#aoat

[fkahejira]

[worldhammerer-old]

the Sa are a species of insect folk who came to Vuatlieo from across the sea to the east. their formidable array of ocular and olfactory organs provide them with heightened awareness of their surroundings. they tend to keep away from metropolitan centers, living in warm temperate forests in townships they build themselves from chewed wood pulp laminated with secretions from glands in their crop. these townships resemble termite mounds or the nests constructed by paper wasps but Sa are not eusocial; internally the structure partitions into dozens of apartments where extended family units live, as well as communal refectories, workshops and libraries. emanating out from the ‘hive’ structure is area given over to horticultural concerns where Sa cultivate whatever crops they brought with them long ago that are suited to the area, and fill in gaps with local plantlife. they are especially fond of horned melons, which they prepare for food in a number of ways and also brew into a sort of beer in wooden casks. dotted throughout this roughly circular clearing are the stumps of trees that have been felled to build the ‘hive’ and outlying sheds with, upon which the growth of various useful mushroom species is encouraged until the wood substrate is so compromised by mycelium that it eventually collapses. living in homes essentially made of papier-mâché, the Sa quite rightly fear fire and their societies invariably have imbedded injuctions against its use. bio- and chemoluminescent lanterns provide light within enclosed spaces, and typically a crude smithy is erected at the edge of Sa terrritory from stone where one or two of their number with an affinity for metallurgy ply their trade. Sa smiths are generally regarded with a mixture of pity, fear and awe, for they are considered to be at least a little mad, but also clearly work potent sorceries. Sa in their townships rarely cultivate livestock for food purposes, and most of the meat they eat consists of small birds and rodents felled by hunter-sentries at the periphery with slings or clubs. Sa have an innate affinity for architecture, intuitively understanding the ideal form of any given building and how best to realize it, and this is even truer when they work purely with wood as their material. Sa can digest raw wood, but only with a certain amount of gastrointestinal distress. They find it much more palatable when it has already been processed by fungi.

[bookseraph]

Beast: "I used to have a real name, before all this."

Belle: "What was it?"

Beast: "It doesn't matter now. Even if...even if I turned back into a person, I'll never be that person again."

[bookseraph]

True love doesn't just fall into your lap. You have to go out and find your other half.

Liz Braswell

[worldhammerer-old]

Day 5 - Civilisation & Architecture

(Don’t worry [or possibly do worry?], i haven’t forgotten about the History prompt for day 4. I just figured since I’m already pretty far behind, I might as well get to the interesting ones before i tackle the ones that are likely going to be longer, drier, and more involved)

Vuatlieo

In the western deserts of Vuatlieo many live in cave homes not dissimilar to the yaodong of northern China - typically of the sunken-courtyard variety but sometimes dug into the sides of cliff faces, or other freestanding features. Communities of these dwellings have existed in this area for thousands of years, each remaining within a single family that they support. In areas where the water table is too high to support such ventures, homes and other buildings are built of bricks of cut stone or sun-dried mud, covered over with stucco. Sometimes one comes across complexes of earthen homes, storage spaces and workshops build into the undersides of hanging cliffs or shafts dug by humans, connected by ladders and gently sloping wooden platforms - the settlements of the Xwalhabmenet and the Hwalzanmenet, two great peoples of the West prior to its assimilation by Vuatlieo.

In the central areas of Vuatleio, they favor housing made from stone or mud bricks stuccoed and painted in angular geometric designs of purple and green, of red and gold, rich and vibrant colors. Rooms are boxy rectangular prisms grafted onto each other in a  somewhat haphazard way, where two connecting rooms might have very different dimensions including ceiling height based on what the builder intended the rooms to be used for. Most houses like this are built on a single level, with multi-story houses being atypical. When they exist, attempts to correct for the uneven quality of the floor - the previous level’s ceiling - are essentially unheard of, leading to disconcertingly angular lumps in the surface people walk on. The central Vuatlieone folk don’t seem to mind it, though. Almost no home in this style has internal stairs, with access to the roof or to potential other stories being provided by ladders or stairs on the outside formed by successive wooden stakes being hammered into the wall, or by natural slopes of hills or other geological formations that the building may be built into. Roofs may be the same stuff as the walls, supported by internal braces of wooden beams, or may be formed of woven corn leaves and stalks, or of baked or fired clay tiles in imitation of the East. Garden areas or courtyards might be sectioned off through extensions of the walls, enclosing some area beyond the normal confines.

