Remedial Ravenloft: Kartakas

Before - Like playing Are You a Werewolf with Dutch opera singers.

After - Pretty damned much the same.  It's too weird for me to really want to mess with it.

Where it is - A small, landlocked nation in the southwestern Core.

Technical Advancement - A touch behind most of the Core, for reasons that are kind of hard to pinpoint or identify.  Roughly equivalent to western Europe in the late 17th - early 18th century CE.
Supernatural Advancement - A class of trained magicians of moderate to high level power.  Tutelage in the local magical tradition is widespread and protective hexes are widely available for purchase.  Supernaturally invested musical instruments are plentiful.

The Land - Kartakas is largely forest and bog with a number of major rivers flowing through and stimulating trade.  The forests are old-growth, dark and deep and similar to those found in neighboring Verbrek.  Bogs are more settled than the forests, they sport raised platform houses, suspended villages and locals who traverse the land on stilts.  Houses are snug and often sport bright paintjobs or, at least, eye-catching trim.  Despite the geographic distance and radically different culture, Kartakan architecture is closest to Lamordian in design.  Mountains spring up, seemingly without any sort of warning, in the southwest at the Garancian border.

The People - Kartakans are weird.  They're pleasant, good-natured, easygoing - and that's odd enough, but they often seem oblivious, sometimes going about their routines in a near fugue state, singing to themselves.  They can also seem flighty and forgetful, especially in the face of awful mishaps or eruptions of horror, a fact that can really put visitors from abroad off.  That's not to say Kartakans are constantly in a trance or that they aren't cognizant of the world around them.  They just seem to sometimes slip into trances (usually singing to themselves) and come out of it ...bemused.  Abstracted, usually for a couple hours.  Foreign scholars hypothesize that this is a sort of cultural and linguistic trick the Kartakans use to cope with trauma, which, let's face it, is pretty easy to come by in the Realm.  Kartakans tend to have either very fair skin (mostly in the south and east) or very dark skin (usually in the west along the Valachan border), and what with populations of ethnic Valachans, Verbrekuns and Sithicans common in Kartakas, a wide variety of features (sithicans are a near human species which the Kartakans refer to as elves, which makes for a lot of confusion among northern Core nationals who have a very different species of elf.  Sithican elves are cross-fertile with humans, and mutual attraction between the two species is not rare).  Kartakans speak a local dialect of Rabben and a pitched, sung language that's referred to in non-pitched languages as Shokkal.  Kartakans have a local religion that is somewhat ancestral and somewhat animistic.
Wag's Eye View - I. Literally. Can't. Even.

The Boring Stuff - Kartakas is not the place you want to go if you like things making sense.  The nation is run by their language, which has law and culture seemingly coded in.  The songs get interpreted and propogated by a network of bards, who wield some amount of authority, though they seem to find more authority through force of personality than through understanding of the songs.  Aside from that, the song seems to serve as law and leader, and native singers of Shokkal who try to flout the law tend to suffer a great deal of anxiety when they do so.  The song seems to account for the common good, and despite the lack of any centralized authority, order is generally maintained people are cared for and public works are completed.  Occasionally, one or more of the Bards have to step in in the case of dispute or crisis, but their opinions are usually accepted by all parties.  In the cases where one party fails to accept the judgment of the bard, well, they tend to be pretty formidible in either martial or supernal arts (or both) and have the authority to solve problems that way as well.  Foremost of the bards for more than a generation has been a man named Harkon Lukas, who apparently knows a few songs that most Kartakans do not.

And their Mothers Walked Toward the Forest (Music Tonight, I Just Want Your Music Tonight) - It's probably not going to surprise anyone, what with the whole culture being frustrating to interpret by outsiders, the history of the Domain's inclusion is utter nonsense.  Kartakas might have entered the Realm with or part of Bluetspur or Arak, given their history's obsession of those from the mountains, but neither domain is apparently inhabited or even bordering Kartakas in the present configuration of the Core (domains tend to shift around, geograhpically speaking, the last shuffle occuring when Azalin Rex apparently blew up Ilaluk and most of the central Core).  There's also some historical accounts of something called the wolf song being employed on a tryrant at terrible cost (in the present day, Lukas is the only one thought to possess the secret of that song.  At least, he has intimated that he may consider using *something* to face the tyrant Malocchio in neighboring Invidia if the young man continues to violate Kartakan territory.  Something whose efficacy he doesn't doubt.)  There's also some songs about a squirrel spirit or a fox spirit or a squirrel-fox spirit (the squirrel-fox being a small arboreal predator that has superficial resemblance to both animals, is common throughout the southern Core, but is not thought to be native to Kartakas), but those go nowhere useful.

The Darklord Could be... It could be Harkon Lukas.  The going conjecture is that Lukas knows the Wolf Song, that he used it on the tyrant in question and that the song is of such a nature that it drew Kartakas into the Realm.  This would be a good conjecture if there was any evidence of it, but there is fuck all, outside of Lukas' possible bluff in regards to Malocchio's ambitions and the man's strength of personality and appearance relative to his age.  Lukas is, like many Darklords, a lot older than he looks, but then, so are most people with Sithican heritage, and he certainly seems to have the markers of that.

...It could also be the Shokkal language.  Pitched language is only documented one other place in the Realm and that is on the island of Liffe in the Nocturnal Sea, and we know that language is related to the powers of the Darklord of that Domain.  It certainly seems to have a strong effect on the thought processes of those who learn it (whether or not they are Kartakan), but those effects seem to be lessened outside of the nation.  The major strikes against this hypothesis is that the Realm does not normally include Domains for nonhuman entities, and persistent rumors of blue-skinned folk singing a very similar pitched language in Bluetspur and Lahey.

...More specifically, it could be the wolf song itself, possibly embodied by Harkon Lukas as the one man who is thought to know it.  If that is the case, the song is a very subtle and light handed darklord indeed, having shown none of its presence outside of the occasional closing of the borders.

There is no Escape from the Slave-Catcher's Song - Kartakas is a popular destination for adventurers, especially those with a musical or magical bent.  Tutelage in both is easy to come by and Kartakans are remarkably relaxed in the presence of murder hobos, considering.  It's also possible to assimilate into Kartakan society pretty easily, as long as you can carry a tune.  Several of the more popular and authoritative bards began their careers as adventurers looking to do respectable work (and there are persistent rumors that Lukas himself used to be a foreign adventurer who went native).  Kartakas is also a logical staging ground for forrays into Garancia, Sithicus and Invidia, and while it's got wolves like whoa, it doesn't have wolves like Verbrek, so traveling the countryside (the forest moreso than the bog) is dangerous but not foolhardy.

Closing the Borders - When the borders are closed, an eerie song comes up around the Domain.  This song causes severe psychic shock after a short time listening to it, and later physical effects, culminating in the eventual shattering of teeth and bones.