> Can anyone explain what the Ygg's Island Vikings, variant Orlanthi, are
> doing waaaaay over there, far away from the main body of Orlanthi culture?
Their variance is proportional to their distance. Most Orlanthi aren't sea-reaving Viking types who worship Ygg (god of the Winter Sea Storm) or nail living wolves to the figureheads of their longships, after all.
The Barbarian Belt does stretch along the Western Rockwoods (cf. Aggar, Talastar, Brolia, then through Worion and Charg into Syanor and Oranor), though many peoples in Fronela have been converted to Syanoran Malkionism (where some of the Old Gods are recognisable as Saints, or still worshipped in the Highlands of Jonatela). IMG, the barbarians are different in different parts of the world, but even the Yggs folk are still "recognisably" Orlanthi.
> Has anyone done any background on them?
Canonical article by Greg Stafford in Tales #10, the Sea Special. Joerg will have some good stuff on the Ygglinga (his coinage), too. And I imagine Sandy has something from his current campaign's background.
> Has anyone done anything on the Vadeli? Their culture and how likely
> someone sailing the seas around Loskalm is to encounter them?
For their culture, think of Moloch-worshipping Phoenicians or Carthaginians, with a splash of Frank Herbert's "dirty, stinking Tleilaxu" and a dash of mediaeval anti-Semitism (sleazy traders, confined to ghettoes in the Western port cities, accused of doing horrible things to captured children). The hatred is justified, in the case of the Vadeli: they devour their children to obtain immortality, and commit other atrocious and evil acts as well. In "How the West was One" we gave Abdelcar, the Vadeli Observer, the ability to clone other characters (needing blood samples, or a pound of flesh, or some such raw material), grow homunculi, etc.
In person, a Brown Vadeli (the most common caste, Fishermen and Sailors) is normally oily and self-deprecating: you could meet them on the docks of Sog City, or in the Vadelot quarter (where Honest Babdil's Virgin Megastore is a prominent Vadeli-run local slave market: they cream off the most sellable refugees from the shipments they dump in Sog). They are rich, now, as their vessels dominate the sea lanes to Pamaltela giving the Vadeli a practical monopoly on the import of certain exotic foreign goods. They are also treacherous, sly, devious, grasping, slimy, self-effacing, downright evil, etc. etc.
There are also the monstrous and inhuman Red Vadeli warriors, terrifyingly brutal in battle, bloodthirsty, murderous and cannibalistic. Plucky Loskalmi ships are swarmed and gutted by their sudden raids (Sandy posted stats here recently): I doubt they could be fought off by normal means (better to swim for it, play dead, fire your own ship, or do something similarly dramatic). It may not be common knowledge that the two races are related, if that suits your campaign. They may not even be working together (yet), in the absence of the Blue Vadeli ruling race, who were fortunately exterminated by Zzabur's genocidal magic before the Dawn of Time. IMG, there will probably be a renascent Vadeli thalassocracy in the next few years... you can't keep a good villain down!
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