Amazons
Both culturally and ethnically related to the other Elves of Realmgard, the Amazons inhabit the remote Land of the Phoenix in the northeast of the continent. Amazon culture has several unique aspects not found elsewhere, due at least in part to the fact that all Amazons are women and will only ever have female children.
The exact nature of Amazon heritage being exclusively female is not well understood, though it is assumed to be of magical rather than purely natural origin. Indeed, the Amazons hold that the sorcerer Angeron was responsible during his war with the Amazons, cursing the ancient Amazons to give birth to only daughters reasoning that no woman would be strong enough to defeat him.
For the record, Angeron was ultimately defeated by the Amazons.
There are two major misconceptions about Amazons in Realmgard at the large. One: that all inhabitants of the Amazon Decapolis are female and are hostile to outsiders, men. In fact, Amazon women freely associate with outsiders, both male and female and all Amazons necessarily have a non-Amazon father. Within the Decapolis, only Amazons have full citizenship and all Amazon citizens are therefore female Elves. Men and non-Amazon women are considered Perioikoi — an old Elven term meaning something like “neighbours” — free non-citizens.
The second major misconception about the Amazons is that all Amazons are full-time warriors. While the Amazon military is entirely female (notwithstanding the Perioikoi auxiliaries) and all Amazon girls do receive a level of preliminary training, young Amazons who complete this training are freely allowed to pursue whatever profession they so desire.
When writing the Amazons, my major thought was “How would an all-female warrior society actually function?” Ultimately, my conclusion was “it wouldn’t.” The next generation of Amazons needs fathers (and I mean that biologically and ontologically more so than morally…) and the easiest way to do that was have them go off to find husbands sort of like the Gerudo from Zelda.
But the bigger issue for me was that a society where everyone is a full-time warrior couldn’t function. Who builds their houses? Who farms their food? Who makes their weapons? My major inspiration to sort this out was Sparta.
In fact, even the most famous warrior society in history was not, in fact, a purely warrior society. It’s true that every Spartan citizen was a full time soldier (at least between the ages of 20 and 60), but the Spartans also had the Perioikoi (where I borrowed the term form, meaning basically the same as how I’m using it) and Helots (essentially slaves, but owned by the state rather than individuals) to carry out most of the jobs actually required to run a state — the Perioikoi had a lot of the commercial jobs and the Helots did the backbreaking agricultural work.
Notably, there were significantly more Perioikoi and Helots than Spartan citizens, due in part to the increasingly restrictive property requirements to qualify as a citizen.
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