Settlements

Adult Travelers live generally quiet and remote lives centered on their focal work and their immediate family; their mate(s) and children primarily. This changes as younger adult Travelers begin their rites and begin to walk the Trail with the Lost Travelers during their coming of age period. The parents of a young traveler who ventures out to join the Lost Travelers on their path will set aside their settled life to rejoin the nomads temporarily, and use this period to focus more on spending time with their loved ones and to prepare them for a life well lived, supporting them when needed, while still providing their young more freedom and autonomy in the wilds.

Despite the tendency toward nomadic or small family-based remote settlements, for a few months of each year most travelers migrate and gather to set up large encampments in their festival grounds. Their shelters consist of often-elaborate tents, the leather or cloth sheeting carried from site to site on their backs as they travel; doubling as a sort of clothing made of exceedingly rare and valuable fabrics, sometimes with precious metals woven in as well. Timber frames for their tents are typically left in place at the northern and southern festival grounds. Alternatively, some Travelers will reside in nearby caves, beneath rocky outcroppings, or simply with no shelter at all depending on the region, and their preferences and means. More powerful Travelers who operate as mortal vessels to the gods tend to enchant their festival lodgings to become large and elaborate, luxurious dwellings within what appears to a simple, small tent from the outside, to better entertain friends, family and their followers.

The encampments are usually grouped by families and followings into ‘neighborhoods’, and an encampment can span many square miles. The travelers are open and eager to trade with other races, and their encampments will frequently be visited by the The Lesser Tribes of Ir'resthel for this very purpose, which lends to the common name of their largest, summer-long encampment and festival being known simply as the “Summer Market”. Travelers will often trade in exchange for exquisite fabrics and other finery such as jewelry or regalia.