Culture Focus: Lolahshi

[IGTN]

My attempt at a Culture Focus article. I decided to take the idea of living armor that I posted a while back and make a culture out of it.

Lolahshi: The Demands of Plenty

Lay of the Land:
The island of Lolahshi sits a ways off the Redarkhan peninsula, surrounded by a brilliant sea, clear up close and silver-blue seen from the mountains, stretching off until it and the sky become one. It has similar geology to the Redarkhan peninsula, and is covered by similar rainforest almost from the coast to its highest mountains. The ground terrain is only ever flat when worn down by the island's many rivers or streams, or by the hands or feet of its inhabitants. Despite its small size, about five days under sail along either of its long coasts, it is home to an amazing variety of plant and animal species. The Lohali islands around it, ranging in size from barely enough for a village and fields to a day's walk to cross for the largest three, are even more diverse, with each of the islands playing home to its own distinct species of many genera of animals, notably snakes, pigeons, and leopards.

However, while the land is very friendly to life, it is much less so to civilization. The variety of animals has also made Lolahshi home to some of the most poisonous beasts (especially snakes and wasps) and plants, and deadliest diseases. The island's own inherent magic also enhances the fertility of every animal on it, from the common rat or mosquito, to deadly tigers and gold pythons (native only to Lolahshi), all the way up to the mightiest dragon. That humans, ormigans, and rice also benefit from this power (twins are not uncommon, and triplets not unheard-of) is a small consolation at best to those who must struggle against the beasts and plagues of the island. Despite these challenges, however, the island is inhabited by the Lahshi-ngum people.

Major Cities:
The largest city, and capitol of the island, is Lohei, which grew around a cove off a bay on the outward side of the island, facing away from the mainland, and has about 80,000 inhabitants. It is sustained by a combination of fishing, both in the bay and out at sea, farming on terraces carved onto the island's hills, and gathering fruits, berries, and meat in the surrounding jungles. In addition to its port, Lohei also has many roads into the island, at least a dozen connecting into the city, and two dozen more counting branches, connecting to its other towns. A thousand people are employed soley to ensure that the roads are kept usable against the rapidly encroaching jungle.

Major cities other than Lohei are Losaang, Zuelum, and A-lwan. All of them are connected to a waterway of some kind, and have at least 50,000 people: A-lwan is coastal, Losaang is located on an island in a lake in a swamp drained by the Lahaiku river to the sea, and Zuelum is built around where the Zueku river is fed by the Loaangku river.

Also of note is Hive Chu'ritl, on an island that bears the same name to its inhabitants, and called Tu-lial by the humans, the second largest of the outlying Lohali islands. The ormigans of hive Chu'ritl are heavily influenced their human neighbors, having adopted much of the same culture. Currently, they are a grudging tributary state of the Lahshi'ngum. The island of Chu'ritl, in all, has 60,000 inhabitants.

Disease is a constant threat in the cities, albeit a controlled one, but full-scale outbreaks are rare due to their ability to quarantine people, and their use of life magic to suppress disease. The cities all have a strong government enforcement of public health and sanitation laws, as such matters are literally life and death for large numbers of people.

The Lahshi-ngum people seldom live further from a populated town than one can easily memorize the way in case the road is overgrown and lost; while they are scattered across the entire island, by necessity they are clumped together. Most of their population is rural, and most of the island is out of easy reach from any inhabited settlement. Legends tell of entire counties of thousands of people which simply disappeared into the jungle when their roads were overgrown, but which were rediscovered generations later by explorers; it is fully possible that there are still lost towns in the jungle.

Economics:
The Lahshi'ngum have an economy primarily based on gathering the fruits of their island and its seas, and on protecting themselves from its dangers. Because of the island's extreme productivity and extreme danger, they gather into close groups. Typically, these groups are extended family units, headed by an elderly patriarch (or, rarely, matriarch), with advanced knowledge of Life magic. Many villages consist of a single such clan, or, occasionally, a pair of such clans that once split off from an older clan. In these villages, currency is rare; goods are given freely, or bartered, not bought, except for with outsiders. Larger towns that contain several clans tend to have both money (typically either silver coins or shell beads) and barter, and the clans tend to be less insular.

