Lure of the Deep Wilderness

From the Spirit Panel

Most early Dahan settlements clustered along the coasts. From time to time, a handful of residents would get a distant look in their eyes and stride off into the heart of the island, no pleading or reason dissuading them from seeking some distant call only they could hear.

Many of these involuntary wanderers survived and settles together in time. This may have hastened the First Reckoning, as they relied much more on agriculture than did their fishing bretheren along the coast.

A few wanderers spoke of finding the Spirit which called them ever-further inward, in voices of wonder mingled with fear. But most never even saw it, only felt its distant beckoning.

=Design Lore=

Lure of the Deep Wilderness can in some ways be seen as a counterpart to Ocean's Hungry Grasp: it calls humans towards the deep centers of its power, in one case the depths of the ocean, in the other inland areas far from the shore. There the similarity ends: where Ocean's Hungry Grasp is an embodiment of the seas' hunger to consume the land and those who dwell upon it, Lure of the Deep Wilderness is an embodiment of nature's allure and danger intertwined: the desire to seek what lies further in, and the consequences of so doing. For the purposes of fighting the Invaders, most of those consequences are bad ones, but that is not an inextricable truth about it: wanderlust may lead to good things as well as bad.

A digression: Spirit Island generally presents Spirits in a way such that you see the sides of them best suited to the struggle against the Invaders. However, many Spirits have portions of their nature that aren't very relevant to the conflict, so they don't get much mechanical representation. For instance, A Spread of Rampant Green could (perhaps) cause *only* crops to grow abundantly, creating plenty of food for Invaders or Dahan. But the effect wouldn't be enough to support the Dahan the way that River Surges in Sunlight does, and wouldn't be especially useful against the Invaders, so it doesn't have any rules associated with it. If the Spirit doubled down and hyper-focused on that part of itself, it might be able to expand / empower / better control that crop growth enough to make it relevant - perhaps entice Invaders to change where they try to settle - but in the process, other portions of itself would be neglected and become weaker. Mechanically, this trade-off would most likely be captured in an Aspect for the Spirit. End of digression!

For its part, Lure of the Deep Wilderness likes humans, but not in a way that humans find especially comfortable. Arguably it prefers the acquisition more than the actual having (though it finds both satisfying), and while this tilt is probably a boon to those called away by waking dreams (if they survive, they're likely to break free at some point), it's still not something that makes the Dahan want to have it as a neighbor.

(There are, in the way of humans, exceptions: a scattering of families and people hope to be called on such a journey, seeing it as something of a rite of passage. Their neighbors are pretty skeptical, but hey, if it keeps Lure of the Deep Wilderness from snaring their relatives with a vision-call, they'll happily live with it. And sometimes, Lure of the Deep Wilderness will call an entire village during that village's moving-time; the Dahan tend to find this far less objectionable than individuals being lured away. Partly because it doesn't involve the painful bereavement of loved ones suddenly walking off into the jungle possibly never to return, and partly because villages called in this fashion tend to find excellent sites for their next settlement - often previously unknown ones.)

Unlike the Dahan, the Invaders have no agreements with or knowledge of the Spirits, which means from Lure of the Deep Wilderness' perspective they're entirely fair game. At first, there was no malice in its call, but as the threat the Invaders posed became clear, it began acting with more deliberation and anger.