#information from wiktionary

[hanzioftheday]

April 2nd Today’s Hanzi character is 长 (長 traditional)

In mandarin pinyin it is pronounced “cháng” and it means long.

The character is derived from the oracle bone script depicting an old man with long hair.

[weatherwhim]

toki pona biological classification words (a non-comprehensive list) by Latin grammatical gender according to the ICZN standard:

Masculine:

akesi (from Dutch 'hagedis' which is common-gender, historically masculine)

jan (from Cantonese '人', ICZN masculine, original language is genderless)

kasi (from Finnish 'kasvi', ICZN masculine, original language is genderless)

kili (from Georgian 'ხილი', ICZN masculine, original language is genderless)

pan (from various romance languages, equivalent word is generally masculine)

pipi (from Acadian French 'bibitte', which is feminine)

soweli (from Georgian 'ცხოველი', ICZN masculine, original language is genderless)

Feminine:

kala (from Finnish 'kala', ICZN feminine, original language is genderless)

Neuter:

kijetesantakalu (from Finnish 'kierteishäntäkarhu', ICZN neuter, original language is genderless)

waso (from French 'oiseau', which is masculine)

thoughts I now have from doing this:

there are several funny interpretations of 'use the gender from the source language' involving Dutch, since it is a gendered modern European language with a Latin orthography but collapsed masc/fem into common. my favorite interpretation involves forcibly giving Latin a new 'common gender' paradigm. the most boring is to just steal the masc/fem/neuter system from Old Dutch, which is probably what the ICZN does.

toki pona has more Georgian and Finnish loans than I remember.

most toki pona words from non-gendered languages weren't changed enough to make their ICZN gender different from the native word they were loaned from.

kala is the token girl among toki pona biology words, if you interpret this system in a stupid enough way to be able to say that.

i don't know if any zoologists have invoked the right to change the grammatical gender of their new genus name from the default, or if there are any restrictions on this ability according to the ICZN, but if you're loaning from a language with a non-Latin orthography, you could already do that by choosing to romanize it in a different way (think Hebrew -a versus -ah for the feminine singular ending).

i don't know why only Greek gets to keep its original gender system intact among languages with non-Latin orthographies. i mean, i do from a historical perspective, but i disagree with the ICZN's reasoning.

does the ICZN have an official position on what constitutes 'Europe' and which languages are consequently 'European'?

this whole system is completely inane. i kinda love it.

in zoology, animal species are given standard "latin" names consisting of two words, the genus name and the species name. typically, the genus name is a noun, and the species name is an adjective. following the rules of latin grammar, adjectives need to agree with nouns with grammatical gender, so if the genus name is a feminine latin noun then all species of that genus are given (in principle) adjectives marked with feminine latin suffixes.

in practice of course, new genus names don't always use actual latin words, so these latin grammatical gender rules need to be grafted onto words that aren't really latin. and this is where one of the weirdest conventions of zoological binomial nomenclature comes in!

how exactly do you determine what the latin grammatical gender of a word is if it isn't a latin word? according to the ICZN, it's simple:

if the word is from greek, use its gender in greek

otherwise, if the word is from a modern european language with grammatical gender that uses the latin alphabet, use the gender in the source language (yes it is that specific)

otherwise, if the name ends with -a it's feminine

otherwise, if the name ends with -um, -u, or -o it's neuter

otherwise, it's masculine

unless of course if the zoologist with naming dibs says explicitly that they think this genus should have an irregular gender.

anyway these rules are fascinating to me. why are they this specific? grammatical gender systems compatible with latin's adjective suffixes are found throughout the entire indo-european language family, so why restrict it to modern european latin-script languages (and greek)? I don't know!

[sfstranslations]

what's your process on TLing? like how do you do it? I've always wondered what its like TLing stuff

Disclaimer that it's probably different for everyone, obviously, but for me it usually goes something like this:

(Got long, so under a cut. Minor bonus at the end for My S-Ranks fic writers!)

Get the raws (obviously, LOL).

When I start a TL session, I usually read back a little just to get the context of what's going on, because otherwise you risk getting some of the contextual information wrong.

Time for the actual translating! Read the sentence.

Break it down as best as I can—pick out grammar structure (is XYZ the subject or object etc.), pick out what words I know, cobble together a partial sentence from that. Ends up something like, "Character A {??ed} loudly and lifted their {right? left?} hand."

Look up the words I don't know in the KR-EN dictionary (usually Naver, but also Wiktionary as a backup, both English and Korean) and fill in the blanks. My Korean vocabulary is minuscule so I have to do this for at least one word almost every sentence… I also like to double-check the meanings of some words I'm not fully sure of (see right/left dilemma above 😅), or to see if there's other verified translations that would fit the sentence better if the one I think of doesn't flow well.

Addendum to the above point: If there's a word that doesn't really fit the scene or means some random off-the-wall thing, go on a research spree to figure out why it's showing up here. If this takes longer than 5 minutes, put a pin in it to come back to later and move on; otherwise I risk getting distracted or burning all my energy on research instead of translation, and sometimes the next few lines help me figure out what was being said anyway. Generally I mark these with the {???} from the example above, with a note on what confused me about the bit in question. (These are usually the things that require footnotes!)

If I completed the sentence, read over it to check that it actually makes sense. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to go back over grammar to redo it. Subject/object/topic markers my beloathed

Then once the meaning of the sentence is worked out, check that it flows with the rest of the scene. (If it doesn't, 70% chance it's a quote or reference to something, in which case, again, research or put a pin in it for later.)

Rinse and repeat until the end of the chapter.

First pass complete! 🎉

Go back and do all that research I saved for later :( (Chiyul is niceys to me and only uses odd or flowery wording that I can work out given enough time, but Geunseo is so mean about this. Stop referencing poets from the Tang dynasty who don't have easily accessible online translations for their works. What the hell) (Sometimes they'll reference something obscure and then make an oblique reference to THAT reference instead of the source material because they loooove having characters use injokes which I do love. But it is also majorly harshing my groove. Please have mercy)

Read over the chapter again, Korean then English, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure the translations actually line up and I didn't mess anything up during the first pass. Also for English editing purposes—grammar, punctuation etc. So combination quality-checking and editing.

Pass the baton to other team members for a second round of combination QC/edits; sometimes gets skipped, it depends

Clean the chapter (i.e. deleting all the Korean and running some final checks via regexes for miscapitalizations and the like)

Pick a good excerpt, tag all featured characters, and post! Aaand back to the grind for the next chapter. (…Bit of a simplification. What I actually do is just keep translating until I run out of energy/thinking power for the day. Chapters get cleaned and prepped for posting in batches of 10 only when the last batch have all been posted; e.g. we're on 390-something for S-Ranks right now, so when I'm about to post chapter 400, I'll edit and clean 401–410, and so on.)

Some more notes I wasn't sure where to fit in, below.

Besides quotes/references to external media and language/culture quirks, I also sometimes add footnotes when characters quote other characters from chapters that were posted quite a while ago. This is in part because it's probably helpful to readers but largely because it's helpful to me specifically (I have a terrible memory 😔) (if I don't do it then when I'm rereading the chapter for editing/cleaning I always end up going "they literally didn't say that though…? Is that a mistranslation?" and then it turns out they did say that but it was more than a chapter ago so I forgot. Sighs.)

Disclaimer that I don't translate from MTL anymore!! Quality is worse than translating by hand!! But sometimes if a chapter is really confusing then I'll slap the whole thing into Google Translate so I have an English version I can skim for the context. It's helpful because Google Translate gives extremely bad TLs in terms of English readability so I don't adopt its phrasing into my own TL, but it also gets juuuust enough right that I can identify what the gist of events is. Like if a chapter cold opens on a fight scene and only five paragraphs later clarifies the location of said fight, then the rough MTL lets me know whether I should be translating something as a wall (indoor fight) or barrier (dungeon fight), for example. Also helpful for pronouns, since Korean doesn't use those the way English does; if the character isn't named right off the bat, I don't want to be writing every sentence like "[PRONOUN] looked at [PRONOUN]self in the mirror, noting the dark circles under [PRONOUN] eyes", then have to go back to fill in the blanks 5 minutes later, you know?

I also make style guides for every story I'm translating, which I refer back to while working so I can keep the translations consistent. Whenever we're in a new setting or something gets brought up for the first time, I add it to the style guide for future reference. There's a lot of stuff in the guides that's probably only mentioned a few times, but at least I don't have to translate from scratch each of those few times!

The general style guide has stuff like number/unit formats, honorifics, and notes on spellings I mix up often (I try to use American English for consistency, although personally I prefer a combination of American/Commonwealth spellings (USA you are just wrong about worshiped, it's worshipped!! Do you say shiped?? Huh????)).

The story-specific style guides let me keep track of special names—places, characters, and more—but also things like system message formats. For My S-Ranks, I also have separate sections for the regions with lots of unique terminology (the VR dungeon and China so far, more to come).

Below are some examples from the general style guide and the S-Ranks-specific one.

Oh, one part of the style guide might also be helpful to any S-Ranks fic writers out there—here's the special characters I've been using for system admin messages such as "η๐┰ ሃ๐∪ዩ բმ∪┗┰" from chapter 53. (No replacements for B, J, K, M, Q, V, X, and Z because those haven't been needed so far. Added those in anyway for future-proofing!)

A: მ

B: ß

C: င

D: Ð

E: ∈

F: բ

G: ₲

H: ዞ

I: 𝔦

J: ຽ

K: ƙ

L: ┗

M: ៣

N: η

O: ๐

P: የ

Q: ዊ

R: ዩ

S: ડ

T: ┰

U: ∪

W: ￦

X: ㄨ

Y: ሃ

Z: ☡

Anyway! Hope that sheds some light on the translation process, at least the way I do it. Let me know if you have any more questions or requests! This was fun.

[tired-reader-writer]

Good news: I think I've found suitable replacement names for Ayunnen, Kashi, and Kazai!

Ayunnen:

Aýnabat

Derived from Turkmen aý "moon" and nabat, a type of crystallized sugar candy.

I do realize that this essentially means naming him “moon candy” but y'know what, it's cute, I'm keeping it. The name is feminine, however I have allowed myself this anachronism bc the Marda clan people generally have a very loose relationship with gender. It's fine, I think.

