Cultures of Antibor

26 Feb, 2024

I've gestured vaguely at Antibor's culture-scape in previous posts, but it deserves a more detailed writeup.

Background

In spring of last year I agreed to run a Worlds Without Number campaign for my friends. At the time I had only just completed my first experiments in mapping Antarctica. Intrigued by WWN's plethora of GM tools & having recently had my anthropological imagination stoked by reading Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, I decided to try populating part of the map from scratch. I selected The Spine, a sinuous island mountain range known in the present eon as 'Palmer Land':

Using the Society tables on pp. 128-131 I generated six cultures and presented them as character background options to my players:

• The Golden Men, remnants of a faded empire who worship Yog-Sothoth (stylized as YXVTH)
• The Aldebarati, nomadic worshippers of the storm god Urduk who migrated to the spine
• The Xikai, a communal society with a profession-based caste system devoted to an ideal of progress
• The Tlaxians, secretive folk divided into four animal-based clans
• The Stregovari, religious refugees from the mainland who had raspy voices and placed great cultural importance on perfumes
• The Iotians, diminutive, piratical islanders with a religious taboo against literacy (and therefore a strong oral tradition) who were formerly subjugated by the Golden Men

I had fun rolling these up, but they didn't work well in play. For one thing, I let the 'Template Society' table on p. 131 influence how I presented the cultures. Crawford makes a decent case for the table's utility & I did my best to avoid obvious stereotypes and to relegate my use of the rolled culture to naming conventions, but even so it felt uncreative and sapped my desire to develop them further.

Moreover, while I got some nice feedback from my players about the uniqueness of the cultures & their presentation, we all pretty much completely bounced off of them at the table. For a megadungeon crawl, the cultural nuances of the overworld don't matter much, but even had the focus been elsewhere I failed to appreciate the utility of a 'vernacular' generic fantasy culture.

So as Antibor learns and evolves with its fallible demiurge, I've tried to balance several orthogonal aims:

1. To have a 'vernacular' culture that improv-challenged players can easily inhabit
2. To have a diverse array of interesting cultures to sate my creativity & imagine varied forms of social being
3. To avoid stereotypes that 'punch down' or are hurtful; to avoid direct historical analogues
4. To employ broader categories & sketch out a rough history to make Antibor's cultural landscape intelligible
5. To provide 'interface points' for inserting pre-written modules with some kind of cultural assumption or linguistic baggage
6. To be weird, to take advantage of the Dying-Earth/post-apoc setting to play with weird cultural lineages and insert stupid bits to amuse myself

The Cultures

To triangulate between these goals & specifically to address 1 and 4, I came up with three fuzzy cultural groups: Alabastrine, Autochthonous, and Aldebarati, with the latter two having varied sub-groups.

Alabastrine

The Alabastrine culture is my answer to 1 and 6, a silly take on a 'default' fantasy culture. It is named for the Alabaster Potentate, itself named for the gleaming white vessels in which humanity briefly subjugated the firmament. Many millennia ago, the Potentate overreached and was smashed by a coalition of aliens and rebel colonies.

Alabastrine culture on Antibor descends from colonial elites who were repatriated back to Irð following their defeat. They mostly live in enormous complexes of hexagonal 10-mile arcologies known as Citadels, but also exert nominal authority over the hinterlands. Their society is stratified into a schema stolen shamelessly from Gene Wolfe's Book of The New Sun with aristocratic 'Exultants' deriving family names from their old stellar fiefs, a class of martial 'Armigers', religious 'Hierodules', and the remainder classed as 'Peons' or 'Optimates' based on their wealth.

Alabastrines worship the Idralic Icosidyad, which descends from a syncretic system of archetypes developed by psychotheologians in the 70,000s. Aspects of the mythology have been recast in a redemptive (or sometimes revanchist) light wherein spiritual development serves the absolution or resurrection of the Potentate ('spaceward gleams / Thine ancient pathway of the suns, / Whose flame is part of thee').

