A dusty boulder field, smashed rock scattered for miles. In the gaps grasses sprout and beetles teem and foxes and jerboa skitter. Long-horned goats hop from rock to rock, staring quizzically at outsiders.
3.1 - Dhozal.
A sedentary Maleschi tribe. Squat stone-brick houses perched on the scree slopes. The men and women here are tired but smile wide. The old toil, keeping cashmere goats and cultivating Otlakae (2.1), so that the even older can spend their evenings in quiet conversation as they on rickety shuttles weave patterned square scarves called Kuylanliq. Every Dhozali knows how to weave one and as a matter of pride wears their own masterwork.
The people of Dhozal are afflicted by a curse. Regardless of funerary practice, the remains of the dead always disappear completely. This has been the case for three generations. The trauma has led the village to the guidance of family-chief Jorum Dhozal, a towering, broad-shouldered and implacable man, like a sandstone column. Jorum's cult believes that a Div kidnaps the dead and turns them to boulders before hiding them amongst the landscape. He and eleven other men, who each wear their kuylanliq loosely around their shoulders, wander the rocks in the day and perform warding rituals each night. They suspect that the curse is related to the village's scarves and thus forbids their sale to outsiders.
Lassar, a pale-skinned Sha'ir slim with age, takes outsiders aside. She is independent of the cult and requests that they investigate the burial mound in 3.2 and retrieve for her the head of Tarum, the last Dhozal chief before the corpse-curse. She intends to commune with him through necromantic means to try and uncover the truth of the curse's onset. In exchange she pledges to secretly trade d6 kuylanliqs to her assistants and teach them the secret of the scarves (if worn loosely around the shoulders and gripped in each hand, the garment billows like a parachute and launches the wearer thrice the distance of a normal jump; only possible outside). Jorum's men will kill or exile Lassar if they discover her plan.
3.2 - Kurgan.
A stubby burial mound formed of piled boulders in-filled with compacted dirt. Grass has begun to grow upon it: an island of green in the sea of rock. A circumnavigation of the mound's base reveals three passages: an open entryway (south), a rocky crawlspace (east), and a well hidden tunnel sealed with an inch-thick clay plate (north). The plate is painted with a snarling div, blue-skinned and lion-mouthed. The visage bears no pupils. The creature that breaks the seal is cursed with blindness while the sun has set.
A small ruin sits atop the kurgan, four collapsed brick walls. Once a shrine for offerings, now a squat for a hunting-group of 3 Bazouk: they wait with bow for wild goats to approach, but men will suffice too.
The Burial Mound of of Esur the Red by Dyson Logos.
3.3 - Finger.
A twenty-foot-high pillar of rock resembling a huge finger. It protrudes from the ground as if the unveiled pinnacle of an immense colossus. It has been stained colourful reds and yellows and blues with painting-dyes.
This is a suitable place to commune with giants and evil spirits.