I expect that most of the people who would bother to read this are people who already know about [[universe:mikurmiya:avishraa|Avishraa]]. But if, by some miracle, I acquire a readership that doesn't, it was a setting I first invented as the place of origin for the roleplaying character - Shyriath - whose name I kept long after I stopped using the character himself. It was rarely, if ever, directly seen during that period, but it [[amberworld:|steadily accumulated lore]] that became important in the plots revolving around Shyriath and several of my other characters. Separately, Dread ([[https://www.schlaugh.com/pinkgothic/|@pinkgothic]]), a friend who had been introduced to both myself and to Avishraa during the same period, found it interesting enough to [[thuban:|reuse and expand on it]] in ver own fashion, much to my eternal astonishment and gratification.

In early-to-mid-2017, when I wanted to begin a worldbuilding project, I was searching around for a suitable basis for one when an ongoing Avishraa-based RP involving Dread and [[https://www.schlaugh.com/rehchoortahn/|@rehchoortahn]] reminded me of the setting. It had previously occurred to me, over the years, that I had always wanted to more directly explore Avishraa, to get an idea of what it was like aside from through the memories of the old characters - who, by their very nature, represented a small and specialized subset of the population - and to correct some of the things about it that an older me had thought that a younger me should have done differently. Here, it seemed, was finally a reason to do it.

At least part of the motivation behind Avishraa was, and remains, the possibly childish one to have a world populated by intelligent dragons, or at least dragon-like beings, with their own towns and civilizations. I am perfectly happy to admit that my main justification for this is "because I want to", possibly with a side helping of "and because there are too many depictions of dragons who don't build cities or use tools". But the species so featured are not //quite// like the dragons of Western lore, and I am attempting to give them their own traits, evolutionary histories, sociobiologies, and so on, in the attempt to give them their own twists and turns and be at least mildly interesting as creatures.

I don't really intend that all of my schlaughs should be about Avishraa, but since I have a voice here I might as well use it to blab about my pet project, especially since there are things I might want to say that don't easily fit into the encyclopedia-article-ish format that I tend to use on [[https://www.worldanvil.com/w/avishraa-shyriathfarstrider|World Anvil]]. I will make them easily distinguishable - as I am this one - through the title and the tags as a loose series.

I considered calling them "The Avishraa //Lectures//", but that seemed a bit generous. I went with "Tirades" instead, and I encourage any readers to view schlaughs in this vein as the extremely geeky equivalent of an old man in decrepit clothes shouting incoherent arguments at passersby on a street corner. I sort of enjoy that self-image.