Culture Focus: Wuvu-lu-aua

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Culture Focus: Wuvu-lu-aua

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Here's my shot at a culture focus article.

Wuvu-lu-aua: Forgotten but not Forgiven

Lay of the Land:
The Wuvu is an enormous wetland alluvial swamp with an area of about 30,000 square kilometers. It is crossed by numerous rivers and streams, and large areas are underwater at high tide.

Ecologically, the swamp is diverse. The muddy coastal areas are dominated by mangroves and nipah palms. Inland, where the swamp is freshwater, other sorts of vegetation become more common — herbaceous vegetation, grasses, and forest. A significant portion of the swamp is peatland. It is home to a wide variety of animals, including freshwater fish, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, crocodiles, sea snakes, and pigeons. Due to the unique properties of the swamp, many of these creatures are undead at any given time.

The area is so rich in Death energies that any being which dies within its boundaries will spontaneously rise again as an undead. The kind of undead is determined by the manner of death; plague deaths give rise to zombies, for instance, while death by hunger gives rise to ghouls, and death by old age gives rise to skeletons. Even some of the vegetation is undead, a phenomenon which is exceedingly rare outside the Wuvu. Fortunately, the local wildlife is accustomed to the presence of these things and will prey on the undead as readily as the living.

Major Cities:
The total civilized population of the swamp is roughly 70,000 people, and of those, about half live in the centralized settlement known as Wuvu-lu. The remainder live in smaller fiefdoms about the swamp. The second largest is Wuvu-ulka, with perhaps 9,000 people; and the smallest is Wuvu-huru, with perhaps 2,000. However, in all these settlements, the living are much outnumbered by the undead, by a factor of about 10-to-1.

Almost all buildings are either treehouses or otherwise elevated, on stilts, or stones, or in the case of extremely wealthy families, by undead creatures holding the building on their shoulders. Security in these settlements is oddly inverse to the importance of the inhabitants, with the poorest dwellings being heavily fortified and the grandest houses standing open to all comers. Displaying the confidence that others will not dare to cross you is a powerful status symbol.

Economics:
The undead inhabitants of each settlement serve as the unskilled labor force, bringing in food and water from the swamp under the guidance of Death magicians and providing other basic tasks. Indeed, the lowest position that any citizen of Wuvu-lu-aua can possess is foreman of a labor squad, and they have a generally high standard of living.

Trade with the outside world is unknown, and indeed forbidden. The Wuvu-lu-aua civilization are the descendants of the infamous Aua-lu people who committed many heinous atrocities when they used their Death magics to try and carve out an empire, before their methods invited all of their rivals to unite against them, leading to a crushing defeat. The Aua-lu remnants hid in the Wuvu swamp, and there they have been isolated to this day. It is their belief that if the existence of their society became generally known that a new concerted effort would be made to wipe them out, and they are probably right.

One implication of this trade vacuum is that anything produced outside the swamp is a serious luxury good in Wuvu-lu-aua society. Outsiders that wander into the swamp will be stripped of their every possession (and killed). Every few years, a small raiding party will be sent out to murder and rob some travelers. 'No witnesses' is the motto of these raiders. Unofficial raiding parties are sometimes led out by foolish young nobles, but this is highly illegal and subject to harsh punishment.

Law and Order:
In one sense, there is no law in Wuvu-lu-aua, since everyone does whatever they personally have the power to get away with. In practice, cities are ruled by noble houses empowered by the fealty of less powerful citizens. It is in many ways a classic feudal society arising from a lawless situation.

As a result, illegality is defined as that which the most powerful citizens find annoying, and the punishment is whatever they feel might make the annoyance stop. In most towns, things which the rulers find annoying are written down somewhere, but this is more in the spirit of a helpful guideline rather than a formal law system.

One quirk of Wuvu-lu-auan tradition is that even undead who are self-willed are considered property and not citizens. There are no liches or vampires in positions of authority.

Magical Traditions:
There is only one major magical tradition in Wuvu-lu-aua: the manufacture, and especially control, of undead creatures. Every citizen is raised in this tradition, and most are responsible for the control of 10 undead creatures, with the more powerful magicians controlling the same number of more powerful creatures. Parents are responsible for maintaining the quotas of their children until they have sufficient skill to take over.

The most significant minor tradition is that of using Death magic to keep the many diseases that simmer in the swamp at bay. There is also a small branch of researcher-magicians whose mandate is to discover new forms of undead by experimenting with ever-more-exotic means of dying and seeing what the swamp's power brings forth. This occasionally results in nearly-disastrous consequences.

