Gender Among the Elves

There are only two genders: male and female.

Men are strong, stoic, brave.  They protect the weak and build great things.

Women are sensitive, kind, and insightful.  They nurture and teach, and are more skilled in the arts of magic.

You will see this dichotomy reinforced throughout all elven societies.  Of course, not every elven enclave is the same, but the certainly follow certain trends.  Let's consider the elves of the Yavanelya forest.

(Digression: Note that we are mostly talking about high elves (a.k.a. low elves) and wood elves.  Half-elves aren't really true elves since most of them were born human, and while true elves often do without the cumbersome rigors of biology in the first place.  Here's a primer.  Here's more.)

Gender Among the Yavanelya Elves

Elven women are not permitted to be soldiers.  Elven men are not permitted to instruct children.  There are many professions that are limited to one gender in this way.  It is not elven laws that regulate this, but social pressures.  There is a right and a wrong way to do things, as everyone knows.

While there are not many children among the elves these days, most are in agreement that girls are easier to raise than boys, and so most elven mothers choose to have daughters exclusively.  The ratio of daughters to sons is something like twenty to one.

Among the Yavanelya, daughters are born during peacetime, while sons are born during wartime.  Because the society sees itself as eternally peaceful, they only ever birth daughters.  

Everyone knows that boys will get into more trouble that girls since they are more rambunctious, and yet most parents would prefer that their children experience both genders before they leave home.  While it varies between families, most elven children transition into boys for at least a few years in later adolescence.  

This time is seen as essential to the Yavanelya elves.  It takes time to learn how to perform the norms of each gender, and parents usually see themselves as the best ones to guide this process.  An adult male elf must be easily, effortlessly masculine.  The same can be said for elven women.

Sometimes parents transition along with their eldest children, in order to guide them during this confusing time.  A young elf might have two mothers when she is female, and two fathers when he is male.  (However, this is seen as over-indulgent by most Yavanelya elves.  It is more common among the smaller elven clans of the frozen south.)

Since boys are naturally rambunctious and girls are naturally docile, it is usually a sign of trust when a young elf is allowed to transition to male.  Younger elves who are seen as rebellious are usually not allowed to transition until they are seen as mature enough.

Adult elves vary in their own preferences.  Some prefer one gender over one another, but the majority of elves will prefer to spend time as both genders throughout the year.  Most elves have extensive wardrobes, with different outfits for each gender and each of the six seasons.

The most popular time to be a woman is in the warmest and the coldest seasons (estival and hibernal), since it allows elves to show the most skin and also affords the largest, most complex outfits.  (Women are the beautiful gender--men are more utilitarian, as everyone knows.)

And of course, changing your gender too frequently is seen as dramatic and self-absorbed.  A serious adult elf always has a good reason for changing their gender.  (Although sometimes that reason is just that there is a party that you need to go to, and your date is refusing to change their gender, so you did the noble thing and changed yours.)

Keeping Up Appearances

Elves have always had a tremendous amount of control over their appearances, with both simple illusory techniques as well as biologic ones.  Since elves can change their appearances as easily as changing clothes, this has led to increasingly refined beauty fashions, with everyone wishing to adhere to specific beauty norms while also being different enough from everyone else, and also not seeming like they're trying too hard.  (Elves spend a great deal of time in these pursuits.)

Biologic sex is a bit more complicated than changing the bones in your face, or regrowing a set of teeth after they become a bit yellow, but it is still a short process.  About 48 hours, for young elves.  (Older elves transition slower.)

Similar to gender, elves also choose their facial features in order to evoke certain personalities.  A broad chin to seem course and blunt.  A slender waist to seem erudite.  Large eyes to seem sensitive.  

In a way, it's no different from a human putting on a wedding dress, business suit, or little black dress.  Everything is effectively costume.  Changing your gender is somewhere between changing your clothes and changing your name.  Certainly not something you do flippantly, but also something that clearly has its place.  

Which makes it sometimes difficult for elves to interact with humans.  Of course elves know that humans can't control their appearances, but it still feels grating to see them behaving so out-of-sorts.  A bit like a race of creatures that can't help but wear business suits to the beach, or wedding dresses to the nightclub.  Sure, you can do those things, but how are humans not uncomfortable all of the time? 

To an elf, the life of a human seems to be both unbearable uncomfortable and boorish.  A human's life is uncomfortable because their genders are fixed, even when circumstances demand one gender over another.  (How can anyone go to a funeral while male?  Mourning is essential at a funeral, for both the individual and the family, and yet men cannot cry.  It is both uncomfortable and unhealthy.)  And humans are boorish because they break natural laws constantly.  Human males do in fact cry at funerals.  It's embarassing.  Men don't cry.

An Elven Myth

It was in the early days, before the other races were created, that the Authority first created the elves.

Elves loved beauty and hated war, and so they all remained as women, and there were no men, and no babies were born to them.

And so the Authority, in His wisdom, created menstruation, in order to vex the elves and drive some of them to embrace maleness for some of the time, so that the beautiful and wonderful elves would not die out.

Eventually, the elves discovered remedies and palliatives, and menstruation ceased to vex them.

It was then that the Authority created the lesser races, in order to bring war to the elves.

While the lesser races could never truly challenge the authority of the Firstborn, it was sufficient to drive many of the elves into manhood, for the bravery and wit of men was required to revitalize their glades, which had grown too placid in those halcyon days.

Thus were the elves renewed, forever and ever.

The Imanteur

Once there was a type of dress called the imaunteur which became enormously, overwhelmingly popular.  Everyone wanted to be seen in one.  Since men cannot wear dresses, nearly the entire population of the Yavanelya became female for the entire serotinal season.  

This was entirely untenable, of course.  Many of the masculine jobs were neglected entirely.  (During the season of the imanteur it was nigh impossible to find a decent jeweler!) 

The patriarchs immediately ordered their finest fashionistas to design newer, compelling male fashions in order to restore the harmony.  They were quickly successful, of course, since it is not hard to convince elves to adopt a new fashion.

Still, many elves of the Yavanelya still have an imanteur dress in their closet, and think back fondly to the serotinal season when the entire nation was female.  What a fun time that was!

(The patriarchs would never pass laws to control the population.  Such barbarism would restrict their freedom, and might make some elves feel uncomfortable.)

Relationships

Elves are monogamous, and their marriages are eternal.  Divorces are unpleasant things, and so they are not performed.  You'll only ever see divorces occurring in less developed societies, among the less-developed races.  (However affairs are common.  Among the Yavanelya, they could even been seen as normative.  The marital love is the one that is performed and described, but the adulterous love is the one that is felt but never spoken of.  But of course affairs have their own set of rigid social conventions that exist outside the scope of this blog post.)

Elves court and eventually marry.

At formal events, it is absolutely expected that they present as a man and woman.  They may switch from time to time, but same-sex couples are seen as disgusting.

In private, though, all sorts of things are done, and elves are nothing if not respectful of each other's privacy.  In civilized society, direct questions are brutish and rude.  Direct questions about the inner workings of another elf's marital relationship are obscene.

And of course, there are perfectly good reasons why two elves might need to both be male at the same time.  Perhaps they have health issues when they are a certain gender.  Or perhaps they have some other significant obligation that requires them to be one gender over another.  

Pregnancy

Very few elves want to be pregnant.  And there is very little social pressure to have children.  Quite the opposite, actually.

One big social reason to avoid pregnancy is because it locks you into a female body for a long period of time.  A second reason is that birth and nursing are social "fixatives".  While an elf might change genders many times in their life, elves who gave birth and nursed an infant are seen as slightly feminized forever.

No matter if they spend the rest of their lives as a man, they'll forever been seen as someone's mother.  And while elven society holds women in lower regard than men, it's even worse to be seen as static and unchanging.  Not only is it unfashionable, but beastly.  It's seen as something more animalistic--not "dirty" but definitely something that debases you.

