#ranaite

[cadere-art]

What’s one food/drink in your world that sounds amazing

Do they have any musical instruments, if so is it based off of any really world stuff?

Tahen cultures have all sorts of taboo around fire. This is taken to an extreme in Ranai, where open fires are completely forbidden and one must own a special permit to tend a cooking fire. As a result, Ranai cuisine is renowned for it's wealth of raw, pickled, and otherwise marinated foods. Bcause Ranai's territory is an archipelago where fish and seafood is the main source of protein, makwa, acid-cooked fish akin to our world's ceviche, is a staple. Real-life ceviche being delicious, it is only logical that fictional ceviche would also be*.

Bird-fish makwa is an ancient traditional meal of the archipelago. It has three main ingredients: gruel of uciwici, an oat-like, distinctively purple grain rich in anthocyanins, dried and salted kelp, and shrimp and crustacean meat marinated in sumac vinegar. Eggs, herbs, and tart fruits are sometimes added as toppings. Bird-fish makwa most salient tastes are tartness from the sumac vinegar with salt and umami from the seafood and kelp, on a base note of mild and nutty sweetness reminiscient of brown rice from the mashed uciwici. The name of this recipe is a mistranslation of the meal's name from Wetki to Ranaite Tahen.

Jimeleu makwa is a classic ceviche which puportedly originates from the town of Jimeleu, where the soils and climate are conducive to the growth of citrus trees. Jimeleu ceviche consists of diced white fish acid-cooked in lime juice with horseradish, white beans, and cold-cooked uciwici grains. The marinade is usually clear, with a green tinge from the lime and horseradish. Common variants add cold fish broth or cream of green peas to water the ceviche into a soup. Jimeleu makwa is sour and spicy, and variants with cream of green peas have a distinctive sweetness.

Cici-Uli makwa is reminiscient of tataki or carpaccio. A large, white-meat fish is cut into filets which are marinated in a mixture of sumac vinegar, oil, and seasonings (including, but not limited to, salt, horseradish, and tart fruits akin to pincherries). The marinated filet is then cut into very thin slices and served with crunchy seeds and sliced sweet onion. Only the external edge of the fish has cooked: the main flavor of Cici-Uli makwa is that of the raw fish itself. This type of makwa requires very fresh fish.

*Note that I have not tried to make these The Most Palatable Possible - especially the first one!

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The answer to the second question is a bit less interesting. In short: yes, they do have music instruments! However, I am profoundly not musically inclined and this (as well as sports) is a thing where I show my biases as an individual: I have done roughly 0 musical worldbuilding, and it is unlikely that I will ever do more than the bare minimum (when I remember that the world should, to feel alive, have some music). About Ranaites, I can say that they have a variety of instruments, especially winds and percussions. Bamboo is an important material for their woodwinds and percussion instruments. A large shell is used as a traditional wind instrument. I imagine they have some sort of relatively simple string instrument, and a slightly more complex one with better acoustic imported by members of the Oumdashen diaspora. Ranaites have inherited a taste for passive music such as windchimes from the archipelago's original inhabitants, the Wetki. Shell windchimes are a popular fixture of gardens throughout the archipelago.

[cadere-art]

Assuming the Random Worldbuilding Questions is an ask game number 7, if it’s not, please ignore and let me die of embarrassment

I don't know if it was an ask game, but lets make it one!

7: If you pulled a random average Joe off the streets of your world and asked them to draw a house, what would they draw? (Shape, roof style, position and number of windows, etc.)

Obviously, where you are in Uanlikri when you ask average Joe to draw you a house would change the answer quite a bit! There are a great many styles of houses (and homes which are not houses) in Uanlikri, sometimes even more than one to a people!

I've selected three examples for this ask: the Oumdashen, the Obixwø-Øi, and the Ranaite Tahens.

The territories of the Oumdashen Confederacy are where you would have the hardest time predicting what average Joe would draw for you: the Confederacy covers a large area, and is formed by what is essentially half a dozen ethnicities in a trench coat. Nonetheless, the Oumdashen are desert dwelling peoples, and their architecture reflects this combination of heat and aridity. Cave homes are common and highly sought after by both settled and transhumant clans. Adobe homes with flat rooves, used for sleeping in the cool desert night, are the most common. In densely populated areas, these tend to be square to better connect with neighboring buildings, but circular houses are also common in rural areas. In all cases, oumdashen homes always have a flat roof, as their is too little rain over their territory for the need to protect the adobe. But you might still get surprised by your average Joe: if they're part of a nomadic clan, they just might draw a tent.

The Obixwø-Øi dwell in the high plateaus of the Kantishian Mountains. They have a very distinctive style of house, square with a tall tatched roof that almost looks like a pointed hat. If you ask an Obixwø-Øi to draw you a house, you might be surprised at seeing a second building right besides it on the drawing: all Obixwø-Øi houses have a small circular hut on the side for small livestock like kabi.