Those who show insufficient Death magic talent are usually killed.

Government:
The best way to understand Wuvu-lu-auan government is as a feudal society where the peasants happen to be undead. Wuvu-lu is the capital and all the other cities owe fealty to whichever noble family rules it. This fealty is quite relaxed, and the outlying nobles send 'gifts' rather than 'taxes' to their liege.

While the structure of government in Wuvu-lu-aua is quite stable, the composition of that structure is not. Intrigues and power grabs are continual, although assassination and blackmail are far more common than open battle.

edit: spelling
Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Wed Feb 25, 2009 6:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

I think you'd want to ratchet down the reanimation rate a lot. Raccoons have a generation every couple of years, so if literally everything reanimated, you'd run out of space extremely quickly. Probably better if "a lot" of dead things reanimate and the Wuvuans know how to ensure that something does or does not if they get to the corpse within a few hours.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Well, there are biomass issues, but honestly I think most critters are just eaten before their bodies finish reanimating, or 'killed' again and eaten afterward, causing only a fairly mild hiccup in the normal circle of life. Hell, zombie gators are probably followed by swarms of little fish which slowly devour them as they go about their day.

I guess a lot of it depends on what kind of undead the swamp produces as the result of death by simple physical trauma. My thought is that's how you get ghosts, and that animal ghosts just don't last that long.
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Post by Beth_Naught »

Or if you really wanted to interweave an undead stage into the swamp's life cycles, thanaotogenesis mostly produces undead creatures that can't care for themselves or avoid predation quite as efficiently as the living creatures that engender them. And folks eat undead possum preferentially, because fresh killed live possum is like a green banana - unripe. Zombies swiftly rot if untended.

Do you have a preferential location for this civilization? The windward side of Kinoc's Spine seems to be as yet unclaimed, and kind of fits the biome. On the other hand, to snatch caravans they'd have to adjoin a trade route between at least two other places where people want to go.
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Post by Beth_Naught »

Well, there's a suddenly redundant crosspost :roll:
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Post by Username17 »

Since having ghost turkeys around is actually kind of cool, it's probably better all around if most of the turkeys that get eaten just vanish rather than all becoming turkey ghosts and then vanishing shortly afterward.

Just structurally, having a recurrent character ghost possum seems highly desirable. And since the only ways I can see to keep the ghost possum population under control are to either have them be so unstable that they are cleared out regularly or to make them somewhat unlikely on a per-possum basis - the second one seems clearly superior. I mean, otherwise you can't have ghost cougars as tower guards. And that seems like a waste of ghost cougars.

In short: given the choice between wasting ghost possums on being transient and inconsequential and having some sort of statistical family planning for ghost possums, the narrative imperative seems clear.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Hm, what if ghosts can be crammed into death magic spirit-batteries and used up like fossil fuels? That way the death magicians have a reason to trawl for all the spare ghosts around the swamp, thus keeping the ghost population down, but can keep the cool useful ghosts around if they want to.

Also, those batteries seem like the sort of thing that would get people really mad if you used them on the ghosts of people, which I assume the Aua-lu did.
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Post by Beth_Naught »

The trope where ghosts are special undead is probably worth preserving: say, killed by void iron or while under a binding oath. And unless the local despots have done ghost raising themselves, it's probably about as socially acceptable as lighting your cigar with a banknote - you permanently sacrifice resources to get something that can't do productive labor and is hard to control. So someone who has a ghost cougar as one of their yoked ten is unsettling even to the natives, for reasons other than just having a phosphorescently camouflaged soul rending killer at your behest.

Feral ghost cougars...from death at midnight of the Most Inauspicious Day? Death at the crossroads of ley lines? Death during a monsoon squall of corrupt energy?
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Post by name_here »

Actually, ghost cougars are actually worth something, they're just tightly constrained in what they can be used for. So, basically, ghost chickens are right out in terms of using resources, but a ghost cougar is perfectly fine if you're a SWAT member or some sort of soldier. It could even be a symbol of position: If you're an imperial guard you have a ghost cougar following you around.
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Post by IGTN »

It could also be that most ghosts tend to dissipate quickly, but a few stick around. Essentially the same as only a few forming, but adding the benefit of keeping the 100% reanimation rate.

Being able to use ghosts as a power source is also cool. The only issue I have with it is that it makes Death and Life too similar, if death mages use ghosts to gather energy, and the life mages spill blood.

So, my idea to fix all of this: the swamp has concentrations of death energy in it that magically arise, but are near-invisible and intangible if you're corporeal, but ghosts can take them, and even animal ghosts will. A ghost that gathers enough becomes peristent (and may have to continue to eat some, but not as much), and ghosts can be captured to extract this energy.

