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So, I saw this whole AMA thing, and I thought to myself:

 

Gee, self, you should probably make one. Just so that the 3 Sharders who have embarrassingly personal questions about you can ask them there. It's all about them, of course. Nothing to do with you.

 

But if you do have questions, embarrassingly personal or otherwise, this would be the place to ask them.

 

-Seonid

 

Keeper of the Edassan Tomes

Lorekeeper of the Worldways

He Who Stands and Watches

Servant of the Light

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Embarrassingly personal? Alright, if you insist... :P

 

What is your favorite color?

 

What does "Sigil Prime Correspondence 00471379

Captain's Office, Lioness II-class Heavy Cruiser Majestic" refer to?

 

You've mentioned the possibility of adding non-humanoid sapients to the Edassa universe at some point. Have you thought up any racial concepts yet?

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Embarrassingly personal? Alright, if you insist... :P

 

What is your favorite color?

 

Blue in general. Specifically, I am torn between a deep, rich navy or a beautiful teal. (Which is more of a mix between blue and green, but enough blue to count :P )

 

What does "Sigil Prime Correspondence 00471379

Captain's Office, Lioness II-class Heavy Cruiser Majestic" refer to?

 

It refers to a science-fiction setting in the future of the Edassa-verse. In short, the humans of Edassa find a set of ancient space stations orbiting their star, each capable of connecting a wormhole from that station to a practically identical station orbiting another star, allowing interstellar transit (after a few technological problems such as how not to get ripped apart by the massive tidal forces are solved) near-instantaneously.

 

Fast forward a millennium or two. Various polities now vie among the network of connected stars. One of these, the Republic of Luxor, is one of the new political players on the scene, disrupting a balance of power. In the republic, the world of Sigil Prime is the headquarters of their starfleet. Because there is no FTL communication other than via the same wormholes that ships travel through, messages have to be routed through wormhole stations. The one at Sigil Prime handles most of the Fleet message traffic (including censoring sensitive material). Correspondence coming from Sigil Prime likely indicates that it is from a Fleet asset on active patrol.

 

One of the classes of warships built by the Republic is the Lioness II-class heavy cruiser. (A direct successor to the Lioness-class.) The Majestic is a ship of that class.

 

So the signature indicates that the post you are reading originated in the captain's office of the Majestic, and has traveled through Sigil Prime to be routed to your location where you receive it. I wish I could have set up an increasing number count to increase as I post, so that each post wouldn't look like the same message number, but the know-how to do that is beyond me.

 

You've mentioned the possibility of adding non-humanoid sapients to the Edassa universe at some point. Have you thought up any racial concepts yet?

Only in the most vague of terms. I'm thinking of a race of sentient Oviraptor-like beings, coexisting with (transplanted) humans and a race of near-dragons.

 

The setting in which these races coexist is far more fleshed out than the beings who inhabit it. That's how I always work, oddly enough. The setting comes first, and then as I explore it, the stories start to present themselves to me. It's almost as if, once I've got their world right (or at least good enough) the characters come to me and say "Good. Now tell my story!"

 

Basically, however, it is a planet in the same universe as Edassa, governed by the same quasi-divine beings, but with no causal connection now or in the reasonably near future to the planet which contains Edassa.

 

Why can I not come up with any good questions to ask you? 

 

Who said that that wasn't a good question?

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But, more to the point, Twi, it's probably because you haven't gone back and read enough about Edassa. :P

Light-heated banter aside, I'm more than willing to answer any questions on religion, my favorite authors, my worldbuilding, Utah, physics, history, my worldbuilding, food, politics my worldbuilding, astronomy, science fiction, the relationship between science and religion, my worldbuilding, how to build a spaceship, etcetera.

Well, maybe that was a bad job of putting light-hearted banter aside, but the point still stands.

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But, more to the point, Twi, it's probably because you haven't gone back and read enough about Edassa. :P

Light-heated banter aside, I'm more than willing to answer any questions on religion, my favorite authors, my worldbuilding, Utah, physics, history, my worldbuilding, food, politics my worldbuilding, astronomy, science fiction, the relationship between science and religion, my worldbuilding, how to build a spaceship, etcetera.

Well, maybe that was a bad job of putting light-hearted banter aside, but the point still stands.

