Fales take hospitality very seriously. There is a lot of ritual attached to hosting visitors and visiting fale homes. To violate any of the rituals of hospitality is an act of war. You can't enter a fale home without invitation and once inside, you can't leave until he feeds you an oatmeal-like hommot porridge. If you offend the host, you've declared war on him. If the host offends you, you can take that as a declaration of war. One way to keep an enemy from hurting you is to invite him to your home and treat him like an honored guest.
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The southeastern continent of Auerbach (aw-er-bak) is thin, jagged, surrounded by islands of various shapes and sizes, and shaped like a noodle someone carelessly tossed on the floor. It is primarily temperate rainforest, with a lot of white sand beaches and coral reefs at the edges.
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The farawads' cycle of working days, their 'week', is 17 days long. It consists of three 4-day spans of working days separated by 1 day off between them, then a 3-day 'weekend'. The middle day of this 3-day span is known as 'Sfallad', and is traditionally a day when farawads get together in public areas to have big parties with food and entertainment. The other days of the cycle are simply numbered from 1 to 16, starting with the day after Sfallad. The other four days off are thus numbered 1, 6, 11 and 16, while the rest are working days.
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There is a species of Rock Leech that is sapient and social. They are known as Leechmen. They resemble anthropomorphocized Rock Leeches; with four arms that end in clawed hands rather than eight arms that end in scythes. They balance on their nest of tentacles in an upright posture.
edited 28th Mar '15 11:56:25 PM by dvorak
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Only farawads, tanaigs, and fales have souls, which is why they don't "stay" dead like other creatures in the world. When zombies, vampires, or ghosts perish, their souls merge with the disembodied spirits of the gods, becoming something like saints or angels. Souls that go to Umbrus are eaten and cease to exist altogether.
edited 29th Mar '15 12:05:10 AM by nekomoon14
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
The World's Least Powerful Man
It is possible for soulless sapients to be reincarnated as a farawad, a tanaig, or a fale depending on what deity they worship. They might not have souls, but they do have consiousness.
edited 29th Mar '15 12:54:43 AM by dvorak
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The sturmurrek is a common species of tree found in the forests of Auerbach, especially near the coast. Its trunk and branches are covered in rough gray bark, with small ridges running along them in a spiraled pattern. Inside, the wood is divided into two distinct types. The 'core' of the trunk or branch (extending from the center about halfway out to the surface) consists of a very hard, dark yellow wood that provides the tree's main structural integrity. Outside that, the rest is a softer, tan-colored wood through which the tree's water and nutrients run.
The tree's dark green needles grow thickly from its twigs, also in a spiral pattern that matches the underlying spiral in the bark, and are angled back along each twig toward its base. The sturmurrek's seeds actually come from its needles: Occasionally, at random, a needle will grow into a seed pod, becoming larger than the other needles and taking on a flattened spiral shape with several small, black seeds along its interior. Eventually it drops off, corkscrewing through the air (due to the aerodynamics of its spiral shape) and falling to the ground.
Sturmurreks can grow up to 60 meters in height, although most specimens are much shorter. The sturmurrek's core wood is sought after for construction and artisanal purposes. The outer wood is too weak to be useful for building much of anything, but makes decent firewood when dried.
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Do they get souls upon reincarnation, then? (You might want to expand on exactly what 'reincarnation' entails, for that matter.)
edited 29th Mar '15 1:18:55 AM by Meklar
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The sandy desert of Focraun is home to a species called behemoths. Behemoths are like whales that "swim" through the sands. They prey on herds and caravans traveling across the desert, swallowing them whole. They are quite large and can easily fit fifty lemaks in their mouths at once. Behemoth meat is so expensive that only incredibly wealthy merchants or nobles can afford to eat it - this meat is tough but sweet.
edited 29th Mar '15 2:20:32 PM by nekomoon14
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
The World's Least Powerful Man
Soulless reincarnation works by way of a deity placing the not-person's consiousness into a foetus of it's chosen race-having a soul is an inherent quality of being a farawad/tanaig/fale. The consiousness' personality is retained, but the knowledge is lost. For all intents and purposes, they're a new person, but kind of like that soulless friend of it's parents who wanted to know about these god people and why they're so important a few years ago. A faithful desciple will be rewarded with a good afterlife, soul or not.
This leads me to ask a question: How will we settle Armed with Canon things?
edited 29th Mar '15 1:59:54 AM by dvorak
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As the Sun crosses the sky every day, shortly before noon it passes behind one of Umbrus's outstretched arms, dimming its light for about 40 minutes, at the peak of which some 99% of the light is blocked. This daily eclipse (and the associated span of time in the day) is known as 'umbragheld', and is considered by worshippers of the other gods to have connotations of evil and misfortune.
edited 29th Mar '15 12:17:59 PM by Meklar
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I was assuming there would be a mix of familiar and original species, so I just threw camels in there. I mainly wanted to focus on the behemoth, but we could swap out the camels for another species adapted for desert life.
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Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit", the way I did with leeches. The animal might be called a "camel," but you'd never guess to look at it.
Let's go with "lemak(s)".
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
The World's Least Powerful Man
as you wish.
