Dominance Challenges: Seeker Cultural Conflict Explored
Purpose of this Guide
Reading through the different backstories as well as some of the discussion posts on the forum, it seems like the ritual of combat between a Nunh and a Tia will be a big concern for those playing Seekers of the Sun. Whether it appears in your backstory or as part of a character or guild’s plot, it would be nice to have some discussion to make this an interesting and vibrant topic.
I’m not actually playing a Seeker (my character is a Keeper), so hopefully I can provide an air of objectivity to get the discussion started. I’m hoping for a lot of input from the community, since I’m not much of a social scientist, as you’ll see below.
My Credentials
I took two sociology classes in college over ten years ago. I had breakfast with Jared Diamond once. (He wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and came to my college to give a talk about it. He’s a pretty awesome guy to meet in person.)
Seekers of the Sun
Given that there are 26 established tribes, and the potential for players to introduce even more, that leaves a lot of room for diversity among cultural practices. I haven’t encountered the Seeker tribes in the game yet, so I don’t really have any information in the form of established lore, but I’m guessing that even when more of the lore is established, it will likely come from only a handful of the 26 tribes. This will leave room for players to be inventive with their tribe’s culture, and that’s what I’d like to encourage through this discussion. I think it would be pretty boring if every tribe dueled in exactly the same way. Human tribes and cultures came up with a variety of options and rituals associated with their duels, and it’s likely the Miqo’te would do the same.
Given that humanity has generated innumerable cultures with a variety of practices throughout its history, I’ll be using human examples as well as a little bit of brainstorming on my part to get the ball rolling. Some of these may be reasonable for Miqo’te and some not, but it’s all thought provoking. Depending on how tribal or modern/cultured you wish to play your tribe, the rules will likely vary widely. As a comparison to human society, many of these practices started out very brutal with duels to the death and evolved to be more gentlemanly or even outlawed due to social pressure and changes in attitudes about the value of life and human/civil rights.
Dueling in Human History
For as long as humans have been in conflict with each other, there have been established rules (both written and oral tradition) for settling those disputes. Duels occurred in the United States and many European countries well into the 1800s, despite laws being leveled against their practice. In some countries and some cultures (and some counter-cultures) the practice persists to this day. I’ll mostly be referencing the Western notion of a duel, as that is what I’m familiar with. Depending on the situation, rules could vary widely, but generally followed a similar structure.
All duels start with a challenge, sometimes referred to as a “demand for satisfaction.†To refuse a challenge is considered dishonorable or cowardly. Each participant appointed another man to be his second. The duty of the seconds is to agree upon a time and location for the duel as well as assure that all aspects of the duel are fair.
Once a suitable location had been found and a time for the duel set, all parties would meet and discuss the conditions or terms of the duel. These tend to vary between cultures and historical periods. Some common choices for conditions include:
Once terms had been decided and the seconds agreed that the terms were fair, the duel commenced and resolved based on the skills of the duelists.
Historical Archetypes
I’ll now go into some of the different historical methods whereby humans engaged in dueling. Hopefully these will inspire some interesting methods and culture for those playing Seekers of the Sun. If any of these interest you, I suggest looking them up on Wikipedia (where I researched most of this information) or other sources, as I’m only giving a short paragraph for each.
Jousting
One of the early forms of ritualized dueling, this involved knights with lances riding each other down and trying to knock the other off his horse. Originally, the joust would often be followed up with a fight using hand weapons like swords, maces, and flails to settle the terms of the duel. Later jousting became much ritualized as a sport, with points being awarded for dismounting your opponent as well as breaking your lance against his armor/shield, and the winner declared by points after a certain number of rounds.
Renaissance Sword Fighting
This sort of duel began as a means for gentlemen to settle courtly disputes. Many different styles of swordsmanship were developed for fighting such duels. For those interested in these sorts of duels, I suggest looking into the roleplaying game 7th Sea by AEG and its less insightful bastard son Swashbuckling Adventures in d20/D&D. There are expansive rules and a long list of fully detailed swordsman schools (which includes schools for fist fighting, spears, bows, and a variety of other weapons) for inspiration.