Fine. How do you integrate food into your worldbuilding? :P

(Believe it for not, that's actually a more serious question. I see food as one of those seemingly small things that can reveal quite a bit about the world surrounding it. I remember being fascinated by one author's description of wartime rationing and how it prompted one family's housekeeper to test bread recipe after bizarre bread recipe on the main character and her friends.)

Edited by TwiLyghtSansSparkles
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Food into my worldbuilding? That is a good question.

Recently, I've been working on the ecology of one of my settings (actually, the one I was referring to above, with the sentient non humanoids), and one of the most difficult parts was putting together a food web.

The setting itself is a massive, contingent sized desert in the center of a super continent. Near the eastern edge is a rather large range of mountains, with spurs that jut out to nearly enclose a large basin. The mountains catch what meager rainfall is available in the arid center of the super continent, allowing human cities to eke out a precarious existence on the edge of the desert.

While their food habits can be highly interesting, the really fascinating food related exhibit is the food chain out in the deep desert.

Many areas of the desert are dominated by dune seas, vast stretches of sand that can go on for miles, and in places can reach thousands of feet deep. There are aquifers under the sand, some fossil - not being replenished by rainfall in other areas - others whose tendrils reach out to the mountains and are recharged there. Into both kinds of aquifers in various places erupt volcanic vents, sources of heat and chemicals for bacteria and other micro-life.

These support an array of filter feeders, moving through the waterlogged sand like earthworms do through more rich soil. These, turn ate preyed on by other strange creatures.

The ecosystems vary, of course, from aquifer to aquifer, and from place to place within the aquifers. Where the sand is not too deep, the inhabitants can grow quite large. Where the sand is deepest, nothing but micro life can live, because of the extreme pressure of the sand above.

All of this is, however a diversion from the main attraction, which is the near-surface life. In the places where the sand is shallow (less than several hundred feet) there grow from the deep water to the upper reaches vast plant-like creatures, who absorb the heat from the surface (although they don't break the surface, as the water loss due to the arid climate would outweigh the energy available) and take up water and other nutrients from the deep, mineral rich aquifers below.

This water transport mechanism supports a wide variety of life just barely beneath the surface of the desert. The most common variety is a worm-like creature, about the size of a weevil, that has a photosynthetic exoskeleton and derives its miniscule water needs from these plants spoken of. It is the food source of several surface filter feeders of various kinds. Most things in the deserts don't live on the surface, but they have to go there to find the sand weevils. These mid sized filter feeders are fed on, in turn, by the rest of the food chain, including humans. Actually, those humans who choose to live on the desert in this setting eat both the weevils as well as the filter feeders, grinding up the weevils into a four and making a sort of dough out of it.

And that's one instance of how I integrate foods onto my worldbuilding.

Edited by Seonid
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  • 3 weeks later...

What's the word "science" mean to you? And how do you worldbuild? I can only come up with interesting ideas, but constructing entire systems off of them is hard.

 

Can you give us another fascinating tidbit (or 5 paragraphs) from Edassa? Perhaps a cultural one?

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What's the word "science" mean to you?

 

Science, to me, is both an enterprise and the method used to advance that enterprise. The method of science is the method of testing and experimenting with the world around us, observing the results, and building models that offer explanations of the results we observe. Then, using predictions made from those models, we set up further tests to either refine or reject them.

 

In the end, of course, we are not approaching some sort of absolute Truth (because I'm not fully sure that absolute Truth has a scientific meaning) with scientific inquiry, but we are building more and more accurate models.

 

But science is more than just this method. Science is the pursuit of understanding. The pursuit of figuring out what makes the universe tick. For a religious scientist (like myself), it is the process of working out what laws and processes and methods God used and uses to work with things.

 

This enterprise is a collaborative effort, premised on interpersonal trust - I trust that the scientists who are working in a field where I have no expertise are doing valid experiments and achieving meaningful results, that the process of reporting those results is not meaningfully impacted by personal pride or vanity or desire for monetary gain.

 

Each instance of research fraud is a blow against that foundation, but to accept and work in the enterprise of science is to believe that the self-correcting mechanism of constantly repeating experiments, looking to verify or disprove results, is stronger than the efforts to derail or misdirect the mechanism.

