Aysgarth does not announce itself with walls or gates. What a traveler notices first is the totem poles — tall, carved, painted, standing in pairs at the approaches and in clusters around the central commons. Each one documents something: a lineage, a successful hunt, a council decision, a disaster survived. They are not decorative in the way a visitor might assume. They are records.

The Spirit Walker River runs along the town's western edge, clear and fast, audible from most of the main settlement. The Kittatiny Hills rise to the east, and in the early morning their green slopes hold mist longer than the valley floor does. The effect is that Aysgarth sits in a bowl of light while the hills stay dark — a visual that the town's storytellers have used in many ways.

The buildings are timber and packed earth, rooflines low to the plains winds, walls carved with patterns that vary by tribe and by family. An outsider sees surface decoration; a resident reads them as a map of the town's social and historical structure. Knowing how to read the patterns is considered basic literacy here.

The smell is woodsmoke, cured hide, and the specific green smell of the riverside vegetation. In market periods, add the sharper notes of the hunters' stalls.

The Spirit Walker River rises in the distant uplands to the northwest and flows south through the valley before joining the Hafsa. Aysgarth sits at the widest navigable point of the Spirit Walker — not wide enough for serious river commerce, but reliable as a water source and as a barrier that historically defined tribal territory boundaries. The original settlement grew up at the ford.

The Kittatiny Hills are not mountains — they top out at heights that anyone in reasonable health can reach in a morning — but they provide the only significant elevation change in this part of Irna's interior. The hills are used for herb gathering, for signal fires, and as the location of the Cheyana tribe's primary historical site, the Telling Stone, which has been carved with tribal records for as long as anyone can reliably document.

The plains to the south and west are where the hunting economy sustains itself. The game population is managed through the Yuchi tribe's rotation agreements, which have been in force for three generations and which Elder Aponi's recent revisions have improved.

Aysgarth's population spans five tribal communities that have been in formal council relationship for approximately a century and in informal proximity for much longer. The tribes are distinct — in their crafts traditions, their spiritual practices, their social customs around marriage and lineage — but they share the town as neutral ground, which requires ongoing maintenance of a certain kind.

The non-tribal population is small but integrated. Stodir Hasgrad's adoption into the Kiowa is the most visible example of a broader practice: outsiders who commit to a tribe's obligations are extended full membership. The Dwarf and Elf communities within Aysgarth are mostly integrated into tribal structures rather than living as a parallel community.

Half-Orcs have found a specific and honored place in Aysgarth over the last two generations — their physical capability in the more demanding hunting expeditions is valued, and the town's cultural framework for judging people on demonstrated contribution rather than origin has worked in their favor.

The plains around Aysgarth are one of the most productive hunting grounds in central Irna, and the town's economy reflects this in the most direct possible way: hides, furs, bones, antlers, teeth, and the crafted goods made from them make up the majority of what Aysgarth exports. The hunters are organized by tribal tradition but sell through the central market.

The secondary economy is the craft tradition. Aysgarth's beadwork is distinctive enough to be identified by origin across Irna's merchant network — each tribal and family pattern is documented and the documentation is maintained by Elder Kohana's record-keeping function. A piece of beadwork from Aysgarth carries encoded information about who made it and for what occasion, which gives it a value beyond the purely aesthetic.

Medicinal herbs gathered from the Kittatiny Hills and prepared by the Yuchi healers constitute a smaller but premium trade item.

Aysgarth eats what the plains and river produce: game, river fish, dried berries, and the cultivated root vegetables that the edge-of-plains soil supports. The cooking tradition is fire-based — the communal fire pits are used for the largest meals, which in turn are the occasions for the social rituals that keep the five tribes functionally unified.

The specific preparation of dried meats is a point of genuine tribal pride and ongoing competition. The Lakhota dry-cure method and the Kiowa smoke-curing approach have had advocates arguing the relative merits in the market square for as long as anyone can remember.

Fermented drinks exist but are treated as ceremonial rather than daily. Water from the Spirit Walker is the daily staple.

Aysgarth's social life is organized around the principle that the tribes are distinct and that this is a feature rather than a problem. The Council of Elders does not try to harmonize the five tribal traditions into a single culture — it maintains the agreements that allow five distinct cultures to share a space without erasing each other.