Iajutsu/Iaido
This is the Japanese art of quick-drawing the sword from its scabbard and striking your opponent in the same swift motion. While I’m unsure if this was ever used in historical Japan as a means of dueling, it was expanded greatly as a means of dueling and dispute resolution in the roleplaying game Legend of the Five Rings by AEG and its d20/D&D derivation Oriental Adventures.
Holmgang
This is the ancient Nordic practice of dueling. When a challenge was made, the participants would meet at a specified location and set out an animal skin on which to duel. It evolved over time to have a variety of conditions, but in general, a death in Holmgang was not considered murder and may or may not require restitution in the form of weregild. Later versions of the practice instituted a very small maximum payout to discourage dueling for profit. Another form involved each man producing three wooden shields and taking turns striking each other until the shields broke. The first man to lose his third shield or submit lost the duel.
Pistol Duels
This famous type of duel involved each man taking a loaded pistol, walking ten paces while the seconds counted, turning and firing on their opponent. Rules varied between one to three shots, with any more than three being considered barbaric, and the loser being the first person to suffer a gunshot wound. This later evolved in the American frontier to be a contest of both speed and accuracy with participants quick drawing revolvers at high noon. (As far as this could apply to Miqo’te, I suppose it’s possible a tribe could do this with bows or even magic.)
Just Plain Weird Duels
There have been a handful of duels noted in history for their exceptional strangeness. These are referenced on the Wikipedia page for dueling. They include a duel by two Frenchmen in hot air balloons trying to shoot out each other’s balloon and force them to fall to the ground as well as another duel by two Frenchmen in which they threw billiard balls at one another. The final, and weirdest, involved a challenge between two Germans in which one suggested they be presented with two sausages to eat, one of which had been infected with Trichinella (though historians apparently doubt the validity of this scenario).
My Own Brainstormed Ideas
These are ideas I came up with that have some cool potential for Seeker tribes. Some might recommend themselves well to existing tribes. Others may only see exploration through a guild specifically designed by the community to introduce a new or lost tribe with very different culture from the norm.
Machiavellian
Disclaimer: I’ve never read The Prince, despite many times deciding I should, so my input here will be little informed to the details of that text. What I envision here is a culture where cunning is valued over strength. Likely this would be associated with tribes that revere animals like snakes, spiders, and scorpions. The males would be political animals, the duel would involve maneuvering and backstabbing, and due to the need for subterfuge there would be no direct challenge. Rather, all males would be rivals and seek to secure and maintain the position through whatever means necessary. They would need to be prepared at all times for an assassin (or a poisoned drink) and go to great lengths to secure and maintain power.
Survival Challenge
This would be something along the lines of the recently popular survival shows on the Discovery Channel. Each male would be stripped to a limited wardrobe and given a knife before disappearing into the wilderness, most likely a desert or jungle. For one week, they must try to survive to the best of their ability. If both survive the entire week and return on the seventh day, the elders of the tribe will decide based on their health and condition which one performed the strongest. Alternatively, this could be combined with the endurance test below, where both men enter the desert, and whoever survives the longest before returning home is declared the victor. I imagine in this case there would be certain historical grounds, say a pair of five by five malm squares marked off and designated for this purpose, just so they could observe the challenge and know when to declare a winner.
Tightrope Joust
It’s been stated on several of the wikis that Miqo’te are renowned for their excellent balance (a typical trait of species with long tails). In this case, the challenge tests their agility and balance as well as strength. Each of the participants mounts a tightrope or balance beam with a spear, lance, or staff. I can see options for a single tightrope, two tightropes, or even a field of upright logs or pegs so the challengers can leap around the field in an attempt to gain high ground or some other advantage. You could even make it more complicated by having swinging pendulums or starting the two rope duel with acid dripping onto the ropes or a portion of the ropes on fire to add an air of urgency. Whichever challenger stays on the rope the longest claims victory.
Endurance/Willpower Test
This would be a challenge specifically designed to test the participants’ endurance, stamina, and willpower. Basically the idea is to see which one of them is truly the most driven and the most dedicated towards the goal. Examples would include the legendary swimming challenge described in Beowulf or the more modern challenge of the publicity stunt where a car or motorcycle dealer will give away a vehicle to whichever person can keep their hands on the vehicle the longest.
