#fokuts

Two left and then I gotta do this all again tomorrow. Hopefully I can do a little bit of this when im out of the country, even if it is just by hand.

I’ve created a large list of major holidays which are seasonal kind of in nature. There are also days for every god (of which there are a lot more in Chaum). Most people on the border of these countries celebrate a combination of these holidays. There are many holidays which are celebrated on a local level but there are also a number of holidays almost everyone celebrates. 

March: New Year (Universal) (The first day of spring also marks the first day of the new year.)

April: Spring Feast (Universal) (All of winter has blown away and the flowers are growing, this is a time of peace and exuberance. Most people will set aside even the harshest feud with their neighbor.)

May: Mountain Day (Nizid) (Celebration of the mountains they call home. has lots of artisans showcasing their wares. it is also the day the government sends out money to every citizen as the country always ends the year with a profit.)

June: Hero’s Day (Fokuts) (Semi-religious holiday where the Fokuts clans celebrate those great people from which they are descended.)

July: Longest Day (Universal) (Lots of feasts, parades, and staying awake for about forty-eight hours)

August: River’s Float (Fokuts) (Another artisan holiday but this one focused around boat-wrights and wood-carvers) 

September: King’s Day (Chaum) (celebration of the king and also every king they’ve had before)

October: Spirit Week (Nizid) (starts with days of worship and solemnity and ends with outright celebration)

November: Autumn Feast (Universal) (think thanksgiving)

December: Remembrance Day (Fokuts) (day to remember and celebrate the dead)

January: Winter Solitude (Universal) (day to remember the year and also settle any issues that you don’t want to follow you into the next year.)

February: History Day (Chaum) (Day to celebrate and remember the ancestors from whom you came. kind of a fraught and tense day for some.)

Gotta blast through these because I am hashtag not feeling it. 

Fokuts: The Council of Clans and the Fau are the two main governing bodies. The Council of Clans is made of up the two representatives of the fifteen most populous clans and fifteen of the richest clans. If there is overlap, the rich part becomes their main factor and all of the other population based seats move up one to fill the space and the next largest clan not on the council takes the lowest seats. Every twenty years, a census is done to determine which tribe takes a place on the council. Council members serve for five years each. The Fau is elected from any clan, council member or not, and is usually chosen as a youth who has apprenticed with the council, this apprenticeship is one of the most cherished position in a clan which serves on the council and is highly competitive for those who are from other clans. There are at any time roughly sixty apprentices to the Council, half from clans with seats half from those without. 

Chaum: The Ruler of Chaum rules absolutely. The Yaudairo is either the child, grandchild, or cousin out to the second up to thrice removed of the last Yaudairo. They are then exposed to a mystical item which judges their worth as a candidate. This item is a closely kept secret of the royal family and most people living in Chaum believe the Yaudairo is chosen on a basis of favoritism or by some influence over a dying Yaudairo. Governors appointed by the Yaudairo then approved by the people of the district do most of the direct, small governing tasks.

Final post for today because this means I’m all caught up!! Once I finish this post, I’ll go through and add all of my posts to the /ehkv page! I would also like to say I think a lot of the stuff that went into the making of the different views on sexuality is what i think worked best with the ruler of each country. Xazexa needs a society that’s going to support her sexuality while the characters of Fadaya and Auwa both have more to gain development wise if they come from stricter/less supportive backgrounds. 

Fokuts: Gender means very little to a group of people who all wear the same type of clothings, which is a skirt and jewelry. In general, they are also the people most comfortable with nakedness in a nonsexual context. They tend to be a group of people who is very serious about monogamy, only because of the complicated clan system they live in. 

Nizid: While most people are pretty chill with frank discussions of sex and sexuality (winters are long and cold and lonely), the most elite in the society have strict rules about when and how sexuality of any type can be expressed. They have stricter gender roles than Fokuts but they are accepting of any non-cis person within their society and non-binary people have their own class of expectations and fashions they adhere to especially in the higher castes. 

I’m a day late on this one but honestly, I’m doing it now! so I’m good! I’m alright! As a disclaimer, I’m about to do no research on this. Most of the architecture I’m about to describe will be based more on the aesthetic I’ve ascribed to each country than on actual good architectural knowledge. The same for the civilizations. I doubt these civs could exist in this way in the real world but I’ve got better things to worry about than the this. Like creating a good story.

Fokuts: Most of the buildings are made from wood. This is one of the easiest, most plentiful building materials in the area. Basically, the capital is the only major city where you’ll find buildings that aren’t entirely wooden. The buildings in the capital are instead made of petrified wood. Since a lot of the land in Fokuts is marshy at the very least, a lot of buildings are built either on stilts or in the massive trees which thrive in the swamps. The central communal space in the villages are the clan houses, where each clan in the village has space for storage and meeting space. Most cultural events take place in the clan house. In larger cities, richer clans might have their own clan house. All clans who have a representative on the Clan Council, part of the governing body, have additional space in the Council house, located in the capital. Another building every village will have is a Messenger Post. These are small buildings located along the major waterways which have both boat repair supplies and space for the ferrier bats to roost. Human and bat alike are used to deliver news and packages from one village to another. The human messengers all have small raft-boats which these use to navigate all types of waterways. Buildings in Fokuts are often rebuilt after bad floods or when they begin to rot after exposure to the moisture. 

Chaum: Most of Chaum’s architecture is heavily influenced by the ancient civilization who once inhabited their country. Many of the government buildings in use are buildings that have rarely stopped functioning as government buildings in the thousand and a half years since the Empire fell. A lot of the building material has been reclaimed from these ruins and most people try to either emulate the architectural style of the Empire, with its floating annexes and impossible engineering, or the style of the raiders, with large domed buildings. In most cities, the people live in apartment style housing, in rural towns, the people live in individual homes with their immediate families. One of the few surviving cultural remnants from the natives of Chaum is the shell-shaped music halls, which have been rebuilt and rebuilt as cultural centers extending past just music, with many schools also being held in those halls. The magic schools are held in massive tents which follow the natural flow of the leylines as the seasons change.