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W'hoorn cultural exchange

Decheerans have one, now we can too!

Mostly this is meant to be a place to hammer out what we know and/or have cooked up/seen cooked up regarding Benu Wen culture, W'hoorn in general, etc.

To start off, I've been playing Crorr as someone who's just a bit of a hedonist in terms of wanting exotic foods and other indulgences (though he doesn't trust mind-altering substances like Leesa and synthahol.) up to and including rather shamelessly and brazenly appraising just about everyone he meets in his head for what he's mentally cataloguing as 'bunkability'.

At the other end of the scale, he doesn't really 'get' monogamy or wanting to limit himself/force others to limit themselves to one partner, romantically or for bunking. He recognizes that other people aren't W'hoorn and that they have different cultures, he just assumes that the W'hoorn way is the best way and doesn't understand why people might not agree. I've had him joke that people who're being mouthy and abrasive are trying to flirt, using what he describes as backwater, rural, antiquated courting behavior, which implies that at one point in history it was actually the norm.

Of note: some of the shops in Vertenalith are dedicated to things like fancy clothes and sweets. One of the sweets available is a candy ry'nari soldier, which seems to imply a softening of some if not all of the cultural tension. One of the W'hoorn NPCs in Litharge sort of stole the aesthetic I was gonna go for with Crorr, amber-eyed, stoic, paternal type. It definitely feels right that in the modern era at least some W'hoorn are turning their aggression and competitive spirit toward commercial, industrial, or other pursuits where the focus is less on physically beating on one another and more on doing so metaphorically. With Crorr this is manifesting at the moment as him pushing himself toward the upper echelons of interstellar commerce and captaincy.
Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!

Comments

  • I took a lot from how W'hoorn act in game. Two years mandated military service, check. Honor and glory as my go-to salutations, check. Then things like my character has obvious siblings because he was part of a litter - I kinda wrote them off. I have his father having lost a Right of Challenge (but cloned back so still in his life) and the family being impacted by that, leaving Benu Wen at a young age to almost live as refugees in Scrapston. 

    But having atyipical parents, he doesn't have the same aggression or drive for competition that other W'hoorn might. He does take pride in his accomplishments. He's definitely slightly claustrophobic and thinks of the W'hoorn gods as inspiration, more than having any true belief.
    Vote for Starmourn! Don't hurt Poffy.
  • It's funny but I have my character kind of played out like vegeta from dbz where honor and pride dictates his every action a long with temper but with he's alone with his mate he's eh weird. Also any good templates for a desc?? i keep coming up with blanks 
  • Moved from the Discord: Any interested want to send Aurelius a proposal for the elusive "Physical sport" W'hoorn apparently really enjoy? Bonus points if said sport can actually be played by PCs using existing game mechanics.
    Hi, I'm Ata. Oh and maybe some other people, too. o:) Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.
  • Pulling in my 2 marks from there as well:
    I got the impression that it's not any one specific sport, but more like some of them like space football, others like space REAL football, others space lacrosse, or space boxing, or spaceship racing, or hockey.

    I think they probably had some sort of gladiatorial games as a major pastime at one point or another, and W'hoorn-centric and cultural games are probably very reminiscent of American Gladiators, Ninja Warrior, Wipeout, or a toned down version of the Running Man. A bunch of physical challenges and quick arena style matches that rely on strength and agility to complete.

    They look like they evolved from pounce-predators or swoop-predators, so their sports are probably a lot of climbing/jumping/gliding/swooping, mixed in with what humans would consider traditional wrestling and tussling.

    Off the top of my head:

    Two competitors start on adjacent platforms with a wall dividing them and a series of pillars with platforms on them arranged so that there are several layers of play. Many platforms have strips of cloth looped over a pole in the center of the platform. At the bottom of the arena is a pair of stakes about three feet from one another. The superficial objective is simple: Whoever has the most flags around their stake at the end of the match is the winner. Competitors aren't allowed weapons, but are permitted armor padding similar to the kind worn in martial arts sparring to prevent serious injury.

    What usually follows is a three-phase game where competitors first race to snatch as many of the flags as they can, then when the number of free flags starts to dwindle and there are only a few relatively easy ones left it transitions into trying to steal or wrest flags from one another before they can be delivered, or while the other competitor is trying to retrieve more, and finally into one competitor defending his or her own cloth while the other tries to catch up by subduing the defender enough that they can successfully get strips off the defender's stake and onto their own.

    Obv need to give fancy space-cat names to everything.
    Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
  • Personally, I picture something sort of kinda like Quidditch. The game is played airborne with two teams of 8 players, the arena made out of 16 tall, different height cone-shaped (flat-topped) pillars, 8 on either side of the field, with stairs spiraling around them back to the top of each pillar. There is a "ball" and a ring goalpost high up on each side that the team can score with, but you can also win the game by simply incapacitating or grounding all the opposing players. If you touch the ground, you're out. The first team to reach 30 points or ground all the opponents wins.

