dusterist Union agreed to dissolve their government due to irrelevance. Religious belief and practice had resulted in much of the population wandering the desert in small family groups for half the year, with the expectation that they would be self-sufficient for this time. Towns and villages, usually populated by a few extended families during the settled season, were self-governing at this point as well. As part-time nomads themselves, the last leaders of the Dusterist Union saw no reason to fight a losing battle and chose to let towns and villages be fully self-reliant and independent when they were populated, while getting out of the way of the nomads during the wet season so that individual families could deal with issues as they came up.
    This state of affairs has apparently worked fine for centuries, with the vast majority of Dusterinos choosing to follow the religious mandates to live humbly and wander for half the year. Within the last few years, however, a woman named Serena has started calling herself the third reincarnation of the prophet, claiming to speak on behalf of the god of the Dusterinos, Ol’ Dusty. Serena preaches a fully settled lifestyle which takes advantage of the comforts of magic and technology. In her words, Ol’ Dusty wants the Dusterinos to be comfortable and happy, allowing them to better pursue the studies of logic and the natural world. Serena sees wandering the Sea of Dust as an important rite of passage for each Dusterino, but she says it does not need to be done every year. More conservative segments of society hold their noses up at this radical philosophy, claiming that it is foolishness that will only deplete the limited resources of the dry season settlements. Serena argues that the Dusterinos have mastered the techniques needed to supplement their water supplies with other sources such as ground and rainwater. Other supplies can be bought from First Empire merchants with the cactus water they want to sell back in their homeland. To keep supplies flowing, Serena even claims that cactuses can be farmed and harvested from without taking precious water away from the towns.
    For the most part, more traditional Dusterinos tolerate Serena and her followers, seeing them as a small group of weirdos who won’t ever be able to gain influence. Although Serena is a radical and an outcast by Dusterino standards, she still preaches the importance of logic, observation, and knowledge, maintaining a lot of common ground with those who are committed to their annual wanderings. No one, except for the very young and old, stays in the towns during the wet season, allowing Serena’s followers to stay behind unchallenged and pursue their new way of life. Since each town maintains its own rules during the dry season, formal recognition of this growing movement varies greatly between settlements. Some towns have set up brand new systems of government to accommodate year-round residency, while others have no recognition of their permanent residents and they are left on their own when most of the town leaves for the wet season. Some groups have seen the recent growth of Serena’s group of radicals and feel like their traditional way of life is being threatened. While this is not necessarily the case, tensions have been rising and there are people on both sides who feel that it is only a matter of time before violence erupts. Until then, tolerance continues and peace is upheld.

Religion:
    The religion of the Dusterinos, known as Dusterism, is practiced by almost all Dusterinos and centers on the worship of a god known as Ol’ Dusty, the collective consciousness of all of the grains of sand in the Sea of Dust. There is no organized system of worship or religious order associated with Dusterism, but rather the teachings of Ol’ Dusty have been passed on to the other Dusterinos by prophets who speak on behalf of their god. Stella, the first prophet, was the originator of Dusterism 4,000 years ago. She was the first person Ol’ Dusty ever revealed himself to, and her teachings are recorded and passed on in a document known as “The Book of Stella”. There was a second prophet, Starla, 2,000 years ago who claimed it was Ol’ Dusty’s will for all Dusterinos to be united under a single banner, and so she started the second unifying war to expand the Dusterist Union and follow the will of Ol’ Dusty. Starla’s teachings are recorded in a book known as “The Book of Starla” so that future generations of Dusterinos may always be able to access her wisdom. Today, Serena is claiming to be the third coming of the prophet, calling for a return to the settled lifestyles that the Dusterinos lived thousands of years ago. While her prophethood is still in question, many believe Serena to truly be the third coming of the Dusterino Prophet.
    Without any kind of formal rituals or priests, Dusterism is a religion that is mostly practiced by reading the books of the prophets and living a life that cultivates the skills needed to survive in the desert for extended periods. Most Dusterinos see the teachings of the prophets as desert survival guides couched in philosophy and morality. Regardless, the followers of Dusterism have always seemed to have an easier time in the desert than others, so anyone who doesn’t believe in Ol’ Dusty and his prophets tends to follow Dusterism out of pragmatic self-preservation. That said, there is a more mystical side to Dusterism as well. The prophets all teach that all Dusterinos are inherently tied to the desert and that when they die, their souls become one with Ol’ Dusty and the sands of the Sea of Dust until the appropriate time for their souls to be reincarnated back into the Dusterino population.
    The most devoted followers of the more mystic teachings of the prophets believe that there is a way to achieve enlightenment, becoming one with Ol’ Dusty while alive and gaining absolute control over the Sea of Dust. Through deep meditation and solitude in the deepest parts of the deserts, these Dusterino mystics hope to achieve this state, although no one has ever managed to do it. What seems to happen more often than not is that one who is on the cusp of enlightenment is subsumed by Ol’ Dusty, dissolving their body into sand as they fail to wrest conscious control of the desert away from their god. Ultimately, each mystic has their own goals for achieving enlightenment and gaining absolute power over the desert. Most simply wish to gain a complete understanding of it, while others have more sinister goals. One day, one of them may attain full enlightenment, but until then, they meditate in the deep desert, hoping to succeed where so many have failed.

Towns:
    Each Dusterino town or village is built around a permanent oasis or freshwater spring which is able to produce enough fresh water to sustain a group of several extended families for the duration of the dry season each year. When they are inhabited, the towns are independent and self-sufficient, rarely communicating or trading with each other. By tradition, each extended family in a given settlement is able to elect one representative to a town council for the duration of the settled season. This council exists to hear and pass judgment on conflicts, petitions, and policy proposals that their people bring to them. Their decisions are binding, but only for the duration of the settled period of the year, and those who dislike the decision are free to start their annual wanderings early if they no longer wish to be bound by the ruling. Year to year, the councils tend to have the same members and goals, resulting in a great deal of stability for a nominally anarchist society. Each town is under no obligation to have any particular laws or policies so the laws and practices in each town can be wildly divergent and diverse. Because of this, some towns are much more open to the growth of Prophet Serena’s followers than others, with policies spanning the spectrum from complete persecution to full acceptance and adoption of Serena’s teachings.
    As far as taking in outsiders goes, some villages are more welcoming than others. All Dusterino settlements are concerned with maintaining the sustainable use of their water sources, and this has led some to be less welcoming to outsiders under the concern that they will be too much of a burden on their food and water. While this has presented an obstacle to travelers and merchants in the past, the attitude is becoming less common over time. The Dusterinos are generally curious about outsiders, sharing their culture and stories in exchange for the same from the outsiders. Merchants seem to have a hard time making money in Dusterino villages due to a focus on traveling light during the wet season, but thanks to Serena and her followers, this is slowly changing. As more people start to follow her teachings, more cactus farms spring up, providing more cactus water for the merchants to buy up. This is creating a quickly growing technology and culture gap between those who follow the new prophet and those who follow the traditional Dusterino lifestyle, a technology gap which is causing increased concern among the avowed traditionalists. More traditional towns feel like their independence and way of life is being threatened, and it is possible that this conflict will result in violence in the near future.