Vices

The most common drinks in all the Lands are mild cider and small beer. These contain very little alcohol, and are not considered vices anywhere outside of Vye. Kvass is popular in Gasmithon, with most clans having some ancestral recipe they claim is superior to all others. Stronger ales and ciders are common only in Jorvik.

The primary producer of wine is Acadia. This forms one of their major exports as they are not generally a heavy-drinking people, though it is an important factor in many religious ceremonies. Jorvik has a national pride for a form a mead brewed from certain roasp hives - most others find it unbearably sweet on its own, and use it only as a flavoring.

Acadians are also known for their brandy. This is both for export and to fortify sailors during long, lonely expeditions.  Whiskey is distilled wherever and whenever an abundance of grain presents itself - it is easier to store and trade than the raw harvest. The strangest and strongest liquors are traded by the Glist on their annual south-bound journey.

Many farms grow small plots of tobacco, but it is not a popular indulgence in the Lands. Its consumption was nearly eradicated before the onset of the Slow Burn, and there was little incentive to carry forward its legacy or cultivation during the hard years that followed. Marijuana and several engineered descendents, on the other hand, grows easily and wild throughout the Lands. Its use is outlawed only in Vye, though the dominant clans of Gasmithon frown on it, as do the more stringent orders of Acadia.

Draze is available everywhere, if for nothing else than its medicinal value. A universal image in the Lands is that of a small clutch of old men perched on some porch or bench, watching the world go by through a haze of oily smoke.

Popular with the criminal, the fashionable, and the desperate is gamey, a milky, resinous substance which can be smoked or dissolved under the tongue or, for the true devotee, under the eyelid. The drug gives a period of heightened alertness lasting several hours. Perceptions of risk or danger are also dulled - there are numerous urban legends involving a gang leader or borderlands warlord tainting his troops' rations with gamey. Withdrawal usually manifests as exhaustion coupled with the inability to sleep. The resin itself is derived from an illicit strain of roasp and is available in almost any city, though most seems to flow from the inner Borderlands.

One of the most hated, feared, and desired substances in the lands is known as halcyon. This sky-hued, egg-shaped tablet casts one's mind back to an idealized version of their early youth in which they laugh with their first playmates, are welcomed and protected by loved-ones long dead, and all the promise and hope of a life not-yet-lived stretch out before them. The customized euphoria lasts a subjective day or so, while only an hour or two pass in the Lands.

Most wake tear-soaked and willing to do nearly anything to return to the vision. Halcyon, however, is a rare and carefully-guarded thing, each pill costing several times its weight in gold. Those that peddle it target those weary of power - those who long for a brief escape, whose childhood has had time to luster in the years, and whose pride lets them think they will be stronger than their own mind's wishes. Many Borderlands have seen their wealth and hope drained by a once-charismatic leader who succumbed to the lure of their past, and Jorvik has grown to expect a halcyon scandal within the senate at least once a generation. The exact origin of the stuff has never been traced, but there seem to be links to the Autumn People, and, along with the already disturbing implications, the viscerids.