Neuroth

The following report was provided to Quayam Srae by Opportunities Incorporated in February 2486.

Neuroth is a large nation in central Idonius, bordered on the south by the Western Outlands, on the east by the White Mountains, on the west by the similar barbaric nation of Grototh, and to the north by Rusk and the frozen arctic. Its population is stable at one million souls.

The Neurothis keep the skulls of their slain enemies over the doors of their houses. When they die, their skulls are buried with their body. If you die in battle, your enemy will chop your head off afterwards, if she can, to take it home and boil the skin off. Most people are buried without their heads, because most people die in battle. But they are buried with any skulls they might have earned. Whether you have earned any skulls or not, so long as your sword is in your hand when you die, you go to heaven.

Given that the population is stable, and everyone brings only one head into the world, the average number of Neurothi skulls earned per person cannot be greater than one. Some people die of of their wounds after a battle. Others die of accident or sickness. A very small number die of old age. These are buried with their heads attached. At the same time, some skulls will be robbed from graves and claimed by young warriors as their own. The number of trophy skulls ends up being roughly equal to the number of people. Nevertheless, only one in two Neurothi has a trophy skull of their own, while others have many. A trophy skull must be won in lawful battle, which could be a duel or a war between chiefs. Unlawful killing is punished by death, and in that case the murderer's skull is buried as a trophy of his victim.

For want of a better measure of martial prowess, we take the number of trophy skulls a Neurothi warrior has taken as an in indication of their skill and experience. To the firat approximation, half the population has no trophy skull, one quarter has one, one eighth has two, one sixteenth has four, and so on. The total number of trophy skulls, as a fraction of the population, is 1/4 + 2/8 + 3/16 + 4/32 + 5/64 + 6/128 + .. = 0.99, so the number of trophy skulls is roughly equal to the number of Neurothi. Of one million Neurothi, five hundred have ten trophy skulls and two have over forty-five. When Neurothi go on raids, they leave their skulls behind, in the care of the warriors who remain. When they go on a crusade, they take their skulls with them, so that they might be buried with them if they die in a conquered land.

There is no sterilization of young women in Neuroth. The population is limited by war. Women and men are encouraged to refuse to make love to one another until they are over twenty, so that they don't sap their strength, because love undermines war, and war is the path to heaven. The population of Neuroth is limited by violent death rather than by disease or starvation. We present the following graph of population distribution with age. Neurothi custom prohibits men and women from conceiving children before the age of twenty. Many young adults have sexual relations with one another secretly, but they know of ways to avoid pregnancy and to abort pregnancies. The penalty for conceiving a child before the age of twenty is death, but so long as the pregnancy does not come to term, the sentence is unlikely to be administered. Neurothi children die of disease and accident. Young adults die in the many violent conflicts in which they embroil themselves before they start their families.

To generate the following plot, we assume couples produce one child every four years. We start with a hypothetical self-contained villages that starts with ten couples who have a total of one hundred children. Of these one hundred children, fifty survive the the age of twenty, when Neurothi custom permits them to start families. Thereafter, each surviving member of the child generation produces 1/8 of a grandchild per year. Population equilibrium requires that the number of grandchildren be one hundred, for this was the size of the children's generation. We choose the death rate per year per child to bring the final number of grandchildren to one hundred.

Figure: Population Distribution in Neuroth.

A birth rate of 1/4 grandchild per person per year is 1/2 a grandchild per couple per year, so each woman has one child every two years. Humans who breast feed their children but use no contraception tend to have one pregnancy every three years. If we consider miscarriage and menopause, the birth rate per couple will be close to 1/4 than 1/2. We adjust the death rates until we have 100 grandchildren born, and now we see that 75% of people die by the age of 30 and 85% by the age of 40, but we still have 2% over 80. The average age of a Neurothi is 21, and the median age is 13. Half the Neurothi population are children. Given that half of the Neurothi population are zero-level adventurers, and the other half are first-level and up, we see that by the time a Neurothi is 14, he is already a first level adventurer.