Legal Status

The Yavanelya are led by patriarchs.  Even if some of them happen to be women this month, it is clear that they are patriarchs, since they were crowned as kings.  Women obviously cannot rule, since they are too irrational.  

If one of the patriarches happens to make a pronouncement while they are female, it is not legally binding.  However, everyone knows that they are one long weekend away from reverting to their masculine posture (this the legal term), and so the decrees from female patriarchs tend to be effected de facto, even though they are not obligatory de jure.

While elven women have fewer rights than elven men, this is hardly ever relevant given the ease of transitioning.

However, there one place where the difference is not negligible.  Male witnesses are legally held to be more trustworthy than female witnesses.  If an elf witnessed an event while female, their testimony is not held to the same standard as if they had been a man at the time of the witnessing, even if they later transition to male prior to the trial (in order to improve the logic of their mind).

Most elves have one gender that they prefer over another.  (Although it is a rare elf who lives their whole life as one gender.)  Upon death, they are assigned their preferred gender, even if they die while they are the non-preferred gender.  This is what goes on their tombstone (or ashakka) and how they are spoken of for all future discussions.

Other Races

To other races, elves sometimes seem a little androgynous to begin with.  (Although most elves would be very offended if you told them they looked androgynous.)  Elven men and women both have similar heights and builds.  They both love beautiful things.  

Elven culture seems highly gendered.  At a social gathering, elven women will always pour the drinks, while elven men will never touch a teapot.

Some elves will make allowances for the lesser races.  If a human woman raises a bow, it is not such an abominable thing.  Humans are frail and inflexible in their natures.  As the "elder brother" to humanity, elves have a duty to gently steward the younger race in matters of propriety, dignity, and morality.  It is difficult for humans to behave morally--they are stubborn and foolish, and they have so little time to mature out of their foolishness.  They are eternally children, putting their shoes on the wrong feet and laughing at it.

Other elves are more abrasive in their paternalism towards the lesser races.  If humans wish to behave like animals (e.g. women wearing pants, men crying) then they will be treated like animals.

Humans aren't always aware that elves can change genders over the weekend (especially since many humans think of half-elves when they think of "elves").  Reactions to their discovery to the contrary are mixed.

However, humans are often surprised by how different elves seem between their different genders.  Their elven friend Alyste might be pleasant and supportive when they are female on Friday, and yet be mocking and sharp when they are male on Monday.

Although this shouldn't be too surprising.  Elves see their natures are flexible and able to rise to any need.  Elves will change their personalities along with their clothing.  (Humans do much of the same thing, but tends to be smaller and more subconscious.)

How to Use This in Your Game

This blog post isn't really game content.  This blog post is more like speculative fiction minus the fiction.  It came from the idea of "Can you have a misogynist patriarchy where everyone is trans?"

If you think that your table would have fun with the ideas presented here (or in the Dwarven gender post) then you should incorporate into your game as much or as little as would be best.  And of course, this topic cuts very close to real world politics, so deploy this secret elven lore carefully.

But, hopefully this post is also encouragement for other people who will have other good ideas.  There's tons of creative people out there writing creative game worlds with creative societies, but it's pretty rare to see gender be a part the creative world building process.  I think we usually just take it for granted.

Some Words on Dwarven Gender

 Gender

The two dwarven genders are miner and blacksmith.

Gender is among the first ways we describe someone, along with age, name, and where they're from.  "My new boss is this woman from Texas."  Most of the time you don't even have to say whether someone is a man or a women, since the pronouns do it for you.

Dwarves do the same thing.  "What's their name?  What's their craft?"

So it will come as no surprise that dwarven have pronouns indicate profession.

Gender and Profession

Of course, miner is used in both the literal sense (they literally mine ores) and the general sense, as in anyone who collects raw goods might also be referred to as a miner.  (The word is unfortunately ambiguous when translated.)

And literally translating blacksmith is also misleading, too, since it can also refer to anyone who transforms raw materials into a more unfinished state.

Human: "So your mason is also a blacksmith?"

Dwarf: (Rolls eyes.) "They don't work with metal.  I told you they work with stone.  But of course, yes, they're a blacksmith."

Human: "Huh?"

That's what they put on their tombstones.  Instead of "devoted mother and wife" you'll encounter "diligent mason and bondholder".

Some parts are non-intuitive.  Warriors are usually considered to be miners, except for cavalry, who are considered blacksmiths.  Of course, in a war, everyone fights.  It's just that miners are expected to fight, while blacksmiths are not.

Which seems a little bit silly to humans.  "Surely you still need miners during a war, and surely a blacksmith can fight as well as a miner?"  It's a cultural norm, not a rational decision.

Gender and Names

Human names are gendered.  You can usually tell someone's gender just by their name.  Tabitha is a girl.  Scott is a boy.

Dwarven names are the same.  Oskerval is a miner.  Gathron is a blacksmith.

Dwarves give themselves their own names when they are young.  It is considered important for dwarven children to have good role models of both genders.

Gender and Language

Dwarven pronouns are also built around the same divide.  They don't have he/she.  Instead they have a different set of pronouns based on whether you are talking about a miner (raw material collector) or a blacksmith (manufacturer of finished goods).

Even dwarven nouns are gendered in this way.  (It's a bit like German in that way.)  It doesn't always make sense.

A pickaxe is a miner, but a shovel is a blacksmith.  Rubies are miners, diamonds are blacksmiths.

Birds are neuter.

Is Gender Even the Right Word?

Not really.  It's not quite like how we use gender, but "gender" is the closest thing that we have for the dwarven concept.  It's probable that the roles for blacksmith and miner evolved out of the types of gender roles that humans are familiar with, so it's possible that dwarves were like us, once.

Dwarves see the world in a certain way that makes them want to put everything and everyone into these two fundamental categories.  A person is either a miner or a blacksmith.  Even animals and objects have associations as one or the other.  

Humans do the same thing with gender.  Cats are kinda feminine, dogs are kinda masculine.  "Don't be catty." "You dog!"

Among dwarves, snakes are kinda minery and goats are kinda blacksmithy.  If a dwarf calls you a snake, he's not accusing you of lying--he's saying that you have a lot of the negative traits associated with miners.

There is a little bit of prejudice against miners.  Most fathers desire blacksmiths.

by Sergio Artigas

How Dwarves See Humans

Imagine a man who goes to a faraway place to visit a new people.

The foreign men there are a little odd, having characteristics of both men and women.  That's fine, though.  The man can handle people that are a little genderfluid.

But then half of them AREN'T LIKE THAT!  HALF OF THEM ARE JUMBO-SIZED CHILDREN WITH TUMORS ON THEIR CHESTS!  

That's how dwarves see women, with their high-pitched voices and smooth chins.

A dwarf goes to visit a human city.  The men are easy enough to interact with.  A lot of them shave their faces (which makes them look like children--like someone wearing a diaper in public) and most of them of genderfluid (they transition between miner and blacksmith all the time--not even like transitioning once in their life, but they switch back and forth daily.)   That's okay, though, the dwarf can handle people that are a little genderfluid.

So even human men tend to make dwarves uneasy.  Younger dwarves tend to be cool with it.  They'll just smile and say "That's fine!  That sort of thing doesn't bother me at all!  If a human wants to shear a sheep and then weave it into cloth himself, that's fine!  I don't judge him.  I'm not a bigot!"

Dwarven elders tend to be more conservative.  (This is an understatement.)

Women are a much stranger concept for dwarves, and if a dwarf hasn't been around humans for very long, expect lots of staring.  Dwarves are also more comfortable talking to men, especially men with beards, and especially men with beards who fall neatly into either the miner or blacksmith category.

This is why dwarves who emigrate to human cities tend to seek out blacksmiths or other crafters early on.  (Cities are full of crafters.)  And since most dwarves who emigrate are miners, in the few cases where a dwarf falls in love with a human, it's inevitably some sort of crafter.

