Matriarchs Among the Yugsalanti

A companion piece to our Fortune Tellers edition

Yugsalanti families are not all matriarchal, but some are.  Culturally only the women become fortune tellers, because the men can make money in other ways.  Typically, it is the uglier girls who are taught fortune telling; they are told this is because they are smart, but more honestly it is because they cannot earn as much as “dancers”.

For a male to be taught any magical arts, he would have to show that he was gifted in magic before anyone would “waste” the time to train him.  The assumption by outsiders is that fortune tellers are women, so few customers will want to visit a male fortune teller.  This doesn’t mean that they are useless to the family.  More often, they can teach a somewhat clever girl to become a fortune teller, but if they find such a talented young man, they will have someone teach him a more robust style of magic, such as necromancy or one of the other schools of magic.

For those families that are run by their women, the number of fortune tellers is often quite high.  Because the women are the main earners, these families tend to congregate in the major cities.  Outsiders may never know how many of the fortune tellers in their home towns belong to the same family, as it doesn’t help the women to allow their customers to know when secrets might be shared with other fortune tellers.

In these families, the men are quite often guardians and protectors of the women.  After all, these women are learning the past, present and futures of their customers; blackmail is almost certain to follow.  Though not every matriarchal fortune telling family practices these con games and extortions, most of them do.


This post was written as part of the upcoming The Miscellaneous Anniversary Edition aka All About Everything Else, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Every other Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing small items that didn’t make it into earlier editions, mainly due to size.
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