Excerpted from "A Catalog of Races of the Starmourn Sector"
The mighty Tukkav are a large, exceptionally hairy race that hail from a fairly cold home planet and prefer cool temperatures. Their home planet - Uchyeon III - has a climate ranging from the merely temperate at the equator to uninhabitably cold, even for the Tukkav, towards the poles.
A female Tukkav starship commander.
| Home System | Uycheon |
|---|---|
| Homeworld | Uycheon III |
| Capital City | None. |
| Lifespan | About 110 years. |
| Preferred foods | They're omnivores with a wide variety in their diet, and they really enjoy drinking lapteth beer, which is a beer made from a grain - lapteth - native to their world. It's quite bitter, and considered an acquired taste by non-Tukkav. |
| Social structure | Historically, the Tukkav were a nomadic race, traveling in tribes of interrelated families across the plains and snowy forests of their homeworld, and they retain some of that tribal structure today. |
| When was spaceflight achieved? | Approximately 16,000 years ago. |
| Historical enemies |
They and the Loroi have a strong dislike for each other, nearly universally, and have been at war with each other on and off for the past 1700 years. |
| Notable rituals | Their oldest ritual - a gathering of the tribes - is called the Ouran. Every ten years, going back to time immemorial, each tribe has done their best to send some number of representatives from that tribe, of which there are thousands, to the Ouran. Tribes that roamed or later permanently dwelt close to where that decade's Ouran would be - the location chosen varied each time - sent many, and tribes from far away may send only a handful, or even just one. At the Ouran, matters of cultural importance are discussed, and major feuds between tribes are adjudicated. And, of course, there are celebrations, with a great deal of drinking and playing of the toof, their most historically significant musical instrument. The toof originates from the pre-spaceflight age of their species, and is a horn instrument, powered by breath, that has a tonal range varying from deep bass to mid-tone. |
|---|---|
| Entertainment | Toof circles, where everybody brings a toof and plays together while consuming enormous quantities of lapteth beer are popular. Hunting is another popular activity, and the Tukkav have had to resort to releasing animals bred in captivity into the wild to later hunt, as they've done such an unfortunately effective job of depopulating the wildlife of their home planet. Because this isn't really considered particularly sporting, hunting safaris to alien planets teeming with wildlife - especially dangerous wildlife - are an especially popular vacation to take. |
| Government | Their race doesn't have an overall government, except in the form of the once-every-decade Ouran, or in case of war, in which case the tribes select a single Warleader. Each tribe maintains its own military, and their shipyards are run by private conglomerations. |
| Key historical events |
About 2500 years ago, there was a great war between alliances of tribes, who marshaled their starship fleets to go to war over a dispute about access to the homeworld. The Tukkav race had grown far too populated to fit on Uchyeon III comfortably, and an alliance of tribes on the planet declared the world closed to those tribes living on colonized planets or on space stations. The Home War, as it was known, was eventually won by those tribes living on Uchyeon, and in the aftermath, many of the resources of the defeated were seized. Today, a small remnant of these defeated Tukkav live on as bitter outsiders with an intense hatred of most of their own race. They call themselves the Exiles, and are scattered about Starmourn, often found working as manual laborers, slaves, or, occasionally functioning as pirate gangs on the starways. The other Tukkav call them names much less polite, including the Rejected or, more colloquially, 'crinkers.' |
| Sources of wealth | The Tukkav build excellent starship superstructures and also own many mining corporations that strip the resources from planets too cold to be comfortable for most other races. |
| Religion | Many of them have a kind of residual animism that leads them to revere that which they hunt, both for sport and meat. |
A male Tukkav warrior.
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