Nabat candy <3

Kazai:

Khazan

Meaning autumn or falling leaves, it's also a Persian festival that has to do with autumn, Khazan Jashn.

Many thanks to @innerchorus for bringing my attention to this! Information on this festival though was. Uh. Scarce. But I did manage to find a small article written entirely in Farsi about an “autumn festival” that was held in a certain neighborhood.

Kashi:

Sâyezân

From Kazakh сая (saya) meaning “shadow, shade, protection, comfort” and жан (zhan) meaning “soul” (both words of Persian origin).

This. THIS was the name that gave me so much fucking trouble. I liked the “saya” part (the Farsi pronunciation was smth more like saye according to the wiktionary audio, hence why I spelled it that way) HOWEVER I kinda. Didn't like the look of “zhan” (jân in Farsi) and I really liked the fact that Kashi and Kazai's names used to share a syllable and... I tried to look up what “zan” would've been in Farsi but turns out, it meant something like “woman, wife, female” and naming Kashi “girl-shadow” just didn't sit right with me 😭😭 Also the original name I found was Zhansaya which... I didn't quite like the vibes of, really............ I tried to look for alternatives to replace that zhan with, but didn't find anything, and so. I was wholly tempted to chop that part off and just have it be Sâye. In the end though, I ended up playing shuffle with the two parts of the name and let's just say the zân still means soul, it's just. Stylized differently. Yeahhhhh. Toooootally fine.

So. Yeah! The new names of my ArSen OCs! Edits to the fic will have to come after I'm done writing chapter 3 (but before uploading it) so look forward to that, I guess!

I have also made the decision to revert “Areyan” back into his canon name “Arslan” as this was a holdover from when I thought it'd be a fine idea to give Arslan another name to denote that this was an alternate, different version of him. Ehhhh he can go back to being Arslan.

[speaknahuatl]

The Truth About "Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl": A Linguistic Analysis

This is an update on the term "Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl," which has gone viral as the supposed Aztec name for the Gulf of Mexico.

Part 1: Findings (as of 2/22/2025)

•Etymology Issues: Chalchihuitl means jade, and Chalchiuhtlicue (the water deity) combines Chalchihuitl + icue (her skirt), similar to Coatlicue (Coatl [serpent] + icue). However, the reasoning behind the 1992 source—likely derived from a 1905 text—doesn’t hold up, as hueyatl (big water) wouldn’t change into yecatl.

•Wiktionary Claim: A Wiktionary entry suggested that the etymology is Chalchiuhtlicue + ilhuicaatl which means "the ocean of the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue." This construction is linguistically incorrect: how is it possible that Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is a combination of Chalchiuhtlicue + ilhuicaatl? It doesn't align with how the language functions. The entry has been edited: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl#References

•Lack of Historical Evidence: The term does not appear in the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, which compiles over 20 dictionaries, primarily from the 1500s–1700s.

Part 2: Sources

•Cecilio A. Robelo (1905). Diccionario de Mitología Nahoa (in Spanish). Editorial Porrúa. pp. 567, 568, 569, 570, 571. ISBN 970-07-3149-9.

•Fernández, Adela (1992) Dioses prehispánicos de México: mitos y deidades del panteón náhuatl [Prehispanic deities of Mexico: myths and deities of the Nahuatl pantheon]‎, Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, pp 148: "Chalchiuhtlicue, 'La de la falda de jades o falda preciosa' es la deidad que representa el agua bajo distintos fenómenos. Ella conforma el hueyatl, 'mar', y por eso el Golfo de México se llama Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, 'morada de la que tiene falda de esmeraldas'. [Chalchiuhtlicue, 'She of the Jade Skirt or Precious Skirt', is the deity that represents the water in different phenomena. She forms the hueyatl, 'sea', and thus the Gulf of Mexico is called Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, 'abode of she of the emerald skirt'.]" https://archive.org/details/diosesprehispnic0000fern/page/148/mode/1up

•https://gdn.iib.unam.mx/

•https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

•https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/yecatl

•https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chalchiuhtlicue

•https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/coatlicue

Part 3: The Viral Post on Instagram

Part 4: Temaxtiani David Bowles' Explanation

Part 5: The Takeaway

Be cautious about the information you encounter, even in academic spaces. Always ensure that the temaxtiani is either a native speaker (L1) or a near-native speaker (L2) who has learned directly from a native speaker. Furthermore, a plus if the temaxtiani has a linguistic background, especially in language teaching studies, language pedagogy, language revitalization, and/or second language acquisition.

[thedreideldiaries]

Today’s Yiddish Fun Fact: “Nebbish” is a noun, not an adjective.* It comes from נעבעך/ nebekh, which sounds like it should be Hebrew but is actually an *adverb* of Slavic origin meaning “sadly” or “unfortunately**.” “Oy, nebekh” is an expression of sympathy you can use when someone begins to tell you their woes. “Nebekh” became “nebbech” in German, and from there it’s a short walk to “nebbish” in Yinglish (though “nebekh” is, as far as I can tell, still used). (Further information and exhortations under the cut)

“That guy is such a nebbish” is fine, assuming the guy is actually a nebbish. “That guy is nebbish” is not fine unless he comes from the mythical land of Nebb, or perhaps works for the National Environmental Balancing Bureau

“Okay fine, but how do I know if the guy is actually a nebbish?” So glad you asked. Nebbish roughly translates to “sad sack” (sometimes with the implication that the person is kind of making it Your Problem, but always with a degree of pity). It also has connotations of timidity and ineffectuality. The nebbish can’t quite manage to be anything else. Other things that are said about the nebbish include: “when a nebbish leaves the room, you feel as though someone fascinating just walked in” and “a nebbish is the guy who picks up what the shlemiel knocks over” (more on the shlemiel in a future post). It does not mean “nerd” or “some guy I don’t particularly like” (though a nebbish can also be either of these). It means a very particular kind of guy. And, if you must use it as an adjective, “nebbishy” is the word to say. (Source: The Joys of Yiddish, Merriam-Webster, NYTF 15 minute yiddish, Wiktionary, my own frustration with hearing more than one non-Jewish acquaintance abuse the word)

*Obviously language changes all the time, the lines between noun and adjective are blurrier than our elementary school teachers led us to believe, and maybe I will look like a linguistic pendant in 20 years, but for now, please let me have my soapbox. 

**The word has, however, made its way into Hebrew via Yiddish, so hurray for lexical borrowing! 

[sag-dab-sar]

Lesson Learned: Theoi.com Isn't Perfect

*I'll probably be taking my modern Theogamia Ritual down. Maybe contacting reblogs to see if they'll delete it there were 4. Sigh

So when constructing my modern Theogamia ritual. I made a conscious decision to—in a sense— tell a progression story via the ritual by which epithets I invoked— with them beginning as "Adults", then "Marriage", then finally "King and Queen".

From my post

There is a purposeful timeline in this ritual: it starts with Zeus and Hera as “adults” [Teleios / Teleia], proceeds to Zeus and Hera being “marriage participants*” [Gamelius / Gamelia], and finally ends with them as married “King and Queen” [Basileus / Basileia] of the Gods.

*"marriage participants" wasn't a translation it was my intended meaning behind the epithet. Hera Gamelia is apparently a real epithet (but Gamelia doesn't have a wiktionary entry) but the source I had for Zeus Gamelius has vanished. So I guess I'm yeeting those two epithets in the ritual.

On Theoi dot com it translates epithets on the cult pages that I have used extensively

Teleia on Hera's Epithets is translated "adult woman." Written as: Τελεια — Link | Some epithets have elaborations on the page but this epithet does not.

Teleios on Zeus's Epithets page is translated "of marriage rites." Written as: Τελειος — Link | There is no elaboration on this epithet on his page either.

Turns out these epithets mean "perfect"

Now τέλειος— I had to add the tonos έ not ε to find it more readily—has this wiktionary entry under Ancient Greek

Now technically it does have "full grown / adult" listed, but as humans; it specifically has a different meaning listed for Gods which is "perfect omnipotent infinite." And no where in wikitionary does the word carry the definition "marriage rites" the closest is "a royal banquet." But that quotation mentions a royal dinner not in relation to a wedding dinner, apparently an annual dinner to a king (Herodotus, Histories 9.110) Link, though it could be something to do with a wedding........ I can't read ancient Greek.

As a non-academic this is supremely frustrating because

I can't trust easily accessible sources apparently. One I've used for a very long time

I don't know Greek well enough yet to spot anything off I can only go on translations

Even if I did know, ancient Greek is just different enough that research is hard; looking up Τελεια gave me Modern Greek Teleia meaning "full stop / period" and nothing more, with no Ancient Greek wiktionary entry for the word.

So if I wanted to keep the ritual story line I'd have to take Teleios/Teleia out of ancient context and also use the definition that denoted humans. Which is significantly less than ideal. So options:

Remove the story I enjoyed telling. And go with just Teleia / Teleios since I believe thats the ancient Theogamia's epithets ... though I can only find the claim on Helpol sites so I don't know.

As I said Hera Gamelia apparently exists but not Zeus Gamelios or Gamelius

Make modern epithets, which I usually do in modern Greek; "adult" or "fully grown" would be: enílikos/eniliki ενήλικος / ενήλικη; groom/bride; fiance; suitor; bachelorette/bachelor..... no idea. I prefer ones that exist already.

Or somehow magically find attested ones that actually fit my idea.

Also there is this on Theoi Project

ZYGIUS and ZYGIA (Zugia and Zugios), are surnames of Hera and Zeus, describing them as presiding over marriage. (Hesych. s. v.)

Which I have found more information on outside of Theoi project and also had discussed it with @/sisterofiris a long time ago so there is that

edit: *takes a big giant breather* I have an entire year to figure it out. I need to be nicer to myself

[dedalvs]

Is there something up with the High Valyrian wiki?

https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=High_Valyrian_language

I've had this link bookmarked since ages. I can't seem to load the page. I've tried all sorts of browsers and it is still not working. i wanted to get back into actively learning HV again and duolingo is kinda annoying so. Is there a different page/resource the wiki has moved on to? I also seem to recall an old forum for HV with a bunch of really good resources for it. is it possible for you to provide a link? Thanks so much anyway!!

Good question! This wiki, which you can find here..

...is a labor of love—not just from me, but from a team of dedicated individuals who want to get information about my languages up somewhere more or less permanent, editable by many, and all in one place.