Finally, a Ranaite Tahen's drawing of a house would reflect the fact that Ranai is the largest city of all Uanlikri, because it would very likely be connected to other houses, have several floors, or at least imply a connection to another building: there are few standalone houses in Ranai. Ranai architecture reflects both the pressing need for light generated by its monumental bureaucracy, and the high costs of materials such as stone and brick. Ranai houses typically have walls consisting of stone or brick arches with walls of waxed paper filling the arch openings. It is common for houses to have "backalleys" or communal living space in what is essentially their attic, a flat, tiled roof which is beneath the raised tatch roof.

[cadere-art]

Depending on how much you want to answer: 2, 3 and/or 10 for the worldbuilding questions? (Also, though off topic: I love your art style)

2) We all know about weddings and marriage, but are there any ceremonies that symbolically / legally / magically officialize a different type of relationship in your world’s culture? (Adoption, apprenticeship, friendship, etc.)

The Tahen peoples have a weaning ceremony. In Tahen cultures, hatchlings are raised by their parents until they're weaned & have shed their neonate duvet, a little before one year of age. When they reach this age, the duty of childraising is transferred from the parents to the grandparents (traditionally the maternal grandparents, though this varies). At this point, the grandparents hold a feast to celebrate the arrival of the children in their lives. There are gifts to the child, and theatrics where the parents pretend to be reluctant to give away their children while the grandparents reveal gifts and make increasingly grand promises for the children's future.

Among Ranaite Tahens and other Tahens where maternal grandparents no longer have automatic precedence, these feasts may also be rather tense as all sets of grandparents use them as a way to show off their willingness and ability to care for the children in a bid for custody. Of course, in most functional families, this has been orchestrated beforehand and the grandparents have already agreed on custody details for early childhood - as they get older, children typically move freely around the houses of all their grandparents.

3) What’s a rule or social norm that is widely followed in theory, but in practice everyone knows it’s not a big deal and breaks it all the time?

Technically this is more of a "what's a rule that everyone breaks all the time" answer. Among Tahen cultures as a whole, writing and reading are revered, and the dominant religion holds the letters of the alphabet as gods. Writing is therefore both mundane because everyone does it all the time, and sacred because letters are gods.

About 50 years prior to story time, there was a fad among Ranaite Tahen teens to deconstruct the Old Tahen characters for their names, tallying the types of strokes, selecting the most common ones, and assembling them into a unique glyph. They would then use these glyphs in place of a formal signature. To the Tahens, this is borderline sacrilegious as the Old Tahen alphabet is the basis upon which the current (godly) alphabet was built, and also a perversion of the act of writing. Unfortunately this trend caught on and was there to stay, and to this day it is common for almost everyone to use a personalised glyph in place of / along with a formal signature, despites these having no legal tender and being officially prohibited on formal documents.

There are even semi-formal glyph-taking ceremonies, originally organised by teens among themselves during graduation parties, but now often sponsored by their families as well. There are efforts to formalize and legalize glyph usage, but these are quite controversial.

10) What’s a fun fact about your world that you as the worldbuilder are dying to share, but nobody ever thinks to ask? 

Well tbf people don't really ask me that many questions, and I'm pretty good at talking about the things I want to talk about in general. That said, I wish more people knew about this silly genetics thing I made a few years back: pigmentation genetics was a really big interest of mine before I got obsessed with textiles!

[cadere-art]

1

For this list of worldbuilding prompts.

Are there any foods with symbolic meanings that are eaten on special occasions (e.g. katsudon for victory, or new years oranges for luck)? How did the tradition get started?

This was a challenging one! Here are two foods with symbolic meaning and / or eaten on special occasions.

Ambertree fruits and the Þuar

Ambertree fruits are the apricot-sized, very fleshy galbulus of the ambertree. They have waxy white skin and pink flesh, with a single large seed. Their flesh buttery, with a peculiar taste that is both cloyingly sweet and very resinous.

Ambertrees are cultivated for their resin, which can be carefully prepared and baked into artificial amber. For the Þuar peoples, who first mastered ambercraft, both the tree and its fruit are sacred. The fruits were traditionally only eaten by ambercrafters in the purification ceremonies undertaken as preparation for the delicate processes of ambercrafting, or harvested for religious offerings.

After the Þuar Wars, the Namitan Empire stole the secrets of ambercrafting and began growing its own ambertree orchards and training its own ambercraft masters, coveting the wealth to be obtained through the trade of the precious material and aiming to weaken the still-free Northern Þuar Queendoms. Ambertree fruit is considered a delicacy in the Namitan Empire.

Roasted meat and nuts and the Ranaite Tahen

For Ranaite Tahens, the inhabitants of the city state of Ranai on the Ojame archipelago, any meat meal is a special meal as the archipelago's high population density leaves very little land available for the raising of livestock (fish, seafood, and insects make up the majority of their protein intake, along with the meat of some small livestock like kabi).

Roasted meat, however, is a truly special thing and reserved for the solstice festivals. Ranaite Tahen have a strong cultural fear of fire, and fire is heavily regulated within the city of Ranai. Solstice festivals are days of exhuberance and nervousness as (heavily watched) open fires are lighted around the city and meats and nuts roasted on open flames to celebrate.