Twinflame

I'm adoring the lore each and every one of you are coming up with, and I like learning as much about it as possible. For Megs' clan, I'm wanting it to have lived in very shallow caves, which would mean they have always had very close contact with the overworld. However, his clan would only be four or five generations old; relatively young. I'm going to come up with a complete family tree for him when I get enough free time, and one thing I would love to do, is work things in such a way that the first generation or two of his clan are exiles from the clans of other players. They would be Elezen who left y'all's clans and came to the service, found one another, and started anew a couple hundred years ago. This is one of the primary reasons I'd like all y'all's clans to have names and stuff. So I can have Megs have heard about them and RP accordingly. If that's okay. ^^ Incidentally, what do you all mean by Reaver culture? I'm not understanding. As someone who is very experienced roleplaying all manner of offensive characters (from racists to jerks), I'd say it's not something you really should have to worry about. If anyone takes OOC offense at your IC behavior, they're violating the most important rule of RP, and it is they who have the problem, not you. You know at least everyone in here will understand where you're coming from and allow it, so if anybody has a problem with your RP, just let us know and we'll set them straight. An idea you might like to play with is having your character be victimized by their own racism. Your WW may be outwardly accepting of all races and hold this as a point of pride, and yet my be accidentally racist towards Duskwight in a way that he cannot help. Remember that not all racists are that way deliberately; they just have knee-jerk negative reactions and instincts that they cannot prevent. They would just get a bad gut feeling or instinctive fear reaction every time a Duskwight is around, and they can acknowledge to themselves that this is a kind of racism, but still be unable to prevent these feelings. Instead, they'd just have to work extra hard at not reacting negatively to Duskwight. Despite their efforts, they may never have any Duskwight friends, because society has forced the curse of racism into their hearts, and they can't just stop being that way. I think this is sort of how Meg's racism towards the Wildwood may play out. He acknowledges that they're not functionally any different than any other overlander, and he has passed time with them amicably. But he's had too many negative reactions to them in the past, and each meeting will require him to overcome fear and anger that he can't help but feel. tl;dr - Actual racism is complicated and can be played out in a thousand different ways. Anybody who judges you for RPing that way is making a very sad mistake.

*EDIT: Nau ninja'd me. I'll get her next time! I's also a prehistoric real world horse. Extinct, unfortunately. Just google it and wikipedia will pop up. I also know that horses do exist in Hydaelyn. In addition to Odin riding one, there is one in Ishgard's city seal. It's possible there just aren't any in Eorzea, or that they're endangered or even extinct in this fantasy.

Judging from Anti's backstory, there aren't so many viable mates for the Nunhs that they can't keep up with demand. K'piru had a relationship with K'thalen, and K'thalen was present at the birth of K'piru's first daughter (K'airi?), and he seemed to be fairly emotional invested in the event. So I'd guess that the culture of this particular K sub-tribe puts a decent amount of father/lover pressure on the Nunhs. They aren't just studs that get so much tail they don't even know the lady's names. Honestly, I prefer it that way. I was hoping for K'aijeen to have had a strong relationship with K'thalen before he died, based on the father/daughter thing. If the entire tribe is thirty people, then K'thalen would've had three to five mates and prolly somewhere between seven and fifteen kids. That gives him plenty of room to have personal relationships with all of them, though I'm sure the depth of those relationships would've varied. Hi, I'm Twinflame and I like to ramble about RP. Nice to meet you.

That's not so bad, then. I just needed to confirm that all Duskwight didn't mean all Duskwight. I like the setup you've got, and I can only begin to imagine how it's inspired your -- and apparently Eva's -- characters. Considering that every time a man in the tribe wanted to have kids he'd have to go out on a violent trip to grab himself a wife first, the population of those northern clans probably stayed pretty low. Of course that's just me guessing at every Duskwight couple having two or three kids, but also killing two or three from a neighboring clan in the taking of the wife beforehand, which would keep things more or less at equilibrium. So what we end up with is this handful of clans in the Northwest, removed not only from the overland but from massive swaths of the rest of the Duskwight population. In their separate subterranean world, unknown to the rest of Eorzea, they developed an entire culture full of religion, art, political nuance, and this served as the backdrop for generation after generation of great tales that live on in the hymns they sing, but hymns only heard in that same world. Because Linkshells don't work, there is a very definite boundary between this world and that one, and you cannot bring this world with you when you go there. It's a foreign and alien place inside of Eorzea, secluded and secret, but ancient and dynamic. Honestly, I find it beautiful. So, Oskar! This leaves the question: are you back? Or did you just come by to tell us a story?

Absolutely love it. A very cute story, and that sounds like it would be a great group of folk to game with.

