The Merchant's Belt is the most common name given to this asteroid ring. Countless inhabited asteroids ranging from size A to size D exist here. Due to the vast area of the belt (two orbits on the planetary display chart), hundreds of different communities, cultures and small civilizations thrive on isolated asteroids or in clusters.
Please do not use all of the asteroid belt but submit as many asteroid based entries as you like. This is a highly populated and diverse belt. Just remember, you don't know who your neighbors will be.
The region called Stonefield is a section of the belt is quite vast in size (it takes up about six spaces on a Planetary Display chart). The region is warm, very poor in miniral resources and has no asteroids larger than size B, but they are tightly packed and many have small amounts of air and/or water. Never enough, however, to support a colony or very rarely enough to resupply a ship.
Many creatures have adapted to life in this isolated asteroid-desert region. All share the ability to conserve their air and water supplies and have developed some way to travel from one asteroid to the next The foundation of the ecosystem is several species of insect that live of the lichens and other small plant and fungi life. When they gather in great numbers, they form a swarm (use statistic for Insect Swarm, Grasshopper or Locusts). Higher life-forms include various types of bats, asteroid fishers (Cave Fishers that use their filiment line to travel among the asteroids), asteroid crickets (Insect; Cave Crickets), bombardier beetles (who use their explosive emitions to propel themselves between asteroids), asteroid diggers (Ankhegs), land urchins, gloomwing worms and moths, ettercaps, and space cloakers (Cloakers). There are even living asteroids that shape many of the normal ones to their needs (treat as a Galeb Duhr). At the top of the food chain are the hatori (Lesser Hatori only) which have evolved a natural means of travel by the use of tubes in the ends of the flippers that release controlled bursts of compressed air.
The only natural enemy of the Hatori are the Sha'Laiein, a primitive human (Barbarian/Nomad) culture that has adapted to life on the belt. Sages believe they are decedents of an ancient Spelljammer ship crash, but today they survive in the Crystalribbon without benefit of spelljamming equipment or major magic. The Sha'Laiein are at home in zero gravity and can easily adjust to shifting gravity planes. They can also slow their respiration to use much less air and augment this with herbs and spores they harvest that act much like the magic item: Air Spores (Tome of Magic, page 132). They also use slender harpoons made of hatori bone and attached to asteroid fisher filament to maneuver among the closer asteroids. The Sha'Laiein tribes are at home in their hostile environment, but do not adjust well to outside, civilized influences.