Dwarven Women

Human: "So how come I never see any dwarf women?"

Dwarf: "Eh?  What's a wimmin?"

Human: (laughs and points at a woman) "That's a woman.  What are dwarf women like?"

Dwarf: (getting red in the face) "NO SIR!  There are no dwarven women!"

So you can see how the confusion originally arose.  

But the dwarf is right--there are no dwarven "women".  Dwarves don't have a high degree of sexual dimorphism, and their society lacks any comparable role.

Do Dwarves Identify as Male or Female?

Once dwarves are introduced to the human concept of gender, nearly all of them identify as men.  (They didn't realize that we sorted ourselves by gender, like farm animals or something.)

Most of them have a harder time relating to women in the beginning, mostly because they lack beards and have high pitched voices.  To dwarves, they seem like mutant children.

And to humans, all dwarves look like men, so humans assume them to be male, and address them as such.  To dwarves, the whole distinction is rather pointless ("why does it matter so much?") so they don't really care what gender humans assign them.  They have more important things to do.  Fool humans.

Gender Coding Among Dwarves

There's a lot of little behaviors that can make someone seem more masculine or feminine.  Sitting with your legs crossed.  Watching sporting events.  Wearing tight pants.

Dwarves have even more of these than humans do.  Once you've lived among dwarves for a while, you'll notice that there are hundreds of little things that miners do differently from blacksmiths.  Miners tend to stack their fists when they sit at a table--blacksmiths almost always lay their hands flat.  Blacksmiths wear pockets on their chests, but miners never do.  This extends to how they hold mushrooms during meals, how they stack coins, how they hold shovels, how they braid their beards, how they laugh, and how they sneeze.

And when humans go to dwarven citadels, they fuck this up constantly.

Dwarves like to be clean, like anyone else, but miners are expected to be a little bit dirty.  After a bath, a miner will sometimes apply a little black paint under the tips of their fingernails, so they look a bit dirty.  Or a quick smudge of kohl on the cheek, enough to look casual.

Dwarven Sexuality and Romance

The primary engine for dwarven sexuality is labor.

Dwarves become attracted to other dwarves for a few reasons, but the largest one is their work.  A blacksmith might be impressed by the quantity of a miner's ores, or by their skill in prospecting them.  A miner might be impressed by a blacksmith's steady hand.

There are plenty of stories of a dwarf encountering a hammer, falling in love with the craft of it, and then seeking out the dwarf that made the hammer, already enraptured.

Dwarven gender and dwarven sexuality are closely linked.  When two dwarves fall in love, it's always a miner and a blacksmith.  When two dwarves move in together, it's always a miner and a blacksmith who are in love with each other.  Dwarves have a hundred reasons why that's natural and correct.

Sometimes miners fall in love with miners, though.  Or a blacksmith falls in love with a blacksmith.  These unions are (kindly) regarded as misguided, or (harshly) seen as disgusting and bad for society.  The two dwarves in question are usually shunned or exiled.  In some cases they are killed.

Dwarven society is very repressive in its own way.

Dwarven romance is actually highly analogous to human romance.  There is a large emphasis on gift-giving, though, and a weirdly high value placed on punctuality.  When a couple exchanges money, they use envelopes, and the money is not counted by the recipient.

"Sexuality" isn't quite the right word, either, but they do have sex.  Why did you think they were so eager to move in with each other?

I won't go into the details, but I will say that dwarves are not as obsessed with their genitals as we are.

The reason you don't see dwarves making out all the time is because most of the dwarves you'll meet outside of the citadels are all miners.  Their blacksmiths are all at home (and their miners miss them dearly).

Additionally: dwarves are all pretty faithful in their relationships, but even if they weren't, why would a miner want to kiss a miner?

Dwarves also use possessives to refer to their partner.  "my wife" "my husband" "my blacksmith" "my miner".  This also causes misunderstandings.

Dwarven Reproduction

Reproduction is something completely different from sexuality.

In fact, dwarves think it's kinda gross that humans think the two things are the same.

Of course, dwarves understand that among animals, the boys hump on the girls and that's where babies come from.  They raise plenty of domesticated animals; they are not stupid.

But the separation of sex from reproduction is one of the primary things that separates us from animals.  And in fact, it's boggling that humans have so little self-control over it.  It's as fundamental to society as using a toilet instead of shitting in your front yard.  That's what makes us civilized.  Why can't humans separate the two?

The reasons that a dwarf might want to have a child should sound familiar: it's to have (a) an heir, (b) an apprentice, (c) a family, (d) to give/receive love, (e) to give meaning to their life, (f) to fix the mistakes of their parents, (g) to give someone else a good start in the world, (h) someone to pass their debt on to, so their tomb isn't resold after they die, (i) their father expects them to.

All the same reasons that humans have kids for (except for maybe the debt thing).

When a dwarf wants a child, they prefer to adopt.  Dwarves love adoption.  You get to skip a lot of the unproductive years that way, and the kid will still be loyal to you when they grow up.  (Maybe "loyal" is the wrong word.  Adult dwarven children have a shocking amount of legal and financial obligations to their parents.  Marriages can be annulled, but the obligation that a dwarf owes his father can never be discharged.)

When there are no young dwarves to adopt, a baby will be made the old fashioned way.

The father is the one who pays for the baby.

The father might supply seed, field, or neither.  

Paying for seed is cheap.  Paying for field is expensive.  But when you're done, the new father gets a lovely baby to raise, and everyone is happy.  So many tiny clothes to make!

Dwarves don't care much if their sons are related to them.  It's seen as a little bit prideful if all of your sons are related to you.  A dwarf will probably hire one or two genetic parents based on their rates and the quality of the expected offspring.  The spouse may or may not be one of these dwarves.  The prospective father may or may not be one of these dwarves.

If there is a dwarf you greatly admire, you may want to hire them to be a genetic parent to one of your sons.  It's not rare for dwarves to hire their debtholders to be genetic parents for one of their children, but if their debtholder has a uterus, they probably can't afford it.  Paying for field is so expensive because the dwarf usually has to take time off of work.

The dwarf's spouse is not especially involved in this process, although they are on the short list of dwarves that are considered when choosing a genetic parent.  Most dwarves admire their spouses, after all.  But it's also common for spouses to never father* each other's children, even when they have compatible genitals.  Reproduction has nothing to do with gender.

Honestly, it's far more civilized than whatever humans do.

*In this sentence, it's still "fathering" even if you're the one supplying the uterus.  Sorry if this blogpost is so confusing--English doesn't have a good vocabulary for dwarven gender and reproductive roles.

Mothers and Fathers

Dwarves don't have mothers.  They only have fathers.  

I would describe dwarven society as hyper-patriarchal, but without any women in society, the term is kinda hollow.

Dwarves don't deal well with the concept of shared ownership.  "This baby belongs to both the mother and the father."  Huh?  That's all just dumb shit that humans say.

Dwarf: "So who owns this house, then?"

Man: "Well, I share it with my wife."

Dwarf: (rolling his eyes) "But who owns it rightfully?  If you got a divorce, who would get it?"

Man: "That depends.  We'd probably have to go talk to a judge."

Dwarf: (under his breath) "So the bloody judge knows who the house belongs to, but the man paying taxes on it has no clue.  Fucking incredible, I swear to Gox."

Fathership is a type of ownership.  The young dwarf has rights, of course, but they also have a great many obligations to their father.

Young dwarves dread their birthdays, because that's when their father usually presents them with the itemized list of parenting fees for the last year, and reviews their debt repayment plan.

However, dwarves do have uncles, which is a formal legal status reserved for the brothers of the father.  It is also frequently extended to their spouse, close friend, or debtholder.

In rare cases, it is sometimes even extended to the other genetic parent.