How many clans are we talking about here, Oskar? You keep mentioning "all" the clans, but I'm gonna guess you probably mean all the clans in an area. It's cool how much you've worked up you culture. It is, however, a lot of liberties to take for more than a handful of clans in an isolated part of that North West area.

K'aijeen's player checking in. These family trees are already too complicated for my poor brain. So I'll just have to trust you guys. On the subject of tribe leadership, there is a Miqo'te tribe settlement I remember running across in-game. There was a single male NPC in the tribe, the chief. The rest of the NPCs were female, and spoke about "The Nunh," but the description might not have been the chief. The tribe was relatively small, and had long-term buildings, so they weren't nomadic. I'm suspecting they had a structure similar to what we're going for with the K tribe, minus the nomadic thing. Their predominantly female population seemed to be primarily hunters, and my guess is there was a single Nunh, and the tribe's chief was an elderly Tia. Just, however that applies. For my own part, K'aijeen left the tribe after the Calamity and is still a very young teenager. She's off with K'airos somewhere, so anybody looking to reunite the tribe could end up finding them. K'aijeen will be called D'aijeen in-game, because she got in a fight with her mom and decided she wanted to be a dodo instead. What a bird-brain. ... *punishes self for that last sentence*

I would say the fact that the Duskwight can't count on anyone that is not a Duskwight, and since Duskwight are relatively rare and reclusive by nature, having a constant connection to them would be self-evidently useful. Besides just the social aspect, it would be nice if there were people one could turn to for help that would not deny that help based on the fact that you are a Duskwight. As a Duskwight RPer, roleplaying with other Duskwight is going to be a cool experience that I might not just stumble across. As well, Megs is sort of prejudiced against non-Duskwights, since he was raised to believe he must exist in conflict with the overlanders. Any relationship is has with a Duskwight will be unique to that he has with others, and I'd like for him to have those connections. Oh, I'm proud of my time as a Daughter of Elinu...some of the things I'm most proud of I've written about my Elin. If I can develop Isobeau's character a fraction of how my Elin was, I'll be a happy role player in FFXIV 8-). Moeblob...heh :dodgy: Ah, I didn't mean that all Elin were moeblobs! I knew some very good Elin roleplayers. They were just incredibly few in number. So, I was talking about, y'know, all those other folk. The kawaii desu desu kyaaa cutsey anime Elins. Those were just. You know.

As someone who alternates between 100% RP and 70% RP (as in, I will always be a heavy RPer, and will RP every character I play), I've got no real reservations about using a non-RP Free Company. I know a number of the people in the Free Company are RPers, the officership specifically, so I'm not worried about not being able to use the FC house for RP. Though Unity won't be an IC group, we will still be RPing with one another, and I'm sure we'll be using the FC house as some kind of IC gathering place. I also know that Unity has skilled PvEers, and I personally wouldn't want to attempt doing PvE seriously without the resources the Free Company provides. Especially not the scale of PvE that ARR is going to deliver. I think one thing to keep in mind is that, while Unity is open to casual and hardcore players and everyone in between, there's going to be a core of very progression-focused PvEers. I will be one of them, even as I RP very seriously on a (hopefully) daily basis. To me, the resources of the FC are integral to that.

Haha! I just might use this! Without a reference I'd just end up making stuff up off the top of my head and prolly getting it wrong.