This also lets determined people stay on as ghosts, if their determination gets them to find the energy they need to become persistent.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Angel's idea where ghosts are fuel is probably a good one.

It explains why there aren't ghost chickens everywhere (they're collected and forced into a ghost-battery.... the HD (or lvl, or w/e) of a creature determines how much juice the ghost can provide), while allowing ghosts that are useful (ghost cougars) or fun (ghosts of pets) to remain.

It also explains why there aren't tons of wild ghosts; the ghost-mages go around collecting their essences. This sounds like a full time job too.

So, the villagers sell their ghost chickens to the ghost-collectors, but keep their hunting dog ghosts since they don't need to be fed and having lots of them makes hunting easier.

Ghosts could eventually "fade" or "die" (ghost state is the creatures age at death x D%; so even a fruit fly won't live more than 700 days; while a pet dog could live up to 1400 years as a ghost, or an extra 14; probably more like 700 extra years).
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

name_here wrote:So, basically, ghost chickens are right out in terms of using resources, but a ghost cougar is perfectly fine if you're a SWAT member or some sort of soldier.
I dunno, I think you could probably do some funky stuff with the ghostly eggs.

Although the undead trees might be more fun. If I can steal a bit from Books of Magic:

"Good lemonade."
"Thanks. I make it every morning from the ghost of a lemon."
"...That's awful."
"Don't insult my work, kid, it's a lot easier to make ghosts out of people than lemons."
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Post by Grek »

My take on it:

Incorporeal undead can, for the most part, only interact with and be seen by other incorporeal undead*. They also try to suck the life out of whatever they ate in life. They normally can't attack the living, though. Herbivores cause a kind of blight in plants and are hated. Carnivores eat the herbivores are are liked, for the most part.

A special case is parasites, like leechs, mosquitoes and blood sucking bats**. Parasitic ghosts can and will attack living things. They can be kept away using certain swamp plants or having a ghost that can eat them nearby. Falling into a pool of ghost leechs is not fun

It's possible to use Death magic to allow a ghost to feed off of you, so it doesn't die. This feels exactly like getting your soul eaten by leechs. If you have a pet ghost, it's better to have them eat some ghost possums than to let them eat you.

It's also possible to use death magic to stab a hole in another living thing's defenses and allow normal ghosts to suck life out of them like they were ghostly leechs. This is done with a doll stuffed with blood soaked bat fur and a long iron needle. This only works if there are infact ghosts around. If you are raiding someplace outside the swamp and want to kill someone with ghosts, bring your own ghosts.

*Iron stuff hits them, because iron is special in this setting.
**Bloodsucking bats are seen as evil and malign. Insect eating bats are seen as good and protecting. This makes for interesting superstitions about bats.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

When I think of using ghosts as a power source, two things come to mind.

Image

Image

I consider both of these to be pretty awesome. I like the idea of ghost hunters who hunt down generic ghosts to charge their batteries. Ghosts that get more Death energy for whatever reason can be more persistent and unique, possibly creating a new type of bounty hunter that finds unique ghosts and sells them off to inventors who use them in their bizarre experiments.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

I'm not keen on ghosts eating.

I know that in Greek mythology letting ghosts drink the blood of a goat makes them corporeal-ish, but I'm not keen on ghosts being something that can not only kill you, but also eat you.

I'm fine with ghouls eating things, potentially even zombies eating things. Since they have bodies that could be fed. Ghost cows that blight plants only works if this 'blight' is the result of damage that all ghosts can deal to a target. I don't want one single type of undead to be more interesting than every other type of undead combined.

At that point we might as well only have ghosts, but I think that the shout-outs for zombie 'gators and ghoul voodoo priests make having only ghosts sound like a cop-out.
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Post by Username17 »

Judging__Eagle wrote: At that point we might as well only have ghosts, but I think that the shout-outs for zombie 'gators and ghoul voodoo priests make having only ghosts sound like a cop-out.
What if all the undead were ghosts, but some of them possessed bodies? Then your basic zombie could be something that you'd legitimately fear.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I've toyed with a similar idea before. Some ghosts can only possess their own corpses, some can 'possess' objects poltergeist-style, and so on and so forth.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

FrankTrollman wrote:What if all the undead were ghosts, but some of them possessed bodies? Then your basic zombie could be something that you'd legitimately fear.