Previous Dwarven Culture Posts

A Few Words on Dwarven Culture

A Few More Words on Dwarven Culture

Dwarven Architecture

The Dwarves of Mt. Doldrum

A Disclaimer

Dwarven culture is not monolithic (even though dwarves will insist that it is.)

This blog post mostly refers to the dwarves of:

• the Seventh Citadel and all its sons and grandsons.
• the Third Citadel of the Fifth Citadel, and all its sons.
• a couple of orphaned citadels in Tramaldea, part of the Cordyceps Diaspora

So if anything in my posts seems to contradict itself, don't worry!  I was just talking about slightly different dwarves.

The Ungreya

Origin

This is their second time through.

A million years of dynasty, brought to a halt when their empires ran into the temporal kingdoms of the elves at the end of recorded time.  Older than the universe that cages them.

Refugees into their own history, then, a fragmented retreat that left them crippled and ignorant.  A crash landing into pre-history: spaceships cracking their spines on the teeth of mountains, burning cycads, and a decade of dust that blinded the sun.

So they say.

All of their treasures (constellations of mirrors, weaponized languages, omniscient birds, artificial suns, liquid syringe-worlds) were scattered when they hit the ground (like Judas when they cut him down).

The only treasure that they kept was the treasure that they couldn't throw away: their blood.

Sixteen billion bases of genetic foam, unassembled and unruly.  Lacking the epigenetic leashes of post-singularity medicine, the genetic gardens grew wild.  A cancer of the genome; protein-coupled cascades of maladaptive engineering.

They've tried evolving, and they've tried dying, but their genes will not allow them to do either.  

All of this knowledge has been passed on for millenia, scratched out in the dirt in the shadow of their mother's belly.  They know this, and they know that information cannot survive that long.  They know how inaccurate oral traditions are across long periods of time.  But it is their history, and it's the only one that they have.

Biology

Adulthood is bestial, and so they avoid it.

Their maturation is marked with an immense decrease in intelligence.  It is death, as far as they are concerned.  To devolve into a beast is to die--it is the cessation of Self.  As soon as one of them grows old enough to forget their name they are cast outdoors, where they live like beasts.  Beds are only fit for those who know enough to name them.

Sexual maturation is the ultimate abomination.  Copulation is disgusting, a vector for disease and pregnancy (which are not so different in their mind).

The Brutishness of Adulthood

And yet, the adults are not mindless; they are single-minded.  Memories of childhood have been subsumed in martial contemplation.  There is no need to know the names of things when you know how to destroy them.  And above all is an overriding urge to protect their children and keep them save.  

They respond to cuteness--they obey it the same way they obey gravity.  The instinct was instilled in them with all the force and subtlety of a warhammer.  Ducklings are cared for.  Bulls are torn apart with their bare hands.  They keep cats.

It is not clear whether they understand that they are actually ruled by their children, or if they know and simply don't care.

They sometimes fall into the blood-sickness, as their bloods struggle to re-assert themselves.  Along one pathway, their genes code for hypercerebral elites.  Along another pathway, their genes code for hypertrophic super-soldiers.  And without any epigenetic modulators to reign over this melee, the tide swings back and forth, but finally turns irrevocably at puberty.

They haven't forgotten much.  A full-size brain still sits behind the grossly thickened plates of their skull.  (Their skulls are the strongest part of their body.  An elephant could stand on their head and it would not crack.)

By the time they are banished into the kennels, they have long since stopped caring about their bed.

The Cruelty of Children

Pre-adolescence is a difficult time.  Each one is a genius, by our standards, but they have only a decade to learn and to act.  (The adults do nothing but fight, fuck, and pet their cats.)

At the age of one, they are speaking and arguing.  At this point, they can be taught calculus, but not grammar.

At the age of two, they have friendships and ambitions.  They've divided into cliques.  They shun the fashions of their older peers.

At the age of three, they are wrapping up their education.  They are better at chess than you are.  They attend art shows.  They sleep with stuffed animals: hippos, cats, sheep, parents.

Location

They rule most of Yog, the city at the center of the Madlands.  (All of the races of the Madlands practice slavery, and they all have different reasons for doing so.)  

You may even spy a few as far away as Charcorra, the gateway to the Madlands.

Society

Sometimes, everything I've said so far is enough to explain their society.  Brutish, idle adults and a desperate ruling class of children slipping to the grave of puberty.  They tend to wage war on their neighbors.

A second type of Ungreya society is this: the children have found a way to retard and manipulate their adolescence.  They never grow up.  It's a sort of twisted neoteny, where they are sexually and intellectually mature and yet continue to look like children.  (Rejoice, ye pedophiles.)  This type of Ungreyan society relies on poisons and insects, both of which hold positions of immense practical and symbolic importance in their societies.

They usually refuse all attempts at diplomacy, except those conducted by children. Likewise, visiting adults of other species are not allowed to wander around freely unless escorted by a child.

And there is even a third type of Ungreyan society: the aristocratic fetuses.

The Tyranny of the Unborn

As soon as a society decides that maturation is abominable, there can be only one logical conclusion.  Their utopia has a form, even if they haven't achieved it yet.

They call themselves the fetati, they for whom birth signals the end of their lives.  It doesn't matter how they achieved it.  They have found immortality by delaying their own births.

And so they live inside their mothers.  And when their mother ages and grows frail, they move into another.  (I'll leave the details to your imagination, except to say that the process is simple, direct, and messy.)

They see through their mother's eyes and speak through her mouth.  They experience life through her skin, a billion trembling nerves pressed against the surface of their placentas.

To be born is to die.  For those who are full citizens, birth happens only through accident or punishment.  Once they are born, it is the end of their life.  A funeral is held for the deceased.  The protestations of the newborn are ignored.  They are now a beast, a practitioner of slovenly biology: mastication, digestion, defecation, riddled with disease and suddenly mortal, an exile from amniotic Olympus.

They are all vegetarians, even the adults.

Stats

Because why not.

Ungreyan Adult

HD 3  AC leather  Sword 1d8

Int *  Move 12  Mor 12

*For things related to combat, treat their Intelligence as if it were 16.  For everything else, treat their Int as 4.

Adaptive -- After an Ungreya Adult attacks or is attacked, it gets +1 to attack, AC, and damage.  This bonus stacks up to +5 and lasts for 10 minutes.

Ungreyan Child (Creeper)

HD 2 (HP 1)  AC as armor  Dagger 1d6 + poison (1d6)

Int 14  Move 9  Mor 2

Scream -- Once every hour, an Ungreyan Child can scream.  Everyone who hears it sees a tiny black speck appear in their vision.  These specks last until the next day.  The next time they take damage, they take +1 damage for every speck in their vision, and the specks disappear.  Ungreya and their servants are immune to this effect (through years of exposure).  Outdoors, the screams carry for a mile.  Indoors, the screams carry through the entire floor of the dungeon.

One danger of exploring an Ungreyan dungeon: once they know you're there, they'll begin screaming every hour.  After the players have a few specks in their eyes, every combat becomes a lot more threatening.

Ungreyan Fetal Aristocrat (Fetati)

HD 0  AC none  Bite 1d4

Int 14  Fly 3  Mor 2

Fetal Domination -- A fetato (singular form of fetati) can see through the eyes of it's pregnant/pseudopregnant mother.  The mother automatically fails her saves against the fetato's spells.

Suffocation -- A fetato dies after 1d6+4 minutes outside of a womb.  (And remember that they travel with their placenta.  Otherwise none of this makes any sense.)

At-Will Spells: dominate person (only one domination at a time), telekinesis (duration = concentration).

Spellcasting as a wizard of whatever level you want.  Example spells: scry, invisibility, wave of mutilation (basically cone of cold that does slashing damage), wither (target loses half current HP, save for half), cure light wounds.