In Conclusion
I hope that this has inspired some of you to come up with different possibilities for your Seeker tribe to experience the duels associated with dominance among Seeker males. I expect that if you’ve fleshed out the culture for your tribe, that will suggest a certain kind of dueling, certain terms, and values associated with strength, honor, and life. If you haven’t fleshed out that culture yet, perhaps figuring out how they duel will give you more insight into their cultural values as a society.
I haven’t even gotten into the rituals that would likely surround these duels, but I consider that an effort for those of you writing culture for your tribe. I’m sure that as long as these duels have been practiced, they’d develop a wide range of ceremony - from immediately grabbing a spear and drawing a circle in the sand to elaborate pre- and post-duel ceremonies along the lines of The Hunger Games. In fact I can see a tribe where when the Nunh dies or steps down, they have an event for all the eligible Tia similar to that of The Hunger Games. I’d love to hear ideas other people have for how their tribe undertakes this very important rite.
Protection or Warding Duel
I just had another idea for an interesting type of duel where there is either a fragile item (like a clay pot or effigy of a baby) or a second included as part of the duel, and the objective is to destroy your opponents guarded item or strike a blow on their ward. The idea here being that nunhs are protectors of the tribe, and whichever is more capable of protecting something or someone precious deserves the position.
Purpose of this Guide
Reading through the different backstories as well as some of the discussion posts on the forum, it seems like the ritual of combat between a Nunh and a Tia will be a big concern for those playing Seekers of the Sun. Whether it appears in your backstory or as part of a character or guild’s plot, it would be nice to have some discussion to make this an interesting and vibrant topic.
I’m not actually playing a Seeker (my character is a Keeper), so hopefully I can provide an air of objectivity to get the discussion started. I’m hoping for a lot of input from the community, since I’m not much of a social scientist, as you’ll see below.
My Credentials
I took two sociology classes in college over ten years ago. I had breakfast with Jared Diamond once. (He wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and came to my college to give a talk about it. He’s a pretty awesome guy to meet in person.)
Seekers of the Sun
Quote:Quoted from the naming conventions for Seekers:
“Males do not take family names, as they are each considered the ‘origins’ of new families. In place of a family name, they are given a title that denotes their tribe, and their position within it. For a male Seeker of the Sun, there are only two positions available - breeding males (nunh – pronounced ‘noon’) and all others (tia – pronounced ‘tea-ah’). All males are born as tia. At any time in their lives, a tia can challenge the tribe nunh to battle. If the tia is victorious, he takes the nunh’s place as tribe breeding male (until he is challenged and defeated), and the nunh becomes a tia once again (if he survives the ordeal). This is done to ensure that the tribe’s offspring are of the finest stock. Depending on its size, a tribe may have multiple nunh (a ratio of one nunh per ten to fifty females is average).
There is only one other way a tia can become a nunh, and that is to leave his tribe, and start his own. This, of course, requires several females to accomplish, and most female Seekers of the Sun are rarely impressed by a male who cannot defeat a nunh. As all letters of the alphabet are already taken by the 26 original tribes, any new tribes founded by tia are named with a second letter, such as "Ma" (e.g. "Ma'shtola"). These tribes tend to die out due to the aforementioned lack of women.â€
Given that there are 26 established tribes, and the potential for players to introduce even more, that leaves a lot of room for diversity among cultural practices. I haven’t encountered the Seeker tribes in the game yet, so I don’t really have any information in the form of established lore, but I’m guessing that even when more of the lore is established, it will likely come from only a handful of the 26 tribes. This will leave room for players to be inventive with their tribe’s culture, and that’s what I’d like to encourage through this discussion. I think it would be pretty boring if every tribe dueled in exactly the same way. Human tribes and cultures came up with a variety of options and rituals associated with their duels, and it’s likely the Miqo’te would do the same.
Given that humanity has generated innumerable cultures with a variety of practices throughout its history, I’ll be using human examples as well as a little bit of brainstorming on my part to get the ball rolling. Some of these may be reasonable for Miqo’te and some not, but it’s all thought provoking. Depending on how tribal or modern/cultured you wish to play your tribe, the rules will likely vary widely. As a comparison to human society, many of these practices started out very brutal with duels to the death and evolved to be more gentlemanly or even outlawed due to social pressure and changes in attitudes about the value of life and human/civil rights.