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That would work nicely. The standard is to cremate everything, but pretty much everyone knows enough necromancy that there are a good number of zombie pets around. Then there are scary ghosts hanging about until a ghost buster comes by and cleans things up, but the ghosts themselves usually don't pose a threat so long as bodies are properly disposed of.

I think, however, that these people might be vegetarian as a rule. Eating any flesh might be viewed as cannibalism, the act of a ghoul.
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Post by IGTN »

CatharzGodfoot wrote:I think, however, that these people might be vegetarian as a rule. Eating any flesh might be viewed as cannibalism, the act of a ghoul.
I liked the idea of them eating twice-dead meat. Then again, having a rule of "eating animals is for the dead" makes sense, and ghouls are less likely to get food poisoning from eating a twice-dead rat.
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Post by Username17 »

If eating flesh allows a ghost who is possessing their own body to maintain the blush of life you get lots of ghoul/vampire stuff going on without having to have long lists of inane necromantic classifications. Also, socially speaking meat eating could be considered a polite thing for the undead to do because it would make them be "not disgusting" and therefore easier to get along with.

For the living, flesh eating would be an ostentatious display. It is needlessly difficult compared to eating yams and corn, and it takes resources that could be used to keep zombies fresh. So only the rich and powerful get meat. Which means that they are also bigger and stronger than other people. Good for Feudalism.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Now I'm thinking that since all undead are ghosts, then they're all self-willed, but the Death magic that binds them to service usually makes them act mindless - because it's a crude form of control. So uncontrolled undead can be canny foes, and controlled undead are more like shambling hordes. Only the really skilled death magicians can dominate their ghostly minions while leaving their initiative and personalities intact.

This could lead to the same number/more elite setup that the Wuvu-lu-auans use, if ghosts need to be able to manipulate their etheric powers with skill of their own, which is suppressed by a cruder binding.

Another thought, maybe all mind control is tied to Death magic, and even the living are compelled by having the ghost inside them being told what to do. It works for Ars Magica.
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Post by Username17 »

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Another thought, maybe all mind control is tied to Death magic, and even the living are compelled by having the ghost inside them being told what to do. It works for Ars Magica.
It is also imperative that Life Mages get to sick bugs on you. So I propose that mind control be Death, and emotion control be Life. So the result is that you can pilot wasps around with life magic because they are ruled by hunger and rage, but if you want to puppet people around more heavily than simply "U lurvs me!" you need Death.

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Post by TavishArtair »

FrankTrollman wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote: Another thought, maybe all mind control is tied to Death magic, and even the living are compelled by having the ghost inside them being told what to do. It works for Ars Magica.
It is also imperative that Life Mages get to sick bugs on you. So I propose that mind control be Death, and emotion control be Life. So the result is that you can pilot wasps around with life magic because they are ruled by hunger and rage, but if you want to puppet people around more heavily than simply "U lurvs me!" you need Death.

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Right. Even without the very physical nature of the brain, the unfortunate fact of the body is that you... think with it. In a very real sense your body influences your mental processes even while you're sitting down and doing mathematics to balance your budget. A Life mage can probably condition someone in a sort of Pavlovian sense or Skinner's operant conditioning to get more nuanced results over time. This is probably even harder to shake, since you don't even need to reassert the magic if you've had a hold of them long enough... the enchantment can't be "dispelled" directly since the influence is lasting.

However, usurping someone's free will requires root access, which is presumably in your soul. Or, for some people, in your absence of soul. This is more powerful, more certain, and quicker, and by killing certain thoughts as they come online, can probably create similar conditioning although never quite the same, more akin to brainwashing than instilling a series of desires.
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Post by eeuuugh »

There might be problems here with peak predator populations. If zombie cougars are eating living animals, there's not a lot of room for living cougars. Maybe the demand for ghost cougars is sufficient to keep zombie cougars (from which the ghosts are harvested) from bumping living cougars out of the niche, but I think the ecosystem would have reached the equilibrium of "all cougars are zombies", before the Wuvu showed up.

How about ghosts only coming from zombies? This would easily limit the possible number of animal ghosts, cougar or otherwise, especially for prey animals like turkeys/possums, which usually die by being eaten. You would also necessarily have to raise a zombie before you raised a ghost. This step is fairly trivial in the swamps, but if you want to travel with your death magic skills you've got to master it.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

First, let's be clear - the apex predator in the swamp is the crocodile. Anything dead that's in the water is going to be eaten by tiny fish before too long.

Second, classical zombies are sucky predators. They tend to be slower and less stealthy than their living counterparts.

Finally, I oppose ghosts coming only from zombies on the principle that it looks like ghosts are becoming a significant part of the general setting anyway.
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