Alabastrine names are really silly, the verbal detritus of countless eons (i.e. whatever I think sounds funny or cool + inane references):

Bonnie Pisces, Pothos Bunderwall, Jocasta Plinth, Mas Garbanzo, Tungsten Hatchiman-Nedge, Herbert DiFool Jr., Alyssa Dugnutt, Simon Oakeshotte Jr., Armelline Madonna Crumhorn, Bonnie Rortugal, Crispin Saracen, Sam Archideld-Guildenstern, Solange Krishnamurty, Nigel Methuselah Savonarola, Columbia Bonnie Larkspur, Akira Wintergreen, Xerxes Malamute, Sage Speedwagon, Kilroy Pothos Wintergreen, Alyssa Sternenhoech, Erasmus Eldritch, Ambrose DiFool, Nigel Rortugal, Llewellyn Barbute Jr., Marjoram Curio

Autochthonous

This term was also stolen shamelessly from BOTNS. I mainly like it because it starts with an A and I think it's amusing to pack as many A words into this worldbuilding as I can. With that debt acknowledged, Wolfe's use of the term seems racially loaded¹ in a way I very much want to avoid or subvert.

On Antibor, the term 'Autochthonous' refers (in a strict sense) to cultures living on the Irð before the Alabstrine elite was exiled there and (in a looser sense) to anyone living outside the web of economic and cultural ties radiating from the Citadels. They have no overarching commonality outside these definitions. By the latter eons, almost all the cultures listed below are extensively hybridized with Alabastrine culture;

They're my outlet for being playful & experimental with imagined cultural traits, social formations, customs, languages, art styles, etc. But in doing so I intend to avoid uncritically reproducing tropes of indigeneity. The societies of Antibor are technologically heterogenous, but none are to be thought of as primitive. Some are egalitarian, some hierarchical. Some live sustainably, otherse are wasteful. Some are peaceful, some tend to be warlike. Similarly, I'm still working out the degree to which some or all of these cultures are actively marginalized or oppressed by the Alabastrine vernacular culture and how much they are simply 'other'.

In a lighter sense, I really loved how Vance's Dying Earth books are peppered with these weird little towns where the inhabitants have some really specific style of dress and also some ludicrously arbitrary law or tradition that inevitably suckers the main character into an inane misadventure. It may not come through in this post but when actually filling hexes with Autochthonous villages I hope to mix in some whimsy along these lines.

Some of these cultures are derived from the WWN-generated ones above. Many are just random names I made up when carving Antibor up into regions.

My list so far:

• Xikai
  • Mostly as described above, they represent the largest and most powerful Autochthonous state on the continent, occupying the temperate coastal region of Lon Galo.
    • 
  • Distinguished by having four fingers per hand -- a rare case of physical appearance and culture aligning. Immigrants from outside Lon Galo often voluntarily sever their fifth or sixth digit(s).
  • Prolific landscape architects, they maintain a large but evenly-distributed population, unlike most of the rest of the continent. They fastidiously defend their lands against the sporadic xenoflora found elsewhere.
  • Xikai names are structured as Caste-profession-family-personal:
    • Wallraiser Mason Fionn Dek, Tiller Vintner Zinain Ke, Tiller Shepherd Requin Ba, Shaper Tailor Gresava Ba, Shaper Potter Vadassa Ke, Spearcaster Corporal Shashar Ke, Tiller Vintner Gresava Nu, Tiller Genesplicer Kerak Nu, Wallraiser Carpenter Miritak Set, Spearcaster Mercenary Decimari Dah, Shaper Potter Kaitan Ba, Shaper Tailor Xirasen Set, Tiller Genesplicer Kaitan Ba, Spearcaster Peltast Kaitan Su, Tiller Farmhand Zinain Ka
• Iotians
  • Mostly as above, but recast as a more widespread maritime culture, honorary privileged subjects of the Archon Nereus. They are expert breeders of aquatic megafauna (such as the sought-after Emperor Ragworm), which they use for food and transport.
  • Their permanent settlements are concentrated in the islands near The Spine and in the Ektashi Main, but they maintain many smaller settlements around the coast.
    • 
  • I'm still working on how to evolve their names away from the Greek roots I was using before
• Stregovari
  • Somewhat overhauled and recast as faux-central-European denizens of the inland Taiga regions (Skagmar Basin, Balvarada, Svathi Riin Kalai) and the general Psoutheste. This is one of my concessions to stereotypes, as having something like a central Europe analogue opens up quite a few module options.
    • 
  • Names are in progress, but I'm currently thinking of a mashed-up list of gothic and proto-slavic sounds
• Tlaxians
  • Mostly as above but recast as reclusive masters of genetic engineering; they live in overgrown brutalist arcologies deep in the rain forest. Aspiring vivimancers pay dearly to learn their secrets.
  • Located in the farthest reaches of The Spine
    • 
  • They may have some connection to (or even control over?) the geo-engineering that keeps Antibor's climate stable.
  • I'm working on evolving the names away from the Mesoamerican list I was using; but I think I want to keep some of the sounds intact.
• Xeroians
  • Denizens of the arid Psouthern mountains of Xeroia
    • 
  • Resolutely egalitarian, I imagine them a bit like the Annaresti from The Disposessed. I'm still working on taking it further though. In what traditions or history is this tendency rooted? How do they relate to the presence of the Archon Eloaios in their homeland?
  • Xeroian names are mostly inspired by cheesy sword-and-sorcery names, and the aforementioned LeGuin novel: R'ktath, Oiie, Am-ra Tan, La-alah, T'skoth, Re-h'ka, Tu, Kulthulos, V'nakan, Tsu'bokh, Shivekh, Zha'duul
• Yedithian (not yet sure what they're going to be like!)
• Riluvii
  • Inhabitants of a tiny enclave next to Lon Galo (the Xikai homeland). They live in grass dugouts on the steppe that are deliberately difficult to spot from a distance.
    • 
  • Names are mangled parody of American suburbanites: Bryschleigh, Ghrayden, Breggsleigh, Tressika, Gholton
  • Really don't have more than this so far. It's a stupid bit but I'm determined to scrape something interesting together lol
• Concavitan (TBD)
• Gelidian (TBD)
• Seventh Gorth
  • Inhabitants of Gorth7 and Magnasanti
    • 
  • They're a weird attempt at mashing together cyberpunk and fantasy; tbh I don't really know what I'm doing here.
  • Names are prefixed with numbers: 322Ophaline, 7Mark, 42Barnabas, surnames are capitalist buzzwords like 'Innovation', 'Synergy', etc.
• Quelesquoine (TBD)