 

On the subject of faith and science, I go further than just believing that they are compatible. The fundamental premise of science is a faith-driven one. Not a religious one, to be certain (although there is potential religious meaning there), but the fundamental premise of science is the belief that the human mind is, in fact, capable of understanding the universe - that the models built by our human brains and subject to the limitations of human beings are in fact, capable of transcending those limitations.

 

I believe that this is true, but that belief is and must be an expression of faith.

 

And how do you worldbuild? I can only come up with interesting ideas, but constructing entire systems off of them is hard.

 

For me, worldbuilding is an art, and takes a long time. The worlds I work on - Edassa, the worlds of the Starnet, Hatharin (the world with the continent-sized desert I talked about above) - are all the product of immense amounts of time spent thinking and molding and rethinking and abandoning and coming back to and splicing and pruning and amputating the setting. (Well, by the time I'm ready to do anything in Hatharin, it will be - but it's only a few months old now)

 

Edassa has been percolating in my mind for 11 years. It's undergone major structural changes - my 14-year old self would hardly recognize it now. The Starnet is only a little younger than that, maybe 9 years or so. And that same 14-year old self would be heartbroken at some of the cool ideas that got abandoned along the way for both worlds.

 

I hope he'd be amazed at some of the new ones that found their way in, though.

 

For me, the actual mechanics of worldbuilding start with a setting becoming real to me (like Edassa and the Starnet are - Hatharin is too young for that yet).  That requires characters, for me at least. If there aren't characters in it with stories to tell, then the setting isn't real yet.

 

Edassa started that way. In a very real sense, it grew up as the setting for Zephyr Westwind (don't judge my 14-year old self's naming ability :P ), Kal Seonid and his grandfather Samhain, and later Areska Lasofer, Asher-veradon Kitsara, Ariel Kilbaen, Kedonai and Niobe Verekai, and a host of others. (Including, at this point, the Paladin Bran the Blessed, Fenrison, the Inquisitor Samuel Carthen, Murk, Shuster Toktureed, Khuvlai, Fina, and the rest).

 

The details grew in fits and starts. I drew a map, because it needed it, and then a brief history came together. Oddly enough, a whole lot of the detail came from modding or building scenarios in various computer games. I made the map so I could put it in Civ II, and the current set of culture groups came because I was thinking about a total-conversion mod for Age of Empires II (currently not yet started, because I'm still behind on my Wheel of Time mod).

 

That got me thinking a lot about what the various militaries are like, how they are organized, what weapons are preferred and how that changes over time. Finding names for various units got me a language distribution (even if I did rip off most names from real-world languages that might have no business being in a fantasy world. Language has always been my weakness).

 

Other things came from my college studies. Taking classes for my Religious Studies major got me thinking about what religions were like on Edassa, and how they had grown and evolved and changed. This in turn made it rather critical for me to start thinking about what things were actually like in the cosmos there, so that I would know how to present the religions properly. Were all religions just naively optimistic (or pessimistic, as the case may be) ways of looking at the world that ultimately had no truth to offer? (That was an unsatisfying answer, not least because I rather strongly believe that that is not the case in the real world.) Eventually I settled on a cosmology that drew exceptionally strongly from my Mormon beliefs, adapted slightly and reframed significantly before being fleshed out with elements drawn from the heavily speculative Mormon theologies of the late 1800's as well as my take on how the most recent archeological developments in understanding ancient Hebrew religion would have been projected into those theologies. The magic system came quickly out of that setup.

 

My physics studies also required me to rationalize the basis of my magic system, ensuring conservation of energy (most of the time) and allowing me to draw on force laws that already exist in nature to describe relationships of magic. (One of my favorite phrases that came out of this, now part of a discarded magic concept, was "Let us consider magic as a field force, arising from the interactions of a scalar potential...")

 

This description is now a lot longer than I expected when I started answering this question, so sorry, I guess? Ask more questions if you're still curious.

 

Can you give us another fascinating tidbit (or 5 paragraphs) from Edassa? Perhaps a cultural one?

 

Hmmm....a cultural tidbit from Edassa?

 

Let's see. I've been working on Starnet most recently, so Edassa has kind of receded into the background temporarily. But I'll see what I can pull out of the memory files there.

 

I don't think I've talked a lot about the Taravoy peoples yet, so there is an interesting culture.

