#urro

Appearance

One of the more visually distinctive peoples of the continent, the Ürro have a wider range of hair colors than were seen before their arrival. Blond and reddish hair are generally considered Ürro features, though of course they have spread through intermixing over the past 800 years. The Ürro typically have unusually pale skin, though there is some overlap between darker Ürro who spend a lot of time in the sun and paler Yantri. They also sunburn easily and get freckles more frequently than the ethnic groups native to the continent.

Beauty Ideals

I made sims of this, because that’s the kind of nerd I am.

The current Ürro beauty standard fetishizes paleness and blond hair, to the degree that bleaching hair has become common. What’s not visible in these pictures, because I’m too lazy to go back and get a 3/4 view, is that a hawk nose is also highly valued. Thin brows are in fashion, as is long hair -- braided for men, worn loose and loosely curling or wavy for women. Freckles are looked down on, and red hair is considered unlucky and usually dyed or bleached.

Body type-wise (I’m not doing this in the Sims because it’s virtually impossible to get rid of the thigh gap), women strive for an hourglass shape, but a thicker one than we see idealized in modern American society. Men should be shaped roughly like vending machines, and preferably approach that size (high yield crops developed by creepy eugenics monks mean that people on the continent are typically taller than pre-modern people on Earth).

There’s the easy part done. Now the other cultural stuff, of which I have less.

Religion

The native Ürro religion is devoted to three goddesses known as the Three Mothers, and denies the existence of any other deities. And I do mean the native Ürro religion. It’s not clear what the state of religious diversity in the Ürro homeland was, but the people who crossed to the continent we’re concerned with were all of this main religion, with some admixture of unorthodox beliefs here and there.

I really don’t know much about the Three Mothers, other than that they’re typically depicted as owls. The image below has kind of become a keystone for my vision of the Ürro aesthetic at the time of their arrival.

(A medallion with stylized three owls, each a different type, arranged in a circle with their pinion feathers interlocked. Celtic knotwork and spirals decorate the upperwings. The image is copyright 2008 Amanda Fisher and watermarked with her URL, www.afmetalsmith.com.)

So yeah, not much there yet. I do know there’s been syncretism over the years, with many Ürro now believing other gods exist in some lesser capacity and some non-Ürro incorporating the Three Mothers into their pantheon in some way, much to the frustration of the heads of the Ürro religion.

Though people of any sex can enter the Ürro priesthood, the three heads of the religion must have given birth. They could be non-binary or trans men, but they have to have had a child as the biological mother.

Material Culture

Decorative metalwork features heavily in Ürro culture. Goldsmiths are especially admired, and Ürro goldsmithing is the most sophisticated on the western continent.