Note: Their psuedopregnancies aren't limited by species.  To answer your next question, a hippo can hold about eight; a horse about four (although they prefer to have more room to stretch).

Dwarven Architecture

Evolutionary psychology has been drawing on the backs of napkins for a while now, and one of my favorite theories concerns the genetic basis for the appreciation of beauty.  Why is beauty?

The rationale is this: protohumans were preyed upon by big predators, and so they benefited from living in places where they can see a long distance without interruption by bushes or tall grass.  Open spaces, instead of deep forests.  And trees gave us fruit (one of our favorite foods) as well as a refuge and a good viewpoint.

And so protohumans that liked living in those locations prospered, while the ones that liked living in tangled forests got eaten by thylacodons.  And that evolutionary motivator that made us move into rolling grasslands with a few tall trees, that motivator was beauty, or at least a certain predisposition toward a certain kind of appreciation.

One one hand, it's poetic.  Beauty saved our lives.  Trees plucked us out of the mouths of tigers.

On the other hand, it's dehumanizing.  The only reason we enjoy parks is because of some ancient genetic imperative in the back of our brains that has long since outlived its usefulness.

But that's just speculative.  Let's talk about dwarves, which are totally factual.

Dwarves are not just short, hairy, drunk dudes.  Dwarves are alien.

This means that they have alien notions of honor, of family, and of beauty.  They will disagree with you about what a city is supposed to do, and how you are supposed to interact with it.  They do not go to parks to relax.

Foreign Angels

Go read a list of demons and you'll notice how Christian they are.

I don't mean that the demons themselves are Christian, just that they are designed as an evolution of human morals.  Demons are often designed to exploit one of the seven deadly sins, for example.  And angels are stamped from the same Judeo-Christian coin, just the opposite side.  And this set of Christian morals informs the whole structure of morality and divinity within a game.  The good gods are the ones that embrace Christian values, and the bad ones are the ones that eschew them.  Time and time again.

This is moral chauvinism.

The funny thing is that D&D has often been about exploring other cultures, religions, and ways of life.  The best parts about it were like the best part of old Star Trek.

And yet this diversity of otherworldly cultures never really spread into morality.  And once you notice that, a strange incongruity begins to emerge.  There are lots of races with bizarre cultures and moralities, not just Christian ones.  Yet, the arrangement of heaven and hell mirrors Christian values, and only Christian values.  Where are the foreign angels?

Lust and wrath are bad. . . right?  What about a culture in which lust was considered sort of okay, and extra-marital sex didn't condemn you to hell?  What about a culture where you were expected to fly into a murderous rage if your honor was insulted, and it was pathetic if you didn't?  What about ones where incest was okay?  Or funerary cannibalism?

And that last paragraph was just for normal, Earth-human cultures.  We haven't even gone into the deep end of fantasy cultures yet.

What if D&D was written by elves, for whom pride was the highest of virtues, and chastity the deepest of shames?  Or by druids, who see language as the root of all evil and bestial mindlessness as something to be aspired to?

Fuck, what if it was written by work-obsessed dwarves?

There are many places where we could begin rewriting the moral cosmology, but maybe we should start here, and just start 

Foreign Angels and Demons

Human angels represent human values (which are not monolithic, but have certain predispositions), and tend to resemble humans (if they resemble any humanoid at all).  Their angels tend to be white and radiant, while their demons are often muscular and fiery, and speak to their private shames.

Dwarven angels represent dwarven values (which are not monolithic, but have certain predispositions), and tend to resemble dwarves.  Most notably, they all have beards (which dwarven demons never do).  Dwarven angels swim through the earth, and many of them resemble moles or other burrowing creatures.  Most of them give gemstones as gifts, or leave them in their wake.  Many of their angels are associated with fire or other symbols of the forge.  Dwarven demons tend to be invisible things, or creatures without any muscle or callouses.  Every dwarven demon is supposedly unique.

Elven angels are freakishly beautiful.  They offer a great many compliments, and expect a great many in return.  They are also fairly worldly, and many expect hospitality to be offered to them.  Elven demons are tremendously ugly.

Orcs have no angels, only demons to torment them.  Their demons sometimes resemble the other races.

Merfolk angels resemble edible fish, and are themselves edible.

Goblin "angels" (of the goblins who worship the False God) resemble goblins with wings made from wires and trash.  They have no powers, no special knowledge, and are mechanically indistinguishable from normal goblins.

Druidic angels are all fucking bears.  So are their demons.

How to Use Foreign Angels

Like all angels, they're sent to help the good guys.  But the cultural gap can be huge.

Maybe the party is supposed to seal a demonic portal in the Underworld, and the cleric prays for assistance.  A dwarven angel is nearby, hears the prayer, and decides to show up.  It casts (a morally relativistic version of ) detect evil and sees that one of the party members donates their money to people they don't even know, and another of them is only interested in knowledge, not money.

If the party can convince the angel that they are good, greedy, and hardworking, it might help them out.  It'll probably just leave, mildly disappointed and disgusted by the party's vulgar display of unrepentant sin.  It probably won't attack them (angels, on average, tend to not be total dicks) unless the party pisses it off by casting ESP on it, trying to pick its pocket, or arguing theology.

OR

Maybe the party is in an abandoned Elven rocket-ship tree and they pray at an elven shrine for assistance clearing out all the orcs.  An elven angel shows up and nearly vomits at how repulsive the party is.  None of them have a Charisma above 15.

But the angel is a professional, and made certain Oaths in the name of Authority.  Besides, it hates orcs, so it negotiates for a little while.

It wants to challenge mortals to testing their skills, so perhaps it will ask the party to go through the dungeon in a more difficult way.  Or challenge them to fight a certain monster in a duel, rather than a group fight.

"You are skilled with a blade, are you not?  If you were truly excellent, you would walk up to those orcs, naked except for your weapon, and challenge their leader to a duel."  or  "Orcs are truly miserable creatures, worth your contempt.  A party of elves could kill all of the orcs in this building in less than an hour.  If you could do the same, I will open the door to the basement, and you can perhaps claim some weapons of the Elven ancestors.  Though you cannot escape the ugliness of your race, there is no reason why you could not bring your skills to an elven level of prowess."

(Dwarven) Angel of Greed

This angel usually manifests as a dwarf with gemstone eyes and enormous badger claws.  It's dirty, muscular, and has a soothing musky scent, like lumberjack beard.  It's belly is fully of dark soil and silver nuggets.  It exists to help dwarves overcome the obstacles that would prevent them from achieving the object of their greed, or to reassure them if their greed should waver.  They strive against evil (lazy dwarves who aren't greedy) 

Digression: a strange bureaucracy of heaven seems to be emerging where dwarven angels oversee dwarves and hold them accountable to dwarvish morals, human angels oversee humans and hold them accountable to human morals, and everyone bows to Zulin, Prince of the Upper Air, Servant of the Authority.  How does this work?  Can a dwarf convert to human-flavored Hesaya?  Are the angels of one the demons of another?

<Unworthy Wealth>  10% of a character's metallurgic wealth combusts (gold, silver, copper, etc).  (5% on a save.)  It does X holy damage to them, where X is equal to the square root of the wealth that was lost.  (So if 100gp were lost, the character would take 10 damage.)  It can do this ability once per round as a free action.

<Mine> Whenever a beneficial magic effect occurs within 100', the Angel of Greed can copy it onto itself.  (This applies to healing spells, as well as healing from potions.)

<Spells> Can give a person a permanent version of find the path so that they will always know how to get to the thing that they want.  Can give away one of those extradimensional chests that is summoned/dismissed by waving the key around.

