Pictish Wilderness

• Population: 600,000
• Capital: None
• Ruler: None (various chieftains and shamans)
• Major cities: None (small villages)
• Resources: Game (antelopes, deer, giant elk, panthers, wolves, bears), furs, rare herbs
• Imports: Steel weapons
• Historical Equivalent: Late Stone Age Man 
• Religion: Jhebbal Sag, Gullah, Jhil

The Pictish Wilderness is the far western region of the world continent, lying west of Aquilonia, north of Zingara, and south of Vanaheim. The Aquilonian frontier of Pictland seems to have fluctuated between Thunder River in the east and Black River in the west. The land in between, Westermarck, is rather optimistically deemed a part of Aquilonia.

The coast of Pictland, some 1300 miles long, has not a single port city. It is the domain of the Sea-Land Picts, who dwell in small villages of a lower cultural level than their inland brethren. They do not go to sea, but scavenge the strand for walrus and whale carcasses, which yield ivory that can be traded.

Interior Pictland is best described as a "howling wilderness". A slowly rising coastal plain, it is covered with a vast marine forest with mild winters, broadleaf to the south, mixed with conifers to the north -- humid, rank, and tangled with briars, thick, shrubby undergrowth, ivy, and other vines.

The saber-tooth tiger and other large carnivores such as panthers, venomous pythons, wolves, cave-bears, and dragons make life somewhat hectic for the forest-dwelling Picts. The woodland glades are the home of elephants, antelopes, and deer, including the giant elk. The abundance of fur-bearers encourage the Picts (who go more or less naked) to hunt pelts and trade them to the civilized people in the East.

Although Pictland is deemed a wilderness by the Hyborians, it is a virtual paradise to the hunting-and-gathering Picts, who have thrived there during the millenia since the Cataclysm.