In the cities, such clans still exist, but a second layer of social structure is added: squads. Most work, whether Council or private, is done in groups ranging from five people to several dozen. Such groups are typically referred to as squads, and one is expected to treat one's squadmates as family. Almost all people are never on more than three squads in their entire working life, and most squads are expected to outlive their members. Abandoning one's squad on one's own initiative is frowned upon, but not treated harshly unless important duties are abandoned (such as road-clearing, hunting, or policing). Shorter-term arrangements, such as ship crews, are also treated as squads, although leaving when they disperse is expected. Squads under the Council also occasionally have members moved to other squads, and can be dissolved entirely. Those on work squads are paid in silver coins and shells, and the cities have a thriving coin economy. Redarkhan clay is also not unheard-of in their cities, and is common among wealthy tradespeople and mages.

The closeness with one's squadmates and family stands in contrast to their views of everyone else. A Lahshi-ngum will often not lift a finger to help a stranger, even to save a life, without a personal benefit to themself, their family, or their squad. While they will stop short of outright theft, fraud, or murder, they will also waste no effort to make the lives of others easier in their business dealings; if your luxury of feeding rice to your fish causes your neighbor to starve, that is not your problem.

In addition to agriculture and fishing, the islanders also mine silver and copper from the local rocks; silver coins are typically kept in airtight pouches, for fear that the air will cause them to tarnish; for that reason, shell beads are preferred, especially in coastal areas. Silver jewelry and eatingware is seen as a high status symbol, as it must be kept well-oiled. The shells come from a genus of mollusk unique to the shores of the Lohali islands (as well as Lolahshi itself), which is considered a difficult-to-catch delicacy, are typically about two centimeters in diameter, and are covered on the inside side in mother-of-pearl. To make them into coins, they are split in two and have a hole drilled through their center allowing them to be strung as beads, are coated in wax and sealed by a mage, and then are pickled in vinegar for two days before having the wax scraped off; this pickling causes the seal to change color and texture. The shells are naturally a bright white, with deep brown and golden stripes; when pickled, they change color to a green and blue marbled pattern, and become softer. The minting authorities typically keep one shell in ten from gatherers for this service, as it mostly serves to confirm that the shell comes from the animal it is claimed to.

The Lahshi-ngum are also frequent sailors. Their boats are made from tightly-woven still-living wicker, sealed with its own resin, and their ships grow masts as trunks, although they weave their sails from dead canvas. Their ships bear edible fruit (although only enough to serve as a supplement, not as a staple), with seeds that, if carefully tended by a Lahshi-ngum Wood Weaver, will grow into more ships (although most simply grow into wild twiggy thickets). During their occupation by Atayala, they learned the rudiments of weather magic from their masters, giving them both navigation and the ability to control the winds. This combination gives them an astounding ability to make distance voyages without the problems of other distance sailors, unmatched by any except for Hive Moskitia, which has superior, faster ships, and Redarkhan skyships. The crew of a short-distance ship is a long-term squad, but the crews of longer voyages disband when the voyage ends. Many of their ships are made flat-bottomed to sail in rivers, although such ships usually also hug coasts, rather than sailing at sea. A few flat-bottomed seagoing ships are constructed, however, for special purposes.

Lahshi'ngum ships take longer to build than foreign ships, as the wicker takes several years to grow into the full thickness needed for a ship, although they can be built with less labor: a handful of accomplished Wood Weavers and several apprentices can manage an entire shipyard growing several ships at once. Because of this, ships tend to be built in advance, in accordance with a long-term plan for their use.

The major export from Lolahshi are the exotic plants of their land, along with, occasionally, the animals. These plants often form the entire basis of Lahshi-ngum society, and fill the same uses elsewhere as they do on Lolahshi, as food, dyes, fabrics, spices, medicines, and magical reagents. Even "useless" plants and dangerous animals are exported as amusements or decorations. Lolahshi is poor in tin, iron, lead, and gold, as well as wool and any other products of plants or animals that cannot be grown there.

Hive Chu'ritl has similar economics; each clan is defined simply as the descendants of a single living queen, including any daughter queens she may have. Typically, Chu'ritl clans are much larger than Lahshi-ngum clans; one clan might have a town and all of its outlying villages and number over a thousand. Over a dozen clans make up the main city of Chu'ritl.