For years I have had a hosting plan from DreamHost. For a fixed fee, DreamHost allows you, essentially, infinite storage. I've got a dozen or so websites hosted by the same DreamHost account. I have to pay for the urls (a yearly fee; everyone pays these), but the hosting itself is covered, no matter if I had one website or a hundred.

Creating a wiki that would function like Wiktionary was my idea. I love Wiktionary, and love the idea behind it. For example, let's say you wanted to look up mate. This is an English word. It's also a subjunctive form of matar "to kill" in Spanish. It's also the word for "saliva" in Swahili. It's also "dead" in Tahitian. It's also a word in several other languages. It's kind of cool to take an abstract form—going just by spelling—and seeing that it's a word in a bunch of different languages, all with different etymologies (some related, of course. For example, mate has something to do with death in a lot of Oceanic languages. In Hawaiian it's make, which looks like an entirely different English word!).

In Dothraki, the word tor is the number four. It comes from Proto-Plains *tur (and so would be tur in Lhazareen). It's also the word for "tower" in Hen Linge (this is one of the words coined by Andrzej Sapkowski, not created by me). In Noalath, from The Shannara Chronicles, it's the word for "wolf", and in Shiväisith, the language I created for the Dark Elves from Thor: The Dark World, it's the word for "sword". While it's true I didn't create the Hen Linge word, I created the others, so you can see it's a form I'm fond of, where the shape is possible.

Anyway, that's kind of cool! And that was the point of the site.

As it happens, the High Valyrian section of the site is…massive. To give you an idea, at the moment, the wiki has over 220,000 pages. Most of those are High Valyrian pages. This is because there's a dedicated team for High Valyrian that has added pages for every single noun, adjective, and verb inflection for every existing word on the wiki. To give you an idea, every verb of High Valyrian has around 200 forms (ipradagon "to eat", ipradan "I eat", ipradā "you eat", ipradas "s/he/it eats", etc.). Every single form for every single verb has its own page. This was accomplished primarily with a program that populated the inflectional pages, but however they got there, they're there.

Certain things on the wiki are templates that need to go through and "check" every single page. Additionally, a webcrawler goes through and checks every single page on the wiki. This requires a lot of RAM. As a result, periodically, the entire website just...shuts down.

Obviously this is not cool. I asked DreamHost about it, and though we have infinite space, we don't have infinite RAM. The first step was to disable all web crawlers. You know about SEO, and how you can do things to increase the page rank of your site? Well, we needed to do the opposite. We needed to make the site disappear from the net, effectively. And we did. This is why even if you type "David J. Peterson wiki language invention" into Google you get nothing. It's like we don't exist. We're there, but you have to know we're there and go to the site specifically. That helped, but our own programs still shut things down.

The second step was to get a private server (technically a virtual private server) for the site. This cost me an extra $25 a month ($300 a year) from what I was already paying. This definitely helped, but sometimes things get to be a bit too much, and so the site still shuts down. This is what you experienced.

You know how Wikipedia begs you for money every year? It's because of this. It's one thing to create an awesome resource; it's another thing for people to actually use it.

Hosting already costs me about $250 every two years, and every year I renew the urls for about 15 websites, which is another $300 a year. If I upgrade the VPS to the next level, it's even more money every year. And that's just me paying it.

Right now, we're in an okay spot. The site shuts down every so often, but most of the time it's more or less stable. Unless I start making a lot more money regulary, that's the way it's going to stay.

So if you go to the site and it's down, I'm very sorry, but it will be back. May take a few days, but it'll come back (as long as I'm alive, anyway).

[warlordgab]

Analysis of shipping: Found family and pseudo-incest?

Last year I was requested this rebuttal to detractors, but it took a long time to make because it was hard to pinpoint where these arguments came from

But, after one perceptive individual nailed it right on the head, I finally had something to work with

So, let's start with the argument: "These characters can't end up together because they're like family/siblings, so that would be incest"

This isn't unique to one single fandom. Antis had used this reasoning against NaLu and similar pairings in the past, based on the fact Natsu and Lucy belonged to the same guild, a community that treated its members as "family"

Needless to say, they stopped using it after seeing how Mashima made pairings like Gajeel and Levy, or Gray and Juvia, pretty much canon. Making it clear that romantic relationships between members of this particular circle or community were perfectly fine (That doesn't mean cheating is fine though!).

But, this argument still persists in other fandoms. One Piece is not the exception, where the anti-LuNa crowd constantly tries to paint all romantic potential between Luffy and Nami as "incest" because they're "siblings."

Let us address something first, what's incest?

"Sexual intercourse between persons so closely related that they are forbidden by law to marry"

- Merriam-Webster, 2024

"Marriage or sexual intercourse with a relative within the prohibited degree of consanguinity. In other words, incest is sexual contact between close blood relatives"

- LII / Legal Information Institute, 2024

After 1000+ chapters worth of story, nothing implies Luffy and Nami are related by blood. So, where does the argument comes from?

In reality, antis are using a concept people don't often hear about: pseudo-incest

It's not a widely known term, in fact, it's not even in the Oxford English Dictionary (OEA), the Cambridge Dictionary, or Merriam-Webster.

However, we can still find some defintions that helps us to understad what do LuNa detractors mean with this?

"Sexual involvement between family members who are not blood relations (e.g., siblings by adoption, stepparents and stepchildren, in-laws)."

- Wiktionary, 2024

Once, again we hit another wall, since Luffy wasn't adopted by Nami's family, nor Nami was adopted into his. So, why do antis claim they're "like" siblings?

Let's go from the minor statement to the big one. The first argument is that "The have a sibling-like dynamic"

This is one is odd, because it can come from actual unawareness about the nature of relationships, or the malicious use of the common traits seen in all sorts of human connections

After all, all healthy relationships, either being with relatives, companions, or potential romantic partners, are defined by affection, shared values, support, and sometimes a little bit of discord and/or conflict

If we were to use these traits to label the connection between two characters as that of "siblings," we could describe a lot of official pairings (and potent relationships) from a huge lot of stories as "siblings" instead of lovers/spouses.

Let's use a potent relationship as example: Sabo and Koala feel affection for one another, share similar values, support each other, and may have an argument from time to time...

...does that make them "siblings"? What about Ace and Isuka? Does the combination of affection, support, and occasional conflict rule out any possibility of a relationship upgrade?

If we apply this "measurement" to official pairings from other series, we're likely to jump to similarly flawed conclusions about their relationships.

However, even if there are similarites, there are several differences. For bonds outside our family circle. we may see chosen affinity, sometimes a greater attachment and/or emotional codependecy, a strong passion, and even a deeper sense of compromise coming from the willing choice of those involved.

Potent relationships have all of this, even if they're yet to become canon. And due to their emotional chemistry, LuNa seems more like a deep companionship with the potential to evolve rather than a sibling-like bond

However, that was just the minor statement from western fans. We may deduce some say this because they can't picture a romantic relationship without one (or both characters) being a total simp; perhaps they're so used to the "loveable perv" trope, that their idea of romance relies how horny the characters act with one another; or maybe they just too enamored with the cool good-looking buff guy to acknowledge anything deep, but I digress...

Still, we're yet to address the elephant in the room, the bigger argument, which is a combination of two things:

Just like some anti-NaLu fans did ages ago, a lot of anti-LuNa fans take their "sibling" argument from the same place every other permutation of this reasoning came from, a misuse of another concept: Family of choice

Family of choice, Chosen Family or Found Family, all refer to a group of people who willingly stick together to provide each other with the sense of community and belonging, as well as a feeling of affection, joy and security inherent to a functional family, without being related by blood.

It's seen as an alternative to those who faced rejection from their biological family, or society itself, and even to people who lost their relatives to tragedies or disasters.

It's a useful literary device to develop characters due to how flexible it is, given that members of these groups don't need to fill particular roles for their relationships to work, which provides authors with a lot of freedom in terms of writing.

However, some detractors have been abusing the "family" part of the term to argue against pairings that have enough development and history together for a natural relationship upgrade. How?

By limiting each character to a specific role: Father, Mother, Sibling, etc.

This allows them to claim, that characters within "Found Families" cannot become couple because that would be pseudo-incest.

As some people already noticed, this makes no sense; it replaces the versatility of the trope with a far more rigid, static, and limited form of narrative; and goes against what the idea of "Found Family" was supposed to be, which is an alternative to "family," not a carbon copy of the traditional family structure.

So, how does this argument survives logic and reason?

Well, here's the elephant in the room: in the SBS Volume 48, Oda was asked the question: "If the Straw Hats really were an actual family, who would be the dad, and who would be the mom?"

The following was Oda's answer:

Dad: Franky (Thug)

Mom: Robin

First Son: Zoro

Second Son: Sanji (Punk)

Daughter: Nami

Third Son: Usopp

Fourth Son: Luffy

Youngest: Chopper

In the SBS Volume 50, Oda added Brook would be the "Grandfather" "If you Likened the Crew to Family".

Here we have another example of a quote taken out of context, because the question was 'if they really were an actual family', and Oda later framed his answer as "Position in the crew if they were a family."

It was never about the strawhats being "an actual family," it was merely mindless fun with a "what if." To drive that point home, Sanji still gets horny for both Nami and Robin, yet nobody in their right mind would accuse him of lusting after his "sister" and "mother," because they're not actual relatives.

And this leads us to a couple of plot twists: all of this started because of the song "Family" performed by the strawhats seiyuus which, while invoking the "Found Family" trope, includes the following statement:

"We're not relatives… we're not even siblings!" (親戚じゃなくて　兄弟じゃない)

Which pretty much kills the "they're like siblings" argument used by detractors to liken LuNa to pseudo-incest.

The second plot twist comes from the SBS Volume 99, Oda says that if the cew was an actual family Jinbei would be the "father," replacing Franky who would now be given the position of "pervy granny"

This proves two things. First, that such "positions" are neither "fixed" or "absolute," they're malleable and can be changed or altered at any given moment.

Second, that this "Family" thing amounts to a mere joke, it's just a silly little game with no real impact on the story and characters. Although the idea of Frobin Vs. Jinbin(?) sounds amusing, but I digress.

So, what's the conclusion?