At least with Elin we had the lore to back up that they weren't supposed to be cutsey moeblobs, even if most folk didn't pay attention to it. Actually, you know what? Let's just forget most of the Elin RP in TERA ever happened. Oh, yes, definitely. I'm completely behind people RPing their characters however they want. But when someone is more tolerant than the norm of the world around them, I'm going to react ICly as if that is strange, not as though it is typical. It'll be notable. I'm also hoping to encounter other points on the spectrum of prejudice, from the norm (which sets itself against Duskwight) to the extreme (where one refuses to tolerate a Duskwight's presence). I think it would be best if there were characters in the community representative of each point. Catching up on this thread took me forever. >_< Mostly because I haven't had the time to really sit down and read it in the past few days. At least it was a great read when I finally sat down to go through it. I love how much time and thought y'all have put into your Duskwights, and I'm looking forward to seeing them each IC. For this reason, I'm liking the idea of an IC LS for Duskwights. I'm not sure how much honest use my character would make of it, since he'll have his primary LS in the Commerce Regulation Agency, but anything that keeps me connected to people in a way that leads to RP is most welcome. It's nice to see that most folk are RPing in a way that agrees more or less with the backstory I've got set up for Megiddo. Just so you don't have to go back two pages for a refresher: Megs is an elderly Duskwight who was the patriarch of a small family group (think like twenty people) who lived in shallow caves in the Black Shroud. So I guess we're calling them clans? I don't know why that word hadn't occurred to me before. So Megs was the patriarch of a clan. I think the way I'm seeing this set up is that Duskwight society is greatly fragmented and spread out. The various clans found deep places in the earth, but didn't stay together, and didn't necessarily stay in intimate contact with one another. Over time, these split clans developed different ways of coping with life in the dark, with the peoples that lived above, with one another and with themselves. Some of them grew cruel (like Megs' clan), some of them became resourceful (teardrop's miners) and some of them developed deep-held traditions (Eva's very strong and tragic culture). Each of these flavors are fantastic and vivid, and now that we've moved into the overland again, we get to roleplay reconciling with one another as well as handling how the overland peoples perceive us. I doubt SE is ever going to put out lore that tells us anyone one of our clans is wrong. Even if they eventually add an entire ancient Duskwight city full of lore for us to explore, they will always have been outliers from that culture. So here's my idea: What I think would be great is if we all accepted the existence of one another's clans and accepted each of them as canon (within reason. As long as nobody does a werewolf-vampire-angel clan, which I don't really expect to ever come up ). We should attach labels to our clan -- probably based off of location and the name of the original progenitors -- and then describe and define their believes. We can attach them to our wiki articles (my own is forthcoming, so I can just tack it in there). The reason I think this would be awesome is because Megiddo is an Elder, more than sixty years old; he's traveled a lot, met a lot of Duskwight, and knows a lot. I would like him to have incomplete IC knowledge of different clans, and it would be interesting to try and attach his heritage to a few different clans. For instance, Megs' family group would have been Clan Desfosse of the Black Shroud. Their culture would have emphasized family relations, reverence of one's ancestors, and surviving at the expense of overlanders. Nothing was sacred except for one another, and everyone was equal in responsibility, but clan leadership fell upon a single patriarch. Of course his clan is dead, now, but I plan on rolling up a full family tree and, if I go crazy, may go back several generations. In the process, I can connect his ancestry to some of y'all's clans. What do you guys think of that? *is super excited to be back in the conversation*

The most likely reason your clan hasn't come up, Eva, is because of what Teardrop touched on: people RP their characters, but fail to RP the world. Another way to say this is that people won't let their characters be prejudiced as much as lore characters would, because they're being influenced by their present culture. A good parallel to this was in Rift, where many RPers from the two factions were not only tolerant of each other, but actively condemned those who were not, even though Defiant and Guardian NPCs regularly attacked eachother on-sight. If you were even slightly prejudice against the opposite faction, the community would treat your character like worthless, racist scum. Which was totally at odds to the spirit of the lore at the time. If Eva wants to be perceived as just an Elezen like the others, then the OOC mentality if the community is most likely (but not certainly) predisposed to help her in that. Which is why I intend to give the invitation to others to please be ICly prejudiced against my character if it is appropriate for the culture and history of your character. That's directed towards any Wildwood RPers who may be reading. I searched Gridania for any Duskwight NPCs at all and was unable to find any. My perception was that Duskwight are not permitted to live in Gridania, except maybe in the Inn at the Adventurer's guild. Respectfully, did I miss something, or am I just the only one who took my conclusions so far?

So all this implies that the 7th Umbral Era is indeed over and we're in year 1 of the 7th Astral Era. Edit: And derped because that's the quote that Mtoto used up yonder. Oh well. Must.. read.. entire post.. before running off to search.. I know this is coming from a dev, but even then, I'd have to be skeptical. If I were living in Eorzea and heard someone proclaiming that the 7th Umbral Era was over, I'd wonder where in the world they were getting that from. It was more than just Bahamut that dropped us out of the Astral era, but also the arrival of Garlean forces. If you tell anyone from Ala Mhigo that the Umbral Era has ended and they can be done with their "regrouping" they're going to either laugh or sneer at you. Especially with how many people know the Garleans are preparing for an invasion, to the point that we can't even freely operate skyships at the heart of our own continent for fear that they'll get shot down. Anyone in Eorzea who thinks the period of "Chaos and regrouping" is over just isn't in touch with reality. However. We could be in an extremely brief or tenuous Astral era that extends only as long as peacetime between the Battle of Carteneau and the oncoming invasion by the Garleans, and we'll be in the 8th Umbral era any day now. But if we start measuring eras like that, we'll be counting eras in double digits before the decade is out, since even if we do defeat this invasion force, another will probably be along in short order. What seems more likely to me, both OOC and IC, is that we're just stepping into a very bloody Umbral era that will be marked by repeated invasions by foreign powers. It's possible we could experience some kind of great victory or see the Garlean empire collapse as suddenly as it rose into power, but my character wouldn't bet on it, and certainly wouldn't believe anyone who said we were at the beginning of a brand new shiny Astral era. I also remember what Nova was talking about, which means I'm cheating. But still!

