I thought I had posted these questions before, but now I can't find them.  Either I am losing my mind, or Mr. Nixon really HATES me asking these questions and moderated the post out of existence.  What is he trying to hide?

Anyway:

* Starting characters with Zu syllables; I assume its one advance= one syllable, and you cannot buy two syllables in a row?

* In two places in the rules a location called Oran is mentioned (as a trading partner of Khale and Qek).  Anyone ever used this place in a game?  Any official word on where it is and what kind of place it is?

Your own answer to your first question is correct.

As for your second question, there's no "official" version of anything in Near. It's a dream. It's open to interpretation.

With that said, we played in Oran once. In my mind, it's a steppe-based traveling culture, made up of hordes of warbands made of men. Women and children under 13 live in villages and they only meet twice a year to mate.

Thanks.  Did you have some idea where this culture was physically located on the Map of Near, recognizing, of course, its all a dream and open to interpretation?

They only get nookie twice a year?  I'd travel in around pissed off in a warband too.

Perhaps they're not socially heterosexual?

My vision is that they're in western near, in the steppes before the mountains (west of Ammeni and Maldor).

Heck. Why not spill my original vision here?

So, ok, these guys are totally Arabian horse-lords in look. When the Shadow came, they hid underground. Because of social mores, men and women were hid in different areas, not mingling. They were the first people to leave their holes after the Shadow, because they needed to breed. Still, 25 years in the hole does a lot to a culture. Men and women are now not supposed to intermingle whatsoever. Civilization is kept by women, who have very different mores when alone. Men fight Violators and ratkin and each other all year. They especially fight each other for control of villages. Once a month, eunuchs from the warband meet with the villages they protect, and engage in trade. Twice a year, on the equinoxes, men and women meet. In the fall, older men and women primarily mate in a week-long celebration. In the spring, the men come and put all boys of 13 through their rites of manhood and they sleep with a woman in the village before they head off to the warband.

Oh, yeah, Mark's right. Of course they are not socially heterosexual, although romantic love between men is still socially discouraged. Romantic love between women is common and within women's civilization, completely ok. The love of a man for a woman is primarily one-sided: men write epic poems about the women they love and sing their praises, but it's more rare for a woman to recipocate.

There are men-women and woman-men, as well. Rarely, a woman will join a war-band. She is culturally a man, and to have male-female sex, at least in a traditional vaginal fashion, is completely abhorrent. Also, rarely a man will stay in a village. He is castrated and is culturally a woman, and will generally adopt children from women who die. He - or she, really - will take part in the normal rites.

Cool stuff, thanks!

How the heck do they keep their birthrate up high enough to cover death rates (given no antibiotics, no vaccines, no sanitation of drinking water, etc.)? Do they have some kind of funky fertility magic that radically increases the chance of conception from a single act of intercourse?

Also note that certain kinds of eunuchs/castrati are historically favored as sexual partners by women who want to avoid pregnancy. (The prostate gland's internal and doesn't get snipped with the testes, so assuming the penis itself is intact, which I understand it often is, well...consider it a radical vasectomy rather than a neutering).

I hinted at my own version of Orania in the Finnish version of the game:

Orania is a lost colony of the Maldorian empire (think Rumania) situated on a wide plain area up northwest, near the Qek jungles. When the Shadow came, the city and the culture miraculously survived, thanks to the help from the barbaric nomad tribes of the area. A covenant was struck between the barbarians and the patricians of the city. Modern Orania is a locally overpowering city-state living in an elaborate diplomatic relationship with the nomad tribes, who war with each other constantly. While Maldor proper has fallen into a feudal dark age, Oranians uphold the civic virtues of "Old Maldor", resembling Romans more than Middle Age baronies. The cultural exhange with the barbarians has brought about a vibrant cultural meld, and most of the time the citizens of Orania are both more refined and more barbarous compared to the Maldorites and Ammenites in the south.

The coolest cultural ability the Oranians get is without doubt "Diplomacy", hardened by their teetering existence as the city among the tribes. It's exactly what the current Maldor needs to get out of its bloody cycle.

So, quite different from Clinton's Orania. I think I'll combine them the next time I play in Near, though.

Eero wrote:
So, quite different from Clinton's Orania. I think I'll combine them the next time I play in Near, though.

I'll jump on the bandwagon and throw in the Oran we're using in my game, which isn't quite like either Eero's or Clinton's. Sorry if this gets a little long.

My Oran is a horse nomad culture, though much closer to a pre-Genghis Khan mongolia than anything else. On our map, they're located to the west and north of Maldor, among all those hills in the map. The "Roof of the World" is part of their lands, as well. Oran was once responsible for lightning raids on Maldor, and some military effort was expended repeatedly to fight them back and overtake the harsh steppelands. A group of Maldorite barons settled in what would be southern Oran and proclaimed themselves "Shieldholders," a sort of alliance designed to keep the Oranian nomads from riding south to raid Maldorite communities. Incapable of repelling them fully through warfare, it was commerce and trade that "civilized" Oran, ultimately causing some Oranians to give up nomadic herding and take up farming in the southern lands, as Maldorite goods, architectural designs, and politics filtered into those southern communities, the first of their kind in Oran. Farther north, the nomadic people scorn the decadent village folk, and maintain their lives as they always did.