Even if the strawhats are an example of "Family of choice," that doesn't make the greatest potential relationship upgrade within the crew problematic, it all depends on how the author handles the situation. And given Oda is a top tier writer, we got nothing to worry if he decides to pull the trigger

And, despite what huge players within the community said before, Oda never claimed the strawhats were "an actual family." So any accusation of pseudo-incest, whether subtle or direct, is just the result of general ignorance, misinformation, and/or personal agendas

BONUS

There are times in manga/anime when one character refers to another as brother/sister/sibling, despite not being related.

One example would be Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist, who claimed Edward is like a "brother" to her. However, given that they're not related, nothing stopped them from falling in love, ending up together, and having children...

If we rely on the same reasoning used by antis, we could conclude this relationship is problematic. However, even if they have some moments when Winry goes ballistic on Ed...

...nobody in their right mind would dare to say their relationship is akin to pseudo-incest.

Oddly enough, we have a case in One Piece, when one character (Kinemon) made a similar brother/sibling claim to Tsuru, using a similar reasoning to that of Winry's...

I'll give you three guesses on how these two ended up, the first two don't count

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 25 of Nona the Ninth

So this chapter has a broken Gideon skull, which in this book seems to mean people being deceitful, and something is definitely up because Gideon is like 2-3 times as much Gideon as she normally is in this chapter, and I don't think that's an impression I only have because I've recently been through 3/4 of book full of Nona POV

Throughout this chapter, Gideon is referred to as "the corpse" or "the corpse prince" frequently, and I just feel like I should point out that we've gotten to the point where there are actually two different walking and talking corpses in this scene and both of them could plausibly be referred to as a prince. Even though Naberius's body is not currently being controlled by Ianthe, Naberius himself was a prince before he died

Hmm

That's all the definitions, I think Gideon just made this one up. Also, it's not a good day when you learn a new ethnic slur from the dictionary

Pyrrha acts like Gideon said "yes" here, but she didn't. That's like, a combination of "yes" and "nope"

It's hilarious, and I think actually accurate, that she's still terrified of the needle even though she is literally immune to needles now

"Judith Deuteros for some reason" really just sums up Judith's whole role in this story, doesn't it? It also would make a great blog title for a Judith fanblog, someone should get on that

Poor Judith! It's been a hot minute since Judith actually said something in a language that someone other than Nona can understand, so I really do hope it still is Judith in her body, and not someone or something else in there now

Right, so this could potentially mean:

The whole time since she impaled herself on the fence (unlikely since Gideon was stealth-narrating the entirety of Harrow the Ninth)

The whole time since Pyrrha and Nona met up with BOE at the end of Harrow the Ninth (since BOE had Gideon's body at that point, I think it's entirely possible that Gideon's soul transferred back into it from Harrow's body when she came into its proximity)

The whole time since John reacquired Gideon's body and made his modifications to it, and possibly also brought Gideon's soul back to it at that point

She could also just mean "the whole time I've been in New Rho" or "the whole time you've been in the barracks" but obviously she's been awake for longer than that since she was around to receive medals and stuff from John

Wiktionary says a "rusk" is a "weaning food for children" but doesn't give any kind of information on what specific food it is, or if it's just a general word for that kind of food

So Ianthe can "shut her off" somehow. I'm not sure if I buy that it was Gideon's idea to come here. I don't think she likes Ianthe, I don't think she would have thought New Rho would be a fun place to be, and even if she actually wanted to go to Ninth House like she says later I don't think she could have predicted that she'd be in a position for that to happen here and there are much easier and more straightforward ways for her to get to the Ninth House if she'd stayed with John

An interesting question is whether or not she would have won a fight with Ianthe's entropy field. I tend to think not, because a literal bar of metal didn't survive the entropy field, and even though she has some, like, I guess artificial preservation from being John's daughter she wasn't immune to direct physical damage because of that and even John himself wasn't immune to being taken apart into bits by Mercy, and since Mercy made the OG entropy field I'm sure it probably works using the same principle as whatever she did to John. Gideon may still survive the entropy field somehow, but if the entropy field was still functional it would actually be a great way for Palamedes to get a blood sample from her for Tomb-opening purposes, and so I think John would be extremely against having any such thing anywhere near Gideon's body. So I'm sticking with my theory that this was Ianthe's idea. She intentionally showed Gideon's body during the broadcast, she did that on purpose, although I guess if Gideon was "turned off" during that time she might not know that

Man, thanks for nothing, Gideon

Significant things that happened in the River at the end of the last book:

G1deon and a bunch of ghosts scared Number Seven off and it went to New Rho

Augustine was eaten by the Stoma

Harrow's and Palamedes' River bubbles ceased to exist

The Mithraeum was submerged in the River and sank very far down, unknown currently if John and Ianthe managed to save it

I can't think of why any of these things would make it safe for non-Lyctors to travel safely through the River. The ghosts all make themselves scarce around resurrection beasts, but I'm sure Ianthe and Gideon's journey didn't start out in the presence of a resurrection beast and I don't think the ghosts are the reason why River travel is dangerous for non-Lyctors

Blatant lies, lmao

She's so bad at lying, she starts off with "I don't want anything anymore" and finishes with "I want to go to the Ninth House because I have unfinished business there", and I suspect both of those things are at least partly lies. But I think she's right that John would probably give her a medal for killing this collection of people at this point, including Corona I think

But I suspect that she is the one who wants to go back to the Ninth House, for some undisclosed reason, and she's not acting on John or Ianthe's wishes here. If John wanted her to go back to the Ninth House she would already be there yesterday. If Ianthe wanted her to go there, I don't think she would have put up that entropy field, and she might even have tried to do some deal with BOE where she exchanged Gideon for the Sixth House. Also, I don't think Ianthe actually gives a shit about the Ninth House or anything that happened there. And there's no one else left in John's circuit at this point

Man, when Pyrrha said she was heavy, I just thought it was because she was tall and full of muscle. How damn strong is Pyrrha, exactly?

No, hold on, let me math this

A normal adult human has 11 kg of bones. Cortical bone makes up 80% of bone mass and has an average density of 1908 kg/m3, and cancellus bone makes up 20% and has an average density of 1178 kg/m3, so that is an average density of 1762 kg/m3 over all. There are 1,000,000 cm3 in 1 m3, so 11 kg / 1762 kg/m3 * 1,000,000 cm3/m3 is 6,242.9 cm3 of bone. Titanium has a density of 4.506 g/cm3. 6,242.9 cm3 * 4.506 g/cm3 is 28,130.5 g or a little over 28 kg. Since bones usually weigh 11 kg, that's only 17 extra kg of bone, so she only actually weighs about 37 and a half more pounds than usual. She says "titanium plex", which is not a real thing, but I can't imagine that titanium plex would actually be more dense than titanium, so I think it checks out that she would just be somewhat heavier than expected and not ridiculously heavy or something like that

That's a great question that I'd love to see answered. Is the fence also going to turn out to be some kind of holy object infused with a power even higher than John?

Speaking of holes, I remember back a long time ago I reblogged that one poll that mentioned stigmata sex, and people assured me that while the stigmata were actually in the book, the stigmata sex was not. Are Gideon's holes the stigmata? Does that count as stigmata? I think it's in the wrong place, isn't it?

So, thanergy is cell death, but it seems like dead bodies radiate thanergy even if no cell death is occurring, because John's cryo bodies were generating thanergy for him even after he'd completely stopped them from rotting. So Gideon's body is somehow preserved due to being related to John, but in a way that doesn't involve being infused with thalergy as she suggests for the blood sample, because as we know from the last chapter, body + soul + thalergy = living person, and Gideon isn't a living person, so she must be missing one of those, and it's not her body or her soul. The preservation only applies to the bounds of her body, and her body is still radiating thanergy, apparently enough that it would kill the blood sample?

She got her whole childhood fantasy of a famous and powerful parent who gave her everything she wanted, but that person turned out to be John, and now she's stuck with him and Ianthe and being used as figurehead for John's military, and he spent just enough effort on her to make sure that her body can't be used against him but didn't fix the gaping holes in her chest, and the person she sacrificed herself for is missing and possibly dead, and someone else is in her body instead

I mean, Ianthe was keeping her locked up behind the entropy field. I wonder if she's had a lot of that from John, too

[etym-a-day]

cantankerous, adj.

First attested in 1772, the most likely origin for this word is Middle English contakour, meaning "troublemaker", through (possibly) an alteration of the word in the Wiltshire dialect.

Middle English contakour comes from Anglo-French contec, meaning "discord or strife", which in turn is from Old French contechier, comprised of the Latin prefix con- meaning "with" and -teche, meaning "to pierce or sting" (related to Old French attachier, "to attach or hold fast").

Interestingly, the Old French contechier is a blended word, with its affixes (con- and -ier) of Latin origin and its root from Germanic origin (specifically, Proto-Germanic *stikaną through Frankish *stekan, both meaning "to pierce").

--

The information on roots and stems is taken from Wiktionary: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/atachier#Old_French.

[hanzioftheday]

April 14th

Today's Hanzi of the day is 哈.

In Mandarin pinyin it is pronounced "hā" There is literally 18 etymologies with definitions on Wiktionary, but I think the most common may be as onomatopoeia for laughter.

It is a compound of two characters, 口 is the root of the meaning and means mouth, in the Oracle bone script it's more rounded so we can see how it is a pictogram of an open mouth.

合 is the root of the pronunciation and it's pronounced "hé" in mandarin.

[sachermorte]

Hey, loved your post about German and English being similar after all, but I gotta ask about your sources and/or expertise. I want to believe Baum and Beam have the same shared origin and that this is true for a lot of English words, but I need to ask where you got this info from. It's too outlandish for me to believe blindly.

Experience: I'm a master's student in historical English linguistics at the University of Vienna. Basically almost done except my thesis. I think I mentioned that in my post/bio?

Sources:

- My academic advisor, for one, who's been in the field so long that he's retiring at the end of next semester. I'm not giving out his name because I already share way too much information online about myself

- The Oxford English Dictionary, an excellent source of etymological information (unfortunately requires institutional access)

- But I just now looked at Wiktionary, which seems to say the exact same thing as the OED in this particular case. There are many other etymological dictionaries that may suit your fancy instead

But I have to say. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been doing this for too long, but the idea that Baum/Beam are an outlandish comparison is so strange to me. It's on the same level for me as saying that the idea that wolves and coyotes are related is too outlandish. It's the same word? Only the vowels are different. Vowels are squishy. They'll move around as soon as look at you.

