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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8643616" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I strive to give small details that indicate "lived-in-ness," e.g. when the players visit a city they've never been to before, I'll describe a local favorite dish, or local clothing preferences, or distinctive architectural elements that make that area stand out. (The food examples are pretty popular with my players so I do that one a lot.) Little touches like that help to make it feel like it's a place out there somewhere, even as you see flying carpets and such.There is an ecology and a biosphere with different climates. It's probably not very realistic, but I do try to make it at least passingly resemble IRL semiarid-to-desert regions (the primary ecological inspiration is Morocco). It has cork forests in the northeast and citrus groves/forests in the wetter parts. There are areas that diverge quite heavily from "arid" due to stuff like a major river flowing through (or near its headwaters, where several minor rivers converge in the same basin, creating a marsh area despite the overall arid climate), but by and large, it is a dry land, and the deep wilderness is desert, not forest. Monsters and other dangerous things live out in the deep desert, making it even more hazardous than it might otherwise be, but the various city-states (particularly the largest, Al-Rakkah) keep the roads relatively well-protected, and the monsters don't generally stray from their hidey-holes much.There are two primary religions in the area: the older Kahina animistic/shamanistic faith, and the "newer" (but still very old) monotheistic Safiqi priesthood that largely supplanted it. The two exist in a tense peace, where the "moderate" members of each group basically agree to let bygones be bygones so long as neither side does anything particularly egregious by their standards (e.g. the moderate Safiqi "only" ask that the Kahina never preach that their deity, the One, is merely a powerful city-spirit; "orthodox" Safiqi demand they convert but this rarely ends well for practical reasons, while "orthodox" Kahina refuse to play along at all.) Some, particularly among the Waziri mages and merchant class, are effectively atheist or agnostic, but this isn't something most of them would make common knowledge. (To be clear, most Waziri and merchants are still at least nominally of the Safiqi faith, but if you go looking for exceptions, those are the two groups where you'd have the most luck.) Other religions exist, but most of them exist far away, so they haven't been particularly relevant. The party did recently learn that their dragon friend, Tenryu Shen, follow a religion which he sees as being equivalent to the Safiqi priests', but structured differently (in a way that effectively integrates a portion of Kahina doctrine); in his homeland of Yuxia, the being whom the Safiqi worship as the One is called the August Jade Emperor, and the other spirits are considered members, whether they know it or not, of the Bureaucracy of Heaven.At least six completely distinct cultural groups (one of which has two main branches) have been identified in the game thus far. They are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Tarrakhuna. This is the native culture of the lands where (all but one of) the PCs originated, and the main setting of play. Arabian Nights flair and flavor. It's the one with two subdivisions, which both see each other as part of "the same culture" but sometimes in not-entirely-polite ways. They are the "city folk" and the Nomad Tribes. The two share one language, many religious beliefs, literature, essentially all of their oral traditions (just flavored/presented differently), and one believed-mythic-but-actually-true origin, but have many distinct cultural traditions and practices as well. Because the city-folk and Nomad Tribes both contributed to throwing off the shackles of genie-rajah slavery, one of their important shared values is that slavery is unacceptable. (Some still practice it in secret, but it's a HUGE no-no.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Jinnistan. This is the elemental otherworld genie land, made up of many allied city-states, ruled over by nigh-immortal noble genies and populated by a mix of many races. Jinnistan is an even more intensely magical land than the Tarrakhuna, and its rulers can be capricious and cruel, but they can also be sources of incredible wealth and power if you learn to play their games. They still have somewhat tense relations with the mortal city-states of the modern Tarrakhuna because, thousands of years ago, the genie-rajahs ruled over (this part of) the mortal world and enslaved most mortals of the region. That sort of thing doesn't get forgotten easily.