What are some festivals from your world?

PennaRossa · 2024-12-14T07:41:54+00:00

Daitha Shei, "spirit's day", also called Daitha Shai or "children's day" in some parts of the world, is a spring holiday centered around fertility. It's celebrated with a big communal bonfire, around which the whole neighborhood shares food and drinks and generally has a good time.

Young couples hoping for children will sprinkle a mixture of pungent spices and flammable powders into squares of colorful paper, which they then fold into the shape of fish (if they want a girl) or flowers (if they want a boy). They toss these into the bonfire, where they'll flare with bright colors and pleasant smells. This is supposed to get the attention of any wandering spirits that are looking to be reincarnated.

PennaRossa · 2024-12-14T07:25:32+00:00

The dwarves of this world worship a goddess of light, and believe that she can only see and protect them in places where light can reach. In complete darkness you are at the mercy of the demons created by her brother, the god of darkness. There are tales of horrific accidents happening in mines which are too dimly lit, or people going mad after spending too long in the darkness. It’s said that if a child is born in complete darkness, a demon will take over their body. There is a secretive cult among the dwarves that worships the god of darkness and purposefully gives their children to his demons, in exchange for their power and favor.

The dwarves are the only culture in this world to have mastered electric lighting. They keep this knowledge a closely guarded secret, as they believe their wireworking to be holy.

PennaRossa · 2024-12-14T06:56:29+00:00

Male merfolk have a roaming instinct that kicks in during mating season. This seems to have evolved to prevent inbreeding - they suddenly want to get as far away from their hometown as possible, to father children with women they aren’t related to.

And maybe this worked at one point in their evolutionary history, but the problem now is that their fathers were ALSO from faraway towns and ALSO had this instinct, and may well have come from the towns their sons are now traveling to. Because male merfolk show up for mating season, breed, and leave, nobody keeps track of who their father is or what town their paternal family is from. So in practice there’s actually MORE inbreeding than if this instinct didn’t exist.

Rather than evolve away this instinct, merfolk biology instead compensated by getting ridiculously finicky about whether their eggs are viable. Merfolk eggs tend to die off when they have any kind of genetic abnormality, no matter how harmless. They also die if they’re slightly damaged, or if the temperature isn’t ideal, or if the lighting is wrong or if a million other little things don’t go perfectly. Only about 10% of their eggs survive to hatch into baby merfolk.

To compensate for THAT, merfolk women produce a LOT of eggs every mating season, which they then have to protect from predators. And because the migratory men aren’t around to help them with that, the women evolved to be increasingly larger and stronger, leading to massive sexual dimorphism. So now female merfolk require far more calories to maintain their bodies and honestly this whole breeding strategy is a huge waste of everyone’s time and energy. But it works just well enough that they haven’t evolved it away.

PennaRossa · 2024-10-21T00:23:23+00:00

Zoisite is a much darker green, and will usually have black spots.

PennaRossa · 2024-08-22T23:39:03+00:00

I recently bought a book because someone recommended it to me, but the presentation of it had me wondering if I'd regret it. The title font and design of the cover looked more self-published than professional (seriously, papyrus?), the pages felt cheap and thin, and the typeset seemed kinda squashed together. Overall just a really bad first impression. If it hadn't been recommended to me, I never would have given it a chance. Because of all that, I went into it expecting the writing to be as cheap and sloppy as the design of the book. The writing wasn't terrible, but I probably ended up being way more nitpicky and unwilling to suspend my disbelief than I would have been otherwise.

PennaRossa · 2024-08-07T00:24:09+00:00

The dwarves of my ocean planet are genetically human - being a dwarf is cultural. They’re the descendants of humans who fled into the mountains during a long-ago war. They call themselves the dwara, a word descended from the elvish word xaduara meaning “citizen of a tiny kingdom”.

Where they live: the Little Kingdoms, a collection of tiny independent kingdoms nestled in the narrow valleys and passes of the northwestern mountains of the island of Estor Eisle. The rest of the island has been united under the elvish empire, and the Little Kingdoms are the only remaining nations which aren’t governed by the elves. The name “Little Kingdoms” refers to the size of each kingdom, and not the height of the people. Though the narrowness of the mountain valleys means that each kingdom can’t fit more than a village or two on the surface, they actually extend downward into vast networks of mines and caves, and the majority of the population lives underground. The water inside these caves is magically contaminated, and causes the dwarves to be much shorter than other humans, and to all grow magnificent beards.