English and German are related languages. Scientific consensus is that they come from a common language, which we call Proto-Germanic. Almost every language on the European continent (with the exception of languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Basque) all come from an even older common language we call PIE (Proto-Indo-European). This is where most of these shared origins come from. From that same ancestral pipeline

[creature-wizard]

https://youtu.be/U8NNHmV3QPw?si=6aInyR5QVTAT3z0R Watch if you're bored but you might be surprised 🤷🏻‍♀️.

It's about spirit science

GHJKSD when you said this video was about Spirit Science, I thought you were gonna like, link to a video talking about how the Spirit Science guy Jordan Duchnycz is a rapist or his weird obsession with Emma Watson or his antisemitic claim that Jews come from another planet. I didn't expect you were going to link to like, an actual Spirit Science video.

In brief, what Jordan's putting out here is straight-up baloney. A lot of it's pretty bog-standard New Age pseudohistory based on unsubstantiated conjecture, misinterpretation of various mythological traditions, and shit somebody just pulled straight from their ass. Not only is there no actual evidence to support any of the stuff he's putting out there, the actual evidence we do have inevitably precludes it.

Here are some links that explain why and how we know that people like Jordan are just wrong:

The Sirius Mystery: did the Dogon know about Sirius B?

The Truth About Atlantis

Atlantis @ Bad Archaeology

The Weird Case of Atlantis-Mu in the Madrid Codex

Lemuria, the weirdest continent that never existed

Naacal @ Wikipedia

Close encounters of the racist kind

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist And Harmful

Zechariah Sitchin @ Bad Archaeology

"The Emerald Tablets of Thoth": A Lovecraftian Plagiarism

Left- vs. Right-Brained: Why the Brain Laterality Myth Persists

Are the Egyptian pyramids aligned with the stars?

Criticisms of Drunvalo Melchizedek @ Wikipedia

Detailed deconstruction of the "face" and pyramids on Mars claims

"Christ" @ Wiktionary

"Allah" @ Wiktionary

Charles Hapgood @ Wikipedia

It’s better light, not worse behaviour, that explains crimes on a full Moon

Sphinx water erosion hypothesis @ Wikipedia

Egyptian Hieroglyphs @ World History Encyclopedia

Predynastic Period in Egypt @ World History Encyclopedia

Sumer @ World History Encyclopedia

Debunking the Myth: The Council of Nicaea and the Formation of the Biblical Canon

First Council of Nicaea @ Encyclopedia Britannica

Did Jesus Go to India? A Modern Gospel Forgery

Also, the fact that Jordan appeals to channeled information is a massive red flag. Channeling is fun and sometimes produces some interesting things, but a source of reliable information it is not.

He also claims that a pole reversal makes the planet start spinning the other way, which is literally not how pole reversals work at all.

And of course, Jason's claim that thirteen powerful families are controlling the world is that general conspiracy theory shit derived from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, early modern witch panic, and blood libel. The whole thirteen families thing in particular comes from Fritz Springmeier, a far right conspiracy theorist who proudly cites other hateful kooks like Edith Starr Miller and Alexander Hislop and basically claims anything that isn't good wholesome Christian entertainment is actually Satanic programming.

Basically, Jordan Duchnycz is just another New Age conspiracy theorist pushing the same old garbage as loads of others like him.

[kkulbeolyeonghwa]

hi!! fellow language nerd here, and i really admire how youre studying some smaller languages as well despite it being pretty difficult to find resources ime

some of them are actually also on my "wishlist" but ive been struggling with finding resources, so i was wondering if youd have any to share?

im interested in the north korean variety of korean, in the jeju dialect/language and in okinawan! (i can also read korean, so resources in korean are fine too. sadly not good enough at japanese yet 🥲)

also if you have tips for finding resources yourself those would also be appreciated!!

tysm!!

Hello, and sorry so much for not answering this earlier, I've been super busy!

For North Korean, there are actual NK grammars for the language, but now that the country has started taking many of their websites down, it might be hard to access (also depending on where in the world you are and if you have a VPN or not), so if you can read Korean, I recommend just going to read NK news! They are very easily accessible online, for example, at KCNA watch ! You can also watch full days of TV content on the site and use their useful tools for going through the content. This site is awesome and needs way more support from viewers!

I usually recommend news and a good dictionary for any language, same goes for Jejuan, as you can find news online at KCTV Jeju. They are also on YouTube, so you can listen to the news in the language as well. There are just over 1000 lemmas in the Jejuan wiktionary, so that can get you started. After you have less to work on, but with a good website translator, anyone can use the Naver Jeju "dialect" database.

For Okinawan, I actually ended up finding most of the sources out there lacking, so I made my own textbooks while searching for information (I made three in total. I don't think I can post them because it's not my place to say how their language works, I might be a linguistics student but am not qualified enough yet). What I recommend is jlect for searching for words (may not be that helpful after reaching B2, as many translations are in Japanese. With Okinawan, you really want to know Japanese first, as most of the resources out there are aimed at Japanese-speaking Okinawans wanting to reconnect with their language. There is currently a Wikipedia incubator for the language, and I recommend checking that out for reading. For listening, there is the Okinawan "dialect" radio, which you can also find online if you look for it.

My hidden tip for any language is searching for grammars using Google's "filetype:pdf" search feature. I will demonstrate its effect:

Searching for a grammar online will usually bring you to websites which may not be very useful if you are a linguist like me as they are aimed at the average non-language nerd! Now, if we put filtype:pdf at the end...

The search result brings up whole grammar books for free. Easy! This is how I find the grammar books of my most endangered languages. Have fun!

[talenlee]

Dal Raeda, The First And Greatest

I’ve written about Dal Raeda, before, in parts and in places. I’ve run games there. I’ve used it as the 0,0 of the great graphing calculator of the world, and it sets the ‘normal’ in Cobrin’Seil (my own D&D setting I’ve used for a long time) for me. It is obviously informed by the way I see the world, and the world I’m used to, and it is very much an attempt to do something for the baseline of European Fantasy that doesn’t just copy England or the edge of France the way that so many fantasy nations do. In this case it’s an enormous land mass with huge barely-connected provinces and an island off the southern edge, which I, an Australian, came up with independently and on my own.

However, prior to now there’s never been a comprehensive article explaining Dal Raeda as a nation; its outlook, its divisons, and the way I think a player should look at that part of the world.

Warning: This is a long post, and it’s about a place that does not exist. This is straight up just game lore and you might not even be playing a game that can use this kind of lore.

Dal Raeda

Very large continental, near-imperial nation, the First Empire, the Centre Of The World

Dal Raeda is a multiprovincial megadiverse nation roughly 3,500 km north-to-south and 4,000 km east-to-west. Its shape is roughly comparable to a wide diamond, and its northernmost edge is south of the tropics, while its southern edges routinely deal with hard, cold, snowy winters. It is situated in the southern hemisphere and experiences its seasons opposite to most of the rest of the mainland of Bidestra.

In building Dal Raeda, I tried to get away from just ‘England 2’ that I think is too common in Dungeons & Dragons settings. I wanted something that could be familiar to the style of European fantasy that I enjoy comfortably, but I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just renaming something I was familiar with.

To that end, Dal Raeda’s naming scheme, from the top down, is built out of Old Irish words, mostly gleaned from Wiktionary. The actual provinces aren’t trying to be real specific places but are more informed by thinking about these spaces as ‘a type of guy who wants to be the king’ and then imagining a culture that might give rise to that kind of guy.

Obviously it’s all going to be very similar to British colonial culture, because that’s what I grew up in. Still, when you see things that you assume would carry obvious colonial tropes, many of these points are where I explicitly don’t want it to be that way. For example, Dal Raeda calls itself the First Empire, but strictly speaking it isn’t either the first Empire, nor is it actually an Empire – it refers to itself as an Empire to elevate the notion that the provinces are each equally as valid as nations to themselves, instead of the interdependent components of a large nation.

Dal Raeda is divided into Provinces, of which there are four, five, six or seven, depending on who you ask and when. The comprehensive list is:

Brin Proper

Danube

Deilahn

Glotharen

Sanders

Virett Keep

Willowsebb

Some consider only Danube, Glotharen, Sanders and Willowsebb to be ‘true’ Provinces, in that they were the four provincial powers that were present in the compact that made Dal Raeda into its own multinational power. They’re also large land masses that more or less divide up the mainland into four roughly-equally sized chunks (though three of them are happy to point out that Danube is the smallest of them).

Deilahn, the fifth is added to the list because it was a semi-independent nation-state that sued for entrance into that compact, and is considered culturally contiguous with the provinces next to it. It has land and people, and those people are basically the same as the people from the mainland, and that’s why people think it counts.

Virett Keep is the next admitted to the list, and it is notable for being a province that has very little of what can be considered ‘territory.’ They have the legal claim to the castle Virett Keep and a host of holdings on the coasts. While absolutely made up of people culturally connected to Dal Raeda, Virett Keep tends to get excluded because it’s hard to argue you’re a Provincial Power when your population can fit in a large sports stadium.

Finally, the ‘barely counts’ Province is Brin Proper, which is one city, situated in the near-centre of the landmass. It’s the capital of the nation, and it only exists to ensure that the King’s own palace is not in any province where a provincial power may try and use mundane resources to exert power over the crown.

Cultures

Dal Raeda is technically, sparsely populated. This is not because there aren’t many people living there, but because it’s so big. Small towns in Dal Raeda have and sustain a lot of people, and they are connected through different transport networks, usually a variety of different roads maintained by different authorities. There’s an aphorism that from anywhere in Dal Raeda, you can walk in a straight line for two hours and find some kind of settlement; obviously, this isn’t true, there are large expanses of empty space in the country, and huge dense population centres in each province. Around one in four people in Dal Raeda live in one of these cities.

The cities are extremely metropolitan, with a lot of heritage variety, but the basic infrastructure of Dal Raeda is made for Humans and humanlike people, including Half-Elves and Half-Orcs. Abilen are common in trade centres, and most urban places have Halflings. Tieflings and Eladrin can be seen in the cities, normally enough that they are commonly part of the language. More rural areas tend to be more homogenised with heritages, just because people are more likely to be operating within a small community.

