Taeuvanshu Turn #0: NARRARATIVES

Area Overview
This is an overview of what you, the god, already know about your area as of turn zero. It is made up of a series of impressions and historical/mythological information gathered from your people, plus some residual information left over from a long period of your own pre conscious self watching the people of the area. This information isn't meant to be complete, your area is huge and much of it isn't yet inhabited by humanity, and some of it may be outdated or even false, but it is a start.

A curve of sea bounds the northeastern edge of the known world, sparkling blue and tranquil. Into this sea comes the great river flowing from the south along multiple pathways. It crosses six areas of shallow rapids. The river has two tributaries feeding into it and ends in a vast delta of papyrus reed marsh. In the south the river flows through cypris forests, rain forest, and marshland. Moving north the land becomes plains and even desert before reaching the delta and it's vast papyrus marshlands. To the east there are mountains, unexplored by your people, to the west the land becomes dry desert, equally empty of human life.

Culture Overview: The Fischers
This is a cultural overview of one of the three races currently living in your area. It is meant to give you a broad, brief, idea of their personality and lifestyle.

Every fischer family lives in an oval woven papyrus raft made watertight with tar gathered along the marshy shoreline. Half of this shell is open to the air, while the other half is enclosed in a rounded shell, like a gigantic basket. These boats are steered along the shore and inland through the delta and along the shore using large sticks to push against the shallow bottom; a method of propulsion that limits the people to staying in shallow waters.

All life centers on the boat and the family. A typical fischer band includes a man, several women, and their children. They may also take in older people who can no longer run their own ships, or the severely injured. Life for these people is relatively easy and happy. They gather fish using nets, and spend time swimming and diving for clams and other shellfish, or gathering reeds to weave into pots which they use to store their fish after letting them dry in the sun. When two boats meet it is time to socialize, trade, and for the young to seek mates and consider beginning to weave their own boat.

A typical meal for the people includes raw dried fish, dried kelp, crab, clams, and edible reeds mixed into a salad. Fischers have no knowledge of clothing and are most active in the morning, evening, and early night when the suns rays are least likely to burn. They also smear themselves with mud for protection when not in the water or safely hidden under the canopy of their boat, preferably in the shade of tall inland reeds. Less typically the fischers will trade seafood for cooked meat at a riverside village of the flussdorf people who live along the great river to the south. Even more rarely some of the people will trade their some of their watertight basketwork for bone whistles, leather clothing, and other finished goods. Some fischers even use cypress spears to propel their boats, though they don't know how to use them as weapons yet.

Culture Overview: The Flussdorf
This is a cultural overview of one of the three races currently living in your area. It is meant to give you a broad, brief, idea of their personality and lifestyle.

The flussdorf have historically lived in villages built along the forking banks of the great river and out into it's vast flood plain. They lived by gathering wild grains and trapping small animals. The shape of their villages betray this origin. Each flussdorf building rises on cypris logs ten feet above ground level and is a light weight and sturdy combination of soft woven mats and sturdy wood. When the flood waters come these homes are not inunduated and the people are generally able to come down and splash through the muck in peace.

Lately though the spread of deserts to the north and east have pushed another, related, culture into the territory traditionally ruled by the flussdorf. Since then everything has changed. An ancient alliance between flussdorf and laufendorf peoples has gotten much closer with the elders of the laufendorf living in the flussdorf villages for safety, and the two cultures relating together on a constant basis. Today flussdorf villages act as trade hubs and industrial centers making a wide variety of goods for use by both cultures. They also act as shelters for bands of nomadic laufendorf who become stranded on the floodplain during the flood season.

The recent history of the people thus has been one of integration and change. They now have access to the meat and bones of much larger animals, and trade between villages has picked up as the nomads carry goods and information everywhere. Flussdorf still consider themselves a separate people, but as time goes on this is more and more a matter of personal viewpoint and tradition than of real fact. Of course if you were ever to tell a flussdorf that they are part of the laufendorf or vice versa they wouldn't simply laugh at you, but might even kill you.

Culture Overview: The Laufendorf
This is a cultural overview of one of the three races currently living in your area. It is meant to give you a broad, brief, idea of their personality and lifestyle.

Historically these people were independent nomads who roamed the vast dry plains away from the rivers bank. They hunted elephant, zebra, gazelle, and other large creatures of africa. They had portable homes and made all of their own tools and equipment. This all began to change as the deserts began to spread out over the plains pushing them closer and closer to the river floodplain. On the floodplain their traditional leather homes were useless and quickly became a lost technology. Worse they entered into the area of a related culture, the flussdorf.

These village dwellers had always had some contact with the laufendorf, and trade had been common, but now the people needed refuge and their "brothers" offered it to them. But it wasn't free. More and more the adult laufendorf were hunting game in order to support their old people in flussdorf villages, or to pay their keep in flusdorf homes during the wet flood season when sleeping on the ground wasn't possible. Slowly the flussdorf began to make tools to help the people bring in more meat, and the laufendorf began concentrating on ever more efficient means of gathering the meat and paying for their refuge.

Over time the laufendorf have become expert traders of raw materials, and the flussdorf have become expert producers of finished goods. The laufendorf carry news, and may even trade one finished good for another depending on what a certain village needs at the moment. They also venture out into the spreading deserts and hunt beasts such as the addax. As much as they hunt they also scavenge, elephant bone and ivory is good material no matter where you get it. These are a people who have made a place for themselves, but who haven't found a home yet. They consider themselves a separate people from the flussdorf, but more and more the two cultures are becoming integrated. Yet they don't live entirely in flussdorf villages, nor do they have their own mobile encampments anymore. They are wanderers in the twilight walking between other peoples homes, and the twilight sands of the desert lands that they once called their own.

In the unified culture they might be considered the blood of a new people being born as you watch, but THEY don't consider themselves that. They consider themselves simply Laufendorf, no more, no less, and tell stories of the days when the deserts were green and filled with wild game!