hologramblue

The aesthetic of Allagan technology is effectively its standard, so far as I've assumed. The TRON thing is very distinctive, and the biggest point of national pride that can be gleaned from what's left of them (Crystal Tower, Fractal Continuum, etc) was their use of advanced technology, quality of life resulting from technology, etc. Allagan colors are unnecessary glowy bits.

Just the fact that there's an established variety of factions helps, actually; it's a lot easier to just make up a new faction with its own norms than to try to tease out some universal heretic culture. Where does the very first quote on the first link come from? That speaker shares a name with Truthspeaker Huibairten from the FATE chain in the Forelands - coincidence, or did that guy have dialogue in 1.0?

Heretics! By which I specifically mean people of Coerthan origin who are actually allied with Dravanians against Ishgard, not political inconveniences to the Ishgardian status quo who've been marked for destruction. Things I know: 1) Any information on heretics that comes from Ishgardian sources - CCH MSQ, leves, other flavor text - is necessarily biased, first because it will discount any possible motivations or beliefs in favor of THEY JUST HATE HALONE, and secondly because Ishgardians lump a lot of different things into the "heretic" label. Some of this bias is easy to pick out. Some of it is less so, especially in things like FATE descriptions where the line between IC and OOC description can be unclear. 2) It is, at least, safe to assume that heretics are not universally people who got up one day with a raging hate-on for Halone and hankering to murder some of their countrymen. Plenty seem to have been failed by or driven out from Ishgardian society and displaced their faith onto dragons. 3) That said, many of those we get to see seem less than lucid, though I'm not sure how much of that is ARR jank (aevises in SV Hard come to mind). Drinking dragon blood and completing your transformation appears to do something to your mental state. 4) There is some kind of established heretic belief system - see the draconian rosaries, the value placed on transforming into an aevis, the images of Shiva. This info is heavily colored by Ishgard bias, because anything that seems weird and aberrant gets talked up and anything actually kind of reasonable is denied. 5) Militant heretics are, if not friends with Nidhogg's minions, then at least on good enough terms to fight together with them, as when the dude summons a wyvern at Witchdrop. Things I know I don't know: 1) Any info from the Dragoon job quests. Things I'd like to know: 1) Just how many heretics are there? Is defecting to the Dravanians like joining a tight-knit club where you know most people, or is it much more distributed than that? If you're not an undercover heretic and you've actually packed up and headed west, what does your daily life and social circle look like? 2) Are the militant heretics we've seen pretty representative of the whole - like, to be cool with the Dravanians, you have to commit to fighting - or are there "casual" heretics out there who just kind of live their dragon-revering lives? 3) Was worship of Shiva a thing before Iceheart showed up with her revelation, or was that story news to everyone? 4) What exactly does turning into an aevis do to you? If you don't get shanked by Ishgardians, does it leave any kind of tempering-like effect, or do you just kind of go back to normal eventually...? Do dragons actually possess hypno-vision that enthralls people? How much of this is Ishgard talking up how scary evil dragons are and how much is actually kind of shady? 5) How much face-to-face contact with dragons does the average heretic have? Is this mostly an ideology that is spread and negotiated mortal to mortal, or does(/did) the Horde have an active interest in cultivating and working with a force of Coerthan apostates? Basically: seeking a realistic perspective on the lives of Dravanian sympathizers that allows for RPing one beyond a caricature level.

I think Garleans are considered (by Eorzean classification standards) their own "race", most similar to Hyurans but made distinct by the third eye and being kind of tall and lanky. ...I think. How to represent that with the models we have available is something I smacked my head against for a while and eventually gave up on - closest I ever got was with a Midlander-F set as tall as possible and with the most angular face options, but it never quite worked out. Shame the aether insensitivity means we'll probably never get playable Garlean models. Good luck!

OH RIGHT that's where that paragraph was going, re: rural vs urban, along the lines of that Coerthas leve. Money gets its value from your ability to get things with it. The universality of its value today is a product of the reliability of trade networks; you can count on being able to go to the store and exchange $$$ for goods, because they can count on being able to exchange that $$$ to their suppliers for goods, and so on down the line. At the root of it, the value of money reflects confidence in the physical availability of goods. So, if for whatever reason people aren't confident in their ability to trade a certain kind of coin for Stuff, the value of the coin dives. In the Coerthas example, these rural Coerthan towns can't eat or wear gil - it's a commodity for trading with merchants to get goods they can't produce on their own. Problem is that the snows have fucked up trade routes, so the presence of these merchants is unreliable, and bam presto, taking gil instead of barter is a gamble because it might not get you what you need. The value of gil dives. And here's where I was going - I would imagine that other frontier-like locations in Eorzea have something similar going on (though not to the same extent as poor Coerthas), where it's common for people to be resource-rich and cash-poor because money isn't super crucial to trade within a small village, just for getting goods from elsewhere. Ever read a fairy tale where grandma pulls a few dusty coins out from under the bed and tells grandkid to go to the city and buy medicine/whatever? Yeah. Something worth thinking on if you play a character from a remote area.

