The terrifying Kalaak—a sect of savage, self-mutilating barbarians said to be in league with an ancient evil—plague the central and northern Tundra.
Longstanding rumors say that a rakshasa rajah, one of three in Sarlona, sleeps below Tashana. The savage Kalaak barbarians might be evidence of this fact. Like the Carrion Tribes of the Demon Wastes, the Kalaaks are inhuman in their savagery and have dealings with fiends.
A new and formidable threat to the Tashana, the savage human barbarians of the Kalaak swarmed from the area of the Eska Mountains and laid waste to everything in their path. Undiscriminating in their wanton destruction, the raids target shifter, human, half-giant, and even Neanderthal tribes. The few survivors of these raids describe returning to camps that are not just pillaged, but utterly savaged and desecrated, with dark references to torture and cannibalism. Some captives are cruelly injured and released; those who can still speak tell of selfmutilating barbarians using hooks and knives to sculpt their own flesh into nightmare visages.
The Kalaak are relentless in their insane killing. Entire herds of caribou are found slaughtered and mutilated, left to rot on the taiga. This terrible waste goes against the very nature of the Tashanan people, especially the shifter tribes. Recently, the Saartuk and Qiku tribes have organized scouts and sentries as the Kalaak raids travel farther south into the heart of the Tashana. But it is the northern Chuniigi who have borne the brunt of the Kalaak aggression. Desperate, the Chuniigi have in turn begun raiding Dorann dwarf clanholds and even other southern tribes, bringing a dangerous instability to the natural order of the Tundra.
Getting PCs Involved: The Kalaak raiders represent a grave threat to the order and balance of the Tundra, and a good opportunity to present truly terrifying villain for PCs. The PCs might need to cross the vast wilds of the Tundra to reach a particular destination. Perhaps they have been hired by Khorvairian agents to find and contact a remote shifter tribe in order to barter for the Tashanan goods so valued in certain circles of Khorvaire. Simply making the journey is hazardous enough, but upon arrival, the PCs find the shifters under attack or already destroyed.
Or the PCs might take up the cause of the beleaguered shifter tribes directly. The Sky Tellers are deeply concerned about the presence of the Kalaak in the Tashana. They might hire or otherwise compel the PCs to journey to the Krertok Peninsula, where the Kalaak appear to be based. There the characters find a strange and terrible relic from the Age of Demons—a gargantuan statue of an ancient rakshasa rajah, the physical remains of a demon long ago dispatched and bound. The Kalaak worship this ancient evil, whose vague stirrings of malevolent consciousness power their terrible savagery. Here PCs might uncover the true directors of the Kalaak terror—Sarlonan rakshasas, whose machinations endeavor to free the fiends of ages past.