(08-23-2017, 06:25 AM)Valence Wrote: Others have already answered possible solutions, especially the usual one being working on a "local lore" (versus "global lore"), about a specific unit in the clan and whatnot. You can definitely play on expanding your own lore applied only to your little nucleus of family for your character. World building with that approach, is a nice writing exercise and I understand how it can flesh a character out. And it's certainly not really overstepping boundaries, but rather taking risks with the possibility of steering away from xaela stuff in favour of your own.
I also see another approach, or rather, reasoning, that may not be as popular I guess, but that has the merit to be lore centric. With this in mind maybe you are trying too much to go away from the lore we have instead of working with it? For example if you take even the xaela tribes that are actually portrayed in Stormblood like the Mol, Qestir, Oronir and Dotharl, I can honestly say that maybe with the exception of the Dotharl who actually bear brand new Dotharl lore, most of what we learned about the other tribes is either confirmation of the few descriptive bits we had on each of them, or either xaela lore in general covering the whole race and its customs.Â
If you take the Mol for example, the lore doesn't really try to "world build" like you try to do. It doesn't go lengths to describe how their hunting tools are different and what you have or how their people are different from the other tribes. It just flows in the direction of what we knew already of the Mol, and how they do the bidding of their gods in everything and how their whole karma is tied to it. It expands on that mostly. For the rest, well, it shows how they still are xaela, how they have xaela customs, xaela diet, xaela problems, and even how they still participate in xaela steppe politics. Their specific tribe trait with their gods just tends to colour the way they do all of that.Â
While we had a whole new understanding of what the Dotharl actually are and how they think, well, they still portray the same xaela generic customs too. A lot of the quests you get in the Steppes with all those tribes are specific to them yes, but they also most of the time bring up various bits of generic xaela traditions (like milking sheep or how sheep is regarded and treated, etc). Reunion itself brings a lot of lore in that regards (thinking about the xaela children creche for example).Â
What I mean is, you can also try to take all those bits of xaela lore, which are now quite numerous (food, eating habits, hunting, warrior culture, politics, herding, mating, education and whatnot), and try to see how they would apply to a tribe like the Sagahl. And/or play around all that xaela lore we have already.
I think the pros of that approach is that you might also get a tribe more anchored into the nomadic xaela atmosphere.
Edit: if it's any help that's how I proceeded to flesh out my own character background. I could have gone with creating my own Keeper tribe or what you have, with their own made up customs, thinking "what if I try to create a new keeper clan with their own little things and what will happen?". It's perfectly fine but I chose to go the other way around: "Let's take keepers with a city life and botanist/gridanian lore, and see how I can insert all that actual lore in her past and how it will flesh her out". In that case, I made up almost nothing, because the lore is already here, so I didn't go out of the mold.
Edit 2: re reading in details what you fleshed out already doesn't seem contradictory at all with what I say so... maybe that makes my post more like a ramble and guidelines than an actual counter proposal.
I appreciate the ramble, regardless!
That's exactly what I try to do when I world build, I want to work with the lore. My biggest problem now is that I'm not as well-versed in Xaela lore as other people because I've not played that far ahead. After everyone's responses I definitely feel more confident in my approach and that I'm not taking things too far. I was worried about "overstepping" because of what might happen should Cota meet another Sagahl who would undoubtedly have a different background. If tribes stayed in one big unit and didn't split up across the steppe into smaller units, that would cause problems. At least for me it would just because of how nitpicky I am.Â
But now I have another problem and that's my lack of knowledge about Xaela lore in general. Reading about it and experiencing stuff in-game are two totally different things; I don't know the finer details of half the things you said, so now I feel like I need to keep Cota in reserve until I've played up to that point so I know exactly what to work with. Even though Cota himself is supposed to be different from how Xaela are explained and one of his major character traits is wanting to distance himself from being Xaela altogether, it's because of his experiences as a Xaela that he feels that way in the first place. It's hard to portray that accurately if I'm not even sure what being a Xaela means, not just a Sagahl.
