Arachnia Turn #0: DEMOGRAPHICS

The Society Page
Standard Info For This Sheet

~Statten~
The statten people live by family, blood and clan. Descent and inheritance follow the females line, a child belongs to the clan of it's mother, a man belongs to the clan of his wife. Most clans live in all of the different villages providing the basis of trade between them. If your clan doesn't inhabit a village you aren't welcome but must trade with them through a middle man of some kind. Statten villages are ruled by a council of male elders, and Statten clans are ruled by the oldest males in the clan. The oldest male in the entire city is it's nominal ruler but needs support from the other clans to enforce his edicts, the same patter happens inside the clans themselves with the oldest man in nominal charge (and on the council) but requiring support from younger men to enforce his wishes.

Previous Turns Population N/A / Current Turns Fatality Rating N/A
Total number Who Lived Between Turns: N/A
Total Number Of Deaths between Turns: N/A
Current Turns Population: 1000

5% Old Men
Old age starts at 35, and men can live to be up to 55 in a Statten village if they aren't knifed by a rival first. The business of old men is teaching the young men, and performing politics. The oldest man in each city sits on the village council, an old man with an entourage of younger men may lead a trade party to another village where the clan lives and exert his authority there as part of the clan as he distributes the "Gifts" he has brought for his relatives, and confers with them on the best way to redistribute those gifts to the other clans of the city to buy his family the most prestige there and get a little something to bring back home. Old men arrange for the marriage of there sons into other clans or into other villages to provide blood ties to hold the community, or family of communities together; such an important decision is never left to the young. Old men also trade the clans women between villages. Women never leave the clan but it is important to maintain the bloodline in each village and that requires women in every one, for every generation.

40% Younger Men
Younger men between the ages of ten and thirty four are the backbone of the village. They primarily perform construction work, hunt dangerous game on the open Sahel, accompany trading parties, escort and protect gathering parties of women, and fire various types of pottery. They also take turns tending to the fire within the central council of Elders which is high prestige work and places them where they can begin to give input on the politics of the village.

50% Women
Women are the primary gatherers and scavengers of the clan. They also are the source of the clans bloodline and status and need to be protected at all costs. Many women spend much of the time pregnant or taking care of children, and the women are also responsible for tending to the family fires of each clan house providing warmth, heat, and light, but also being high intensity work as the fire burns hot in the vision and unless you close some or all of your upper eyes while tending it the heat can blind you. Women are also the primary fisher-women.

5% Children
children are cared for by their mothers and the women are taught gender skills. When the males reach ten they begin to train with the other older men in various industries and in the hunt. As they get older men get more training in politics, while women become more expert in the wild foods that can be gathered in the areas around the village and in fishing.

~Khanti~
The Khanti people of the Mesopotamian Forest Canopy are a laid back and easy going people. They dwell in extended family villages grown into the circular layers of weeping wheat trees, and organize themselves into clans that claim many miles of land as their own, marking those lands with elaborate and skilled carvings edged into the living bark of important trees. Each clan knows it's own borders and those of it's neighbors and visits happen only by those carrying elaborately carved truce sticks, mostly for trade or to seek marriage with other, foreign, lineages. At the center of each set of related lineages they mark a site for cooking, trading, and partying, and at the center of the territory they mark out a site for the entire area to come together in peace. Parties and gifts hold the people together almost as much as blood or friendship.

Previous Turns Population N/A / Current Turns Fatality Rating N/A
Total number Who Lived Between Turns: N/A
Total Number Of Deaths between Turns: N/A
Current Turns Population: 1000

2% Old People
Not many khanti people live to reach much past 30. They live an easygoing life, but the dangers of the forest are many, and the old are prone to accidents, predation, and disease. Yet those who do survive are respected and cared for by their children and grandchildren. They don't have any official position, especially when they are too old to hunt and gather, or move around much amongst the branches, but they are treated with respect as a source of knowledge. If they are lucky they have raised many children up to take care of them, respect them, and carry on their ways. An old person with no dependents is a pitiful sight, and not long for this world as there are few who would care for such a wretch.

88% Adults
Adult mated pairs are the leaders of the khanti people. Each tree is part of a lineage, grandparents, parents, and those seeking to achieve such status. A mated pair is given position in the lineage based on how many children they have and how successful their family is at hunting and gathering, and the gifts they are able to give to other families of the line, or to other lineages of the clan during parties. Over time new lineages are formed as large groups split to find new trees. Those lineages remain related, and share much with one another, and as they grow further apart genetically they trade children with each other and with other lineages who share the immediate neighborhood with them.