 

They have inhabited an archipelago near the equator for several millennia, and have colonized several other archipelagos and islands as well. They are the lords of the seas, and there is a strong cultural seafaring tradition. Their ships are technologically advanced, and they are the original developers of gunpowder.

 

But we aren't talking about military matters here, so let's look at their culture. Their home archipelago is volcanic (it is actually the partially submerged caldera of an oceanic supervolcano larger in diameter - but not height - than Olympus Mons) in nature, and ring shaped. Hotspots in the center have formed a few low-lying volcanic islands that are much more geologically recent (though they almost all likely predate human habitation of the archipelago - the most recent is potentially within the range of dates when the ancestors of the Taravoy could have arrived). One of these has a lava pool like Kilauea on it, which is revered as the dwelling-place of a fire goddess.

 

This is geographical, not cultural, though, and I need to wrap up (time constraints...frustrating things). So a cultural tidbit about the Taravoy is the class of the bahri, the sea dwellers. Basically, any child who is born on the ocean is considered touched by the ocean goddess (the Taravoy pantheon is entirely female - make what you will of that), and is taken and set apart to her. They are henceforth forbidden to set foot upon land for more than an hour, and require extensive purification rituals before and after. Whole ships crewed by these bahri sailors (both men and women - once touched by the ocean, children are considered to be cut off from the traditional way of doing things, including traditional gender roles) roam the seas, only seldom putting in to port for supplies. Many bahri consider it a point of pride that they have never set foot upon land, having slaves to do so for them.

 

Some bahri become pirates, and the reputation of these few have colored the perception in the eyes of the whole continent (well, at least the parts that are aware of them), so that bahri are looked at with a mixture of awe, fear, and suspicion in every port they land in. They are, however, highly desired mercenaries and trading ships.

 

Hope you enjoyed it!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Looking at the map you've made, there's a ring of islands in the south east that I don't believe you've mentioned (or maybe you have, and I haven't seen it  x.x) 

 

Is there anything significant about them? Kinda looks like the place you would go to catch a certain legendary pokemon... :3

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Looking at the map you've made, there's a ring of islands in the south east that I don't believe you've mentioned (or maybe you have, and I haven't seen it  x.x) 

 

Is there anything significant about them? Kinda looks like the place you would go to catch a certain legendary pokemon... :3

 

Actually, the ring of islands on that map is the Taravoy homeland. I talk a little bit about them in the post above this one. To add a little more cultural tidbits, the Taravoy are the enablers of much of the slave trade, trafficking in human cargo from the equatorial jungles and moving them to the rich markets of the Rakalli, the Lyusans (some of the city-states, at least, others have abolished slavery), the Alcorazimai empire, and virtually all of the lands around the Jade Sea. The far northern slave market is much less profitable, in part due to the culture of the Senlii, who regard their own populace as slaves of the Empire and as such have little use for outland slaves, and in other places due to the existence of an underclass of immigrants, who supply much cheaper labor than the expensive slaves of the south.

 

With regards to legendary pokemon, you aren't likely to find many there. But I'm wavering back and forth between having sea serpents live in the warmer equatorial waters like those. (By wavering, I mean that I think that it is a very cool idea, but I'm not sure whether it belongs in Edassa, or in another of my settings).

 

The submerged caldera whose peaks form the island ring sits above a magma chamber at least 20% larger than the one underneath Yellowstone, in the United States. This erupts in the year 1423, with cataclysmic effects. Not so great as they would have been if the world was at a technological level comparable to 21st century earth, of course, because such staple trades as metalworking and subsistence agriculture have not yet been outsourced to a vulnerable and small class of specialists, but sufficient to disrupt political continuity across the continent. Literally not a single country remains politically intact as a result. Many of the coastal nations are simply flooded out, and places out of reach of tsunamis are still plunged into political and economic chaos as the ash precipitates a volcanic winter. The famines decimate almost half of the continental population.

 

This event, incidentally, is the final death-blow to the Inquisition of the Church of the Martyr. Their control of the united Church had been slipping since the events of Menkor in 1375, with which you may be familiar  :P . In the two decades preceding the eruption, however, their rule was challenged by ecclesiastical reforms in their home cities, and they found themselves increasingly at odds with the Patriarch of Corento, the spiritual leader of the united Church. The new Patriarch adopted a conciliatory posture towards the new Patriarchate of Menkor, reversing the Inquisition's hard-line policies. If the eruption hadn't happened, it likely would have resulted in a war, which the Inquisition would have won. The eruption and resulting famine broke the Inquisition's armies and ended what was left of their political control. Unfortunately, it also ended the new Patriarch's reforms, as he died during the famine and the disease outbreak that followed.

