https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/ 2026-04-07T04:09:09+00:00 https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/ https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=wiki:logo.png text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:37+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-01&rev=1706193817&do=diff I expect that most of the people who would bother to read this are people who already know about 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 text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:37+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-04&rev=1706193817&do=diff Here are True Facts about Avishraa! avishraa is the name in start - a long-standing lingua franca - of the largest, and only habitable, natural satellite of a Saturn-like gas giant which is known, likewise in Imperial, Kastun. Avishraa is smaller than Earth, with about 88% of its radius and 87% of its surface gravity. It orbits close enough to be, barely, within Kastun's magnetosphere - fortunate, since it generates no significant magnetosphere of its own - but far enough not to lie within the … text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:36+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-05&rev=1706193816&do=diff I was going to continue on to the topic of evolutionary history, but I realized that before I do that, I should probably explain timekeeping, because otherwise no one's going to know what I'm talking about when I say “millions of cycles”. While the planet that text/html 2024-01-25T14:56:44+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-07&rev=1706194604&do=diff An explanation of the evolutionary history of the three known sophont species is illustrative, particularly since it provides an opportunity to show what other Avishraan lifeforms are like. It is important to remember that a large proportion of Avishraan vertebrates are text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:36+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-09&rev=1706193816&do=diff A comparison of the takmar and the xtauh is probably worth musing upon, not only as the two most prominent sophont species on Avishraa but as very closely related species. There are a number of things that make them different, which are the ones they tend to focus on when interacting with each other, but there are also an awful lot of things they have in common. Let's start with those. text/html 2024-01-17T18:57:47+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-12&rev=1705517867&do=diff In a way, it's a little hard writing about this. The xtauh - or the takmar or orghysh, for that matter - are a whole species, not a homogenous mass, any more than humans are. They have their different cultures and languages and customs, and numerous individuals within each one, and nearly any general rule one might propose for their behavior, there's almost certain to be an exception, if not many of them, somewhere. So when I write about each the mindset and behaviors of a species as a whole, as… text/html 2024-01-17T18:57:47+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-14&rev=1705517867&do=diff While xtauh don't really like being too bottled up together, it remains a fact that there are going to be places where they live in closer proximity than others. There are lots of reasons for this. Is there a place where there's more food or other resources than in the surrounding areas? A defensible place that's safe from enemies? A convenient site for trade? A place of religious or mythological significance? People are going to want to live there - and it's hard to stop them, unless there are … text/html 2024-01-25T14:54:03+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-18&rev=1706194443&do=diff The impression given by the outlying villages is only increased when first beholding itself, and with good reason, for in many ways it's the same thing except scaled up. As mentioned, the city is at a river fork; it rests in the narrow angle between the River text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:34+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-20&rev=1706193814&do=diff Continuing the Poradrin stuff is taking a while, so I thought I'd detour into a completely unrelated subject, because sure, why not! One of the less stable pieces of lore related to the xtauh and the takmar is that they are both prone to suffering a fear of the open sea. This fact has had some strong consequences for the history of their civilizations, because it means that, although they've built ships and boats for a large part of their history, they haven't done anything nearly as impressive… text/html 2024-01-17T19:21:51+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-23&rev=1705519311&do=diff And here we are, the third part at last! The last one gave an idea of what residential neighborhoods are like in . But what, you might ask, about the bigger picture? What about infrastructure? What about services? What about crime? What about maintaining spaces vital to the public good? In a human city, even well before modern times, many of these things would be the remit of a government - since it doesn't sound like the city has much of one, how are these things handled? text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:33+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-29&rev=1706193813&do=diff In many ways, the Chosen are what Avishraa was built on - not least because Shyriath-the-character, for whom the setting was built, was one. @pinkgothic has gone into the OOC history of the Chosen before, but I wanted to touch on this subject again, mostly because, in the current continuity, there are some things that have changed since their text/html 2024-01-25T18:30:24+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-06-30&rev=1706207424&do=diff In all of avishraa, there are only two - possibly three, now - major places where the Chosen can live openly without being hunted down, enslaved, or otherwise made miserable. One is the city-state of , whose peculiar tolerance for “witches”, and indeed other types that society might consider unsavory, stems from its history as a penal colony for the city of text/html 2024-01-18T19:30:12+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-01&rev=1705606212&do=diff Element magic is the most common type among the Chosen; a