10% Children
Children are the wealth of the people and the source of their prestige, they spend their days learning to climb and carve, to leap from one large branch to another, to shoot slingshots, and gather edible foods. As they get older they learn to tan leather and to grow and maintain their families wigwam skeleton. They have no real status of their own, but as their elders know that they will one day have to depend on these children to take care of them they are usually well treated.

The Science Page
Standard Info For This Sheet

~Statten~
The Statten are a group living in the arid Sahel that once was the Syrian desert, near the border between Arachnia's area and Charlotte's area. This area is near the place where the Mesopotamian bit of forest got it's start, but it's soil was to poor, arid, and generally desolate for the trees to get a start. However the forest itself has been holding in water with it's roots and releasing it slowly over the course of a year making this edge area capable of growing grasses, and enlarging the existing oasis' into lakes. In this area many of the original inhabitants saught refuge, forcing each other further south into the waste where they became the Statleute and the Trockentreck people's, however here the strongest of the various groups that were those people's ancestors merged into a single body and survived advancing and fighting over time.

Language & Social
These are the common social and linguistic skills that bind the statten together as one people and which have held their technological progress together as a single tech grouping

Sprattus Language (25), Patriarchial Clan System (15), The Blutstaat (10)

[The sprattus language is a fairly advanced indo-european language with elements in common with both Latin and German. Like latin it has many different noun classes and the placement of a noun within a sentence is used to put emphasis on a word, rather than to change it's meaning or relationship to verbs. This means there are often a lot of different words for the same "noun" displayed in English. Different nouns replace the need for pronouns entirely, at the expense of a much more clumsy language. However like German it is an inflected language to the point where some sentences can be composed only of a single word based on one of the languages many nouns.]

[The sprattus organize themselves by families and clans ruled by the oldest males. Blood relationships are tracked through the mothers line. Membership within a clan determines a person's ultimate loyalties, or at least it is supposed to. Women never leave their clan, though they may be traded between city-states, while men join the clan of their wives and often are guilty of divided loyalties between the clan of their adulthood, which they help to rule, and the clan of their childhood where they are born and raised. A clan shares all property and wealth and the clan is responsible for taking care of each individual family and person. The oldest male within a clan has absolute power in theory, but in practice he relies on the influence and backing of younger males to enforce his power, and clans are filled with many factions based on personal relationships and they hold the actual power.]

[The Blutstaat or blood state is a city state system ruled by the citizens of the clans, represented by a council made up of the oldest men of each clan within the city. This council of patriarchs rules over the entire city trading resources and manpower between the clans for the good of the entire community and arranging marriages between the clans to hold the entire structure together via ties of blood. This primitive system has allowed the people to build some rather large villages, but when it breaks down entire towns destroy themselves via internal strife.]

Construction
These are the technologies used by the primitive statleute to build their villages and store food for the long dry season.

Clay bricks (10), pottery (10) clay firing (10), glazes (10) [blue & Black], brick construction (20), fire (5)

[Statten Architecture is based around the idea of the polis, or city state. The central building where the clan elders rests at the center and is the only free standing structure in the town. It is basically a single square wall with an opening at the front. It also has a flat tiled roof supported by many square brick interior pillars. The floor is tiled, and in the very center of the room rests a fire pit that provides light (and lots of smoke) for the assembly. Around this structure the community is a series of walled courtyards. The homes of individual families are small square stalls built along the walls, with openings at the front, and the entire set of stalls has a single flat tiled roof. The courtyard too has an opening at it's front. Individual home fires normally rest outside the families doorway, providing light for the structure within, but not trapping smoke inside the stall. Bigger polis often have several of these "courtyards" devoted to each of the clans with those of higher status living closer to the center of town. Smaller polis' only have the one courtyard and clans are arranged around the opening that leads into the central structure.]

[The Statten people glaze entire bricks in red or black, sometimes even glazing half a brick one color and half another, and they arrange these bricks to create elaborate geometric patterns over the surface of their buildings, they also use these glazes to create colored pottery which they use in their homes to store their possessions, and to seal up and store gathered grains from the surrounding dry plain.]

[As a side note it should be remembered that these people don't have any real sanitation or trash disposal, the interior courtyards of the villages are strewn with trash and refuge. These are not sophisticated city builders, and the people don't live spread apart in very small villages of a few families, these verge on being proto-towns in their own right, based around lakes set in the middle of an arid grassland teeming with game. The water sources have pulled the people together, and the abundant food sources have allowed them to prosper so far without sophisticated or stable methods of food production.]

Hunting, Fishing & Gathering Technologies
These are the technologies used by the people to feed their growing villages even as they approach the level of becoming real towns or even city states.