The East and the Northern islands are pretty similar in architectural styles, so they’ll be described together, here. They are characterized by white or off-white buildings of clay or stone or, for certain monumental buildings, marble, built tall and supported by pillars and arches. While rectangular floorplans are favored as in the Central and Western regions, circular or oval shapes are also common and are held to be especially noble. Second or third floors may project beyond the boundaries of the first, and be supported by columns of pillars which signify a semi-private boundary while still maintaining visibility in a way that walls cannot. Stairs can be within or without a building, and as aforementioned, roofs are typically made of red tiles of fired clay, but may sometimes instead be domes of glass or beaten metal. The East being where the Emperor of Vuatlieo resides, and where the Royal Palace and City are, the Eastern style is associated with class and artistic refinement, and thus families or organizations in other regions who have high status, or wish to appear to, may have their buildings constructed in this style.

The towers of Vuatlieone wizards are famous, visible against pretty much any Vuatlieone horizon, majestic and eccentric, drawing from multiple traditions within and without the country, often from styles that only exist within the wizard’s mind. They may see multiple resident wizards over the course of their lifetime (though rarely more than one at any given time), each with their own preferences for how a building should look, and thus accrue a layered shell of balconies, windows, walls of stone or wood or metal. Their main unifying traits are their considerable height - wizards are a secretive sort, who see use in ensuring that their only visitors are those desperate enough to climb several flights of stairs or magically gifted enough to levitate to the top - and the considerable cellars at their base, stocked with the restorative wines and spirits for which Vuatlieo is so well known.

The Vuatlieone chthonic tombs are labyrinthine constructions, some of the very oldest not only in Vuatlieo but in all the known world. Their aboveground portion can be deceptively simple, an earthwork mound in the shape of a  hemisphere or a long wedge or a pyramid, shored up where needed with marble or granite and marked with a devotional stele proclaiming the family or individual the tomb is associated with. An opening will lead to a staircase or downward-angled corridor which invites deeper into the tomb, and into the earth, where the complex truly begins. The dead, in the Vuatlieone folk tradition, are displayed sitting in niches along the walls, or on thrones or benches, or lying in repose on slabs; regardless of the specifics, they are open to the elements and not hidden away from the eye as they decay into skeletons, draped with funerary goods of beaded necklaces, torcs and bangles, and sometimes dressed in a curious sort of armor of beaten copper, or silver, or gold, which would have done little to protect the deceased in life but rather is meant to beautify the corpse, with breastplates that draw one’s eye to the heart, or helmets with elaborate flared headdresses that put one in mind of a peacock’s train. The hallways and open rooms of the tombs are supported by fluted columns. Statues or murals may be present to commemorate the individuals interred or specific evens in their lives, or to act as a focus for prayers to ancestral spirits residing within the tomb or underground more generally. While excavating space for their dead, the Vuatlieone sometimes broke into natural caverns or underground tunnels. While sometimes these were assimilated, in whole or in part, into the structure of the tomb, at other times the architects were content to leave the natural beauty of these spaces be, and would leave them as a vista for the dead and their visitors to view, or even wall them off (though over time not all of these walls have remained).

Along the eastern borders, at the shores of the great lakes, the particularly destitute, humble or pious may live in the massive shells of deceased snails which have washed ashore; these are cramped and, in terms of weight, relatively light, such that particularly strong winds may blow them over or even carry them some distance (including into the water, where the resident will likely drown). It’s this lightness of shell that is an asset for the structure’s other use, that of the carriage for carts drawn by aavexhãonon, the large birds that act as steeds and beasts of burden in certain southern and southeastern areas of Vuatlieo, and who lack the strength to pull heavier wooden carts for a useful distance.

Hambry

The buildings in Hambry are overwhelmingly constructed of wood, with sparing use of iron or ceramics or stone for nails, hinges, tile floors, etc. Accordingly, fires are a very serious problem which can cause tremendous loss of life and property damage. However, in most of Hambry, stone is too scarce, difficult to access, or poor quality to be a realistic building material for most people. Use of stone is reserved for the rich, the priesthood, and communal warehouses, these last being built entirely of stone in the hopes that they withstand fires that lesser buildings do not. Somewhat ironically, the main place where stone is an economical building material for most people is one of the poorest places in the empire: the Nivan highlands, up on the slopes of the mountains and the hidden valleys where they make a rough living herding yaks and cattle for their meat and for dairy products that make their way through all the Nivan astral-trail system to be deeply embedded in southern continental cuisine.