Aldebarati

The Aldebarati were brought to Irð as battle-thralls by alien invaders known as the 'Swallowed Ones' around 4000 years ago. They fought a coalition of Antiboreans to the brink of defeat only to be left masterless when the mysterious species that originally created the Swallowed Ones abruptly exterminated them with an engineered plague.

Afterwards, many Aldebarati adopted the Icosidyadic faith and partially integrated into Alabastrine or Autochthonous societies. However, they broke into three schismatic sects during the Epoch of Heresies:

• The Golden Men
  • Settled on The Spine (Psouthestern savannahs) and adopted YXVTH as their god, believing it to be one of the beings that liberated them from the Swallowed Ones. They have a tightly-regulated economic system built around the exacting requirements for supplicating their deity.
    • 
  • Their name derives from a secret baptismal ritual that turns one's skin a metallic gold color.
• Urdukites
  • Adopted a nomadic existence as mastodon-herders in the interior steppe. They worship Urduk, a powerful god embodied by the perpetual wall of storms that encircles Antibor. Theirs is a millenarian faith that believes Urduk will one day sweep over the inland reaches of Antibor, washing away the decadent Alabastrines and initiating an epoch of renewal.
    • 
  • Many Urdukites maintain close partnerships with specific communities of Proboscideans, trading their mastodon byproducts for those of the Proboscidean's simian livestock.
  • Urdukite priests are known as Fulgurarchs. They live as stylites until struck by one of Urduk's bolts. Those that survive can wield powerful anodic magic.
    • 
• Ektashi
  • The Ektashi are descended from Aldebarati and Alabastrines who sided with the 'Rebel Archon' Sabaoth during the Epoch of Heresies and joined his exile on the isle of Ektash. They are known for mechanical skill and mysticism, trawling the savannahs of Ektash in 11-legged peripatetic monastery-cities.
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  • The Ektashi faith is an inverted version of the Icosidyad in which the Fool is alleged to be responsible for bewitching THE BOUNDLESS COSMOS into a dream-state. Most hold that this can be penetrated through prayer and fasting, but some extremists identify one or more Archons or prominent figures as literal embodiments of The Fool that must be slain for imprisoned souls to reunite with the Divine Unity.

Aldebarati forenames are loosely inspired by those of the Dunmer from Morrowind: Dranar, Varryn, Lavo, Relyn, Releth, Etenir, Mirox, Halla, Bel, Fevera, Drarel, Nedryn, Ravasa, Mevindra, Relys

Surnames indicate clan membership, of which the Ektashi have four, the Urdukites seven, and the Golden Men ten.

#antibor #lore24