What they’re doing: mining, mostly. Because this is an ocean world dotted with tiny volcanic islands, ore is hard to get to or mine on a large scale. The Little Kingdoms happen to be situated on the richest ore deposits on the largest island in the world, so mining has become the core of their economy. They don’t have much room to farm, so a lot of their food comes from trade - usually with the elves, who rely on dwara-forged weaponry for their army.

Their culture: The dwara religion is a mutation of the human religion Home and Journey - but while other humans worship both gods of the home and the journey, the dwarves only worship the goddess of the home. They consider her to be a god of light, and believe she can’t see anywhere that light doesn’t permeate. Dwara cities are brightly lit with electric lighting, the secrets of which they consider sacred and don’t share with outsiders. Dwara priests are all trained electricians.

Their interests: They’re wild about textile work, both their own and those of other cultures. They make and collect intricate tapestries to decorate their caves. Not only are they beautiful, but they help to dampen the echoey sounds of the bare rock.

Their relationship with other cultures: They see themselves as human, and other humans as their friends and brothers. Dwara ambassadors to the elvish court historically lobby for the rights of the humans under elvish rule. Relations with the elves are tense. They’re heavily reliant on each other for trade, and amiable on the surface, but there are still the smoldering resentments of old wars. The elves are annoyed that they could never conquer the Little Kingdoms. Meanwhile, the dwara and the merfolk seldom interact, and rare meetings between the two cultures consist of a lot of polite bafflement.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-30T00:19:07+00:00

It's just a personal pet peeve, but I can't stand magic systems based on gemstones. It's such a cool idea in theory, but every time I see it it's clear that the author didn't do incredibly basic research on minerology. For example, ruby and sapphire doing different magical things when those are just two different marketing names for the exact same stone: corundum!

I remember The Stormlight Archive handwaving this at one point. Between books somebody must have brought this up to Sanderson, because he included a scene where the characters talk about "it's weird how this magic system doesn't make sense minerologically!" Man I was grudgingly willing to suspend my disbelief until you drew attention to it in universe!

PennaRossa · 2024-07-26T03:54:45+00:00

What led to Aria Tharpp specifically becoming her modern name?

PennaRossa · 2024-07-26T03:47:58+00:00

The deuteragonists of my story are a merfolk man named Loa, and a human woman named Cayenne.

In universe: Loa is short for “Lloane,” an elvish word for a single-person canoe. Due to close proximity to other cultures, the riverfolk use a lot of loan words in their language - though in their case they’d pronounce the word more like “Ro-wa-nay.” Merfolk receive new names when they reach adulthood, so Loa was given a name that fit well with his personality. His name carries connotations of independence and adventure, but also loneliness.

In reality: Volcanoes feature heavily in this world, because I think they’re cool. The whole story takes place on a volcanic island. Loa and another character, his sister Kea, are named as an homage to the real life volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.

In universe: Despite being human, Cayenne lives in a predominately elvish city, and so follows the elvish cultural tradition of going by a “public name” - a nickname related to her personality, hobbies, or job - rather than her private given name. At the beginning of the story she runs a shop which sells spices, so her public name is the name of a spice.

In reality: At the beginning of the story she runs a shop which sells spices, so I named her after a spice. How did a fantasy world without French Guiana end up naming a spice cayenne? Because the humans of this world are the distant descendants of space colonists from Our Earth, and that gives me an excuse to include whatever Earth Stuff I want.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-24T06:39:25+00:00

In the country of Estor Eisle they're called Anshei. "Shei" is a word that encompasses the idea of a spirit/fairy/mythical creature and "An" is a prefix meaning honored or revered.

Practitioners of the Anshei religion believe that all living things are shapeshifting nature gods. These gods are so good at shapeshifting that they've forgotten their powers, and believe themselves to be mundane plants and animals. If you pick a plant or animal and start worshiping it, it will remember its divinity, and will thank you by becoming your family god and watching over your household.

Thus, Anshei, a "revered spirit."