Oh yeah, definitely. There is no One Great Trajectory of history or technological progress or anything of the sort; different corners of Hydaelyn take inspiration from different facets and periods of real-world history, but nothing maps perfectly to the world as we know it. In the case of economic ablooblah, when I say "pre-industrial economy", I'm thinking of the specific developments that really shape how people in the "developed world" today relate to goods and currency. Things like the technology and infrastructure used to get goods from place to place, the communications technology we use to find out what's available in other places and what its value is (and thus standardize prices and currency values), and the political happenings that determine the shape of trade routes and the stability of currency. I think of Eorzea's economy as being generally more similar to (what we think of as) a pre-industrial economy than a post-industrial one mainly for two reasons: first is the reliance on artisans and handmade goods over mass-manufacturing, and second is the apparent reliance on overland transport by chocobo. The first is a gimme - mass-manufacturing (and automation in agriculture and natural resource extraction) totally changes a society's concept of what things are worth. Reading up on what life was like before those advances in reality gives a better impression of how an Eorzean might think of their money and what they buy with it. The second kind of varies since there are airships whizzing around, but airships can't service every settlement on the continent, and we see tons of cargo movement by chocobo. Eorzeans have to contend with all kinds of hazards on the road, which complicates supply chains. One of the big effects of modern transportation tech is a slow equalizing of urban and rural areas in terms of what goods can be acquired, and sort of a trend of overcoming geography - think the seasonlessness of grocery stores, how you can walk in and buy an orange absolutely whenever because it's shipped in from Florida (assuming you're American), or how your proximity to the, idk, pencil factory doesn't affect the cost of a box of pencils because to transportation overhead was so low. Eorzea is going to have way, way less of that. I forgot what the rest of this paragraph was going to be because it's 2 am and I'm wiped. Tl;dr lots of subtle little things inform our whole concept of what money is and what it means and what it's worth and those subtle little things are at play in Eorzea too and it's super cool and now I really want a Cadbury creme egg because I'm thinking about seasonal availability

In gil and other yen-based RPG currency systems, I always think of 100 as being kind of the default unit. ....But Eorzea has a pre-industrial economy, so it's not as simple as "100 gil is one dollar k bye". The prices of things are going to vary pretty widely depending on both how close you are to a city (vendors will charge more in places they expect to get customers who CAN pay more) and availability of product (this is still true to an extent in the modern developed world, but reliance on hazardous overland travel = much lower geographical threshold for what constitutes "local and available"). Money doesn't have inherent worth - its worth arises from consensus. So how much a gil is worth is really as simple as looking at the offerings around you and seeing how much you could get for what you have, and how much it'll buy you. When prices in one location seem too high or too low, that's a merchant's chance to make profit by buying goods in one place and selling them in another, provided transport doesn't eat up their margins. The same is true for overseas markets - gil has value there as long as the people accepting it can turn around and use it to buy other things, so the EATC and other Eorzean merchants having a presence in Kugane is good news for Eorzean who want to shop there. (That might be an IC explanation for why gil prices are so high in Kugane? Small amounts of gil not being very useful since it's used mostly to purchase imported goods? I Am Not An Economist.)

Huh. I misremembered! I hope they shed. Removing enough scales to cover a boat can't be...pleasant. Or healthy. Even over a long period of time. 8(