In the Nivan lowlands, the thin and scraggly grasslands and black sand beaches that lead down to the steel-grey ocean, many live in villages made from clusters of an enormous root vegetable, woody and bitter, which are hollowed out and then covered with woven roofs supported by short wooden stakes. These are typically one-room, with a hollow in the center of the room for a metal bowl (and insulating cloth between the bowl and the substance of the root) to built a fire for cooking, light, heat, etc. Other housing solutions unique to the region include the discarded shells of snails that the famous great crabs of the Kymnutari Ocean feed on, much like the ones in eastern Vuatlieo, but formed into a large cone, rather than a simple round shape. These are somewhat heavier than Vuatlieone shells, but further held down with magical stones, incised with runes by a wizard, and possibly also restrained by nets nailed into the ground with great pegs.

The kansiuq of the south have mastered the art of defensive architecture; covering their island beaches with rough-cut spiked logs, giving their fortress walls a beard of the same, placing tall towers at the corners of their towns from which enemies can be seen for miles around. The wood used is typically pine or cedar, and not always particularly well finished - visitors or soldiers stationed at kansiuq settlements often come away complaining of splinters. To some degree this is alleviated by wall hangings of furs and skins (the product of the kansiuq diet, in which meat features prominently) which may be painted, an artistic medium of the kansiuq which may convey stories about the Hambric state religion, famous kansiuq and foreigners of history, or naturalistic scenes.

In the Zrii isles, city-fortresses are built in shells of iron and Zrii metal, in the shape of truncated pyramids with pentagonal bases, off of which many semi-open promenades and boardwalks may project into the warm northern waters or along beaches. These can be tightly shut in the summer and fall months in which tropical storms are common. Inside, iron and Zrii metal are still prominent building materials, but also the jungle hardwoods, and soft carved stone. Light is provided by narrow windows in the city-fortress shells, but also by gas fires. Gardens in cup-shaped structures outside the cities were once exercises in patience and continual rebuilding, annually ravaged as they were by weather, but now trade with Vuatlieo for resilient glass in large panes that the Zrii islanders don’t have the technological expertise or facilities to create themselves is much easier (if not much less expensive), meaning that many of these gardens are now greenhouses of sorts.

Szaomngba

Szaomngba is a land of nomadic horse-riders, and so much of their architecture is based around the tent or somewhat more permanent (though still ultimately temporary) ger. The truly permanent settlements that they have make use of the volcanic stone basalt which is plentiful in that place, as well as tuff and the wood of the black walnut tree; roofs of stone, copper or bronze are common, as are domed roofs, which may be ornamented with weathercocks, spires, cupolas, or devices meant to strain the volcanic ash of Red Mountain out of the air and collect it in reservoirs for the residents’ use. These devices may also stand free in the countryside, their ash collected by travellers. Szaomngba mortuary architecture is superficially similar to Vuatlieone practices but differs in a number of crucial ways. The mound aboveground is typically meant to enclose the entirety of the tomb; though in practice most specimens have at least one chamber sunk a significant ways into the earth below. The mound is formed of a frame of wooden beams surrounding a (series of) room(s) built of wooden planks, surrounded by heaped stones packed with earth. 

[worldhammerer-old]

Day 3: People and Races

Aoat has a number of sentient species on it; it’s difficult to create a precise compendium of all who share the world because there are many who exist only in isolated pockets in remote locations, and others who do their best not to be found or at the very least recognized as a species of their own. That said, here’s a (non-exhaustive) listing of some of the kinds of people you might find around the rim of the Kymnutari Ocean:

Ksui are muscular feline folk averaging around twelve feet tall. They are obligate carnivores and come with most of the expected cat accoutrements: triangular ears that can rotate independently of each other for improved directional hearing, a proud twitching tail that provides balance and lends expressiveness to one’s demeanor. They have five fingers and one opposable thumb per hand. While by far most thickly found in the Firsthomes - their first home, and only secondarily home of any other species harbored there - they can be found in any place on Aoat with any significant population. Even Hambry, thought to be the human nation if any such thing existed, has a sizeable slice of ksui in its demographic makeup. Their coats come in a number of colours and patterns.