Law and Order:
Law in the villages is simple, as long as one stays in one village, and based on obedience to the village patriarch. Exceptions arise for travellers, who can invoke the laws of the Council of any city and claim to be under their authority, and interactions between rural clans, which follow a byzantine code that is not written in any one place, and has thousands of conflicting precedents; disputes under it typically go to the side with the more cunning lawyer, regardless of practical guilt or innocence. The village law also contradicts Council law and edicts for the villages, although except near the cities, villages usually ignore Council edicts. The cities, however, have a strong, strict, and clear written law, available on scrolls made from tree bark or carved in its entirety into wooden posts in important areas of each city.

City law is heavily shaped by the prevelance of disease. Council-employed Physicians are given the authority to order anyone into quarantine at a moment's notice. Breaking quarantine is punishable by imprisonment, which usually means a quick death, as the prisons are festering disease pits. Even those who survive are seldom released even after their sentence has expired, for quarantine reasons. This has stretched into strict cleanliness laws ranging for everything from food preparation to littering, punishable by lashes or fines.

Property and violent crime are likewise prosecuted, the first with fines and lashes, the last with lashes and either imprisonment or exile. Exiles are branded with a mark on their forehead and cheek, given a day's food, simple armor, a weapon, a backpack, some simple tools (such as rope and a stone axe) and any of their possessions that they can carry, and are taken to a secluded place in the jungle and abandoned (typically, their tools are held from them until they reach this place). The death penalty is nonexistent except aboard ships (where it is carried out by tossing the offender overboard), but most exiles do not survive more than a week. A few, however, do, meet eachother or kidnap others from villages, and form bandit clans. Those children of exiles that do not become bandits are welcomed back, if they can survive on their own, although not with completely open arms until they prove themselves.

Magical Traditions:
The major magical tradition on Lolahshi is the control of life, plant, animal, and microbial, whether through domestication and cultivation, destruction, or more magical means. Plants are often the most pliable, and so their primary tradition is called the Wood Weavers; the magic of a Wood Weaver contains a small plant manipulation, plant control, and speaking with plants, as well as a small amount of herbalism. Wood Weavers are the primary architects and shipwrights on the island, as many of the island's buildings are grown out of living wicker, which only ever grows properly if tended by a Wood Weaver. The Lahshi-ngum's best craftspeople are also Wood Weavers, determining the proper plants and stones to arrange and the proper treatments for them to produce the desired magic items: knife blades made of coral or silver, axes of stone, wagon wheels, bows and staves made of oil-treated woods, and full suits of armor made of living wicker.

The other major magical tradition is known as the Physicians, whose work is mostly as their name implies. Lolahshi medicine is heavily based on herbalism and animal secretions. The native life has a number of unique and special properties; selecting exactly the right species of plant or animal to use in a potion or ritual is a skill that many Physicians dedicate their entire lives to, with several tomes on the subject. An offshoot of the Physician tradition focuses on using the magical properties of various herbs to attain trances that allow one to see far-off places or the future. A small number of skillful Physicians, known as Plaguelords, learn to wield the magics of the diseases they conquer and are feared by the general populace. Despite this fear, their reputation for skill brings the most dangerous cases to them.

A third tradition is common among the peasants, which has roots in the fundamentals of herbalism and woodweaving, but that focuses more on animals, is usually known as Herd Tending. It is, however, less developed by the scholarly Wood Weavers and Physicians, as most consider it beneath them; as such, it has no philosophical theories as to its workings, simply folk myths.

Many experienced mages set up schools to train children in the fundamentals of magic and philosophy, and most city-dwellers have attended at least some school, while most rural people learn the magic they will need in apprenticeships to elder siblings, cousins, or ancestors.

Many of the native flora and fauna become sterile while removed from the islands, unless heavy magical intervention is used, and some of the flora simply refuses to be cultivated anywhere, meaning that they must be gathered. Many such plants are highly useful, as limiting reagents in magical rituals or medicines. Parts of undomesticable animals are often in a similar situation. Explorers willing to brave the jungle to retrieve specific components are very well-paid for the risks they take. Iron is not particularly hated among the Lolahshi, although their mages do not consider it useful except as a weapon.