This means that the town has five different ways of marking births, deaths, marriages, and disputes, and that the Council's function is partly to know which tradition applies to which situation. The complexity is managed by long habit and by the fact that the Elders have all known each other for decades.

The totem poles are the town's primary public art and primary public record simultaneously. New poles are raised for significant events; old poles are maintained against rot and damage as a community obligation. The Cheyana tribe's Elder Kohana oversees the overall pole record with a care that is closer to archival practice than to ceremonial observance.

Three times a year, when the hunting rotation cycles between territories, Aysgarth hosts a formal gathering of all five tribes' councils — not just the Elders but the extended family leadership. The Gathering is when inter-tribal disputes are adjudicated, trade agreements are renewed, and marriages that cross tribal lines are formally recognized. It runs for three days and involves the full range of the town's ceremonial food traditions, which means that the market weeks surrounding it are the best time to eat in Aysgarth.

The beginning of the main hunting season is marked by a ceremony that involves the Council of Elders blessing the departure of the season's first organized expedition. Each tribe contributes hunters to the first expedition regardless of whose territory it enters, which is an explicit statement of the inter-tribal agreement. The expedition's success or difficulty is understood as a signal about the season, which Elder Aponi interprets formally.

Aysgarth's music is drum-driven and vocal — the drum tradition is specific to each tribe, and the differences are audible to anyone who has spent time with them. The inter-tribal musical forms that have developed over the last century are considered by Irna's broader bardic tradition to be some of the most technically sophisticated percussion work on the continent, but Brogan's Bardic College in Adlington has had limited success getting Aysgarth's musicians to come demonstrate. The musicians are not interested in demonstrating for audiences who do not understand what they are looking at.

The beadwork craft is the visual art tradition. The most accomplished beadworkers in Aysgarth are recognized across tribal lines and are consulted for ceremonial commissions that cross those lines.

Aysgarth's spiritual life is organized around the ancestor traditions common to all five tribes — a shared framework in which the land's features are understood as the accumulated presence of those who have lived and died there, and in which the living have obligations to maintain that relationship. The Spirit Walker River is named for exactly this understanding; it is considered one of the more active ancestral presences in the region.

The five tribes' specific practices differ in form while sharing the underlying framework. There is no temple and no organized clergy. The spiritual function is distributed — each tribe's Elders carry it within their broader leadership role.

Thulgard has a modest presence through the Dwarf community, and a small Bethsia shrine exists on the town's northern edge, attended primarily by the Elf population. Neither is prominent in the town's spiritual life.

The Spirit Walker ford was a meeting point before it was a settlement — the place where tribal territories traditionally overlapped in a neutral zone for trade and dispute resolution. The permanent settlement grew up around the ford over three generations, as families whose work involved managing inter-tribal relations found it practical to live near the meeting point year-round.

The formal Council of Elders structure was established after a territorial dispute between the Lakhota and the Navara tribes that came close to disrupting the hunting rotation permanently. The mediation that resolved it was conducted by the grandmother of the current Elder Chayton, and the formal council structure was her proposed solution. The Telling Stone on the Kittatiny Hills records the establishment in the Cheyana's carved-record tradition.

A Dwarf craftsman whose clan had turned him out arrived at Aysgarth during the Gathering, demonstrated metalworking skills the Kiowa had immediate use for, and petitioned for adoption into the tribe through the formal process. Elder Takoda's sponsorship was decisive. Stodir's subsequent rise to Chief — by demonstrated competence and by his wife Lelani's existing standing — was through the Kiowa's internal structure, not the Council's. The Council recognized the result.

Elder Aponi successfully negotiated a comprehensive revision to the hunting territory rotation that had been operating on terms that were three generations out of date. The revision took two years of negotiation, involved all five tribes, and has measurably improved the game population in the southern plains. It is considered the Yuchi tribe's most significant contribution to Aysgarth's governance in living memory.

Aysgarth functions well, which in this context means the five tribal agreements are holding and the Council is not in active crisis. The Chief Hasgrad's relationship with the Council is respectful and practically effective — his governance of Kiowa-specific matters runs cleanly, and the inter-tribal Council work runs separately. The current concern, not yet a crisis, is the number of young hunters who have been spending the off-season in Adlington and returning with ideas about commerce that the elders find disorienting.