Humans are small (typically around six feet tall), weak creatures built to the ksui bipedal body plan, typically mostly hairless save for impressive shocks of hair on their scalps and, depending on culture and personal preference, beards in a variety of styles. Omnivores, though religion, culture or health may dictate a vegetarian or nearly entirely meat diet. You know what these beings are, probably.

Orcs are creatures from beneath the earth, eight to ten feet when full grown, herbivores who are acutely aware that most other species in the world have no physiological barriers to eating meat, and just as acutely aware that they are themselves composed chiefly of meat. Their skin colour ranges from navy blue, through indigo and violet, through to a sort of magenta, and, in certain cases, shades of green. They have large, floppy ears not unlike those of rabbits, and may be possessed of horns in a variety of styles (rounded nubs, straight spikes, curled ram horns or the ridged curves of the ibex). The deep orcs are subterranean masters of technology, and have carved out a mighty empire for themselves in the chthonic Underworld. The surfacer orcs are what the deep orcs have left behind as a safeguard against carnivore intrusion into the heart of their lands, and they face condescending paternalism from their deep kin while quaking in their boots with us as neighbors. They (often) reside in the discarded reeking swamps, bogs, fens and marshes that others do not deign to call their own, and make a humble living farming fine vegetables and selling deep goods such as naphthalene (essentially, magic gasoline) powered portable lamps and burnished bronze automata in the shape of bulls and other beasts of burden. Orcs have a reputation for being adept at chemistry, draughting medicines, liquors, liquid fertilizers. Due to their herbivore metabolism, they grow weary more quickly and more often than a human would, despite (almost always) being physically stronger, and thus have a number of small meals throughout the day - like a hobbit, say, in the media franchise that hangs over every fantasy writer’s head like the Sword of Damocles.

Mtok are persons who are also birds. Corvids, in fact, of a large size. They were given a power to generate and manipulate electricity long ago, when the world was being made. They can fly under their own power, aided by huge wings and hollow, brittle bones, and indeed have a number of flying cities - huge mobile arrangements of woven reeds and strings and all manner of things that individual mtok have found and surrendered to the good of the city. At any given time these cities have a significant portion of their population given over to the arduous task of keeping it aloft, with rested and fed mtok taking over for the ones who are too fatigued to carry on. A few times a year these cities make landing outside of other, larger cities built on the ground - sometimes landing in said cities if they have fashioned an appropriate cradle in which the city may rest. Then, a brisk trade starts up of goods and services - many mtok turn to the arts of wizardry, given the meditative nature of their flightpower-lending labor corvée, but they also have among them their share of smiths, of weavers, of lapidaries and scribes and lensgrinders and cooks and chandlers.

Kobolds are reptilian folk who are perhaps of a height with ksui, though often so hunched over or otherwise postured that estimating their height is difficult. They were deliberately made by the dragons, in an ancient war, from the dragons’ own essence, cast to be soldiers and fight against the forces of order in the world. Now, the dragons are nowhere to be seen, and the kobold feel no particular obligation to their memory. They can swim for hours underwater without drawing breath, and spit lances of strange energies in times of dire peril. While they lay eggs, like mtok and goblinfolk do, a kobold egg can be left unattended for decades and then returned to and, with the appropriate attention, still hatch a viable kobold. Kobold lineages are thus difficult to trace, and many times great kobold houses will exchange eggs as a show of goodwill and allegiance to each other. They are better suited to warm climates than cold ones, and wet climates than dry ones.