 

What's your favorite genre of music to listen to?

 

I actually don't listen to a lot of music, honestly. It tends to distract me from worldbuilding, which is the default use of my time.  :D  Any time other people would be listening to music, I'm generally crafting worlds (or putting together lists for Star Wars Armada, or plotting in Sanderson Elimination, but those are comparably minor pastimes). But when I do listen to music, I prefer classical. It's soothing, and the least distracting. It's also beautiful - at least the older stuff. Some of the more modern stuff seems to have been written merely to show off the technical skill of the composer, with little regard to whether it is pleasant to listen to.

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Nothing super special there during the pre-eruption time period. The islands are rocky, and not very fertile. Some fishing villages, not really under the domination of anyone but themselves most of the time. Rakalli and Taravoy bahri pirates sometimes extort tribute, but there isn't much to take in the first place.

 

In a few centuries, they become important because of dense uranium deposits, but that's not for a while yet. The central island also one day becomes home to one of the primary spaceports, due to the convenience of the fuel for spaceborne nuclear power plants (the Edassans use pulsed fission propulsion - essentially nuking yourself at a rapid pace to accelerate your spaceship, until the development of fusion torchdrives). After the switch to fusion power, the spaceport remains important because the ocean is a convenient source of deuterium for the fusion reactions.

 

The proximity of a central spaceport stimulates manufacturing of all manner of industrial parts, although the raw materials are shipped in from elsewhere. The manufacturing jobs mostly move into orbit eventually, leaving the island economy far weaker than it had been, but there remains enough of a surface-to-orbit demand to keep the islands economically alive.

 

Also, no, I didn't know any of this until you asked :P

 

As an addendum to Curiosity's question, a whole lot of my worldbuilding comes in the moment when people ask me questions.

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  • 5 months later...

One of my New Year's resolutions is to do a whole lot more writing. I'm still working out a system that will help me to do that, but I'm looking at a set amount per week (something manageable, a couple hundred words or so - I've still got 2 research projects, a full-time job, classes, and a family to take care of). Most of it will be in Edassa or a related setting (like City of Mortals).

 

Eventually, this writing will turn into a large compilation thread in the Creator's Corner, but until then, I'm taking requests for short stories, setting/worldbuilding information, and related stuff here.

 

So, in short, this AMA is back in business.

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That is an interesting question, and immediately spawns the counter-question: unusual to whom? Most if not all of the cultures on Edassa would be quite unusual to modern Westerners - but their contemporaries would find them normal.

 

On the other hand, several cultures are viewed even by their contemporaries in-world as quite unusual. The Nessei, in particular, are seen as quite unusual - but I have already written a great deal about the Nessei culture elsewhere. If you asked a great many of the (non-Nessei, of course) people in Edassa who they thought was the weirdest, they'd say the Nessei. But this is just because the Nessei get around a lot. Nomadic herdsmen, with a strong penchant for mercenary work and a genetic wanderlust tend to show up in the most unexpected places, and their customs can be more than a little off-putting, especially their practice of carrying one of their ancestor's shrines (complete with either the burned ashes or a small bone of the ancestor's) with them everywhere they go. That and taking trophies of the enemies they kill in battle.

 

But of all the cultures in Edassa, the most unusual, measured in some undefined-but-certainly-objectiveTM way, would likely be the Chaod Leu. They are extremely isolationist, and correspondingly xenophobic. Their piece of the continent is blocked off by difficult mountain ranges, and they fiercely patrol their coasts, savagely destroying any foreign ship they come across.

 

Visually, they are striking. Their skin is dark black, but their population has an incredibly high 85% incidence of the skin disease vitiligo, which results in striking white splotches across their bodies. To them, the more mottled a body is, the more attractive it is, and they find people without the condition to be repulsive. Those among their number born without the condition are simultaneously ostracized and revered. These are the Chhuyha, or Touched, viewed as having been touched by the Great Elements who rule the world, and are considered to be too holy (although holiness has a great deal of preconceptions to Westerners which do not hold among the Chaod Leu) to endure the presence of ordinary people. Any who touch them must be put to death, and any who view them without being properly purified first are similarly treated. A mother who bears such a child is spared, as long as she does not touch it after it is born - it is given to a nursemaid (generally a low-caste slave) who is ritually killed after the child is weaned.

