The Minotaur Isles.

’Twas granted me, though,
to pierce the monster with point of sword,
with blade of battle: huge beast of the sea
was whelmed by the hurly through hand of mine.

Located off the Rygge/Court peninsula, roughly 1,000 miles at sea, lie the three Minotaur Isles of Tohyilhal, Naelahi and Bahasahm, known collectively as the Seiskeyah. On these three small islands is the entirety of the minotaur population of Saros, a community of 20,000 individuals.

The minotaurs, or dehnastsosi, as they call themselves, are of uncertain provenance. Their creation myth tells of the deity Ne’ol, who, upon seeing the imperfect beings of other deities, scoffed, and molded an ideal race from the flawed creations of his peers, demonstrating his ability to improve upon the work of others.

The minotaurs of Saros, although a successfully seafaring race, are otherwise confined to their islands and are almost never seen on the mainland. This is due in equal parts to their distance from the mainland and their universal disdain for the humanoid races, along with the unwillingness of men, elves, dwarves and halflings to deal with such a difficult race. Because of their rarity on the mainland, the very existence of minotaurs is often relegated to legend, and among the residents of Saros, minotaurs are not uncommonly the villains of bedtime stories and fairytales, bogeymen that frighten children into behaving.

Minotaurs are large and well-built, standing close to 7 feet tall. Their heads, shoulders and upper chests are furry, with bovine snouts (although with forward-facing eyes), long muzzles and pronounced prognathism. Below the neck, minotaurs are similar to muscular humans. Both males and females sprout short horns as adults, and both primary and secondary sexual characteristics are similar to that found in humans, requiring adequate clothing for both sexes.

The Seiskeyah is a tropical region, in which food is plentiful. Minotaurs subsist on a mixture of hunting, fishing, gathering and rudimentary horticulture, the majority of the subsistence work being performed by the females or by slaves.

Society
Minotaur society is a loose theocracy, founded upon the teachings of Ne’ol. Within this system, minotaurs are the select and sole perfect race on Saros, an elite group whose domain should, ideally, include the entirety of the world and its lesser residents. Anything and everything done to accomplish this goal is fair game; legend says that after creating the minotaurs, Ne’ol left them to their own devices, trusting that they’d be smart enough, strong enough and ambitious enough to work his will without—as opposed to the case of most deities—constant interference. Why tinker, after all, with a race that is already flawless?

In that sense, religion plays both a major and minor role in minotaur society; while all minotaurs strive to take advantage of the perfection granted to them by Ne’ol and their rightful dominion over lesser races, they’re also unbound by conventional religious obligations and devotion. Ne’ol says nothing about interpersonal behavior, morality or ethics, allowing his race to figure it out for themselves, and there are no temples of Ne’or nor books of his teachings.

Minotaur society is organized as a collection of regional tribes who answer to a larger tribal council. Within each tribe is a number of family groups, each being a harem of females bound to a dominant male. Such a male might have as many as 15 wives, and has earned this through a series of ceremonial bouts, bloody and usually fatal battles. In many cases, a male may assume a harem by challenging and besting a superior male, often killing his predecessor’s offspring as part of his new standing. In minotaur culture, only the strongest and most dominant are allowed stature—and with it, breeding rights.

Because of this, the Seiskeyah are overrun with males devoid of tribe or family group. Some of these submissive males form itinerant tribes of their own, groups of submissive males who bide their time until they are able to strike at a vulnerable dominant male and take over his harem. Most, however, take to the sea.

Minotaurs at Sea
Minotaurs have a vibrant maritime culture and are skilled shipbuilders, sailors and navigators. This arose as a necessity for contact between the three islands of the Seiskeyah and has resulted in a thriving pirate culture in which minotaur crews prey on ships sailing from one Southern city to another.

The rise of the Southern Empire and the resultant explosion in trade only honed the skills of minotaur pirates, who have since refined their knowledge of shipping routes as well as their talent in naval warfare. Minotaur ships, well-built and staffed by a small crew, are fast and very nimble, able to outmaneuver and outrun Southern merchant galleys and warships.

A typical minotaur pirate vessel is equipped with trebuchets or catapults armed with pairs of massive iron weights strung together with steel wire, designed to destroy the masts of their prey and prevent them from moving. Once a merchant ship is dead in the water, the minotaur crew will board, raiding the merchant ship’s wares and often executing the highest-ranking of the crew. Common sailors are often captured, later sold as chattel, who become fieldworkers, personal servants or, in the worst case, food. Then, payloads of flaming tar or oil are thrown, sinking the merchant ship.

The city-states of the South responded to minotaur piracy by increasing the capabilities and number of warships, which prowled the coastal waters and often chaperoned merchant vessels from port to port. Despite this, dozens of ships were attacked every year, most of which were vessels who did not adhere to Merchants Guild guidelines or operated outside of governmental oversight. Vessels of the Southern armada, and those they escorted, were usually avoided by minotaur ships, being large, well-armed and well-crewed. Instead, pirates took their pick of the many smaller, unescorted ships—one or two masts being easier to topple than three or four. This translated to an increased danger for non-Guild commerce by sea (and yet another incentive for Guild membership).

The minotaur threat came to a head 30 years ago, when a well-armed pan-Southern armada cornered a fleet of the best-known, most-feared and largest minotaur ships around the Seiskeyah. This armada, numbering several dozen Southern ships, faced off against hundreds of smaller minotaur vessels, with the intent of wiping them out and then invading the Seiskeyah, forever ridding the South of the minotaur threat. The attack was aborted, however, when a particularly horrible storm blew in, sinking most of the armada and most of the minotaur ships. Piracy has been nearly nonexistent since, and the South has not seen any reason to take action against the minotaurs.

Goals
Minotaurs desire the subjugation of every non-minotaur on Saros and are aghast at how little credence is paid to their race among the inhabitants of the mainland. Because their maritime dealings are mainly with humans, it’s with that race that they have the biggest quarrel, but they are aware of and hate equally the dwarves and elves, the halflings and orcs and amazons. They’re shocked that even the centaurs, a lesser, less intelligent and weaker race but one that is most similar to themselves, fail to notice them and recognize their place.

Despite the inability of the mainland races to acknowledge their superiority, the minotaurs are indeed feared, albeit trapped on the Seiskeyah, vastly outnumbered and far-flung. Ironically, their least respected members, the submissive males, are the ones who have forged a reputation for the race.