Not my first post, but I have a newbie question. The first thing I noticed upon popping into Mateus was the alphabet soup in RP-tagged characters' search info. I know "ERP" is smut, but is that the same thing as E/RP? What do M and WU and the other acronyms stand for? Proper intro stuff: - FFXIV is my first MMO, I started earlier this year when they changed the free trial terms and I am lovin' it. - I've RPed for almost ten years now, but mostly on Livejournal/Dreamwidth, where the standard is playing existing characters from existing media in big crossover stories, and people are absolutely anal about canon lore and characterization consistency. Original characters are a newer thing for me, but Hydaelyn is a very good setting for inspiring them! - I found this forum by way of Sounsyy's loredumps while looking for lore from 1.0. - I'd like to RP in-game, but probably casually, due to time constraints. Lore compliance is a must though. -Characters, characters, characters! I have a ton on Brynhildr, if anyone here hangs out there. Rosalind Pytte is my main. Daughter of an Ala Mhigan refugee and a Gridanian merchant, forest-born, had an unpleasant childhood, now an adventurer based in Ul'dah. A pugilist with complicated feelings about Rhalgr and other second-gen Mhigan expats and other things she feels a connection to but can't really claim to be a part of. Possibly has an MNK soul crystal? Hansaku Kiba, Doman refugee, had a bad time when his clan came out of hiding in the mountains to help the rebellion. Currently an eccentric conjurer hugging trees in the Shroud, wearing a mask, and stubbornly pretending nothing bad exists. Likes puns. Pascaleret Merthelin, former dragon-loving heretic and current adventurer and arcanima enthusiast. Talk to him about social ills and sticking it to the Man. Still leveling him for glamour needs. A couple others who I'm still workshopping/leveling. On Siren: A Dalamiq girl (one of the Xaela who worshipped Dalamud). Made her to play with a friend, I don't know if she'll stick. And on Mateus: L'dyalani Mhasi, a treasure hunter who used to specialize in looting and selling Belah'dian relics and is now pressed as hell about the Calamity just shoving it all out into the open and forcing her to turn to regular old adventuring to earn a living. Covertly fascinated by void lore. Still working out the kinks of her personality.

Not the lorebook that I can recall off the top of my head, but there's a river-dwelling Xaela tribe that uses their shed scales in shipbuilding. It's on the naming conventions thread.

There's a pretty big difference between tissue that incorporates keratin (a common structural protein) and a big ol' solid chunk of keratin. If Au Ra scales are keratinous, a better comparison than human skin would be finger/toe nails, the horns of various mammals, and cases of cutaneous horns in humans. In all cases, the keratin growth itself isn't where the sensitivity comes from - it's the nerves in the surrounding flesh reacting to whatever pressure/temperature/injury is felt through the keratin covering. Injury to fingernails hurts because of the damage to the nail bed, cutaneous horns tend to have inflammation around the base due to some underlying cause like a cancer, and rhinoceros's horns can actually be cut off without causing pain or injury because they're a solid block of keratin instead of having a live bone core like most mammal horns. (You see rangers doing this to wild rhinos to deter poachers - no point killing a rhino if it doesn't have a horn to sell, and it doesn't require a surgical procedure so it can be done relatively easily in the field.) There's a couple of options for sensitive scales. One is that the scales are soft, keratin-heavy but also containing blood vessels and nerves and whatnot. I think lore specifically says they're hard, though, iirc. Another option is that they have a thin membrane growing over them, like turtles do on their shells, that contains nerve endings. This would be pretty anatomically neat - Xaela lore mentions scales shedding, and that membrane on turtle shells dries up and flakes off after the turtle is dead, so you'd get the neat detail of Au Ra scales peeling and shedding off in layers as they grow up, sensitive to touch mostly when they're new. Option three is that each one has a live core, like a tooth or a feather's quill, which again would dry up when the scale sheds.

Regarding Au Ra: 1) Since they're mammals, I would put money on their horns/scales being keratinous and therefore not very sensitive. 2) I've spent a lot of time staring at my Au Ra's butt watching my Au Ra closely during various animations, and not only does the tail appear to not be prehensile, it has a much more restricted range of motion than the Miqo'te tail. It also doesn't seem to respond to emotion at all. Miqo'te tails act like cat tails - bristling, lashing, swaying, etc to communicate internal state. Au Ra tails, meanwhile, really only respond to motion in the rest of the body - the most dramatic motion they do is lifting during certain dance emotes and when reeling in a fish (ie when the Au Ra suddenly tenses up). Otherwise it just kind of hangs there and sways with the momentum of walking.

Hello everyone! First post. So, I've RPed for years upon years, got into FFXIV earlier this year, and I've been casually RPing FFXIV content lately - but only off-site with friends, and not in game. I'm interested in making an alt on Mateus and giving "proper" in-game RP a whirl. I think I'm pretty well-versed in canon Seeker lore, and I've seen some examples of how the FFXIV RP community handles Seekers - tribes being larger and more diverse than the single settlements we see in game, that kind of thing. I'm still curious, though, if any loose consensus exists in the community w/r/t the tribes that don't have a nailed-down canon location? R Tribe being La Noscean based on the location of raptors and R Tribe NPCs, for example, is one that I see a lot. Are there other tribes that people tend to agree on a background for? And if you play a Seeker, even if you don't think you follow any kind of community consensus, I'm interested in hearing your assumptions/headcanons/background-building for your character's tribe. (I know the answer to this whole thread is ultimately "if it's not canon do what you want", but I like taking inspiration from other people's ideas, and following community trends/fanon/etc has got to make relationship-building easier.) Thanks!