The Celtic Pantheon owns all the Neurothi temple plots. Their priests live apart from the rest of the population. They are often solitary, but they can also have large families, and they may be male or female. We call them druids. Druids do not carry weapons. They do not fight in battles, nor do they duel to settle their differences. They live apart so they can live their non-violent lives in peace. Because they are non-violent, those who have children will have many children. Most of these are likely to leave the druid's house at a young age to live in the violent and exciting society of the majority of the population. The druids themselves will enter towns only on holy days, and to attend councils of the chief. On holy days, druids will come to town and perform ceremonies. These ceremonies can include sacrificing criminals to the gods, but more often sacrificing animals. The home of a druid will look as if they have been produced by the wilderness rather than made by man. Caves are popular living-quarters for druids. Houses half-buried in the ground with a wood frame, roofed by slate and earth, are common. Inside, they are usually comfortable.

Druids provide medical care, either in the form of effective advice on how to avoid infection and care for the sick, cleaning and binding wounds, setting broken legs, and operating upon people suffering from painful maladies such as appendicitis. In extreme cases, they will administer healing serums and antibiotics, after a ritual in which they apparently obtain the approval of the gods. To the population, it appears that the druids are casting some kind of spell, with minor somatic components to ensure its efficacy. The syringe is one such component. Despite our description of these clerics as druids, they are not experts on the use of herbs and animal products in healing, as are the clerics of the Druidic Pantheon. Unlike the Druidic Pantheon, the Celtic Pantheon in Neuroth insists upon its priests being non-violent outside sacrificial rituals. There are no warrior-priests in Neuroth.

The Neurothi do not pay druids directly for their health care. They pay the Celtic Pantheon by providing mercenary services to the gods managing the Open Worlds. To return to Clarus, a free world mercenary must come through a conjunction. Neuroth is well-blessed with conjunctions to the open worlds. Of the 137 known conjunctions on Clarus, 7 occur in Neuroth, and 5 are to open worlds, so that mercenaries can gate directly to the other side of the conjunction. There are an average of eight conjunctions to open worlds every year, which means roughly two months of waiting on Olympia per trip. A mercenary tour of duty is six months, for which the pantheon gets paid $100k. The pantheon pays $20k salary to the mercenaries, has $50k in costs of transportation and administration, and makes a profit of $50k in six months. The employer provides room and board. These mercenaries are fifth level adventurers and up, or "five-skull warriors", of which there are around 15k in Neuroth, and 5k of these work as mercenaries six months of the year, for a profit of $250M per year. Of this, the pantheon has found it necessary to provide $200M worth of health care to the population, leaving it with a profit of only $50M for a 1M population. That's $50/person/year, compared to $100/person/yr average for Clarus, and up to $200/person/yr in recent years using different management on Clarus.

The Neurothi druids may keep chickens and a herb garden, but they do not farm, nor herd animals. They hunt with snares and traps. They fish with hook and line. Anything they cannot obtain from the wilderness directly, they purchase from merchants with gold. The gold they receive from agents of their pantheon, who visit Neuroth through its seven conjunctions. The pay received by a druid is his or her measure of their favor and status with their pantheon. It will vary from year to year, and arrives in a bag, handed over with thanks from the pantheon's agent, who is often an elf. A novice druid might receive $10k per year. An accomplished druid with a large family may receive $100k per year. Given that this cash is kept in the druid's house, hidden somewhere, the druid makes an attractive target to thieves and bandits. Attacking a druid or any member of his family, or stealing from a druid, is a capital offence in Neuroth. Druids wear a particular costume so that they may be recognised: a dark green robe with a hood. Above the threshold of their home is the sign of the Celtic Pantheon. There are several thousand druids in Neuroth, serving the population of one million. Their salaries are included in the $200M it costs the Celtic Pantheon to provide health care to Neuroth.