(Elven) Angel of Pride

This angel usually manifests as an extremely tall elf, clad in a shapeless cloak of leaves in which diminutive birds-of-paradise nest.  Flowers trail behind it, and the whole world seems to be more beautiful because the angel's sense of magnificence, but also uglier by comparison.  When it is in the room, all other beautiful things are not beautiful.  Not your lovely young wife with Cha 18, not the naked nymph (whose beauty-based abilities would also be suppressed).  The Angel of Pride has no Charisma score, because (a) that would be enough to heretically suggest that it's beauty is finite, and (b) it's Charisma is ineffable.

It wants creatures to be proud of what you are good at.  It wants everyone to strive to be better, more skilled, more beautiful, more exemplary.  It wants you to love yourself, and love that excellence within yourself.  And it wants you to ignore anything to the contrary.

It leaves most groups wanting to take a bath and buy some exfoliating skin cream.  It fights with a rapier and a halo of bird-of-paradise feathers, which dart around like arrows, or like hungry minnows.  It can probably also turn you into an ugly little bird, like maybe a kiwi or a small wood duck.

<Perfection> As long as the Angel of Pride is at full health and hasn't embarrassed itself, creatures who want to attack it must succeed on a save or be compelled towards admiration.  Once it takes damage, the illusion of perfection is ruined and you see it for what it is: a vastly superior creature with immaculate skin, otherworldy grace, and incandescent beauty.  The person who kills it must make a save or fall into a deep depression that lasts until the end of the day or until they get a positive emotion effect.  While in this fugue, they won't want to do anything except mope and apologize to the angel's corpse.


<Look Down Upon> Each time the Angel of Pride is damaged by a filthy mud-creature, it reacts by growing 1d6 feet taller and more beautiful.  (The ceiling grows to accommodate the angel, if necessary.)  It casts command as a free action.

<Eloquent> When it talks to you, every sentence is a suggestion.  When it smiles, save vs charm.

<Boons> Gives away a permanent +1 Charisma to whoever has the most Charisma already.  Give away a suit of elven mithril +1 that can glamour itself into a party dress/tuxedo, but all of this sweet magic only functions while the wearer is at full HP.  Gives a ring of glamour to whoever is highest level that also increases XP gain by +5% or something.  Maybe give you a really racist magic sword that only obeys you as long as you kill orcs and don't take orders from ugly people.  Gives the whole party a blessing that they can expend at any time to double their bonus to a roll (so the people who are already good at something get extra better).

Other Ideas

Angel of Cannibalism

Angel of Incest???

(Elven) Demon of Humility

(Dwarven) Demon of Charity

(Dwarven) Angel of Toil (the value of hard work, and lots of it)

(Dwarven) Demon of Invention and Creativity (humans are very susceptible to this one)

(Elven) Angel of Sloth (wants you to rest, take care of your body, get other people to do it)

(Elven) Angel of Lies (especially white lies)

(Elven) Demon of Honesty (tells uncomfortable truths)

(Elven) Demon of Chastity (bundled up in many layers, full of STDs)

(Orcish) Demon of Mercy (spare the child and spoil the horde)

(Orcish) Demon of Peace and Agriculture

(Orcish) Demon of Calm

(Druidic) Demon of Languages and Symbolic Thought

(Druidic) Angel of Insect Mindlessness

(Druidic) Angel of Selfishness

Disgusting Peasant Foods

Offa
Stinking brown jelly grown on wet rocks, poisonous until fermented, and fermented in pits.  Served in shallow bowls and traditionally eaten with clamshells.  Nevertheless a point of cultural pride in Koth.

Gosca
Watery gruel made from insect larvae (especially mosquito), harvested from bog-farms.  Bog-farmers are widely considered the most wretched caste of farmers.

Jo Bread
Bitter, acidic, and hard as a rock.  Manufactured in black discs that look more like construction materials than food.  Absolutely inedible unless soaked in water for a few minutes.  Families use specialized tea pots to simultaneously boil their tea and soak their jo bread, which is then eaten after the tea is completely drank.  Rich people still use jo bread to add bitterness to sweet teas, but the jo bread is then discarded into the garden.  Popular west of the Elterspine Mtns, especially among halflings.

Horlick
A soup made from boiling the hair of a garguark, which is sort of like a woolly horse that lays eggs.  If made properly, the hair crumbles away and doesn't feel like hair in your mouth.  Tastes like cigarettes and wet cats.

Yeggis
This is horlick with a garguark egg added in.  Actually not that bad.  Traditionally served in a leather pouch.  If you want to flirt with a Fangolian in a tavern, you don't buy them a drink, you buy them a pouch of yeggis.

Scumbo
A broadly defined category of stews served in the Frogwash Swamp.  Could be anything from crocodile to swamp chicken (large frogs) soaked in rum (in order to kill parasites) and then stewed with fruit and/or gilly moss.  Traditionally served with a black stone in the stew, which is then set aside and reused for future stews (believed to prevent disease).

Rat on a Stick
A favorite among dwarves.  The cultural equivalent of a New York hot dog.  Many different varieties available, shaved and slathered in sauce.  For a higher fee you can even buy rats that have been cooked into exciting poses.

Fermented Rat Milk
Also favored by dwarves.  Typically drank in thimble-sized shot glasses (but can be ordered by the dozen) or tall vessels that look like test tubes with a rounded-square cross-section.  Dwarves call it gorbly.

Bagman Soup
Impoverished elves (and bards and noise wizards) can sustain themselves in a forest of jungle by learning a spell called song of the bagman.  It makes birds (who fail their saves) to fly into a boiling soup pot, and it only takes a couple of hours of singing to get a cauldron full of boiled songbirds.  Mind the splashes.  (The songful bagman is a monster from the Book of Mice).

Boiled Barnacles
(Un)popular all over the Sea of Fish.  Restaurants will serve them with a chisel, mallet, and disemboweling fork, but hungry sailors just eat them with knives, rum, and cussing.

Bogglehead
Made from sharks that have died of a particular kind of skin disease (specifically a yeast).  You'd think this would be rare, but you'd be wrong.  Every half decade or so, millions of yeasty sharks will beach themselves along the eastern seaboard of Centerra's Great Continent and die.  Peasants are quick to grab all of these fermenting sharks.  If buried, bogglehead will stay edible for years to come.  It's not uncommon for a family to have a stash of sharks buried in the backyard, saved for a rainy day.  The name 'bogglehead' comes from the stupid expression that all of the sharks get on their face after they die of their yeast infection.

Spell of Prodigious Probiotic Fecundity
Sometimes wizards try to refer to this spell as satiety or nourish person but all it really does is makes someone's intestinal bacteria multiply prodigiously.  This vast crop of intestinal bacteria then nourish the person as they naturally die and are absorbed by the intestines.  Causes bloating, gas, heartburn, and small amounts of retrograde digestion.

Zaratan Hatchlings
The few remaining zaratan (island-sized sea turtles) return to the island of Worthless Zyro every 3 years to lay their eggs.  Their eggs are no larger than a normal sea turtle's, but they do lay vast numbers of them.  These eggs are promptly dug up by the people of Worthless Zyro and sold for pittances at the Happy Turtle Festival.  Eggs are stored in cool basements, and 2 months later, when the eggs hatch, the Joyous Turtle Festival occurs, when all the baby turtles are fried and sold for a penny apiece.

Blevyek
Fangolians have bred Blevyek goats for generations, in order to bring out certain traits.  These are small, hardy goats that violently vomit out their stomach contents if punched sufficiently hard the kidney.  After being fed grass all morning, the goat's vomit is gathered in clay pots, and allowed to sit for 24 hours.  (This allows the goat's stomach enzymes to break down the normally undigestable cellulose in grass.)  The the grassy vomitus is made into a thick porridge.  The goats get their name from the noise they make when vomiting.

---------------------

And just google 'worst food' or 'disgusting food' and you'll get a million other interesting things.  It is worth noting, however, that the most disgusting foods are usually the most expensive (and therefore do not fall under the category of Disgusting Peasant Food).