Oh, and Goblins are everywhere. Even rural communities often have one or two Goblin families. This isn’t actually new, despite what older people think — reforms that made Goblins whole citizens of Dal Raeda just made it legal for the Goblins to be seen and counted. Before those reforms, the Goblins were there, they were just prone to running and hiding (and stealing, because they couldn’t do legal trade).

There are numerous settlements in Dal Raeda for pocket cultures; Dio Baragh, Orc, Kobolds and Eladrin all have their settlements within the borders, and for the most part they operate within the constraints of the government of the provinces, with trade and research exchanges. There are also Beastfolk communities in Dal Raeda, with a number of Gnoll Paths (the territorial trails Gnolls march) which different provinces handle in their own ways. Even within these pocket communities, though, there are normally members of other heritages. In Dal Raeda, even the Gnoll Packs have Goblins, Orcs, and Tjosen members.

Reputation

Dal Raeda is the cultural empire. The common language of the Bidestran continent is called Common because it’s named for the Dal Raedan word ‘Common.’ The language was called that because it was the one language all the provinces of Dal Raeda had ‘in common,’ in that language. Dal Raeda is one large country sometimes and seven still-pretty-big countries in a big coat the rest of the time. Dal Raedan culture is omnipresent in the Bidestran continent but fascinatingly it’s almost always referenced as the traditionalist background that the other cultures update. The population of the Eresh Protectorate will talk about the laws and regulations in Dal Raeda as backwards, and assume that they have better versions of the same.

This is in some places, pretty accurate — Dal Raeda is a nation of kings and crowns and lines of inheritance and noble titles and peerage that has been accumulated through centuries of ad-hoc laws being turned into eternal tradition. Most parts of Dal Raeda are maintained by laws that are themselves agreements between knights and nobles that have never been replaced or updated, only augmented. To this end, laws in Dal Raeda have a whole host of complicated bylaws and substructures, and traditions that follow from those, and practices to express those traditions and all of that is based on a Dal Raeda that doesn’t exist any more. See, the past thirty years of Dal Raeda has been a period of immense cultural reform that includes standardised spelling and language, public infrastructure like street lights and travelling bards providing public education and paying clerics for a certain quantity of free magical healing and food every month. These reforms extended to the legal system, creating an overarching set of rules for how laws are applied equally, and who in the nation is considered to be a person with rights. These reforms were all at the direct behest of the most recent, most beloved, and actually dead king.

Oh yeah.

That’s probably the most important thing people know about Dal Raeda. The king just died, without an heir. Not only without an heir, without even a weird cousin as backup or a magical cloned spare around anywhere. There is a power vacuum at the heart of Dal Raeda’s body politic, and every single major power in a country made up of many small powers is preparing to negotiate for that spot.

Aggressively.

Locals

To matrix out how all of Dal Raeda feels about Dal Raeda is fundamentally too big a work and not necessary. Dal Raeda is a big country with multiple economic classes and numerous fractured political structures. How your life works in Dal Raeda is going to be related heavily to the nearest local authority figure who is given some permission to shove you around based on proximity to the king and how you feel about that. For example, most people live in counties – which is to say, a district ruled over by a Count. But a Count is not strictly speaking, a noble, because the titles aren’t inherited. Unless of course that Count is also a noble in some other way, like a Knight or Viscount or Marquis or Earls or Barons or Lords, but also there are representative peers in some districts and —

It’s complicated.

Basically, Dal Raeda is a massive multiprovincial country with an explicitly regionalised body politic. That is to say, if you’re in Dal Raeda, you care more about the county you’re in, the county next to you, and your province is more like a sports team you may have a strong opinion on. Maybe you like your province and have a powerful resonance with its identity, or maybe you like those street lights that were put up by the provincial authority, or maybe you resent that large state authority that sent you a letter telling you you’re not allowed to make beer in your bathtub any more.

Travellers

If you’re travelling through Dal Raeda, it’s a pretty sweet and convenient place. There’s plenty of places with public infrastructure like roads and ferries and bridges, and there’s even an enormous spiralling Kings Highway, of the Eresh Protectorate, connecting a city within the borders of Dal Raeda to the rest of the world. What’s more, the scale of the place is one where there’s plenty of empty parts where you don’t have to deal with any of that stuff if you don’t want to.

What is most interesting to travellers though is how easily people from Dal Raeda will clock you as not-local. The language of Dal Raeda is old and most people from outside Dal Raeda speaking common are speaking a modernised version of it. Not going to show up in most cases, but there are little giveaways in the language choices, or in the way people outside Dal Raeda don’t quite express the vowels right.

Rivalries

Dal Raeda has no rivals, according to its own internal fiction. It is after all, the great superpower, the military powerhouse, and every one of its most dangerous rivals were made into members of it. There is no reason for Dal Raeda to fear anyone. Dal Raedans even believe firmly that the country can’t be invaded and is at no risk for anything miltiarily.

Anyway, Visente hates Dal Raeda, the Eresh Protectorate are willing to throw absolute hands to protect their one city within Dal Raeda, and Kyranou has a long and storied history of making fun of Dal Raedans and their ugly, utilitarian culture. For the most part, nobody is particularly fond of Dal Raeda, but there are limits to what disliking a military superpower can get you.

Trade

Everyone trades with Dal Raeda, even awkwardly. It’s huge, it has mines and farms and (now) magewrights and cultural exports and Adventurer’s Guild centres. It is simply not possible for a country so large to not have something being made that you can use, even if all you’re using it for is to turn it into something else, then sell it back to them.

Dal Raeda’s imports though, do trend towards the refined and processed goods of other cultures. Particularly, Dal Raeda has taken to importing expertise, a lot in recent years, as Danube attempts to rapidly modernise (but more on that later).

Brin Proper

The Capital

Brin Proper is the capital city and its surrounding territory. Brin Proper is a city that mostly serves administrative function. It has districts dedicated to diplomatic purposes (which means lots of places to eat and entertain people), residential spaces to serve those needs, and a large standing militarised police force who are understood to serve the purpose of defending the city in time of war.

Brin Proper serves two needs and they show in the way the city looks; it has high walls, but those walls are decorated with art, because it is the centerpiece of the nation and hosts the national Palace. It has old buildings and architecture, but laid over that architecture are the signs of modern reforms like street lights and standardised roads.

Geography

Brin Proper was made to be a capital city, and it was made to be the jewel of the imperial project that is Dal Raeda. It sits by a lake from which several rivers flow, and mostly on an island that has been built out further over time, and the surrounding territory around it is rich, fertile farmland and vibrant forest chosen for its aesthetics more than its ability to meet the city’s needs.

Important Sites

The Palace: Dal Raeda is built in a series of rings around the central palace of the royal family. Right now, it is unoccupied (in that nobody is living there), but it is by no means empty (as it needs to be maintained and cared for and guarded).

The Last Stands: Guardhouses around the city are positioned where they are tactically optimal for in case of invasion. These are large, notable buildings, where the guards are operating out of a series of watch towers with defensive slits, which are then decorated with art to make them aesthetically pleasant despite their harsh architectural needs.

Danube

The Iron Gate

Danube is situated at the northeastern quarter of Dal Raeda. It has a balmy, warm climate, and most of it rarely gets snow, except atop the mountains in the province. Danube is the only part of Dal Raeda with a land border with the rest of the Bidestran continent, and it is the province that has taken most aggressively to the national reforms. Marquess Danube is the youngest Provincial leader in Dal Raeda and she grew up with some of the national reforms as normal to her life, and it very clearly played into how she took to the legal system as a thing to be fixed.

Danube’s history is one of infrastructural defensiveness, and its current day is one of non stop aggressive change. These two things don’t work particularly well, and while it’s very exciting for Danube to be this place where new technology and new ideas are being tried out, there is inevitably a lot of stuff that fails because of the mismatch with what they’re trying to do and what they’re made to be doing.

Notably, Danube is one of the provinces that has established a representative parliament. This is a wonderfully complicated situation which involves a process called deprecation and it’s annoying a lot of people, but knowing how it works isn’t immediately important.

Settlements

Carlisle: One of the great examples of the modern Danube reforms, Carlisle is a town built, at great cost. To make Carlisle, Danube authorities recruited two different wizards and their collected apprentices to come to form a town where magical research could be conducted. However, as part of the building of Carlisle, both wizards wanted towers that could meet their needs. As such, while yes, Carlisle is a town with a lot of business for students learning magic and developing magewrights, by volume, the most common thing happening in the town is increasing construction on making one of the towers at least a little bit taller.

Copperhold: Danube didn’t have a forger’s guild – as in metal, not money – before the reforms, and when smiths petitioned for the idea of investing in an organisation that the government could then turn to for mass production projects like weapons, the Marquess took to it with aplomb. As a result, the city Copperhold was repurposed – and thanks to magewrights and aggressive development, a former mass medieval forge has been transformed into a magewright-driven multi-metal refinery.

Freegarde: The largest city in Danube, and home of the Marquess Danube, who has been smuggling her palace here. Perched on the King’s Highway, Freegarde is technically, a ‘new’ city. However, it still benefits from hold, negotiated rules about what it is allowed to have and do (without annoying other provinces) because Freegarde’s legal centre is a little town, surrounded by a series of complicated road and building placement rules that turns the whole city of Freegarde into something more akin to a legal windowbox.

Mhithan: Technically, the capital city of Danube. It’s still a large city with its own needs, but it’s undeniable that the movement of the Marquess has had an impact on the economy.

Geography

Lockrange: Danube’s largest body of water, not counting the two seas on either side, Lockrange is a lake up at a higher altitude towards the southern side of the province. Lockrange’s altitude make it notably cold, despite being near the tropical zone, and a number of luxurious resorts sit on its edges as a place for the wealthy to gather, relax, and enjoy the cool in the hotter months.

Wildreach: Technically speaking, no part of the forest in Dal Raeda is connected to the forests of Corrindale that sprawl across the northern half of the Bidestran continent. The closest that it gets is the forest of Wildreach, that runs right up to the edge of Wildreach Bay; if you stand in Wildreach’s northern edges, at the water’s edge, you can look across and see in the distance, the tops of the Corrindale trees. Wildreach stretches from this northern edge to the back of the Everknell, and all the way in curling around the northern half of Danube.

