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Plains Smilohound — VESSELBORN Codex

Plains Smilohound

Ursocyon Campestris

The Plains Smilohound is a wild pack-dwelling predator of Inland Thazvaar's open plains, descended from domesticated lines that reverted to feral behavior. Intermediate in size between the Greater Smilohound and Lesser Smilohound, its short broad skull, reinforced jaw, and compact musculature are adapted for endurance hunting across sunbaked broken terrain, with a single-layered ochre and stone-gray coat providing camouflage in grassy habitats. It hunts large herbivores in coordinated packs using high-pitched yelps, barks, and long-distance calls, rarely engaging humans unless provoked or territorial.

They are often kept starved and caged by inland pirates who release them during village raids, a practice that exploits the animal's pack aggression without requiring the pirates to risk direct combat. Integral to Thazvaari nomadic life as symbols of unity and strength, the Plains Smilohound's reversion from domesticated origins underscores that even the animals of the inland refuse to stay tamed.

VESSELBORN Codex — Plains Smilohound

About Vesselborn

Vesselborn is the story of Geba — a world that has carried an empire for six thousand years.

It begins with Vaer’karesh, who unites five nations into the first empire and fixes a common language and law. Across the ages, the empire fights and finally breaks Thazvaar, welcomes Jeyrha through engineering and diplomacy, and liberates Berinu by choice. In Ngorrhal, the people of the mountain passes lose their ancestral name and are permanently renamed the Frost Sentinels, whose strength helps secure imperial rule. The Haavu cannon systems cement that dominance.

At its height, the empire spans continents and raises relay towers that bind cities, coasts, and passes into one network. Assassinations and civil wars follow — the Fracture — but the answer is not a vacuum. The Shadow Rule forms from imperial networks and manufactures peace, ending the warlord broadcasts and taking the world back from collapse. They are the empire made quiet: continuity without ceremony.

Today, the Shadow Rulers still govern from the background while the Energy Wars — covert struggles over power grids and relays in uncivilized regions — decide who controls energy, transport, and culture.

Stories range from relay-field defenses and inland recoveries to city governance and frontier resettlement; from rail lines and air programs that stitch regions together to festivals and work crews where culture and politics collide; from Frost Sentinel memory to families choosing the safety of hub clearings or the risk beyond the grid.

This is Geba.
It began in silence.
It has not yet ended.