The Council governs by consensus on all inter-tribal matters. Each Elder holds authority within their tribe's affairs and representative authority at the Council table. There is no tie-breaking mechanism — a decision that cannot reach consensus is not made until it can. This has, historically, meant that some decisions wait years. The Elders do not consider this a flaw.

The Chief of the Kiowa tribe holds specific authority over security and the coordination of the hunting rotation, which gives Chief Hasgrad a broader functional role than the purely inter-tribal Council work would suggest.

Dwarf, Male — fifties — fiery-bearded, stocky even by Dwarf standards

Stodir came to the plains without a plan to stay. A craftsman without a clan, he arrived at a gathering and discovered that what he could make was needed and that the people who needed it were willing to let him become one of them, provided he was willing to do the work. He was. Twenty-five years later, he is the Chief of the Kiowa and the father of two children who have never known him to be anything else.

His governance style is direct and specific. He is not a political man in the way that requires managing perception — what he thinks tends to be what he says, which the Council Elders have found both useful and occasionally frustrating. His real skill is logistics: the hunting rotations, the market timing, the coordination of large expeditions. The plains are not forgiving of planning failures and he has not made significant ones.

Human, Female — Kiowa tribe — forties

Lelani was a widow with children when Stodir arrived, which in the Kiowa tradition meant she had already demonstrated her capacity to manage difficulty. Her standing within the tribe predates her marriage and has nothing to do with it — she is valued for her knowledge of the southern hunting ranges and for her role in the negotiations that preceded the Yuchi Rotation Compact. Stodir is openly clear that she is the reason several of his early Kiowa relationships worked, and she is openly clear that this is accurate.

Her children, Kaya and Takoda Jr. — the latter named for the Elder who sponsored Stodir — are adults now, and the question of what role they will take in the tribe's leadership is a conversation the family has not yet finished.

Human, Male — seventies — calm-spoken, deliberate

Elder Takoda has been on the Council longer than any other current member. His sponsorship of Stodir's adoption is the decision he is most frequently asked about by outsiders, and he has a standard response that declines to be interesting about it. Within the Council, he functions as the institutional memory — he has been present for every significant decision in the last three decades and can locate specific earlier precedents with a speed that the other Elders rely on.

Human, Female — sixties

Niyol communicates more through story than through argument, which makes her positions initially harder to identify and later impossible to misunderstand. Her beadwork is among the finest in Aysgarth — each piece an encoded record — and she occasionally presents arguments in beaded form, which the other Elders have learned to take seriously.

Human, Male — fifties

Chayton is the Council's most commercially-oriented member and the most engaged with Aysgarth's relationship with the broader Irna trade network. His grandfather's mediation established the Council; Chayton's inheritance is the understanding that institutions require maintenance, which he pursues through the careful management of the trade relationships that make the town economically viable.

Human, Female — fifties

Aponi's herbalist practice is the most immediately visible part of her role — she maintains a dispensary that serves the whole town regardless of tribal affiliation, and the Kittatiny herbs she and her Yuchi apprentices gather and prepare are one of Aysgarth's premium exports. The Rotation Compact is her most significant governance contribution, but she considers the herbal knowledge transmission to the next generation of Yuchi healers to be the more important project.

Human, Male — sixties

Kohana is the town's historian in the fullest functional sense — he maintains the totem pole records, oversees the Telling Stone on the Kittatiny Hills, and is the person consulted when a dispute turns on what was agreed when and by whom. His knowledge of tribal genealogy extends to relationships most of the relevant families have forgotten, which makes him useful in inheritance and marriage disputes and occasionally dangerous in political ones.

Halfling, Female — thirties — the Hasgrad estate
Mika came to Aysgarth with a traveling merchant party eight years ago and did not leave. Her cooking synthesizes Kiowa tradition with techniques from the half-dozen culinary traditions she absorbed before arriving, and the results are specific enough to Aysgarth that she has been asked to teach what she does — an offer she has declined on the grounds that it would take longer than anyone has patience for.

Elf, Female — age indeterminate — the Hasgrad estate and its approaches
Sunki manages the estate's security with a quietness that new visitors sometimes misread as absence. She is not absent. Her read on approaching strangers is the first thing Stodir asks for when an unfamiliar party arrives at the estate, and she has not been meaningfully wrong.