    Obviously, physical combat would be a big deal in this sport, since if you lose a fight mid-air and get grounded or KO'd, your team is down a player for the rest of the game. If you want to pass the ball to a teammate, they need to be on top of a pillar (or gliding nearby, and have really good catching skills) so they can catch it and glide somewhere else with it. If there's no one to pass to, you better shoot the ball quick or get ready for someone on the other team to come fight you for possession. Since the W'hoorn can't fly outright, getting up the pillars quickly is one of the most valuable skills that a player can have - and staying on the pillar, or diving to another amid contention, is the other most valuable. Some W'hoorn are strong enough jumpers to just leap up the stairs, straight up the side of the pillar, rather than climbing them in sequence around the pillar, and this is completely allowed.

    If the ball touches the ground, to prevent a player from grounding themselves trying to recover it, it is considered out of play and relaunched straight up in the air, center field, to put it back into play.

    Any form of unarmed combat is acceptable in game with the exception of anything that outright kills an opposing player. No armor, weapons, or game materials are provided with the exception of the field and the game ball. Players are restricted to their own body and personal strength while playing, with no artificial assistance allowed - this includes performance enhancers, weapons, armor, jetpacks, or anything else that didn't grow on/in your body naturally.


  • Yeah, no idea where the singular sport came from.

    Late, but I try to embody Honour, pride, awkwardness and nipple rings.
  • Might I suggest a mechanism for winning EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS POINTS and making the game actually possible in the game: Nanoseers can VOID PROPGRAB and VOID HURL <dir> to hurl a prop in various directions. Not sure what other classes have. Some sort of capture the flag? I dunno.
    Hi, I'm Ata. Oh and maybe some other people, too. o:) Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.
  • it's worth mentioning that we can't actually fly naturally due to game balancing even through every class has some sort of flying. personally my female W'hoorn won't get near a male because of the concern that some idiot will think hook dong because cat. I kinda picture their tongue's like a lions rough for licking blood and marrow but soft around the tip because no one really wants a sandpaper tongue. I do play around acting like a typical cat but it's mostly an act for laughs since I don't think W'hoorn really do groom with their tongue. I still don't know if W'hoorn should purr like small breeds or have a roar like big breeds. I also find it weird females have a mane even though it's basically hair
  • edited January 2019
    Our national sport is chasing the laser beam. It. Must. Die. 
    "Tell me of your home world, Usul."
  • Ephemera said:
    Our national sport is chasing the laser beam. It. Must. Die. 
    <3 omg the mental imagery
    vote ∘ Explore Nexus mods for Starmourn & Achaeandb for Nexus

  • tysandr said:
    Ephemera said:
    Our national sport is chasing the laser beam. It. Must. Die. 
    <3 omg the mental imagery
    The mental image is my cats. W'hoorn are more dignified than that.
    Vote for Starmourn! Don't hurt Poffy.
  • Geariah said:
    it's worth mentioning that we can't actually fly naturally due to game balancing even through every class has some sort of flying. personally my female W'hoorn won't get near a male because of the concern that some idiot will think hook dong because cat. I kinda picture their tongue's like a lions rough for licking blood and marrow but soft around the tip because no one really wants a sandpaper tongue. I do play around acting like a typical cat but it's mostly an act for laughs since I don't think W'hoorn really do groom with their tongue. I still don't know if W'hoorn should purr like small breeds or have a roar like big breeds. I also find it weird females have a mane even though it's basically hair
    Personally, I figure a portion of W'hoorn still have cactus schweens, but it's an evolutionary throwback akin to a human born with a tail. The fact that their mating habits are still competitive suggests that they were likely MUCH worse at the dawn of the species, which at least supports the idea that they had the penile spines at one point (it's part of the reason wild lion males bite the neck of the females, so they don't claw his voidsucking eyes out), but once the ladies started getting a say in the matter more regularly, it probably started dying out. Add a few thousand years for the culture and society to mature enough for faster-than-light space travel, and a few thousand more since then, and I'm willing to bet most W'hoorn todgers either lack the spines outright or that they've devolved to something that would be more fairly called nubs or studs. 

    And now that that's out of the way and you've had a chance to grab the brain bleach. Roaring is more likely. As I understand it, only two species of big cat is capable of purring, the cheetah and the cougar, and both of them are solitary hunters rather than familial/pack hunters. We can still see traces of the Pride roots in modern W'hoorn as presented in the bits we have so it's not hard to imagine them having descended from a species that needed the roars to communicate and locate one another. Though as was pointed out earlier, the sector is deep into the genetic modification and, for want of a better term, transhumanistic roads, so it's not inconceivable that some would have had their larynx modified to allow for a purr instead. 

    Both of the sports presented are possible without flight, and in fact the one I proposed might actually have been harder for a fully airborne race to develop since the final objectives and the entire last phase is ground-based. If the platforms are stacked right and are close enough to each other, it might even be harder to play if you're trying to fly. It's a good thing for newer players to remember though, and it is mentioned in the race description that they can't fly, but still tend to build upwards and include spots to glide and swoop from.
    Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
  • Yes but there will be honor and glory in our laser chase. Your cats don't have to dodge obstacles etc. 
    "Tell me of your home world, Usul."
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