 

The keepers of the 5 great temple grounds where these people are kept constitute the priestly caste - they are born to their positions, and leave them to their firstborn children. Inside the compounds, the strict rules that normally govern every aspect of Chaod Leu society are absent, and each temple has its own social order, grown organically from the children who inhabit it, who are raised without family by the other temple dwellers.

 

Similarly, albinos are also regarded as portentous, either destined to be a great evil or a powerful leader. The ruling class among the Chaod Leu makes it a habit to hunt down and destroy all albinos born among their population.

 

Chaod Leu religion is fairly simple - they believe that the world is ruled by the Great Elements (generally considered to be 5 in number, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit, although some philosophers have tried to argue that others exist). These are capricious, and sometimes cruel, and care little to nothing for humans (except for the great Element of Spirit, who is regarded as the source of souls for the Chaod Leu, and at least notices them and will listen to petitions). In addition, the world is inhabited by a host of minor beings called chirnigi, or sparks, splinters of life-force associated with one of the Great Elements. The priestly caste's job is to observe the movings of the world and the Chhuyha, and discern via those portents what must be done to keep the Great Elements and their minor servants in a general state of benign neglect towards their people. Religion, then, is wholly confined to the priestly caste. For those of other castes, they observe the festivals and fasts as appropriate, but do not have to give much thought to religion unless they find themselves to have attracted the unwanted attention of a chirnigi.

 

Chaod Leu society is highly stratified - a strict caste system is enforced. In addition to the priestly caste already mentioned, Chaod Leu society consists of a Warrior caste - who also act as rulers. The other castes are the tradesman caste, the farmer caste, the slave caste, and the half-souled. For all except the half-souled, life is predictable. The first son of a Priest, Warrior, Tradesman, or Farmer inherits his father's position, caste, belongings, and responsibilities (unless he is disqualified for some reason, in which case, the second son may be raised from slavery to take the position, or the local ruler may appoint some other slave to take the vacancy). Further sons are born into the slave caste. No daughter of a free man is ever born into slavery - she takes her father's caste until she is married, and then takes on her husband's caste. Social mobility is, therefore, technically easier for women than it is for men. However, in practice, marriage between castes is strongly looked down upon, and the descendants of a mixed caste marriage could find their social prospects blighted for generations, even though their legal status remains unchanged.

 

The slave caste, on the other hand, is extremely mobile compared to the rest of Chaod Leu society. A slave serves in the caste his father belongs to, generally, but almost always receives a broad education, to increase their potential value if the family decides to sell them. For all slaves, the military is a legitimate option (unlike for free men), and generally will include good retirement benefits. For those who do not choose that path, they will end up as slaves in a position where their talents are best utilized. As a general rule, slave sons of the priestly caste serve as temple slaves, slave sons of warrior/rulers are career soldiers, slave sons of tradesmen and farmers are manual labor in the shops and farms of their father. But any family may sell a slave on the market, where a prospective buyer could be of any caste. There are, in this manner, quite a few slaves in the temples that started life as a trade or farm slave. A slave cannot be given freedom by his master offhand, because that would undermine the caste system - because such a slave would have no caste, no position, and no expectations in society. However, the warrior/ruler class of high birth have been known to create new caste positions for slaves who have been particularly valuable or useful, and thereby give them their freedom and a caste position at the same time. Such interlopers are often resented by their peers, but not too openly. Once a person has a caste status, it is theirs. Slavery is also a potential punishment, often for excessive debt but also potentially for treason, murder, or other similar crimes. This punishment can either be to the offender or to his/her whole family.

 

A woman who marries a slave caste man also becomes a slave (although a slave caste woman who marries out of her caste takes on her husband's caste). The children of such a slave caste marriage are also slaves, but they are much more likely to be trained in a school and sold once they reach young adulthood. Often, the parents will arrange a purchase with a local buyer, so that their family will remain nearby. Some multi-generational slave families have become quite wealthy by this practice, and children of their households are highly sought after because of their good breeding, impeccable manners, and exquisite education. Owning such a slave is quite expensive, and has become a mark of high social status.