Dueling in Human History
For as long as humans have been in conflict with each other, there have been established rules (both written and oral tradition) for settling those disputes. Duels occurred in the United States and many European countries well into the 1800s, despite laws being leveled against their practice. In some countries and some cultures (and some counter-cultures) the practice persists to this day. I’ll mostly be referencing the Western notion of a duel, as that is what I’m familiar with. Depending on the situation, rules could vary widely, but generally followed a similar structure.
All duels start with a challenge, sometimes referred to as a “demand for satisfaction.†To refuse a challenge is considered dishonorable or cowardly. Each participant appointed another man to be his second. The duty of the seconds is to agree upon a time and location for the duel as well as assure that all aspects of the duel are fair.
Once a suitable location had been found and a time for the duel set, all parties would meet and discuss the conditions or terms of the duel. These tend to vary between cultures and historical periods. Some common choices for conditions include:
- Victory conditions: first blood, submission, incapacitation, death
- Weapon choice: matched weapons versus individual preference
- Limited resources: three shields in a Viking duel, a certain number of shots or volleys in a pistol duel
- Stakes or consequences for winning or losing the duel
Once terms had been decided and the seconds agreed that the terms were fair, the duel commenced and resolved based on the skills of the duelists.
Historical Archetypes
I’ll now go into some of the different historical methods whereby humans engaged in dueling. Hopefully these will inspire some interesting methods and culture for those playing Seekers of the Sun. If any of these interest you, I suggest looking them up on Wikipedia (where I researched most of this information) or other sources, as I’m only giving a short paragraph for each.
Jousting
One of the early forms of ritualized dueling, this involved knights with lances riding each other down and trying to knock the other off his horse. Originally, the joust would often be followed up with a fight using hand weapons like swords, maces, and flails to settle the terms of the duel. Later jousting became much ritualized as a sport, with points being awarded for dismounting your opponent as well as breaking your lance against his armor/shield, and the winner declared by points after a certain number of rounds.
Renaissance Sword Fighting
This sort of duel began as a means for gentlemen to settle courtly disputes. Many different styles of swordsmanship were developed for fighting such duels. For those interested in these sorts of duels, I suggest looking into the roleplaying game 7th Sea by AEG and its less insightful bastard son Swashbuckling Adventures in d20/D&D. There are expansive rules and a long list of fully detailed swordsman schools (which includes schools for fist fighting, spears, bows, and a variety of other weapons) for inspiration.
Iajutsu/Iaido
This is the Japanese art of quick-drawing the sword from its scabbard and striking your opponent in the same swift motion. While I’m unsure if this was ever used in historical Japan as a means of dueling, it was expanded greatly as a means of dueling and dispute resolution in the roleplaying game Legend of the Five Rings by AEG and its d20/D&D derivation Oriental Adventures.
Holmgang
This is the ancient Nordic practice of dueling. When a challenge was made, the participants would meet at a specified location and set out an animal skin on which to duel. It evolved over time to have a variety of conditions, but in general, a death in Holmgang was not considered murder and may or may not require restitution in the form of weregild. Later versions of the practice instituted a very small maximum payout to discourage dueling for profit. Another form involved each man producing three wooden shields and taking turns striking each other until the shields broke. The first man to lose his third shield or submit lost the duel.
Pistol Duels
This famous type of duel involved each man taking a loaded pistol, walking ten paces while the seconds counted, turning and firing on their opponent. Rules varied between one to three shots, with any more than three being considered barbaric, and the loser being the first person to suffer a gunshot wound. This later evolved in the American frontier to be a contest of both speed and accuracy with participants quick drawing revolvers at high noon. (As far as this could apply to Miqo’te, I suppose it’s possible a tribe could do this with bows or even magic.)