Important Sites

Everknell: Across the border with the rest of the world, in large sections, there is the fortified wall that gives Danube its epithet as the Iron Gate. This wall was historically regarded as very important for the long-term health of Danube, to protect it from barbaric invaders. The wall is known as Everknell, and it has guardhouses on it kilometers apart. Since Lagan’s integration into Dal Raeda, these guardhouses have largely never shut their gates outside of situations of weather or maintenance. There’s also a remarkably large marketplace set up on the Danube side of Everknell by the King’s Highway.

Ironfell: Copperhold was not the first attempt by Danube to create a Forger’s Guild site. The first attempt was to use magic and magewrights to construct a unique kind of forge more immediately, and the result was the collapsed site now known as Ironfell. Ironfell is still interesting for researchers and sightseers to visit, as it isn’t just a flooded quarry, but a pretty flooded quarry with brightly coloured water, into which you can throw anything metal and watch it get eaten by the water itself. Not dissolved. Eaten, as if by many chomping mouths. Ironfell’s cave system is similarly flooded, which is a real shame given all the valuable material that was left inside.

Whitwood: Danube does not have its own druidic traditions; what does exist within the province’s borders are mostly members of communions that spread across from the neighbour province Willowsebb and its extensive druidic traditions. Particularly, the druids of Willowswebb have a clause in the provincial laws that no druidic order under the sun’s rays may enter Dal Raeda without their permission. In order to establish a druidic power base, Marquess Danube established the Whitwood, a druidic order of vampires brought from the northern city of Hecsenfore, to explore the relationship between life and death in a nation where the sun shines eighteen hours of the day. While much of Whitwood is an open air grove with elaborate nets in the canopy, it is technically a mansion with an enormous garden around it, and the druids are the keepers of that garden.

Deilahn

Off the southern edge of the Dal Raedan mainland, there is an island large enough to sustain two cities of its own. It’s close enough to the mainland that it’s visible at night to the naked eye, and daily ferries travel back and forth shipping goods and people as best needed.

Deilahn’s history is publically, very well known, but phrased differently based on whether you ask someone from Deilahn or someone on the mainland. Mainlanders’ versions of the history speak of how it used to be a kind of convict colony, where disgraced thieves and criminals would escape the mainland to the island and over enough time this led to a population centre that eventually could do business and became important to the economy of the mainland, until it finally could sue for rights to enter the coalition.

Deilahn tells the story largely the same way, except it also includes the idea that the mainlanders claim Deilahn was the centre for guilds of thieves and assassins, and those kinds of ne’erdowells also fostered the presence of pirates, who then went on to develop a port town with their ill-gotten gains and eventually, elevate the island to enough economic importance that the King petitioned Deilahn’s leaders to then become legitimately part of the country so they could tax them.

Same story, but one of them has a lot more focus on infrastructural power. This may be why the collective opinion of Deilahn is that infrastructural power is so very important, and in part, is expressed through control over what kind of story gets told about you.

Settlements

Deilahn is small enough that there are no ‘non-notable’ settlements. It’s an island with basically two cities on it and a small number of fishing towns.

Earthdenn: A byway town in Deilahn, it’s notable for being the closest town to the the Carpathian Trade House’s Blind Patron. This town is mostly one-storey buildings and a lot of weather protection structures, an incredible food importer, and some of the most disproportionately nice-to-use luxury housing the Trade House can finance.

Marn Tarum: The capital city of Deilahn and home of the Deilahn noble family. It sits on the far edge of the island, away from the mainland, and stands on the top of a seaside cliff. Where it once was renowned for its deep basements and storm protections, as well as a noble family proud of their endurance in the face of hostility, it is now known as a remarkably important shadow finance capital. Thanks to integration with the Trade Houses, Marn Tarum is one of the cities that trades on stocks and shares with remarkable speed, through magical communication systems.

Nevercall: The city most people think of when they think of Deilahn, Nevercall is a raucious casino town situated on the north-western edge of the island on Sirencester Bay. It is both a large port with a well-developed trade system, but also an absolutely ridiculous place for non-stop partying that’s renowned for its extravagent light shows that are visible from the mainland, hence its epithet the City of Light. Formerly, a pirate port.

Geography

Again, Deilahn is a very small island. It has very little in the way of ‘geographical features’ that are not just, you know, look. That’s an island.

Halm Rudil: The centre of the island is split by a forest called Halm Rudil, which has been maintained through ongoing druidic efforts.

Sirencester: Deilahn as an island is a slightly curled semi-circular shape. The northern half of it hosts an enormous bay, which is Sirencester Bay.

Important Sites

Carpathia’s Blind Patron: On the southern edge of the island, away from almost all settlements, the Carpathian Trade House has established a multi-building complex. This complex holds their Blind Patron, an elaborate magical machine that is capable of acting as a Warlock patron and allows the Trade House to have its own way to sustain Warlocks as their direct employed agents.

The Watching Ninmel: In the water off the north-eastern edge of Deilahn, there’s a statue on a natural rocky outcropping. Famously, this statue somehow turns to watch ships as they sail past, but given the nature of sailing it’s possible it’s just an optical illusion and people stare at the big lady with a spear too much.

Glotharen

The First Foremost

Glotharen makes up the southeastern quarter of Dal Raeda. Thanks to a sharp rise in altitude from the southern edge of Danube, while that province is renowned for its warm-to-mild weather, Glotharen is markedly colder, and it shows in the fashion and dress of the people. Long sleeves and heavy layers are much more common, and the southernmost parts of Glotharen are known as the ‘short-dayed’ parts, where the sun takes a long time (comparatively) to set.

Where Danube is modernising rapidly, though, Glotharen is a province that has bound its identity around the idea of being old. Glotharen is very proud of the fact that Glotharen, the province, predates every other province by enough history that every other province’s oldest histories presents Glotharen as already existing, and established, and with cities. This comes out in how Glotharen’s people often refer to themselves as Glotharen citizens, in Dal Raeda, as if the province is more important than the nation.

The age of Glotharen plays out in its material history, too; most settlements are very old and there are numerous old ruins and archaelogical digs in Glotharen exploring the history of the space. Famously, the Dal Raeda Provincial Ruineers (a national service for preserving material history) indicate that roughly half of all submitted preservation efforts in the country are from Glotharen.

Settlements

Dore: The capital city of Glotharen. The city has its own culture of provincial historicity, so deep and so thorough that the people from Dore don’t even say they’re from Glotharen, they say they’re Doren people.

Lagan: Technically an Eresh city, Lagan is an anarchist co-op of goblins built in a ruined boat. It has an extensive history and is why there’s a Kings Highway within Glotharen’s borders, which has been an enormous economic boon that they like to complain about.

Mistwatch: The higher altitude of Glotharen’s river system tends to flow down and away, meaning that Virret Keep struggles to maintain a presence here. As they’re supposed to be allowed to go anywhere in the rivers, Glotharen has a system of locks to allow boats to travel up to the altitude of the province, and that set of locks centralise most boat travel to the town of Mistwatch. It is high enough to enjoy regular rolling waves of mist from the mountains down onto the locks in the morning.

Geography

Glotharen is a place with numerous forests, a mountain range, and a host of valleys and lakes of varying sizes.

Arathairn: A valley famed for peach trees. Communities near Arathairn are often proud to speak about the peach brandy they make using the fruit of the valley.

Figblossom: A valley renowned for flower fields, which is a polite way to describe a feywild portal that Glotharen has been using to make exchanges with the Eladrin living there for generations.

Important Sites

Fogge’s Barrow: A barrow that was, at one point, found to have accumulated atop a sleeping dragon. The Barrow has been politically relevant at points in history, meaning that in addition to the dragon it also has a Gnoll Pack pathing around it, and a gaggle of Kobold Researchers engaging in drug-addled oneironautics.

The Unnameable Meat Forest: There’s a section of forest in Glotharen that’s made of meat? And nobody can quite agree why or what it means.

Wexwend Observatory: There’s a Tjosen settlement in the southern edges, up on the higher altitudes, arranged around a large stone-and-crystal observatory. The Glotharen don’t like acknowledging the Tjosen being there, but they do appreciate that the Tjosen seem to be interested in investigating history.

Sanders

The Imperator’s Stand

Sanders makes up the bulk of the western quarter of Dal Raeda, divided along the boundaries of rivers and the mountain range that runs through the middle of the nation. The altitude of the province contributes to its colder climate, but the cliffs drop sharply to the coast, meaning that the coastal towns of Sanders are all exposed to the heavy southern winds that push cold air up from the bottom of the world. Sanders has a reputation as being dreary and cold.

Sanders is the traditional military powerhouse of Dal Raeda. Positioned on the far side of the province, it was built up as a fortress stronghold that could marshal military resources, and either deploy them out through their coastal towns’ boats, or sent as a mighty spear along the land through to whoever was invading through Danube. Much of the traditional history and rules of warfare in Dal Raeda are beneficial to the way Sanders does war, and that helps to entrench Sanders, in the dawn of a potential civil war, to be very big on keeping those rules and traditional ways of doing going.

Sanders is ruled by a woman, the Dux Sanders.

Settlements

Bournemouth: Most provinces have ‘college towns,’ which is residences and businesses built around the universities and colleges that specialise in their forms of study. Most colleges are magical in nature, but there are druidic colleges as well. Bournemouth is the only military college town in Dal Raeda, though, a whole town built around the Bournemouth College Of Righteous Violence, which teaches tactics and discipline. It is a fascinating place in the ways it breaks down some class distinctions, with knights and knaves alike as students, but the ways that it is also a town where most people are doing ‘get punched in the face’ classe.

Holmfirth: The capital city of Sanders. Holmfirth is a near-fortress of a city, with huge gatehouses meant to hold the city forever against a siege. The gates of Holmfirth were dismantled and turned into artworks during the unification of Dal Raeda, and have been kept open as a show of force. It’s very much a position that shouts I dare you.

Scrantown: The names of towns and cities in Sanders have a distinct archness to them, very evident to people who study such things. That makes the city Scrantown a real weird outlier. As best history can manage, Scrantown, an enormous interconnected farming community nestled between three major Sanders fortress-cities, was created by Willowsebb immigrants during a time where Sanders considered farming beneath them, and they wanted to pay for better food service. Generally, this is seen as to why Willowsebb and Sanders share the common term scran to refer to good, satisfying food.

