Where the Jutons and Ogres announce themselves by sheer scale, the Bocans are creatures of the opposite instinct—small, quick, and built for going unnoticed. Standing rarely taller than three feet and often shorter, with wiry limbs, oversized hands, and ears that swivel independently toward the faintest sound, a Bocan's body seems purpose-built for slipping through gaps other races don't know exist. Their skin runs in mottled tones of grey, brown, and dull yellow-green, patterned in blotches that shift slightly with age, and their eyes are disproportionately large and dark, suited to the dim burrows, root-cellars, and forgotten places they favor over open ground.
The tome must record plainly what generations of travelers have learned less gently: Bocans are compulsive takers. This is not, by their own reckoning, a moral failing but simply a fact of their nature, as unremarkable to them as breathing. A Bocan will pocket a dropped coin, a loose tool, a stray trinket, or an unwatched meal without a flicker of guilt, and will just as readily return the favor if something of theirs goes missing in turn. Among their own kind this creates a strange, self-balancing economy of constant small theft that somehow rarely escalates to violence; among other races, it has earned Bocans a reputation as pests at best and thieves at worst; a reputation the tome cannot honestly call undeserved, however it might color the fuller truth of them.
For the truth is fuller than the reputation suggests. Bocans are, almost without exception, quick-witted—not in the deep, patient cunning of a Choróin war-chief, but in a fast, adaptive intelligence built for immediate problems: how to open a lock, how to slip past a guard, how to talk their way out of a situation their hands have gotten them into. Where Juton and Ogre intelligence ranges unpredictably across their kind, Bocan cleverness is close to universal, if narrow in its application. Few Bocans have any interest in philosophy, statecraft, or the slow arts; nearly all of them can pick a pocket, pick a lock, or talk a farmer out of a meal without breaking stride.
Bocan Society
Bocans do not build kingdoms, and the tome suspects they never will, not from any lack of capability but from a genuine disinterest in the kind of permanence other races prize. They gather instead in warrens—loose, shifting communities built into hillsides, abandoned structures, root systems, or the forgotten undercrofts of larger settlements—that might house a dozen Bocans or several hundred, and that reorganize constantly as members drift between warrens seeking better pickings, more interesting company, or simply a change of scenery.
Leadership within a warren, such as it is, tends to fall to whichever Bocan is best at the specific problem currently at hand—not unlike the Ogres in this respect, though far more casual and far less permanent. A Bocan skilled at negotiating with human merchants might lead trade dealings one season, while a Bocan gifted at reading the mountain weather leads the warren's relocation the next. No Bocan expects, or particularly wants, to lead for long; authority among Bocans is treated less as a prize and more as an inconvenience to be shared around.
Despite—or perhaps because of—their thieving reputation, Bocan warrens maintain a surprisingly consistent code among themselves: never steal from a warren-mate twice in the same season, always share information about danger freely, and never, under any circumstance, betray a warren-mate to an outsider, whatever the offered price. Bocans who break this last rule are not merely shunned but actively hunted by their former kin, for a Bocan who will sell out their own is considered the one true danger their society cannot absorb and balance out.
Relations with Other Races
Human settlements near Bocan warrens have developed a resigned, almost ritualized relationship with their small neighbors—accepting a certain amount of pilfering as an unavoidable cost of proximity, in exchange for the genuinely useful services Bocans are often willing to provide: message-running through terrain too cramped for larger folk, information gathered from places no human could go unnoticed, or small repairs performed by hands nimble enough to work in spaces a human's fingers could never fit. Wise settlements learn to leave out a small, deliberate offering rather than fight a losing battle against Bocan fingers, and find the arrangement cheaper than the alternative.
Elves regard Bocans with a puzzled sort of tolerance, finding their short lives and shorter attention spans difficult to relate to, though the more patient elven communities have found Bocans surprisingly reliable messengers between distant Athàn-Garrow settlements, provided the message itself is interesting enough to hold a Bocan's focus for the journey. Jutons, predictably, take almost no notice of Bocans at all, dismissing them as beneath concern in the way a mountain takes no notice of the moss growing on it—though more than one Ashgorge Juton has woken to find a valued trinket missing, with no explanation the giant's temper could ever hope to resolve.
Bocan Subgroups by Region
- Hollowdown Bocans (Coill-Spine foothills, near human territory)
The most frequently encountered Bocans, having settled closest to Glenmaura's borders and adapted their warrens to sit just beneath human notice—literally, in many cases, with warrens built directly under the floorboards and root-cellars of border villages. The most skilled among the subgroups at reading human speech, coin, and custom.
- Fenlight Bocans (Brine-Root Fen, drier hummocks)
Smaller and paler than their cousins, with a faint luminescence to their eyes said to come from long exposure to the Fen's strange marsh-lights, the Fenlight keep an uneasy truce with both the Slíogach and the Fenwrought Jutons who share their swamp, trading information and small services for safe passage through territory that would otherwise devour them.
Highstone Bocans (Choróin Mountains, lower passes) The hardiest of the subgroups, having adapted to genuine cold in a way most Bocans never need to, the Highstone are also, oddly, the most trusted by outsiders—having built a long-standing, if wary, relationship with the Choróin Jutons, for whom they serve as scouts and messengers in exchange for protection from the mountains' harsher predators.
Driftwarren Bocans (nomadic, no fixed region) Rather than settling any single territory, Driftwarren Bocans travel in small bands alongside human, elven, or Ogre caravans, trading their considerable skills at scouting, lock-work, and general problem-solving for passage and provisions. They hold no permanent loyalty to any single warren and are regarded, even by other Bocans, as the most unpredictable of their kind—liable to vanish from a caravan the moment a more interesting opportunity presents itself.
- INFRAVISION: Bòcan can see in the infrared spectrum, halving penalties for bad lighting when attacking targets that radiate heat or cold.
- MEAN: “Vicious” and “cruel” are the two adjectives most used to describe Bòcan. They subtract 1 from Persuasion rolls.
- SHORT: Bòcan average only about 4’ tall, reducing their Size (and therefore Toughness) by 1.
- SNEAKY: Bòcan quickly learn how to sneak around more ferocious masters who want to kill or harm them. They start with a d6 in Stealth, which increases their skill limit to d12+1.
- SURVIVORS: Bòcan develop numerous tactics to survive in their savage and violent environs. They start with a free Novice Edge of their choice (though they must still meet all the Edge’s Requirements).