The island has a number of fearsome diseases, which are kept in check by its Physicians. The most feared is the Rampant Death, which is transmitted by mucous contact with infected fluids (although, off Lolahshi, it dies quickly outside of a living body). It causes extremely rapidly-growing tumors, which become visible to others within about two months (they are, for the most part, nonlethal), and boils, which form more rapidly; the most fearsome effect of it, however, is that the afflicted's body is eventually controlled into actively spreading it by attacking people and forcing its fluids on them, although their capacity to plan or think is all but destroyed before this happens. It has been known to kill entire villages, although its sufferers are quarantined, usually until dead, in the cities. Once it becomes visible, it is nearly impossible to cure; early detection or prevention are the only likely ways to save one's life from it.

Government:
Individual villages are governed by village patriarchs. Each city is governed by a Council of retired mages, scholars and warriors, typically no more than one to a clan, although more than half of all city clans have none and a few have more (Lohei has a thousand clans, represented by 400 Councilors). Gender ratios in leadership tend to be more egalitarian in the cities with a full third of the Lohei council being female (the highest, however, is Chu'ritl, which has only a single Drone on its council the rest being Queens). Each Council has an informal high council, consisting of an allied group with political influence over the others, or simply enough strength (numerically, economically, or militarily) on their own to force the others to go their way.

The councils are nominally independent, except that the other cities are tributary to Lohei; in practice, however, they also imitate eachother in law. Every city has an embassy from every other city somewhere near its center of government.

Foreign Relations:
Both the Redarkhan and Hive Moskitia are trade partners of the Lahshi-ngum, although their government only attempts formal organized diplomacy with Redarkhan. Hive Moskitia also makes occasional raids against Lolahshi, and, because of their fragmented government, diplomacy between the two is on the level of individual cities, or even towns, and individual families; concessions are rare in such diplomacy, as no family in the Hive can stop raids against a city on Lolahshi, and nowhere on Lolahshi poses much of a threat to anyone on Chtit island.

Hive Chu'ritl and A-Lwan have active war policies against Hive Moskitia. The former's war has been formally declared for four centuries, almost since the Atayalans left, and dates back to older grudges. The latter war is merely defensive; spice shipments to A-Lwan from the surrounding villages were nearly cut off by raiders a few years ago, and so, at the reccomendation of the Chu'ritlan ambassador, the A-Lwan council ordered any solid water ships sighted to be sunk.

There are no formal governmental relations with anyone else, although Lahshi'ngum sailors ply the seas in all directions, and so there are small-scale direct trade relations with everyone holding a water border.

[CatharzGodfoot]

So is the capital under the control of plaguelords? It would seem to be the biggest disease reservoir on the island, what with it's 'crime pits'.

[IGTN]

I may have overstated the threat of disease, at least compared to how I imagined it; it's a battle, but one where the diseases are mostly kept at bay. Everyone's a germaphobe, and you can get flogged or even imprisoned for health code violations if you work with food or anywhere else where you might spread disease, but this results in a clean enough city that you're not likely to actually get sick, compared to living in anyone else's major city. Prisons are an exception, since they don't watch people's health in the prisons as closely.

The disease controllers (I like the name Plaguelords for them; they needed one) was also something of a throwaway line that didn't get as much thought as it deserved (mostly, I wanted creepy people who could hit you with zombie plague to control your body), hence why they didn't have a cool name.

Combining the two ideas, though, could make things awesome. Even if, for example, the major Plaguelord group is just one of the factions on the high council and controls the prisons (and uses them as labs to develop new disease magics) could make things very interesting, politically.

[Username17]

So it sounds like Lalahshi experienced a time of relative order and then a time of relative chaos and is now again in a time of relative order. This would fit with the creation and subsequent dissolution of the island road network as contrasted with the centralized public health and flood control projects of the current civilization.

Working that in historically, they were probably owned by Atayala, which used their phenomenal contempt towards human life to send people off into the serpent and ebola infested hellscape to build roads between cities that had previously been connected only by maritime trade. And also to forcibly ship people inland to claim access to otherwise untapped resources like the veins of silver ore near the island center.

Ironically, this period is probably looked back on as a "golden age" since the things left over from it are large projects, statues of marble and gold, and giant piles of silver. The fact that this was all bought with slave labor and the people's blood is exactly the kind of thing that is forgotten in two or three generations time.