little under one-quarter of the population is either solely or primarily of this type. As previously mentioned, elementalists each control one “element”, and that only; the results (though not the technique) are similar to those of the art of text/html 2023-09-18T19:05:17+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-03&rev=1695063917&do=diff Substance magic is the second most common type among the Chosen, with a little under one-fifth of the population being either solely or primarily of this type. While both Element and Substance magic deal with the control of matter, the fundamental difference between them is that while elementalists control its movements in the aggregate, alchemists instead control its building blocks: to be more precise, their powers extend to the manipulation of first-generation text/html 2024-01-18T19:30:34+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-04&rev=1705606234&do=diff (Note: after some consideration, I'm re-ordering how common some of the magic types are. From this Tirade forward, I'll be writing about magic types in the new order from most to least common. The previous two aren't affected. ...also, ohmygodit's3AMwhatamIevendoingup) text/html 2024-01-17T18:57:44+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-07&rev=1705517864&do=diff (Considering all the pseudoscience that went into the previous two Tirades, Spark is probably going to sound a bit thin by comparison.) Spark magic is the fourth most common type among the Chosen, with around fourteen percent of the population being either solely or primarily of this type. text/html 2024-01-18T19:30:53+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-09&rev=1705606253&do=diff Shift magic is the fifth most common type among the Chosen, with around twelve percent of the population being solely or primarily of this type. Shifters are, simply, shapeshifters, able to alter their bodies from their natural form. The following rules of thumb apply: text/html 2024-01-18T19:31:24+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-12&rev=1705606284&do=diff Mind magic is the sixth most common type among the Chosen, with around ten percent of the population being solely or primarily of this type. The abilities of mentalists all involve psionics: the power of the mind to reach out and affect the world through non-physical means. While their best-known and most powerful abilities involve other minds, they also have available to them a range of abilities involving the physical world. text/html 2023-09-18T19:05:17+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-16&rev=1695063917&do=diff Life magic is the seventh most common type among the Chosen, with slightly less than five percent of the population being solely or primarily of this type. Anything that lives carries with it a certain amount of life force, representing the vitality and health of its body. How much any particular organism has depends partly on its physical size, but very much on whether and how fast it is growing and what its state of health is. Each organism's life force has also a different character or flavo… text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:30+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-18&rev=1706193810&do=diff Span magic is, of the eight magic types, by far the least common among the Chosen. There is generally no more than one oracle in every hundred thousand Chosen; given that there have probably never been that many Chosen alive at one time over the whole of Avishraa, oracles are a once-in-a-lifetime sort of occurrence. text/html 2024-01-25T14:43:30+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-07-31&rev=1706193810&do=diff So I'm ready to start doing some worldbuilding stuff again, and at @pinkgothic's suggestion, I'm going to try to tackle the topic of sex and gender roles and relations for the takmar and the xtauh; the two species remain similar enough that most statements on this topic apply to both, and those differences that crop up can be mentioned at the appropriate time. (By contrast, it should be assumed, unless stated otherwise, that most of this does not apply to the text/html 2024-01-18T19:31:56+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-08-06&rev=1705606316&do=diff In this Tirade, I thought I'd start out with the ways males and females are involved in forming relationships, in childbearing, and in family life. Courtship Courtship, here, refers to the process of initiating a relationship, regardless of its length or level of formality. text/html 2024-01-18T19:33:05+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-08-16&rev=1705606385&do=diff Continuing on from the previous, the next few tirades are going to be about differing roles in what might loosely be called family life. There are a number of factors among the takmin species that, in certain respects, causes family structure to be less flexible than it is in human societies: text/html 2023-09-18T19:05:17+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2019-09-16&rev=1695063917&do=diff Continuing on from the previous, this tirade deals with the subject of gender roles in what might loosely be called the nuclear family, which in one variation or another is generally considered an “ideal” by most takma and xtauh cultures, and is the most common type in nearly any environment that isn't utterly marginal. text/html 2024-01-18T17:23:08+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:2020-02-15&rev=1705598588&do=diff Takmar and xtauh have a long, inconsistent, and extremely complicated history with gender identities and modes of sexuality that are not what most would consider “normal”. As with humans, many cultures consider the latter to be a basic fact of the universe, deviation from which is anything from confusion to an illness to a moral evil; but, also as with humans, this either ignores or actively discounts the presence and prevalence of what we might today call text/html 2023-09-18T19:05:17+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://shyriath.a2hosted.com/avishraa/doku.php?id=tirades:start&rev=1695063917&do=diff Partly to help himself articulate himself on certain topics, partly to see if anyone at all was interested, and partly just because he had a social platform with an audience that was plural but probably not too big as to induce stage fright, Shyriath began posting on