There are selective breeding programs for tame rock leeches. Breeders go for things like more powerful acid that can be spat farther, slimmer profiles, longer claws on fewer limbs, more powerful jaws, etc. This has led to a rock leech the size of a small house-dragon at full size. The breed has two disproportionately large jaws and scything arms, and acid saliva that can bore through a farawad's armor like it was soggy cardboard.
edited 29th Mar '15 6:53:16 PM by dvorak
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The tanaig have a recipe for something known as a 'hommot-slee'. This involves submerging raw hommot nuts in a solution of water and rock leech acid and then allowing them to ferment. Once the originally brown hommot nuts have changed to a navy blue color over the course of a couple months, the liquid around them is discarded and they are dried. These hommot-slees don't have a great deal of nutritional value, but they contain a chemical that has a psychoactive effect on tanaigs, giving them a calm, relaxing feeling and making everything seem more humorous than usual.
2, I was already typing up an imaginary creature to fit the role. Do you want it, or are we going with camels under that name?
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Go for it! This is a collab, after all!
Hommot-slee is deadly poison to most other races, since tanaigs are the only non-rock leech creature that can safely imbibe their acid.
edited 29th Mar '15 3:03:40 PM by dvorak
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There's no reason behemoths can't eat lemaks and whatever else you cooked up too. We need replacements for horses and donkeys, cattle and sheep, all that kinda stuff.
Leviathans are aquatic relatives of behemoths that live in the depths of the oceans but occasionally swim closer to the coasts to prey on small ships and large fish. Leviathans are slightly arrowhead-shaped. Like behemoths, leviathans are sometimes hunted for their meat, which is more tender than behemoth meat and oily enough that it makes its own grease when cooked.
edited 29th Mar '15 3:20:16 PM by nekomoon14
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
2, Okay then.
The lemak (for which the plural is 'lemakki') is a hulking four-footed reptilian creature native to the plains of Focraun. It is reddish-brown in color and looks sort of like a giant fat iguana, reaching up to 4m in length from nose to tail (the distance from the front to hind legs being about half this), 1.5m high along its back, and weighing as much as 1 tonne. Along the animal's side between its shoulders and hips is a row of hard defensive spikes about 6cm long and 3cm wide at the base. The lemak's thick tail is also tipped with a single large spike, which the animal can use as a weapon. They are exclusively herbivorous, and reproduce by laying a single egg in a pit in the ground, which is then abandoned; the young can fend for themselves from the moment they hatch, but an adult who encounters a juvenile in the wild may travel with it for some time and protect it from predators.
Lemakki can be tamed and used as beasts of burden, or even as battle mounts, although they are incapable of achieving much speed. The spikes of tame lemakki are often dulled, or even surgically removed, for the safety of their riders. Their flesh and eggs can also be used for food.
If it is cold at night, the lemak habitually digs a shallow trough in the sand as a bed, in order to conserve heat while sleeping. However, they fare poorly in climates that are much hotter or colder than their native habitat.
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The liquid waste produced by fermenting hommot-slee can be refined into something very much like tequila by adding leviathan oil, distilling the mix, and filtering it through charcoal. It's still toxic to everyone but tanaigs and leechmen, though.
edited 29th Mar '15 3:53:08 PM by dvorak
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Nogards are "reptilian bats" that live in the jungles of Auerbach. They drink the blood of large land animals and supplement this diet with fruit and nuts. Nogards have been known to snatch up lone dragons and carry them off to their nests to be drained. Nogards live in large colonies in caves or enormous trees. Nogards are about the size of fales.
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
The sapient population of Auerbach consists mostly of tanaigs. Skara Brae is located at Auerbach's northern end, beneath a large fold mountain known as Skara Ehdon.
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Ho. Lee. Hell. That was a lot of updating!
Nice one everyone!
I have added all the new bits to the MASTER POST. Quite the divisive world so far - how the heck you don't offend a Fale I have no idea.
So far, not much in the way of warfare and I was trying to work out if Hommot-slee is a technology, cultural item or a religious necessity...
Regarding canon, I will take direction depending on what is most in line with what we've done. If something directly clashes with stuff before hand, then I'll make a judgement call, unless you all want it included!
Ok, I will have something else to add in later myself. So far so good everyone. have a gander at the post, see if you can see any inconsistencies that I may have overlooked.
The most infamous fale pirate is a woman known as Red Ruby. She's reputed to have such a fiery temper that she's made her favorite mates walk the plank for small slights. She's also rumored to have an obsession with rubies.
Red Ruby is said to be as tall as a tanaig, but in real life she's average for a fale. She's said to have hair as red as hot iron, but in real life her hair is more brown than red. Men swear she's more well-endowed than a farawad woman, but she's actually somewhat flat-chested, even for a fale woman.
Secret (known only to Red Ruby and her crew): Red Ruby's obsession with her namesake is the result of being told that she can achieve immortality by obtaining a singular magical ruby by the ghost of her great grandfather (himself a legendary pirate named Rumbeard).
Secret (known only to Umbrus, Solaria, and Lunarus): For centuries after her death, stories will be told of her daring exploits. She'll be the Jack Sparrow or the Davy Jones of future tales. But now, she's just the most well-known pirate in the world.
edited 30th Mar '15 10:27:38 AM by nekomoon14
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
Back after a long hiatus
(I like how the Farawads can be described as Renaissance Italians Up To Eleven.)
Due to the way Farawad cities work, being able to politic successfully and lie through your teeth is considered a life skill, to the point where it is even taught in special schools for future politicians, diplomats, etc.
“Not a promise, not an oath, or a malediction or a curse. Inevitable." - Taylor Hebert
Among the Farawads, certain foods are considered Sacred Meals; improperly preparing them is grounds for summary execution.
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