The Chezuchi are a race living in the northern latitudes and the permafrost, and masters of survival in the cold. They are hunters and herders with an extremely high opinion of themselves: few races indeed could live at a temperature of minus one hundred.
They are unwelcoming.
For all that, the Chezuchi are badly taken with alcohol and will go a long way for it. It works on them like the strongest narcotic: whole villages sometimes drink themselves into ruin, working for one criminal outfit or another and taking bottles of the coveted liquid as payment.
And so on Chezuchi planets alcohol is banned in the harshest terms, while in their religion one who dies drunk cannot enter paradise.
The religion of the Chezuchi may be described as shamanism — with the difference that they worship not the spirits of nature but the spirits of the planet, which they reckon to be living beings.
Migration to other planets is no rarity among them, and the Chezuchi always choose worlds with a cold climate. Often they carry out Chezuchi-forming as they go — importing the sparse fauna of their homeworld.
A Chezuch is a blue-faced creature with a white mane and deep-set eyes; they dress in fur parkas and quilted coats, and go bare-faced even in the frost.
The illustration shows a fighter of the Chezuchi tribal militia: the only element of uniform he has is a pair of camouflage trousers, and the tribal armies fought one another rather more often than any outside enemy.
Below, with captions, are a shamaness and a warrior in scale armour with a crossbow, the traditional weapon of this race, and a Chezuch from a northern settlement — checkered quilting, braids and a pipe.