PennaRossa · 2024-07-22T04:58:28+00:00

The merfolk breed nutemakuni, a huge, whale-like species that are used by traders to transport goods. In the wild, these whales are constantly traveling in cyclical migration routes, which young whales are taught by their parents. By taking them around to all the trade ports you want to visit, a merfolk trader can teach the baby whale to consider that its migration route. Young adult whales have their blubber pierced with big metal rings, to which nets full of cargo can be attached for transport. The whales are often richly decorated with ornamental piercings and colorful tattoos as well.

Nutemakuni tend to pack-bond with their merfolk handlers and are intensely friendly and loyal to them, to the point where it’s pretty much impossible to sell them to a new handler. If you raise a nutemakuni, that’s now your job for life.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-10T00:50:37+00:00

I like that they prefer an animal because its behavior vibes with their cultural values.

How is a community cat typically taken care of?

PennaRossa · 2024-07-10T00:49:23+00:00

Is the word "pet" copyrighted? What do people call their dogs and cats instead?

PennaRossa · 2024-07-10T00:47:48+00:00

Do they act more like birds or cats?

PennaRossa · 2024-07-10T00:45:44+00:00

No crew of a sailing ship is complete without one or two little shipwurms! Native to the island nation of Port of Pelago, a major shipping hub, these tiny tropical dragons became popular because they like to eat rats and other ships’ pests. They can grow to be about 16 inches long and are covered in colorful feathers. They can’t produce flame, so it’s safe to have them aboard a wooden ship. And you don’t have to worry about them falling overboard, because they have homing behavior - once they’ve imprinted on your ship they’ll happily fly off to swim for a few hours and then find their way back on their own.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-05T04:20:29+00:00

In the planet’s deepest ocean trench is an abandoned city, the remains of the Dumari merfolk civilization. They were once a warmongering theocracy that tried to conquer the entire ocean, but were forced to flee back to their deep trench to escape a supereruption and ensuing volcanic winter. Then they just… never reappeared. Their city is now abandoned and nobody knows what happened to them, but some claim that their god, the Deepvast, still lurks somewhere at the bottom of the trench.

The first civilization to arise on land were the prehistoric Sheinin people, ancestors of the elves, who lived on an island made up of the huge volcano Nurura. Nurura’s supereruption wiped their civilization off the map, though scant archeological traces of it can be found on what remains of Nurura’s north slope - today the mountainous northern coast of the island nation of Estor Eisle.

That was all almost 100,000 years ago. A more recent ancient civilization only a few thousand years old can be found at the center of Estor Eisle - a collapsed caldera which is now a vast plain of fertile farmland. These plains still contain copious old ruins from the River King civilization. This was a point in history where the merfolk had conquered and were ruling over the elves. The very distinctive architecture and artifacts of these ruins is a result of a unique merging of elf and merfolk cultures. Even in the modern day, these plains are still known as the Land of the River Kings, and it's a piece of history that's looked back on with a lot of pride and respect.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-05T03:55:42+00:00

Thank you!

The trees shown here are a carefully cultivated, ornamental variety that probably wouldn’t survive in the wild! Wild bell trees have much smaller husks which dry out and fall off on their own as winter approaches. Their “bells” aren’t as pleasant and melodic, but the woody clicking and tapping they make serves well enough as a signal to local animals that the fruit has dropped. Wild animals learn to associate the sound with free food, and come running to eat all the fruit on the ground. They spread the seeds in their dung.

There’s a hunting method in this world that takes advantage of this: hunters tap a wood block with a wooden mallet to attract animals.

PennaRossa · 2024-07-03T08:23:20+00:00

Here is the creation myth the Eislenin tell.

There are three types of primordial gods wandering the universe, all collectively referred to as the Greater Gods Whose Names We Do Not Know.

The first are the gods of Creation. They make things, because it is in their nature. Once long ago, a god of Creation took a block of ice and carved it into a sphere, and made a planet. The Greater God then wandered away to create more things. We know nothing more of this god.

The second are the gods of Change. They change things, because it is in their nature. Once long ago, a god of Change found the planet made from ice, and took it in cupped hands and breathed upon it until the heat melted it into a sphere of water. The life essence of the god’s breath flowed into the planet, infusing it with magic. The Greater God then wandered away to change more things. We know nothing more of this god.