This is all pre-Skyfire history.

I didn't have all of the gender segregation stuff that exists in Clinton's write-up of Oran, though I do think its neat, and might use a toned-down version of it. Oran's northern peoples fared better than most after the Shadow, having always known how to survive difficult conditions and move where food was findable. The southern Shieldholder communities are suffering from the same problems that Maldor has, naturally.

The largest difference between Oran and the cultures around it is a total acceptance of goblins among human society. Humans and goblins can share brother-bonds-- sharing blood with each other to establish social kinship bonds which link two members of the same sex together in spirit and trust. Many hordes are made up of human families and goblin families, who in rare cases even mingle their blood in sex and marriage. Naturally, all other nations find this utterly repugnant, but the Oranian humans prize the adaptability and ingenuity of their goblin brothers.

The cultural abilities we're using (or their nearest conversion, as we've tweaked some TSOY rules for our game) would be:

Archery (Fighting Ability, Vigor): All Orani are taught to shoot and fletch arrows before the age of majority. The compound bow is the common weapon of the Orani horseman.
Endure Hardship (Outdoor Ability, Vigor): Harsh living is a reality on the steppe. This ability can be chained to other ability checks when resisting disease, hunger, cold, and heat. It teaches the Orani way of steppe survival, which sometimes requires you to kill a mount for its flesh and blood.
Falconry (Outdoor Ability, Instinct): Technically a misnomer, most Orani actually train large eagles as hunting raptors. This ability can be used to catch small game, and to impress others with your technical skill. It can also be used to attack an opponent physically, commanding a trained eagle to scratch and bite an opponent.
Horse Lore (Social Ability, Instinct): Growing up around horses, Orani develop strong bonds to the creatures. Use this ability to ride a horse, calm down a panicked mount, and even help a foaling mother give birth.
Stargazing (Priestly Ability, Reason): On the steppe, Orani navigate by watching the heavens, and believe that the patterns in the stars tell stories of creation. Use this ability to navigate using stars, and to recall Orani creation legends.

In addition to a handful of Secrets about horseback riding and the sort of things you might expect, there are additional options for Orani blessings involving the stars. The Orani believe that everything in creation has a Perfect Form in the heavens, an original design which it is based on, the equivalent of the Platonic ideal. So, the following Secret is an option.

Secret of Star-Blessing
You can temporarily grant an imbuement to any being or object by praying over it at night and consulting the constellation associated with its Perfect Shape. This requires a night-time prayer over the object or being to be blessed, and a successful Stargazing Ability check. Success results in a +1 imbuing which can be applied to the target for a single appropriate Ability, such as a horse’s Athletics ability to outrun others, or any use of Dueling with a sword you have blessed. The blessing lasts for a number of days equal to the SL of the Stargazing check. Cost: 4 Reason

Additionally, there are rumors of enlightened monks who dwell in monasteries nestled within the mountains called the Roof of the World. They would be cultural Orani (or possibly emigrants from other cultures), and rumors persist of their knowledge of a martial arts style of their own, and strange powers over mind and body which they possess.

Maybe some of that will be helpful to somebody's game. I've certainly been indebted to other people's postings in my own TSOY game, and have cribbed notes like crazy from other people's ideas, so I feel like it's a "share the love, return the favor" kind of thing.

Also, holy hell, Clinton, I can't stop thinking about your writeup of Oran. Wow.

TSOY has got to be the RPG with the most fascinating gender and sex politics of any that I've seen. You deserve as many props as there are for me to give-- I might have to go to the store and buy some more just to give them to you.

As I play with a group of gamers with a good representation of both genders, and a fair amount of gay, lesbian, and transsexual players, it's nice to actually hold up a game like TSOY whose sex politics are above the watermark for most RPG's (which are sadly about on par with a viking attack). For all the progress that's been made in liberalizing the world of RPG's, most mainstream games are still sadly very white, very Eurocentric, and very heterosexual in their depiction of characters, and indeed the entire world. Your writeup for Oran is yet another example of TSOY's attempt to address gender/sex politics in a way where "mature" doesn't simply equal "explicit content," like it does in a vast majority of the gaming world. Thank you for a game which is as thoughtful as it is exciting.

Regards,

-shadowcourt (aka Josh)

Josh,

Man, thanks! That's a super-nice thing to say. I just wanted to play awesome characters that weren't white dudes with swords.

Your Orania is bad-ass, by the way. Giant hunting eagles? That's great, and using your falconry ability to attack others is just the sort of conflict that I think is incredible.

Clinton, whatever possessed you to leave your Oran version out of the rules? It's awesome! Now I gotta figure out cultural abilities, keys and secrets myself.

- Frank

Frank,
I now want to play an Oranian horse talker in our forthcoming TSOY game.