Mai @mai@cybre.space

I am moving to @mai

I am moving to @mai

it me

I am frequently accused of being cute but I don't know why I get such accusations on a regular basis.

I haven't posted here in a while. I've been sitting on a bunch of DnD style worldbuilding/dungeon notes for a while and I'm wondering if I should release them to the public. If I did I'd probably put them on our main blog. Would that be something useful?

喵

Tired

mao mao

mao

mao mao mao

mao mao

mao

Cadey won't let me buy a domain :(

mao

My dreams have gotten a lot weirder since I started letting my friends travel to my world

I should really put all this into a wiki or something. I'm not sure where to host it though. Ideally I'd like something that only allows me to modify it. Not that I don't trust people, but I would much rather have something that I can both link to people and have locked down enough to prevent others from making changes.

Was Kan actually a local hero that lead the rebellion and later turned into a myth and then a god? Could he as a person have seen the results he would create?

Everything is all interconnected so much that it can be hard to know where to start laying the first cord in the tangle. Truly, laying the cord down _somewhere_ and starting from there is probably for the best. It doesn't matter where, just _somewhere_ and then let the rest of the complexity unravel.

Things don't have to have universal truths seeping out from every corner. History is made out of people, actions people take and the world they find themselves in. Work around it. Envision the end and the beginning, then a way that the end could come from it.

A bit of surrealism helps spice things up, nonfiction tends to not make sense, but fiction sure has to. How would the nonfiction of a place influence its stories?

It's fun to imagine how they ended up that way. How does a society become collectivist like that? What kind of myths would be told to kids as they grow up and wonder why things are the way they are?

Maybe there was a harsh ruler in the past that made his subjects toil and die attempting to grow incompatible crops. Maybe one day the right person spilled the right crop into the right container and let it ferment on accident. Maybe that lead to them later rediscovering the container having a weird scent and taking a sip out of curiosity.

Maybe that revelation lead to the entire society working through an ever increasingly complicated set of steps and distilling processes to make the beverage taste better and better. Maybe they managed to overthrow and exile the king because of it.

That is how weird geography can be used to create history. Working backwards you can spell out this people's entire societal history from the fact that they make a valued alcoholic drink.

Something I've learned about naming things is that names for places tend to describe one of three things:

* a geographic feature
* important people or groups in local history
* a product the area is known for

The trick to making names is to start with one of those three and work your way out. What struggles did those people encounter? What is the geography? What's unique about the area to allow different products to be made?

There's an area to the northeast named Kanar. It is known for a unique alcoholic beverage that takes a lot of group work but is so highly valued that they can afford to import everything they can't make there. They believe the local god Kan blesses the land, but really the soil has a weird microbiome due to being isolated by a mountain and two rivers. Because everyone works together under the blessings of Kan, everyone shares in the rewards.

I guess "friendship" isn't the right translation here. The root word "tash" means something like bond, knot or joining. A friendship is a joining of people together, so i guess the name is more like "where the rivers join".

I have no need to participate in their economy, but I sometimes juice cactuses and mix it with cool oasis water to create a nectar that I barter with. I use a ratio of 2:1 of water and cactus innards to create something more drinkable, however raw cactus juice makes for a great topping on pancakes.

I am anonymous in the town, only known for the juice I barter with; but to those that know me I am a friend. I could teleport to the town in an instant, but I choose to walk the four kilometers each way in the sand, carrying only what fits in my backpack. The sands have a meditative feeling with each step. It is a lovely feeling to let the sand filter through my paws, almost like a warm massage with each footfall.

It is a lovely place, my favorite in my world.