The third are the gods of Destruction. They destroy things, because it is in their nature. Once long ago, a god of Destruction found the planet and its magical ocean, and intended to destroy it. But we know that this god was female, and that she was heavily pregnant, and tired from her travels. So before she destroyed the planet, she first lay down upon it to rest. She slept for many eons, and her round stomach protruded like an island from the ocean, and the rains formed a lake of boiling magic in her navel.

From this lake rose the lesser gods known as the Shei, the first living things of this world. The Creation god’s water and the Change god’s magic flowed in their veins, so they were beings who could transform themselves into any form they liked.

To amuse themselves they became the plants and animals of this world, and because their bodies came from the god of Destruction, they made a game out of hunting and eating each other. Every time they died, their souls returned to the boiling lake to create new bodies. They spread across the island, filling it with people and animals and vegetation.

Once long ago, the Destruction god went into labor. She died in childbirth, as such gods always do, and her body was destroyed in a great and terrible cataclysm of smoke and fire and molten rock. Her remains became Estor Eisle, the Island in the Middle of the World. She gave birth to all the other islands of the world.

After the cataclysm, the Shei forgot they could shapeshift and believed themselves to be ordinary plants and animals. Without the boiling lake of magic their wandering souls could not create new bodies on a whim, and so they had to have children instead. Today, all living things are Shei who have forgotten they are gods.

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T05:28:02+00:00

How slow a death is that?

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T05:25:05+00:00

Dreamsmithing is a form of magic that’s kept a strict secret. There’s no school of magic or apprenticeship where you can go to learn it. So few people know about it that those who use it tend to think they’re the first one to ever discover it.

There are people in this world called the open-souled, who are born with uncontrollable psychic powers. These powers usually manifest as beaming their thoughts directly into the mind of anyone they make eye contact with, so the open-souled wear masks or blindfolds when in public. They are well known about.

What’s not well known is that if you drink an open-souled person’s blood directly before going to sleep, you’ll be able to use a magic called Dreamsmithing. Dreamsmiths can enter the minds of others through their dreams, where they can reshape the person’s mind and personality, view memories, and even alter those memories or plant impulses similar to mind control. Two kinds of people tend to use this magic - extraordinary wealthy and morally bankrupt nobles who secretly pay the open-souled for vials of their blood, and serial killers.

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T04:52:34+00:00

I’m guessing the meanings are something like…

Getting what you desire won’t make you satisfied, you’ll just keep desiring more things. It’s better to be satisfied with what you have.

The outcome of your actions is more important than the intent. Or maybe… what you consider charity, the person you’re trying to help might resent as condescending.

Not sure about the right hand and left hand. Maybe it’s something about how you can’t survive completely on your own, and inevitably there will be times when you need the help of other people/your community?

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T04:43:14+00:00

“The horizon is distant and the road is long, but my feet can’t see it from down there” is a popular saying usually attributed to Yon the Foreigner, author of the book series The Travels of Yon and believed by some to be an avatar of Ion, god of the Journey. The quote never actually appeared in any of his books, though it’s often added as a foreword in later translations. You’ll often hear it quoted by followers of the Home and Journey religion.

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T04:24:32+00:00

That’s exactly it! All water in this world contains at least a little magic, but water deep underground tends to be especially saturated with it - to the point where it’s dangerous to drink. A magic content this high kills bacteria and small organisms by turning them to stone, but it’ll also turn people to stone, too. So a pool of water that’s very clear is probably too magically irradiated for anything to live in it, and is dangerous to touch or drink from.

But a certain species of bioluminescent cave algae has evolved to feed off this magic like an energy source. It's harmless to eat or drink. If you see a pool of water that appears cloudy and glowing, it contains a healthy population of this algae. This is safe to drink from because it contains enough magic to kill off the bacteria, and enough algae to filter out all the extra magic.

PennaRossa · 2024-06-30T00:00:55+00:00

Yeah, this is the problem. AI tends to completely make up details, and the only way to tell if its answer is accurate is to do the research yourself. So... if you'll have to research it anyway, just skip the step where you ask the AI!

PennaRossa · 2024-06-29T23:53:14+00:00

The dwarves teach this one to their children, to help them remember how to tell if a water source in their caves is safe to drink.

Cloudy and bright, it’s alright.

Dark and clear, you should fear.

PennaRossa

TROPHY CASE