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Yuxia. As noted, this is a faraway land, one with wuxia/pan-Asiatic flavorings. (It also has an equivalent of Jinnistan, called Fusang, but Fusang is nowhere near as political or meddlesome as Jinnistan.) Consistent trade with Yuxia across the Sapphire Sea is a relatively recent event, though the fact that this land existed has been known for several centuries--it was just a matter of (a) finding goods worth trading with Yuxia and (b) finding a safe route through the many dangers and vast distances of the Sapphire Sea. Yuxia is also extremely big, much bigger than the Tarrakhuna, so it has many, many subcultures, but none of them have been directly relevant yet. Though he is a gold dragon in disguise as a mere dragonborn, Yuxia is Shen's native culture.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The northern jungles. There used to be a thriving civilization, more or less Mesoamerican flavored, to the north, but a sustained period of Bad Stuff a few centuries ago eventually broke the back of their civilization and they dispersed. (In brief: several natural disasters, a nasty plague, a drought, a resulting famine, various domestic unrest issues, and then an earthquake which severely damaged their main city AND seemingly killed off their direct connection to the divine....yeah, they basically called it quits.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The eastern steppe. Beyond the mountains to the east (from which the major rivers flow), there are high, arid steppe lands, and a culture of clannish, horse-riding people, mostly dwarves, holds sway here. More or less, dwarves but Mongolian; mechanically many of them manifest as Barbarians, but the association isn't strict in either direction. We haven't delved too much into their culture because the player whose character came from there has left the game. But it might come up again in the future.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The "elf forests" to the south. Little was known about them, and they've suspiciously never meaningfully developed, and the forests remain eerily empty of people. The party has since learned that this was an intentional effect, a curse or enchantment that prevents anyone from building new permanent structures inside a large circular region of territory in these forests. Turns out, long ago, the El-Adrin civilization lived there, and depended HEAVILY on magic, but for some reason, a Big Deal Thing happened which would have ended their civilization (at least, the way they lived), so they pulled their whole damn civilization into a pocket dimension, awaiting the day they could return to the mortal world once the changes were reversed. Our party Battlemaster is intimately connected to the El-Adrin and hopes to help them return.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Ten Thousand Isles of the Sapphire Sea. A very eclectic bunch, since a heavy inspiration for these islands is the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, but the overall cultural tone is Polynesia/Melanesia/Micronesia. The name is metaphorical; no one has mapped the entire Sapphire Sea, so no one knows how many isles there are, and it might even be impossible to actually find truly all of them. The people here practice a more open/fluid belief system, seemingly seeing most traditions as just a specialized version of general spiritualism, though we haven't delved too deep into that yet. Our party Spellslinger is of this culture.</li> </ul>There are several relevant political institutions that have come up over the course of play, including but not limited to:Sultana Thuriya and her royal court (the leadership of Al-Rakkah)The Brass Ring (the unofficial-official advisory council, made up of the richest merchants in the city)The Al-Rakkan military (Army, Navy, Palace Guard, Day Watch, Night Watch)The Waziri Order (mages, but also educators for many professional fields including lawyers and some forms of medicine)The Safiqi Priesthood (priests, but they also do a large portion of the region's medical and poverty-fighting services)Within the priesthood, the Asiad al-Khafyun (the "secret masters"/"hidden overseers," the internal police of the Safiqi and also their arm for hunting down nasty murder-cults and Cthulhu-worshippers and the like....because that's a thing)Some specific Nomad Tribes, including the orcish/half-orcish/human tribe led by Alimar bint Khamal, grandmother of our (on hiatus) party RangerThe Silver Thread, a Robin-Hood-style organization of pro-social thieves, vagabonds, and ne'er-do-wells who work to protect the common folk from being preyed upon by the merchants of the various city-statesThe various Jinnistani nobles of note, including His Majesty, His Eminence, Sahl Thaqib Humaidan al-Nazar yatt-Asmar, Prince of the South Wind (or just Prince Sahl for short. Most nobles, genie or otherwise, have similarly stupidly long names that get abbreviated to just their first name. It's an old genie tradition.)And several bad-guy factions, like the (as yet unnamed) gang being secretly run by a black dragon, the "Zil al-Ghurab" or (as we usually call them) the "Raven-Shadows" who are an assassin cult that broke away from the Safiqi priesthood a long time ago, the Cult of the Burning Eye who basically revere some kind of eldritch being and are quite mad, and the Shadow Druids who are heretical Kahina that want to destroy all the cities and transform the region into a giant swamp so they can merge with death itself and transcend the cycle of rebirth.</blockquote>

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