Mai @mai@cybre.space

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.

I am both my world and not my world, it is difficult to put into English. I am the world and a god-fragment of that world at the same time, an infinite slice of the infinite that is my world. I feel fiercely protective of my world but have also been putting effort into getting those I know to visit it so I can share it more directly than just writing it all out in words.

I prefer to consider that I am put in the place that I am for a reason that I may never get to understand, and that I also don't want to think about it too much at this moment in my life because I am not ready for the implications of finishing those thoughts to fruition. I am loved where I am and I am accepted for who I am and that is enough for me.

I am the storyteller and the stage on which stories are told. I am the sun, the sand, the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the residents and yet I am also one who mostly observes and guides it all with a gentle corrective hand.

There are towns scattered across the sands of Miau. Most of them are centered around rivers and they form a trading cycle where the heavier goods go downstream and the lighter goods go upstream in return.

The village nearest my villa is named Riltash, it grows a lot of crops that are found valuable including onions, beets, hay and alfalfa. After every season they grow some hemp to help rejuvenate the soil (arable soil is valued highly in a desert). The hemp is used for clothes, rope making and its flowers are regarded as a symbol of fertility and shared between couples.

There are some livestock raised, but they are well-valued and hard to replace. The vast majority of it are chickens, chicken eggs form the vast majority of their diet.

The name Riltash comes from a word that roughly means "delta" (river friendship, rila tashel). A lot of names in Miau are geographical descriptions that have worn down into names with enough time and repetition.

The focus of my manor is not to be inside the manor. The windows let in a lot of light and heat from outside and allow you to see the stars at night. The bedroom has just enough room for a roughly king sized bed, a bedstand and a standing closet for the three robes I keep as well as some varied sashes with differing symbols on them.

The oasis near my manor has a large pond where wildlife drinks from. Normally the wildlife of the desert is fairly individualistic, but there is a calming effect around the oasis that prevents predator and prey from engaging in their mortal struggles for life and death. It is a source of tranquility, an oasis in the harsh sands.

Few know about the oasis. Fewer know about my manor. Those that have been to my manor and met me have kept quiet about it but sometimes visit to talk and share a meal.

They don't know it's me that made the world they are in, and that's how I prefer it. I'd much rather be an anonymous sage in the desert than their god.