Geography

Dawncairn: Some geographic features are just nice or pretty things. Sanders has a set of rolling fields where the grass glows gold in the morning light. It’s partly due to the angle of the hills, but also the species of grass is local and has a fairly unique trait of looking quite gold when wet.

Wolffront: A mountain range that uplifts the borders of Sanders.

Important Sites

The Sanders Stable: It says something about a province where there are stables in almost every single established settlement, there is one specific place that gets to be known as The Sanders Stables. A multi-building complex in Sanders of fields and breeding grounds and racecourses, the Sanders Stables is a stables that oversees what is generally regarded as the best warhorse creation program in the world. The Sanders Stables have such immense importance in the culture of equestrian that you don’t buy a Sanders horse: You pay an up-front fee to maintain and care for one of their horses, and if the horse dies before that fee has been addressed, the horse is resurrected, and you have to pay off the resurrection. If you die and the horse dies, they resurrect the horse and not you. Sanders Warhorses are absolutely worth the money, though and it’s generally recognised that the Sanders Warhorse is a part of how Sanders has its reputation as a modern military powerhouse despite their bias away from modern military tools.

Whealglen: Sanders makes much show of being a province with a sensible division of religion and state, with its Palescai churches and its largely secular community that extol the hierarchical view of monarchy. That’s not to say there aren’t mystical or magical traditions within Sanders, though, and it’s best seen in Whealglen. This ash-tree grove, hidden away in the forests of Sanders, is a place where wooden trees grow into the shape of statues of fallen heroes of the province of Sanders. This grove is considered a sacred site, but Sanders’ nobility and power structures want to keep people from going there and seeing it much. It does make everything seem a bit… pagan.

Virett Keep

The Blood Of Dal Raeda

Virrett Keep has no specific climate or weather. This is because Virrett Keep’s claim is the river system of Dal Raeda. Dal Raeda has a large river network that connects most of the country from edge to edge. Over two centuries ago, Virett Keep were rewarded this thanks to the family’s service to the state, and they’ve spent the intervening time pushing this legal treaty to its absolute limits.

Virett Keep’s legal permission is that they’re in charge of the rivers; this means that travelling along or across the rivers is technically their territory. The Keep claims some taxes on a number of the major bridges in Dal Raeda, and there’s an ongoing political concern about whether or not they can tax people crossing the bridges that run over the King’s Highway. Virett Keep say yes, and the Eresh Knights following the highway say no.

Virett don’t think they have the juice to get Dal Raeda to fight the Protectorate on their behalf, so they mostly let the taxes go.

Virett Keep is a small population, spread across a number of exotic sites. Virett Keep’s standard of living and general wealth for its population is extremely high. This is a good statistic to be proud of, but the thing is, it’s not clear about the economic disparity. Half of Virett Keep’s income goes to just ten percent of its citizens, who are largely nobles and landlords, while most of its members are riverboat sailors and traders.

The settlements, sites, and geography of Virett Keep are challenging to describe. Many of the ‘settlements’ are boats, and they move around. At the same time, some of those boats stay in a specific location, which means they may be a bit more like a site. Anyway, because of that, here’s just a list of stuff that Virett Keep has in it, and you can sort it into what category you want for your own sake.

Cloverrim: The closest thing the Virett have to a ‘breadbasket,’ Cloverrim is a large farm on the coast in Glotharen. Of course, that territory is Glotharen’s territory, because Virett Keep aren’t allowed to own that land. Virett Keep just rent the land, and then pay the workers to live there, but it’s very important to know that this land is ‘technically’ Glotharen’s land.

Glittering Prizes: Technically, the Glittering Prizes. Glittering Prizes is an immense riverboat, moving in a steady circle throughout the seasons. It’s a casino and a tavern, and well known gathering place for people who don’t want to be where they were, looking for work from people with ready money.

Humble’s Ford: At the edge of the lake in Brin Proper, there’s a drydock where the Humble’s Ford has been docked. That boat is part of Virett Keep, which means that anyone walking off the dock, onto the boat, are going into Virett Keep. Humble’s Ford is also conveniently parked right by Brin Proper, the capital city, which means that people can negotiate with Virett Keep’s power brokers easily.

Ir Osel: There’s a ghost ship that travels the rivers of Dal Raeda, supposedly. Supposedly, because the claim follows that it only shows up around Virett Keep’s natural citizens, who can even board the boat.

Lightbrook: There’s a little exclave of land between Willowsebb, Sanders, and Glotharen, where there’s three bridges set up in a triangle between the landmasses. In between those bridges there’s a large transport ship, unable to leave. But because that ship is in Virett Keep, it’s possible for someone to pass an item to Virett Keep then have that Virett Keep person pass that material to someone in a different province, for legally significant reasons. That boat is called Lightbrook, and if you need to go there, you know why.

Virett Keep: The actual castle of Virett Keep, which sits on an island in the river, with a bridge reaching to the mainland of the Sanders province. This bridge has been dismantled and rebuilt several times based on the political demands of the day. Virett Keep is an ostentatious palace, basically a mansion with a wall around it, and is occupied by the richest people of the Keep, and their servants.

Willowsebb

The Tangled Root

The remaining mainland territory of Dal Raeda is consumed by the daggerlike form of Willowsebb, reaching to the middle of the country but also stretching up to the northern face. At the northern edges, Willowsebb faces the tropical bay that extends across to Visente and Amenti. But that space, where the weather and hills are both mild, people don’t think of that when they think of Willowsebb.

No, they think of the forests.

Willowsebb has the largest single contiguous forest in Dal Raeda. It reaches all across the province and forms, to an extent, its borders – certainly it’s the dividing line where it ends. Within the forest there are glens and specific varieties of trees that mark them as other forests, but broadly, the vast, dark, cursed forest of Willowsebb is what it’s known for.

Oh, cursed?

Yeah, that’s what people say.

Don’t worry about it.

Willowsebb is by far the most rural of the provinces that have any land. Willowsebb’s largest cities are all the smallest major cities and some even argue that Woodshade is instead more of a large township, despite its population and breadth. This stems from the way Willowsebb’s druidic traditions resist modernisation and expansion – historically, some druidic orders had strict and hard policies against (for example) worked metal objects, but more modern ones are much more relaxed. They’re still not in favour of things like street lights and a standardised road network, though, and have impeded them. This is why Willowsebb can be so large, have so many people living in it, and still mostly be rural and semirural.

Settlements

Rosehips: The capital of Willowsebb, Rosehips started out as a town renowned for jam and flowers. The bucolic forager town became a steady cornerstone of travel through the area, until eventually, the druids felt it necessary to protect the town. Rosehips is now a very large town, spread out wide, with no more than two storeys at a time for any given house, and instead of walls, it has an enormous gnarled set of thorny rose-bushes. In times of duress, some have even claimed that the city’s walls become a maze to protect it from assault.

Woodshade: By comparison, Woodshade is a town where, the story runs, a plan was to cut down an important tree as soon as the sun rose to dry the tree out and prepare it for the axe. The druids who revered the tree told the town to not do that, and when they refused, the druids laid a curse on the town. Woodshade is now a town where the sun doesn’t rise; people can travel in to the town from blazing noon, and walking in, find the town in a grim dark twilight, with the moon butting around the edges of the horizon.

Geography

Grubhaben: The actual name of the forest that stretches over the province, Grubhaben is an old word that means something akin to ‘holding everything.’ The name is a promise and a threat; there is more in the forest than you imagined, you can always find something there, but also… you will never know all the things the forest holds.

Woodglen: One strip of the forest that buts against Danube’s border is known by the name Woodglen. For some reason, Woodglen is a well-regarded and very safe forest, where people can go to hunt and forage, from either side of the border. It’s considered that the druids think of Woodglen as an ‘offering’ of a forest – giving the people who are not Willowsebb’s own a version of the forest they can understand and survive.

Plumbreak: Over the edges of the forest, there are a set of towns dotted along the coast, including one large town with a barge train that sends goods across the bay periodically, when the Halfling Hulks arrive in Visente. This is the Plumbreak bay.

Important Sites

Bugrest: There’s a glen in the northern parts of Willowsebb where the Ozu are found. It’s not a large location and kept relatively private. Oh, the Ozu aren’t known? We’ll have to get to that.

Fanaird: Maps of Willowsebb often feature a drawing of a tall tree in the forest. This is usually treated as a sort of cartographic flair. It’s not: There’s a tree in the forest that’s about three hundred meters tall, with broad, spreading branches and an enormous cleft in the centre. This is Fainard, which is known as a central gathering point for the different types of druid from across Dal Raeda, and beyond. Fainard is a sacred site and hard to reach, even if someone heading towards it can find it, sunk deep into the forest as it is.

Stiamuzzehk: The name Stiamuzzehk is an extremely out-of-type name for the Willowsebb, but not because it’s a new import. Rather, Stiamuzzehk is an old name, older than the people using it now, and its meaning is uncertain. What it is is a wide salt flat lagoon, by Plumbreak Bay. The salt-farmers of Stiamuzzehk dig trenches from the sea into the lagoon’s area, to fill it up with sea water, and then perform rituals to enchant the salt while the water evaporates over weeks. Then, with the area dried out, they cut up the chunks of salt for sale in the markets around the world. Enchanted salt is a very common spell component and fully a quarter of the world’s supply comes from Willowsebb’s strange little industry.

Conclusion

There’s always room for more. There’s a conversation around the way that Dal Raedan weapon traditions work. There’s a talk about the way that Dal Raeda’s impending civil war influences adventurers in the space. There’s types of armour, types of weapon aesthetics, there’s attitudes of different cultural subgroups within the country, there’s more about politics and more about organisations and guilds and religion.

But.

This is hopefully, a decent start that can serve as a familiarising beginning on the nation of Dal Raeda and what opportunities it presents for the people who live there, the people who adventure there, and the people who visit there. Dal Raeda is a nation the size of Australia with a population density comparable to mainland America, and a state/province structure that’s meant to feel kind of like a hybrid of the EU and America’s state system. It is a place with a lot of room and a lot of opportunity and all the power structures are distant from the way people actually live their day to day lives.

Like how there are things telling you there are ways you have to do things, but they don’t actually exist and can’t tell you what to do.

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