Dencgha Oasis

Place

Place Name:

Dencgha Oasis

Biome:

Oasis

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

Dencgha is an oasis, but the desert that stretches for miles around has also received the name Dencgha, since the oasis at its heart is more important by far than any other place within the desert. All the cities in Dencgha would vanish instantly if the oasis of Dencgha ever dried up. The oasis is fed by a spring; this spring produces enough water to feed five small rivers, each of which trails off in a different direction. The first river and the largest of the five is the Tatire river, which flows to the north — it is named after Tatire, of course, the city that it runs through and is controlled by.

The second largest river flows lazily to the south, and is called the Druskin river. When it leaves the desert of Dencgha, it joins with a larger river that is a popular trade route; merchants sometimes sail up the Druskin river to trade with the inhabitants of the desert. The other three rivers that flow from the oasis have no names, but they all run to the west. Due to this abundance of water, the west side of Dencgha is the most densely populated. The Isskel Kin'toni Clan has uncontested claim over the desolate eastern half of Dencgha.

This is because there’s nothing over there worth having, other than the desolate city in which the Isskel used to live. This city, once called the Isskel City, has since been abandoned, because a sixth river that used to trickle through it has dried up entirely. The members of the Isskel clan have taken up the nomadic life and begun roaming further west. They took everything of value they had with them, but who knows? If you fancy yourself a treasure hunter you might be able to find something of interest in the old, dusty Isskel City. It has barred timber gates which you won’t be able to get through easily, but the walls themselves are nothing but packed dust at this point.

A sturdy rock or tool will let you break through into the city quickly. (Or you can just use one of the alternate entrances that other treasure hunters have already made. Still, smashing a wall down is fun and well worth your time, if you ask me.) The Isskel clan’s wanderings are bringing them closer and closer to the oasis, since that’s where all the zu’aan villages are. If they try to claim the villages south of the oasis as their territory, that’s all well and good. But if they go north, they’ll find a both a rival kin’toni clan, and Tatire, the largest and best-defended city in Dencgha.

Neither the Ivoro clan nor the zu’aan of Tatire would be thrilled to have another kin’toni clan in the region — although, admittedly, the Ivoro clan has had some history with the Isskel clan and might be thrilled for the opportunity to greet their brethren kin’tonis and then stab them in the back. Who knows. Tatire mostly keeps within its own walls, though. The other zu’aan villages to the south have no alliance with them and receive no aid from their well-armed soldiers. A bit of a shame, really. The villages and traders on the Druskin river could have struck a pretty good deal with Tatire, if they were fewer miles apart.

Plants

There’s plenty of plants to be found by the oasis of Dencgha, but you’ll be a little hard pressed to find anything growing out in the wasteland proper. Still, it does sometimes rain even in the wasteland of Dencgha and there are plants growing out in that wasteland willing to capitalize on this opportunity. The first of these wasteland plants is actually a wasteland crop and a wasteland grain. Brunth is a simple grain, neither particularly nutritious nor particularly tasty, but it will prevent you from starving, and it does produce a surprising amount of flour.

So long as you eat other things alongside it, brunth will keep you alive in the desert. It’s a tough plant. It can survive basically indefinitely without water — though of course it will not grow without water. After a rainfall in the wasteland, it’s fairly common to find large patches of brunth growing where it seemed there had only been sand and stone before. (These wild brunth plants are the descendants of domesticated brunth crops, which the Isskel clan used to farm out in the wasteland.) The other plant that manages to go successfully without any water whatsoever for long periods of time is the narth.

These small purple flowers grow quickly after a rainfall and disappear just as quickly. A few minutes after the rain stops, the narths rise up out of the ground. A few hours after they rise up out of the ground, they wither to nothing and disappear, having flowered, reproduced, and scattered about a hundred of their seeds into the wind. narth seeds look a lot like sand, but they taste quite sweet. If you manage to catch them before they fall into the sand and disappear, you can get quite the dessert. The desert plants that live by the oasis are significantly less hardy than the ones that live in the wasteland.

Take the bentoro Tree for an example. It straight up falls over when it gets too old, because its roots are too delicate to hold up that much weight. Falling over is how it spreads its seeds, though, so I suppose one can’t laugh that much at its demise. bentoro wood is a useful wood, too, so I suppose it’s actually pretty convenient that it chops itself down for you. Brunth and narths grow by the oasis too, of course. But they have to grow in places where they won’t get bullied by the taath. taaths, however, love growing in places where other plants grow, and die out wherever there’s no other plants.

Their genes contain no instructions for growing roots, and the only way they can gather water is by stealing it from other plants. It creates an interesting cycle of taaths chasing the brunth and narths, then the brunth and narths moving on, and the taaths having to keep chasing the brunth and narths to survive… then the brunth and narths reappear in the places that the taaths have vacated. Then the cycle repeats.

Animals

There are numerous little amphibious critters that live in the oasis; they’re called boysts. Boysts seem innocent enough, but a closer examination yields some strange observations. Boysts are small and red, spending much of their time sitting in the sun. Their back legs are much larger than their front legs, but their front legs are much longer than their back legs. The back pair they use for swimming, and the front pair for steering. They eat insects, mostly, but they’ll gladly eat up any small crumbs of zu’aan food that they find.

Twice a year, the females lay eggs, but they then proceed to ignore them, and won’t stir to protect them, even if a tiny fish comes along and begins munching on them, right beneath her nose. So far, so good. boysts seem like an ordinary enough animal. But then you notice that they have a tendency to crawl into the dwellings of zu’aan and kin’tonis, and then just stare at them. And they do this in large groups. There are few things more unnerving than entering your house and finding about three dozen boysts sitting on your carpet, just staring at you.

If you kill one of their number, they don’t even react. If you kill all of them, they don’t even react. You can shove them out of your house and throw them back into the oasis, but they have a tendency to just keep coming back. No one knows why they do this. Some people want to kill all boysts and hunt them to extinction. But other people have developed a liking for boyst meat, and look on the boysts invading their homes as free meals. Another equally numerous but far less suspicious animal is the aatra'dyal. Though they are a little bit suspicious.

They leave a clear mark on the sand wherever they start digging into it and wherever they exit it, and you can find these marks in the oddest of places, including your basement. Aatra'dyals are small furry critters, with small claws and small teeth and small ears but long snouts. They tend to be roughly the same colour as sand. They can swim but are not often seen doing so. aatra'dyals mate for life; when they have babies, the babies ride around on their parents until they can walk on their own. But for their tendency to dig and destroy things.

Which no one has ever really succeeded in driving out of them, aatra'dyals make good pets: they don’t carry many diseases, they don’t bite, they eat mostly insects, and they’re friendly enough to zu’aan (and kin’tonis) that they know. They also weave themselves quite cosy nests; occasionally, if provided with the right materials, aatra'dyals can weave an extremely fine cloth that sells for a good price. But they only make it occasionally. Most of the time they just scrumple up the strings given to them into a big fat pile and then sleep on it like a dragon.

Fortunately, it’s only slightly difficult to unravel the nest and get your pet aatra'dyal to try it again.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Isskel Kin'toni Clan

Place

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Dencgha Oasis

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.