 

The half-soul caste is a different breed entirely. The Chaod Leu believe that they are the only people in the world who have souls. All other people are either demons or sparks manifesting a physical form. This is the source of their xenophobia, and the reason that they kill foreigners with such viciousness.

 

The half-souled are those of Chaod Leu descent who have intermixed their bloodlines with outsiders (and all those of Chaod Leu descent who live on the other side of the mountains are believed to have intermixed their bloodlines with outsiders). They are an untouchable caste. They are assigned the degrading jobs, fill the demeaning and unclean positions in society, and are generally treated like dirt. To kill a half-soul is no crime, and to sell to them is a breach of social etiquette. Those of higher castes must avoid contact with these as much as possible, lest they become ritually unclean.

 

The half-souled have their own society, their own vendors and farmers, but they live out a precarious position. They are not allowed to own money or property, so they live in constant fear that their land will be taken, or their items destroyed (no item owned by an untouchable would be stolen, because of its unsavory associations). But they tend to make things work. On the other side of the mountains, there are several kingdoms of "half-souled." They, of course, do not maintain such a rigid caste system, and they do not regard themselves as half-souled, and sometimes half-souled from the Chaod Leu homeland will immigrate to a better life there. But for most of them, their status is ingrained on their personality, and they would no more think of leaving than of reaching outside their caste. Those of the Touched born to half-souled parents are killed, because they are believed to be demons attempting to impersonate the real Touched.

 

Now, of course, this wasn't a character, but an AMA of a priest caste Chaod Leu can be found here.

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Any other requests for character AMAs? I will probably end up posting more regardless, but if you want to see one in particular, here's a place to post it.

 

I've been thinking a Taravoy bahri sorcerer, and a Nessei warrior. But I'm open to doing any others instead, or in addition to them, if folks are interested.

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  • 1 month later...
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  • 4 months later...
On 5/17/2016 at 4:49 PM, Elementalist said:

How did you come up with ideas for such unique and interesting cultures as the Chaod Leu and the Taravoy? Do you have any tips another aspiring worldbuilder could use to make their own cultures and religions less derivative?

I'm sorry for not replying sooner - I don't know how I missed this.

As far as how I came up with ideas - that's a rather difficult question. Mostly, they just...came, if that makes sense? I mean, once I have the basic outline, there's a lot of editing and revision about details, and wrestling to try and make everything fit in right, but the original ideas don't have a discernable beginning for me. A perhaps more cynical answer is this - I've read a lot, and I do a lot of thinking about things I've read and about worlds that would be interesting. So a lot of that probably filters into my subconscious, ready to well up whenever I am trying to build something.

In that sense, the best tip I can give you is this: read a lot. Everywhere. Of a whole bunch of different genres. And practice worldbuilding. My first worldbuilding attempts were the most derivative things you can think of. They were Tolkien with a little bit of Jordan thrown in, and almost nothing unique.

Be willing to throw ideas out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, no matter how much you love it. See: dragons do not exist in Edassa. In the first incarnations of that world, it had elves, dwarves, dragons, orcs, and a whole host of other magical things. They didn't work. I loved them, but they didn't work. It took me 7 years to work up the courage to write them out, but I finally did, and the setting is much stronger for it.

The last bit is this - learn a whole bunch, everywhere you can. The Chaod Leu were just a name on a map for a while - a country that I knew I wanted to have a vaguely Indian flair. And then someone started asking about them, and I'd just been reading up on vitiligo, and I had been thinking about the politics of race recently, and I'd been wanting to see if I could work a magic/belief system based on the traditional 4 elements into my setting somewhere. And that all coalesced together into the Chaod Leu. The best source for worldbuilding ideas is the real world. After all - it's the one we live in, and the only one that is - so far as we know - actually real.

That's how my religions are so unique - I've studied a lot about religion; it's one of my degrees. And once you've built your first religion, your second isn't a huge deal - you've already got your brain thinking in those ways. The only way to make your made-up religions not derivative is practice. They will be derivative at first. It takes practice to figure out what's a good fit for the setting and what's just copy-paste and needs to be changed. And get feedback. Lots of feedback. From a lot of different people. This forum is a great place to look for that!

 

Anyways - hope that helped, and sorry for not responding quickly.

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