The Hearth-Weight Compacts
The Ogre civilization formed from c. 15,000 BR as the organized refusal of the Chain-Camps: no master, but a custom carried from camp to camp that a band is fed, sheltered, and protected before it lifts, and that a cheated band will remember. See The Bridge Peoples.
Overview
The Hearth-Weight Compacts are the first major named Ogre civilization on Caeldon.
They are no kingdom and no single Ogre nation. They are a custom carried from camp to camp: burden houses, labour bargains sworn before the band, the rule that a band is fed before it works, and work-bands that move with the seasons. Through them Ogre strength is something owed for, not something taken.
The chain-camps raised a god of breaking out, Haggun the Wall-Breaker, who faded once the Compacts made refusal a custom other powers had to bear.
Civilizational Nature
The Compacts live by hearth-weight: strength must stay tied to care, or it turns into something terrible.
No compact makes every Ogre camp obey one master. It gives camps, employers, neighbours, and lords the same answers to the same hard questions. Who is fed before work begins? Who sees the burden taken up? What shelter is owed after a job that nearly killed the band? What is owed when a bridge, floodgate, wall, or winter road stands because Ogres carried what no one else could?
Burden houses keep the count of work owed and work honoured. Camp elders stand by when a band takes up dangerous labour. Hearth-keepers see that food, rest, care for the hurt, and protection for the band's children are paid, not begged. Road and flood compacts say when a band may down tools and walk away from work that would eat the camp alive.
Historical Role
The Compacts turned heavy labour into a place among other peoples.
Most Ogre quarrels begin when others need Ogre strength and then deny Ogres a place once the work is done. A lord at war wants a band to drag his siege engines and build his ramps under the defenders' arrows, then wants it gone before winter. Sieges in the lords' wars along the Headwater roads have been lost because an unfed band set down a ram halfway to the gate and walked away, and the lords who lost them remember it as treachery and the camps as justice. A town wants its flood-banks raised and its gates shut to the workers. A quarry pays in debt and hunger instead of bread and tools. The Compacts answer that a burden carried makes a debt on both sides, and that a band will remember.
In the Writers’ Guide
- Stewards and Resonants FoundationsThe Resonants
- The Bridge Peoples FoundationsOgres: The Weight and the Hearth
- The Ages of Caeldon FoundationsThe Corridor Ages
- The Threads of History FoundationsBurden and Bonded Labour
- A World in Two Halves The Medieval EraThe One Crossing
- Roads, Rivers, and Crossings The Medieval EraKeepers Without Territory
- The Civilizations of the Medieval Era The Medieval EraOrders Without Ground
- Faith in Practice The Medieval EraThe Local Cults
- The Basins and the Marches The Medieval EraThe Headwater Marches, The Broken Marches
- The Windscar The Medieval EraThe High Scars
- How the Present Was Made The Medieval EraThe Corridor Ages
- Writing in the Medieval Era The Medieval EraWho Carries the Weight, Tensions
- Barley A Bestiary of CaeldonUses and Dangers
- Beans A Bestiary of CaeldonUses and Dangers
- Glossary Foundations