Thanks for the lore-dump. I've been looking for lore and having trouble finding it, and as a fresh import to FFXIV who plans on maining a Duskwight, this is incredibly relevant to my interest. My Duskight is Megiddo, and he is elderly to the point that he's probably in his last decade of natural life, and he has outlived his wife, children, and most of his grand children. Creating a family tree for Megs has been a fun and cerebral experience for me, and in my head-cannon, he and his family lived in a relatively small family group in the caves in the Black Shroud. His parents died while he was still young and he became patriarch of this group then, a role that he has filled for nearly six decades. Please note that I don't need this live-with-your-family thing to be common, though if other people RP similar histories, that's all the better. I figure that Duskwight either live solitary lives or live in family groups similar to the Keeper Miqo'te. I've been unable to find lore on Duskwight family life, or their culture in general. Megs wass authoritative and cruel to his family, and they most likely would have been very unsettling to know. A rather vicious and antisocial lot, they worked as poachers, bandits and assassins who made no effort to integrate with the world around them and cared only for themselves and one another. This paradigm is one of the primary reasons that Megs' history is so tragic; the relationship between his family and the rest of Eorzea was one of conflict. Gradually, through his long years, Megs has watched his descendants die off one by one. His only remaining family member, a granddaughter, loathes him deeply and lives apart from him, serving with the Blades in Ul'dah. Megiddo lost the last of his children in the Calamity, and while he helped some with reconstruction immediately after, he has for the most part withdrawn from the world. Left alone in his latter years, Megs lives as a hermit in the Black Shroud, wandering and espousing the virtues of letting Oschon guide one's footsteps. He is generally well-meaning and mostly harmless, though he still has his secrets and is very much the same person who raised his children as killers. In my RP during the beta, I occasionally hinted that Megiddo was the victim of discrimination. At one point, Megiddo's wandering brought him to a seeker Miqo'te who had lost her way in the Shroud, trying to get to Gridania. He guided her there, but scarcely set a foot inside before turning to leave, citing poor treatment of Duskwight at the hands of the Wildwood. Once or twise there was very vague reciprocation in which Megs talked down about the Woodwailers, but it was only in passing. I'll prolly make a wiki for him that includes his family tree and flash-fics about some experiences in his life. Til then, this is the most extensive history I've written for him so far. I'd be very much interested in seeing the angles that other RPers have taken on Duskwight families and whatever kind of society they have.

I bet I'm the only person here playing a Dodo tribe seek (The D tribe). That is in addition to my K-tribe one, though.

Not to mention the amount of gil I have IC won't be related at all to the amount I have OOC. Deciding what's reasonable IC based on game mechanics is kind of how we infer any portion of the myriad things that we need to know in order to RP well. Knowing what a reasonable amount of money for the typical low/middle/high class person is can be helpful for us. This reminds me of some stuff we did in TERA, like working out economical exports and imports of different zones. And by "we" I mean Naunet and Ildur. Not me. I was just kind of "Yeah guys that's awesome. Do that." It was extremely helpful for RP, though.

I've got highlights going on already. The way the highlights on that hair work is that the ends of the hair get the alternate color, as though he dipped just the last few inches of his hair in dye. Right now I've got him with a dirty blond main color and a sort of green-blond highlight, which causes at least a not-pretty color. Unfortunately, the hair itself is still smooth and with great luster, though. She's missing her beard, Beard.

Behold, old man Meggido! Also known as Elder Megiddo or Megiddo the hermit. He might change his look a bit once expanded character creation comes along, if I can find a way to make him look older or if there's a long hair option that looks messy and unkempt. I know it's FF and everyone's supposed to have perms and perfect skin, but Megs needs wrinkles and and dirty hair in order to be his true self (as he was back in Aion, see). Then I've also got D'aijeen, who is based a bit more loosely off a Rift character I RPed for a time, of a similar name. Just about any character, I've learned, can be ported into a Miqo'te (cept Megs, apparently). I've got like 73 other characters, but those are the big two for now. ^^

Going where the RP is. (Balmung) Concerns over Legacy servers will not be relevant in a few months, so I wouldn't make a decision that would lessen the RP I have access to for years based on something that will affect my leveling and PvE experience for a relatively short amount of time.

My plan is a single elezen and like five hundred Miqo'te, but repping elezen for the poll since he's whom I've been RPing in the beta.