Goblins are really three species that share a common ancestor, though when people who have any awareness of goblins at all hear the word, it’s typically the red goblin they think of. These nomads journey along the deep roads under mountains, bridging the Underworld and the surface. They have a long, narrow beak for fishing and for snatching insects from tiny gaps; huge, reflective eyes; clawed hands and feet; and a loose covering of feathers and needle-like quills. They love spicy foods and at each stop along their great roads they plant gardens of chilies. They stand as tall as a human, roughly, about six feet. Next most common (or at least, most prominent in the eyes of non-goblins) are the black goblins or white goblins, depending on who you’re talking to and at what period in history (’white goblin’ was for a long time the preferred term, but has been being phased out over the last few hundred years). These muscular beings have blunted, almost square beaks and scaly armor over much of their head, shoulders and chest. They stand thirteen to fifteen feet tall. They hail from the snowy wastes of the far south of Drokkstang, on the borders of Hambry and Belkharoz, and mostly eat penguins, seals and the meat of the ironwood tree nut (they use the shards of the shell in their arrow- and spearheads and as flanges for their maces). The green goblins/water goblins/kappa are amphibious in nature (in that they thrive both in and out of water, not in that they bear a close resemblance to amphibians) and are most commonly found in the open waters of the Kymnutari Ocean. They bear a deep resentment for ships that are passing through waters they apparently consider to be theirs, and have been known to form parties to climb up the sides of vessels and attack the crew (or at the very least, steal supplies and cause a ruckus). While mute, they have a language (probably many languages) of hand gestures and other bodily motions - history tells of sailors who learned to communicate with them in kind and enjoyed passage unharried (or probably only less harried - kappa are no more a monolithic entity than any other sentient species of Aoat and favor with one does not necessarily mean favor with a whole or any other individual within that whole) but the language seems immensely complex and linguists often would rather study languages with less hostile speakers. They glow a gentle green and stand about five feet tall. Diggings in western Vuatlieo have uncovered skeletal remains of what appear to be a fourth goblin race, the blue goblins, so named for the sky-blue cups and beads that were buried alongside them. They had a curious hollow fluted bone emanating from their skull.

The trolls are towering (eighteen to twenty-four feet tall) herdsmen composed of living stone, migrating from mountaintop to mountaintop with their equally-stony herd animals, who have asbestos wooly coats and udders that drip petroleum. Trolls eat stone, sleep little, and are mostly solitary except for semi-annual gatherings of perhaps twenty at a time.

[worldhammerer-old]

Day 1: Introduction

Aoat is a fantasy world with a number of sentient species - humans and a collection of more or less anthropomorphic animal-ish people, mostly. It’s got magic, sure. It’s got dragons (probably), sure. But it’s not a world that I’m interested in telling particularly grand or epic tales with. Conflicts are more likely to arise from fluctuations in the price of iron, say, than from some dark evil being unsealed after a thousand years. I’ve always been interested in the material artifacts left behind by history - weapons, clothing and jewelry, clay pots, grave or property markings - and the processes by which people created them, and this interest has been one of the driving forces behind my conception of Aoat as a world and its people.

Most of what I have fleshed out for Aoat centers around a few large states who recently had expansionist notions but are currently locked essentially standing still against each other: Hambry is an empire of proud archers and strong-backed sailors, holding claim over the frigid Kymnutari Ocean and the wooded western edges of the continent of Drokkstang. To the west, the Firsthomes, a collection of technologically-advanced city-states of humans and ksui (cat people) who account themselves the appointed rulers of all creation; Szaomngba, a land of deserts and volcanoes in turns sun-baked and bitterly cold, where nomadic horse-riders know secret techniques of lightning-magic; and the Black Territories, a frigid wasteland where inhabitants make a meagre living within strongholds warmed by geothermal energy protecting them from hordes of giant insects. To the east, Vuatlieo, a vast land brimming with abundance, known for its wine and its wizards in equal measure; Belkharoz, south of Vuatlieo, where serfs tied to the land live short and unfulfilling lives for a royal clan of werewolf blood-mages and their vampiric cronies; the orcish lands, too waterlogged, wild or generally unpleasant for anyone else to have laid a claim to, where surface orcs live peaceful enough lives engrossed in agriculture and the sale of fine deep orc goods to surfacer non-orcs; and the Salt Wastes, which lie under the ocean half the year and are barren, the other half, save for smugglers, capitalists, and other evildoers. The Ocean Folk also claim to come from the east, but also that their homelands lie a considerable distance north - all that’s known for certain of them are the artificial islands they grow in favored waters, from coral, and the salt-preserved exotic fruits they trade.

That’s probably enough for today, thank you for your time.

[worldhammerer-old]

the vuatlieone conceive of the sky as the residence of their gods and the means by which divine messages are conveyed to them, and of the underground as the residence of the souls of their departed ancestors (at least until they are once again born in the surface/material realm) and of a vast array of numerous types of spirits and supernatural beings, some of which must be appeased by performing certain actions or giving certain types of material gift, some of which are malevolent amd must be discouraged from interfering with surface/material matters. vuatlieone dead are traditionally buried in underground tomb complexes, where the deceased may oversee their bodies and hear the petitions of their descendants to intercede in material affairs or ask other, more powerful chthonic beings to do so on their behalf