Ralph's conworlding thread

[Ralph]

I've been having some good ideas about Kantaranyan society and culture recently, so I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread to put my conworlding ideas that I want to share in. I'll try to post some stuff about the Kantaranyans later today, but for this post I just wanted to give a brief introduction to my conworld and how it came to be.

The conworld's got two points of origin really. The first was a game I played with a friend and my sister when we were younger where we'd pretend to come from some fictional country. Mine was a place called Cantarinia which has gone through various incarnations to become my main conculture today (it's gone from being somewhere vaguely eastern-European to being a tropical island!)

Secondly, when my dad was younger he used to play war games, and invented a continent as a setting for a campaign, which several of his friends playing the leaders of the countries (he also invented a conlang (called Aithousan) for the continent, which I intend to write a grammar of at some point). I revived the game for a bit with some school friends about 6 years ago, and when some people expressed an interest in exploring the world outside the continent, I decided to create a wider world for it, incorporating ideas from various imaginary countries I'd invented before. The game didn't survive my move to university, but I carried on thinking about the world and its languages.

I've named the world 'Tíruména' (which is derived from the Aithousan word 'tír', meaning 'country' [it's supposed to mean 'all the countries' or something like that]). It's generally pretty earth-like - many of the animals and plants are similar to those on earth, the planet's intelligent inhabitants are almost identical to humans and so on. (The planet's year is even 365.25 times the length of its day.)

My own concultures (or at least the one's I'm currently developing) are located in the tropics on a continent in the world's western hemisphere.

Unfortunately there won't be a map here because I haven't scanned any of my map ideas... I do have a map of the continent my dad created though if anyone wants to see it.

That's it for now. (Although you're welcome to ask any questions about the above ) I'll start writing up some of my ideas about Kantaranya this afternoon/evening.

[Ralph]

So, as promised, here's a bit of information about Kantaranya.

Kantaranya is the largest island in the Haximara Archipelago, which is located in the tropics north of the equator in Tíruména's western hemisphere. Given it's location, the Archipelago has a humid tropical climate. In the centre of the island is a region of highland, including a few mountains and a dormant or possibly extinct volcano, while the rest of the island is rainforest-covered lowland criss-crossed by the various streams and rivers running from the highlands to the sea.

The culture I'm referring to as 'Kantaranyan' here is that of the related Kammar and Amatta peoples who primarily inhabit the river banks in the south of the island. Kantaranyan society is organised around matrilineal clans, which are sub-divided into smaller units called qener, comprising between 5 and 10 adult women and their husbands and children.

In rural areas, a clan will normally inhabit a strip of land along one bank of a river. Settlement is not continous, but rather each qene inhabits a farming settlement on the river bank, each of which is separated from each other by rainforest. Communication between a clan's qener, and between neighbouring clans, is conducted by the river, and each clan also maintains a meeting place where clan members can gather together to celebrate important festivals. Within each settlement, there are two main buildings: one (located on the right facing the river) accommodates the women and children, and the other the adult men. The rural economy is based primarily around farming (with rice and corn being the main crops), which is the domain of a qene's women, and fishing and hunting, carried out by the men.

In the cities, the buildings inhabited by members of a given clan tend to be clustered together, with each qene normally inhabiting a single three-storey building, which work space and communal areas on the ground floor (including shop space to allow the qene's members to sell things to make money), the women's accommodation on the first floor and the men's accommodation on the second.

Clans do not have any sort of permanent leadership, although a clan's eldest women oversee festivals and can be called on to resolve disputes. Government in urban areas is conducted by a council of elders from the city's founding clans.

So that's a bit of an introduction to Kantaranyan social organisation and so on. I think it would help me to refine my ideas (and to explore areas I haven't put so much thought to yet) to answer questions about the conculture if anyone has any, so fire away!