So even though the lifespan in Lohei is probably two or three times what it was under Atayalan leadership, the Atayalan ways (as poorly understood by current scholarship) are probably wildly popular. Probably the most credible threat to the current regime would be someone claiming legitimacy of rulership through the Atayalan Throne. The Rain Kings have been out of power here long enough that people don't fully wrap their mind around the fact that they didn't used to get medical care back then and they can still see the old roads, silver mines, and aqueducts and legitimately want those back.

-Username17

[name_here]

You know, we should probably put a limiter on these before we get setting bloat.

I like each individual one, but too many gets stupid even if EACH ONE is wonderful in isolation and better than every non-TNE culture ever designed.

Also, the rampant death seems to have a serious story issue: either it's a serious bioweapon threat or it can be mostly treated by leaving the islands.

[IGTN]

Frank: You seem to have as good of a handle on these guys as I do. I like the idea of most of the good roads being Atayalan. My vision for the roads originally was just dirt tracks that the jungle was constantly growing over (leave it behind for a year, or even less, depending, and it might as well never have been there; a week and the kudzu makes it useless for your cart and dangerous for your feet). Having Atayalan paved roads adds the possibility that you might be digging in overgrown jungle and sudddenly stumble across a road that had been lost for several generations.

I'm not sure exactly how important aqueducts are; it is a rainforest, and you can't have too dense of a city on Lolahshi without public health, so most of its needs could probably be dealt with by collecting rainwater, especially with weather mages in charge, and what's left can be made up with tea or something.

I really like the idea of Atayalan construction lying around. I'm thinking that maybe only really important/militaristic buildings here get made of stone (and a good many of them could be Atayalan: the current palace in Lohei might have belonged to a Rain King, once), so most buildings are made of wood or living wicker. As long as the ratio of the strength of Atayalan construction to the time since they were driven out is high enough, there could still be large Atayalan forts in the jungle, abandoned and overgrown. And what's the point of a jungle without ruins?

Name: I can add that Rampant Death is noncontagious off Lolahshi, or that resistance to new infections is higher, or something. Maybe it needs a certain amount of life energy to exist, and it only gets that inside of a host or on the island.

I'm not really worried about culture bloat making the setting too big, as long as their interactions can be figured out and their power lists written up; there's no risk of having too many countries or ethnic groups here. How many ethnic groups are there in, for example, just eastern europe? The old Atayalan empire is far bigger than eastern europe, and, of course, the barbarians that toppled the empire (from the outside?) are also part of the world. We're more likely to run out of quality writing and time to write up spells and powers than we are to run out of space in the world.

[Username17]

You know, we should probably put a limiter on these before we get setting bloat.

I like each individual one, but too many gets stupid even if EACH ONE is wonderful in isolation and better than every non-TNE culture ever designed.

This is of course the central paradox of fantasy universes. They can't be as rich and deep as the Earth history they parallel. Which is a shame, but there you go. On the other hand, real history is extremely complicated. I mean seriously, back in recognizably "fantasy" time periods, what we think of as "Germany" looked like This. And yeah, Bohemians and Silesians and Utrechtians and Hessians and Tyrolians all considered themselves different peoples. There were seven major warring states in "China", but that's only because those were the cultures that won their wars and conquered other cultures. Not a single one of them annexed less than five opposing nations, and they call it the time of the Hundred Schools of Thought for a reason.

There hasn't been a second sapient species on Earth for ten thousand years. But while fantasy worlds have a lot more species in them, they are by necessity much more culturally monolithic than Earth's actual past. That being said, I definitely believe that there is room for more than a dozen such cultures in this setup. Cultures are kind of like character classes. And while I definitely believe that 3rd edition strained at the seams under the pressure of having too many character classes - I also believe that there was room for the basic 11 and most of the bonus classes in the secondary books. True Namers and Soulborn were the points at which setting bloat actually broke things. The game was able to handle Warlocks and Scouts without noticeable strain.

In short, just as I don't feel that D&D was severely impacted by the inclusion of about two dozen classes, I think this project can sustain about two dozen cultures. Much beyond that and I think we'd be straying into Magic of Incarnum territory.

-Username17

[IGTN]

I made some revisions and edits; added a Foreign Relations section and moved some things from Economics out to it, and re-arranged which magical traditions get which magic. I also think I might have made some of the parts clearer.