The geonids under Alfheim

The Shadow Elves don't have many intelligent peers down here. The walking dead shamble through the south, and Rockhome holds the east. Northeast (and up), is the Yellow Orkia. Southwest at Losetrel we're told of aranea; but these spiderfolk might have squeezed in from above, or even through a dimensional gate to the Sixty Sixth Layer (grognards know what THAT is). As with the Known World map, north and west are terra incognita. Southeast is our opportunity: here, "south of Alfmyr", the setting puts the geonids.

Geonids were introduced in X5, inhabiting the Great Pass between the great western desert and the Hos-lamic Republic Hule. They are Stone Age sentients, roaming in bands of 2-12 under a shaman. Permanent-ish "lairs" run 30-80, hinting at the classic Neander / Palaeolithic extended-family clan model. Their ethic is "Chaotic" but without real evil in their description, which presents them tortoise-like and defensive. If outsiders are fighting any, it's usually because they've wandered into geonid homes. Over the X4-5 series, shamanistic humanoids fit well within the story theme.

For the Shadowlands, these geonids have been plagued by the Lost Souls. It happens that clerics do well against the undead, when Stone Age tech fails - when all tech fails. That is why these rockmen have evolved their own theocracy. Also, why they haven't graduated to metallurgy. The shamans use magic to fuse the local rocks into the shells of their young, when they reach adulthood; that is when they acquire their fabled armour-class.

The (bad-)Lands of Doog is the geonid home, where the clans meet. A splinter (and illiterate) tribe might further be indigenous to the Shards, bisecting the cavern southwest of Rastignac. The geonids in the great western pass have, also, splintered from the Doog base, floating downstream and then taking a route we know not. Small parties and maybe additional clans wander whatever rocky caverns are south of the Gilfyn. And I washed a symbiotic tribe ashore Ilrondal.

Geonids, at least here, are not savages. They own a literature. It is on stone and parchment, and scrimshawed onto their own calcio-silicate shells. Daily records are on clay: ostraca and tablets. Personal property is gemstone and ceramic, and organic. If geonids have metal treasures, these are the property of the shamans. Metals are in vaults not for their own sake, but for barter with metal-age races. The central geonid library is in Doog, as is the treasury.

Other authors have dealt with their ecology, where they are close to the surface, which at least reveals their biology as carbon. Down here they don't eat horses, nor anything taboo to the elves nor - east of here - to the dwarves. Geonids are not so belligerent or fecund that they present a threat.

Unfortunately for their relations with the elves, the geonids' shamans do use soul-crystals. It is possible that a rogue shaman aided in corrupting some of those crystals which stud the Crown as "rubies".

One low-Expert-level adventure, set before the Crown is found (or made), is a struggle against a bad shaman with his bad rubylike crystal. Then the crystal must be purged - 15th-level Shallatariel helps with this. If all ends well, some peace is hammered out between the shamans of each race.

Once the Crown is donned, the elves have a refugee-crisis.