Just Plain Weird Duels
There have been a handful of duels noted in history for their exceptional strangeness. These are referenced on the Wikipedia page for dueling. They include a duel by two Frenchmen in hot air balloons trying to shoot out each other’s balloon and force them to fall to the ground as well as another duel by two Frenchmen in which they threw billiard balls at one another. The final, and weirdest, involved a challenge between two Germans in which one suggested they be presented with two sausages to eat, one of which had been infected with Trichinella (though historians apparently doubt the validity of this scenario).
My Own Brainstormed Ideas
These are ideas I came up with that have some cool potential for Seeker tribes. Some might recommend themselves well to existing tribes. Others may only see exploration through a guild specifically designed by the community to introduce a new or lost tribe with very different culture from the norm.
Machiavellian
Disclaimer: I’ve never read The Prince, despite many times deciding I should, so my input here will be little informed to the details of that text. What I envision here is a culture where cunning is valued over strength. Likely this would be associated with tribes that revere animals like snakes, spiders, and scorpions. The males would be political animals, the duel would involve maneuvering and backstabbing, and due to the need for subterfuge there would be no direct challenge. Rather, all males would be rivals and seek to secure and maintain the position through whatever means necessary. They would need to be prepared at all times for an assassin (or a poisoned drink) and go to great lengths to secure and maintain power.
Survival Challenge
This would be something along the lines of the recently popular survival shows on the Discovery Channel. Each male would be stripped to a limited wardrobe and given a knife before disappearing into the wilderness, most likely a desert or jungle. For one week, they must try to survive to the best of their ability. If both survive the entire week and return on the seventh day, the elders of the tribe will decide based on their health and condition which one performed the strongest. Alternatively, this could be combined with the endurance test below, where both men enter the desert, and whoever survives the longest before returning home is declared the victor. I imagine in this case there would be certain historical grounds, say a pair of five by five malm squares marked off and designated for this purpose, just so they could observe the challenge and know when to declare a winner.
Tightrope Joust
It’s been stated on several of the wikis that Miqo’te are renowned for their excellent balance (a typical trait of species with long tails). In this case, the challenge tests their agility and balance as well as strength. Each of the participants mounts a tightrope or balance beam with a spear, lance, or staff. I can see options for a single tightrope, two tightropes, or even a field of upright logs or pegs so the challengers can leap around the field in an attempt to gain high ground or some other advantage. You could even make it more complicated by having swinging pendulums or starting the two rope duel with acid dripping onto the ropes or a portion of the ropes on fire to add an air of urgency. Whichever challenger stays on the rope the longest claims victory.
Endurance/Willpower Test
This would be a challenge specifically designed to test the participants’ endurance, stamina, and willpower. Basically the idea is to see which one of them is truly the most driven and the most dedicated towards the goal. Examples would include the legendary swimming challenge described in Beowulf or the more modern challenge of the publicity stunt where a car or motorcycle dealer will give away a vehicle to whichever person can keep their hands on the vehicle the longest.
In Conclusion
I hope that this has inspired some of you to come up with different possibilities for your Seeker tribe to experience the duels associated with dominance among Seeker males. I expect that if you’ve fleshed out the culture for your tribe, that will suggest a certain kind of dueling, certain terms, and values associated with strength, honor, and life. If you haven’t fleshed out that culture yet, perhaps figuring out how they duel will give you more insight into their cultural values as a society.
I haven’t even gotten into the rituals that would likely surround these duels, but I consider that an effort for those of you writing culture for your tribe. I’m sure that as long as these duels have been practiced, they’d develop a wide range of ceremony - from immediately grabbing a spear and drawing a circle in the sand to elaborate pre- and post-duel ceremonies along the lines of The Hunger Games. In fact I can see a tribe where when the Nunh dies or steps down, they have an event for all the eligible Tia similar to that of The Hunger Games. I’d love to hear ideas other people have for how their tribe undertakes this very important rite.
Protection or Warding Duel
I just had another idea for an interesting type of duel where there is either a fragile item (like a clay pot or effigy of a baby) or a second included as part of the duel, and the objective is to destroy your opponents guarded item or strike a blow on their ward. The idea here being that nunhs are protectors of the tribe, and whichever is more capable of protecting something or someone precious deserves the position.
I'm a tinker! Tinkerer? Hrm.... I'm an artificer! - Myxie Tryxle | Impressions and Memories