Spirit Armor Rules (for Guys in Grass Skirts)

Pictured: AC 15

Spirit Armor

If you want to play a game in the isles, you'll soon run into the problem of armor.  You just can't run around diving into tropical lagoons while wearing a breastplate.  It'll rust to shit, shortly after it drowns you.

I already wrote a post about using fashion to modulate AC (instead of armor).  This is the same thing, except spirituality = AC.

Tapu refers to actions, objects, or places that are special to the gods.  This can be unholy, holy, or simply spiritual.  It has the whiff of divinity about it.  Gods pay attention to these things.  Touching or doing tapu things can make you more tapu, too.

Noa refers to actions, objects, or places that are common or mundane.  These are things that animals can do, like eating, working, and having sex.  Touching or doing noa things can make you more noa, too.

AC 14

Mixing noa and tapu is very bad.  It pisses off the gods something fierce.  For example, eating is among the most noa (mundane) things that a person can do.  If a god walks on the earth and a tree then grows in that spot, the tree is then infused with his power (it is tapu).  If a person eats (noa) from that tree, it is a grave offense and he will probably fall sick immediately and die soon after, unless he quickly atones.

Basically, tapu stuff makes your spirituality go up, and noa makes it go down.  You want to strike a balance here.  If you are 100% noa, you are like the dirt in the field.  You have lost your divine connection to the gods, and they will not protect you.  If you are 100% tapu, it is equally dangerous, since everything you touch becomes mildly tapu as well.  At this point, you can only be fed by someone else, since touching food would make it tapu and it would be a sin to then eat it.

So an islander PC has a new stat called spirit.  This is just a measure of how the PC falls on the scale between dirt and divinity, and "spirit" is an ambiguous enough word that it will serve our purposes.  It goes from 0-10.  New PCs start out with spirit = 1d6.  AC granted by spirit overlaps-with-but-does-not-stack-with AC granted my wearing normal armor.

Spirit directly affects your AC.  The sweet spot is right in the middle, around spirit 5.  Any lower and you reduce your divine nature enough that the gods will protect you less (although it would be equally fair to say that the world protects you less).  Any higher and you tempt disaster with your commingling of the divine and the worldly, commiting microblasphemies with every breath you take.

Here's the chart.

Spirit	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
AC	10	11	12	13	14	15	14	13	12	11	10

Things that raise Spirit by 1 point (tapu):

• chanting a hymn to the spirits
• engaging in a sacred ceremony (burial, birth, certain holidays)
• speaking with the dead
• open combat (not just shooting an arrow at someone and running away)
• consuming piece of a dead and honored enemy

Things that lower Spirit by 1 point (noa):

• eating common food
• working (digging, building, sailing, etc.  Any common labor)
• having sex

AC 11--he is a spellcaster

You cannot raise or lower spirit by doing the same thing multiple times in a row.  Repeats don't count.  If you have sex three times, you only gain +1 Spirit.  If you have sex, dig a trench, and then have sex again, you gain +3 Spirit.

Items can have great power, too.  Although it wouldn't grant any bonuses to a foreigner, a headdress that was once worn by a great chief will grant an islander +1 AC as long as the islander hasn't pissed off the gods.

If an islander pisses off the gods by mixing noa and tapu, this whole spirit armor thing comes crashing down, and they are treated using the familiar no armor = 10 AC thing.  They need to go see a shaman if they want to reactivate their Spirit stat.

If you want to integrate spellcasting with this system, link it to Spirit as well.  Shamans (spellcasters) need to have at least 9 Spirit if they want their spell to go off without a hitch (which means low AC as well).

Is it balanced?  Well, it lets you get some AC without any of the drawbacks of armor, but it does place some picky restrictions on behavior.  (Possibly too much finicky bookkeeping?)  Additionally, it doesn't go as high as armor-derived AC normally does.  I certainly can't imagine everyone in a party wanting to use Spirit Armor instead of normal armor, which means it's sort of balanced, maybe.

Pretty much everything in this section has been hacked from Mythos of the Maori, a cool little RPG written by Christopher Johnstone (who taught me everything I know about kapu and noa).

AC 17--note the magical headdress

Zankatzu and the Sea of Suloi

This post is about a part of my homebrew world.  Specifically, the Sea of Suloi, Zankatzu, and the surrounding islands.  However, large chunks of it are based on the culture and history of the South Pacific (especially Micronesia, because Micronesia is fucking awesome) so if you ever want to adapt an OSR game to have a South Pacific-ish theme, you can probably scrape some ideas here.

Bruhok and Zankatsu are the biggest islands in the area.
They flank the Bearded Ocean and the Sea of Suloi.

Nations of the Isles

There aren't any.  The islands are covered with hundreds of small cities and towns, each with their own history and heroes.  Some are banded into small confederacies, and some larger towns draw tribute from smaller, conquered ones.  But compared to the great nations on the mainland, they are all small and mostly identical.

The northern islands are considered more "civilized", since more of them have converted to Celestialism.  In the southwest you'll find more things like dragons and beastmen.

The nation of Keldon once tried to conquer the islands.  They had armor and ballista and more advanced magic.  For a while, they made great progress in subjugating the local population.  Their conquest was halted by three things.  (1) Their crops didn't grow very well in the sulfur rich soil, and led to starving settlements.  (2) The southern islands are infested with feral dragons, which quickly learned to fly higher, in order to scan the horizons for the highly visible sails of treasure-laden galleons.  (3) Disease.  The islands are home to some of the nastiest diseases in the world, and without any immunity, the Keldish quickly died.  A great many of them died after raping the locals, after being infected with a particular disease that was harmless in those who grew up around it, but lethal to outsiders.  They called it "rabbit disease" or "carrot-eating disease".

(As an aside, the locals avoid the dragons by traveling in clusters of smaller boats, rather than one large one.  They paint the ship blue, for better camouflage.  They only raise sails at night, and supplement their movement by paddling.  This makes crossing the open ocean dangerous, but it is ideal for island hopping.)

A small Keldish fortification, Fort Rhodoss, is still maintained on Zankatsu in order to give Keldon a safe harbor should they ever return, and also to conduct trade with passing ships.  However, most ships prefer to sail a bit further to the northwest, and stop at Whore Island (see below).

Nowadays, relations between the Keldish and the  are not as bad as they were.  Small numbers of Keldish will be regarded with suspicion, but not outright hostility.  Just be prepared to be teased about your inability to conquer anything.  

And never offer anyone coins;it is seen as an insult.  In the southern isles they use foreign coins as a way to challenge someone to a duel.  If someone throws a handful of gold coins at your feet, don't pick them up--draw your sword instead.

The mainland-based nation of Basharna is also tried to make inroads into the Isles.  It was a gentle approach, involving a dip of mercantilism and a dollop of religious conversion.  In fact, they even claim the entire island of "West Basharna" as their sovereign territory, despite the fact that West Basharna doesn't pay taxes, have any mainland Basharnese laws implemented, doesn't speak the same language as the mainland, and in fact, most West Basharnese couldn't tell you the name of the queen.  

The most mainland-ish city on West Basharna is called Kasmir.  It is a cultural fondue, full of Bashanese, Keldish, natives, marinel, and even a few beastmen.  It's also a very violent place.  A lot of the native religions directly oppose the churches of the new religion (Celestialism), who they (rightly) accuse of stealing converts and supporting the queen rather than their own people.  And there's a lot of old, bad blood between the native tribes that sometimes flares up in the marketplace, and leaves another corpse in a melon stand.

A map of Galipon.
(also Nan Madol was a real place, you should check it out.)
(seriously, twin sorcerers built a town a coral reef)

Cities

Galipon is a temple city.  Priests of several intersecting religions live there, where they sactify the temples (wherein their gods physically reside) and perform divinations in exchange for tribute, usually in the form of young adults.  The priests spill their own priestly blood, turn the blood into red ink, and then use this ink to tattoo the young people they have been given as tribute.  These tattoos turn them person into mind-slaves of the priests, and who then use them as mindless servants for the next 8 years.  After the duration is up, the tattoo is removed and the ex-slave is sent back to their village with no memory of the 8 years.