Heavy Stone Tipped Spears (10), Stone Knives & Scrapers, Woven Baskets & Mats (15), woven nets (10)

[The people hunt down gazelle, camel, and horse using long stone tipped spears. Their high speed running over rocky ground on six legs lets them keep pace with these animals much better than a human being would, and they are able to carry entire carcasses back slung over their lower backs above the legs. The people increase their advantage by hunting mostly at night when their prey has a harder time seeing and when the prey also stands out against the cooler ground and air in their heat vision. All of this makes them much better hunters than their technology would otherwise warrant.]

[Clothing amongst these people consists of woven reed mats that cover their lower body and tie around the lower six arms. Hanging from these mats are baskets into which each army can place gathered barley, wheat, acacia nuts, figs, birds eggs, scavenged meat from a predators kills, or whatever other foodstuffs they might find. Moving at speed and gathering food into these large, well supported baskets, lets parties of foragers bring home plenty of foods for the people to eat even though the sahel isn't as wet and fertile as the plains that have been covered over by arachnia's forest.]

[The people aren't good fishermen, they are fairly heavy compared to humans, about the weight of a leopard on average (around 250 pounds on average, but can reach 400 without appearing "fat"), and they haven't yet managed to develop a boat that will carry them. So they fish in the scattered lakes by throwing in nets as they stand along the rocky shoreline.]

~Khanti~
The Khanti people of the Mesopotamian super-forest are a single tech group held together by a unifying language and a culture that emphasis the independent family unit as the basis for society and the extended family clan as the basis for trade.

Language and Cultural Technology

Khant Language (15), Khanti Clan System (15)

[The Khant language is part of the proto-uralic language group and is highly agglutinative language using a subject, object, verb order. It is also a highly inflected language with suffixes for singular, dual, triplicate, and group nouns and verbs, also for singular, dual, or group ownership of an object or action.]

[Khanty social organization is based on extended families with descent tracked through the male line, related lineages grouped into clans each of whom marks there territory in the treetops with a distinctive pattern of carvings etched into the trunk of their home trees at the level, or levels of the super-forest they claim as their own. Each clan claims an extended territory and family dwellings are built in the treetops within that extended territory. Carved sticks mark ambassadors between the clans and a meeting is almost always marked by a recitation of lineage names and a discussion of mutual relatives.]

Construction Technology
These are the skills used by the khanty lineages for building their homes in the forest canopy

Wigwam growth (15), brain tanning (15), Stone Knives/scrapers (10), wood carving (15), bone carving (10), bone needles/scrapers (10), Sewing [interior lining, clothing, etc] (10), basketry (10)

[The clans specifically live in weeping wheat trees, they use their psionic powers to turn the rings of the tree into a platform and grow up shoots which form the arching branches to make the strong skeleton of a wigwam the outer coating of the structure is covered in a thick layer of living leaves that helps to shade the dwelling and protect it from rain. The interiors of the wigwam are weatherproofed with a lining of small leather patches sewn together and attached to the fully grown branches and the bottoms are sealed with woven mats made from thick arboreal grape vines. ]

Hunting & Gathering
This is the technology these people use to hunt small game in the treetops and gather wild foods amongst the branches

Super-Forest Lore (5), sling shots (10), Fire (5), Cooking (5)

[fire is needed to smoke the leather for brain tanning, it is also used to provide heat and light at the lowest layers of the forest where one can find mushrooms, mosses, rodents of various sorts, bats, and various sorts of bugs in large numbers. Fire is also used for cooking special exta tasty meat and fruit dishes. Every so often the people try to use fire in their homes for the purpose of heating, or providing light, but fire is a poor light source for these people, and tree homes made entirely of wood and leather have a strrong tendency to burn. Use of fire is strictly limited as the people can feel the trees pain when a fire is lit on it's branches and many people who have used fire in poor ways have died. This is a remnant technology kept because it is needed, but not revered the way a normal human culture would.]

[These people never cook at home. It's a remnant technology from their human past kept because cooked food is tasty, and because it has taken on an aspect of cultural importance. At the center of each clan territory is an area marked with special carvings on the trunks of the great trees where all lineages can bring food to cook and share in an informal family gathering where people can meet, socialize, trade, and perhaps strike up a romance with a distant cousin. Closely related lineages also often share a smaller such fire place, frequent meetings and parties at these sites help to hold the lineages together, and often a connected group of lineages will meet first at their own party place, and proceed together to the fire place of the clan as a whole. Typical dishes cooked at these parties are various kebabs of meat, fruit, and vegetables roasts on sharpened sticks.]