The town is composed of ~200 stone buildings arranged on artificial islands on top off and beside an off-shore reef.  Canoes are used to navigate between buildings.  Underwater fences enclose aquaculture farms.  Different pens are used to keep eels, sea turtles, and sharks, which are then sacrificed.  Many houses have "back doors", where a person could swim through narrow tunnels in the reef.  Some of these tunnels are very long, and some have dead ends, making the process dangerous for those who do not know the right way through them.

Galipon is not very welcoming to outsiders.  They've had a few messy run-ins with pirates who raided the town and stole some very valuable things.  But because they think of themselves as best equipped to represent the large and diverse island (and they might be) they try not to turn any ship away who approaches respectfully and with gifts.  For a suitable enough gift, their oracular services can be hired.

The greatest tribute that can be offered to the priests of Galipon is a living whale, usually subdued with harpoons and towed to the city.  The priests with remove the blubber of it's head, excavate the top of its skull, and burn a specially prepared incense on the flesh of its brain.  Then the whale will speak with the voice of men, and give prophesy to the people of Galipon.

Whore Island is a wretched patch of saltwater swamp with a single town called Whore Town.  The town exists because it is located halfway between two places that merchants and pirates would rather be.  A town of opportunity.

Whore Town was founded after the failed conquest of the Isles by a man called Hambogie.  It wasn't called Whore Town back then, of course.  It only acquired it's new name when Hambogie was searching for ways to lure ships away from Fort Rhodoss, because money.  That's also when he changed the name to "Whore Island".

In his quest to attract more pirate money to his island-town, he brought in drugs, rum, and whores.  Lots of whores.  And although the island turned into a true shit-hole, Hambogie got his money, and lived quite happily for a while.

That era of Whore Island's history ended when the brothels, as the most numerous institutions in town and certainly the only organized ones, revolted.  Hambogie was slit belly to neck, and his corpse was hung up in the town square.

Currently, whore island is administered by four large brothels, remnants of the revolution.  Nearly 500 people depend on the four brothels, which now jockey for supremacy amongst themselves.  It's not open war, but tensions are high, and members from one brothel frequently fight the others.  Each brothel-school has its own set of creeds, colors, and fighting styles.

The town remains a popular midpoint destination for both pirates and merchants, in part because the brothels still revolve around their original purpose (despite the politics, you can still get a good fuck in Whore Town).  In fact, because most of the town's leadership comes from the brothels and most of the brothel-workers are prostitutes, most of the town's leadership are whores.  The place is the world's only prostitutocracy.

Gengrimon is the largest city-state on the island.  It's xenophobic and deeply religious.  Death priests ride in amphibious chariots pulled by crocodiles.  Warlords sell tomb-gold in order to buy more slaves.  Sacred anacondas sun themselves in the street, painted symbols drying on their backs.  These great serpents usually eat the pigs that wander through the city, but sometimes they seize a villager and consume him, and it is forbidden to resist or strike back at these sacred snakes.

The priest-king of Gengrimon has eaten nor drank anything in the last four years except for human blood (and believes that he will soon be a vampire).  The city is infested with witches, who seek to end the priest-king's seclusion, and turn the vast machinations of Gengrimon to war, in order to unite the islands.  Failing that, they will kill the priest-king (who they love) with poisoned branches.

Foxentown is another den of pirates and heavily armed merchants.  It was founded by marinel who claim to have sailed over the Elterspine Mountains (see stormsailing).  Aside from having wenches, taverns, and rum, Foxentown also has a semi-reputable institution of knowledge: the Mariner's Library.

The Mariner's Library has the largest collection of maps in the world.  The Library is well guarded, and only accessible for friends of Governer Jaxon Halfspit.  Maps are deeply engrained in the culture of Foxentown, and it is not uncommon for debts to be paid in treasure maps.  Foxentown also has the only bank in the world audacious enough to offer paper currency (worthless anywhere else).  Different denominations of foxendollars have different treasure maps printed on them, which supposedly lead to different treasure hoards.  It is the treasure in these hoards that is supposed to prop up the value of the foxendollar.

The other thing of note in Foxentown is Foxenrum.  It's a bottle of middle-quality rum stuffed down the throat of a taxidermied fox.  They are is mostly sold to ignorant out-of-towners, or packaged for resale somewhere else.  For inexplicable reasons, this tacky export is fantastically popular in Meltheria and Asria.

Cutty is another hive of scum and villainy, although it is the smallest on on this section.  It's notable because it's mostly for islander pirates (as opposed to all of the white people pirates you'll find in Foxentown).  It's ruled by a leper king called The Great Bon Grell.  It has a shark graveyard.  Fishfolk sometimes stop by and do business, usually to buy worked metal.  They pay for their purchases with fistfuls of pearls, gold nuggets, and magical fish.

Currency

Fuck coins.  Currencies include beads, copra (dried coconut meat), and cowrie shells.  However, we probably should talk about rai stones.

Rai stones are huge stone donuts.  The largest of them are twice as tall as a man and weigh 4 tons.  A lot of these stones were quarried on a different island (one with limestone) and then shipped on canoes to its final destination.  They're presumably shaped like donuts because that's the easiest shape to transport when you've all you've got is a lot of manpower and some ropes.

Rai stones are money for the same reason that gold is money: because it's just awesome to look at.  But unlike gold coins, you can't exactly tip your bartender with one.  In fact, you aren't going to be moving it much at all.

That's because rai stones don't move, but ownership of them still changes.  It's all transmitted through oral history.  To spend a rai stone, you just publicly announce that you are giving your rai stone to someone else.  Rai stones are rare enough and huge enough that everyone can remember who owns which one at any given time.

Even the "civilized" merchant cities will use rai stones, simply because they are such fungible currency elsewhere.  In places like Fort Rhodoss or Foxentown, however, they'll probably give you a title certificate as well.

Even if a rai stone falls off a canoe and sinks to the sea floor, everyone can agree that it must still be there, and so even that rai stone is worth something, and it was traded and valued like any other.  It sounds sort of useless until you realize that they don't have to carry around any heavy piles of useless gold.  The "average" rai stone is worth about 2000 sp (using the silver standard), but it varies in both directions by an order of magnitude.

It doesn't stop there.

Dowries between chiefs are negotiated for the price of ownership of the peaks of a nearby mountain.  Maybe merchants sell their canoes in exchange for the ownership of a huge, beautiful, immobile crystal on the side of the mountain.  (And you can even find some naturalistic non-materialism in this--if the crystal were ever broken off and brought to market, it would be worth a lot less since it can no longer be seen and shared by the thing that gives it value--the villagers.)

(Actually, all currency is pretty fucking weird, now that I think about it.)

And of course you can trade names.  The title of "Slayer of the Purple Serpent" has got to be worth something.  You can either earn the title by killing the purple worm that is menacing the village, or buy it off of the guy that did.  Names entitle you to better treatment, and they're worth quite a lot in themselves.  The "average" name is worth about 5000 sp (using the silver standard), but it varies in both directions by an order of magnitude.

Interestingly enough, as the name changes owners, so does the retelling of the tale.  Of course, this depends on the storyteller being up-to-date on who currently owns the name.

"  . . . and so did Great Tova build the Eternal Wall, who is the grandfather of Mirok . . ."
"Sorry, Elder Storyteller, but Mirok was the descendant of Great Tova last week.  Now the descendant of Great Tova is Karkoot."
" Ah, then I misspoke.  And so did Great Tova build the Eternal Wall, who is the grandfather of Karkoot. . ."

Truth bends like a tree in the wind.