Just a bunch of setting facts in a big old list, no order or theme besides what was either already written or what I thought was neat.
If I give a mention of a cultural feature without specifying where it's from, it's most likely from the mid-to-north Hespermont and descended from the Longhouse Culture.
Some might be repetitions or variants on a theme. Some might have unfinished sentences or hanging thoughts.
Dragons do not roar, and instead make a trumpeting noise. And cassowary noises.
If I was the sort of author to get really into linguistics, Pen and Tam would be speaking something akin to Breton if it had crossover with Mohawk.
Sweetbread Day - A holiday to honor the corvids, celebrated predictably enough by cooking sweetbread and setting it out on the porch. The corvids in return will leave some shinies.
Calling the Law - When the buruq clans meet at the Hollowhorn to settle major disputes and inter-clan issues.
Saltmaid - A witch of the orcae / black amazons. Typically the party that deals with outsiders on behalf of the band leaders.
Gravemound - Formed from mass graves. A small hill of flesh and corpses. Spread disease. Burn them.
A lineage of hymns to Tubalkhan are traditionally sung with no musical accompaniment besides hammer and anvil.
The amazons have not only bred remarkably courageous horses, but they have also tamed chalicotheres for labor and war and eohippi as pets.
Other mammalian megafauna are typically found in Kara Koren, Far Amda, Colcie, Azuda and the Dayr and include but are not limited to: glyptodonts, baluchitheriums, machrauchenia, entelodonts, and assorted giant shaggy versions of other large but more well known animals. There's probably an andrewsarchus out there too.
A very small number of non-avian dinosaurs survived into the modern day, though only in miniature forms and only in Azuda. The largest of these are sauropods about the size of a deer.
Scholars have gone back and forth on whether or not the troodontids of Azuda are one of the Peoples. They will use and make stone tools, but don't appear to have fire, language, art, or magical practice. Current consensus is that they are in the same category as the apes.
Those who wish to change their sex may go to the temple of Quiest (also called Tonsi or Tongzhi, who oversees comings and goings, hospitality, change, and uncertainty) and request the aid of the priests there. Applicants will begin an eleven-month preparatory period, during which they are put on a regimen of hormone blockers and enhancers, as well as anti-cancer treatments (as magic that shapes and changes flesh is prone to generating tumors). At the end of the eleven months, they present themselves at the temple for the final stage of transition, where after a short ceremony (often a mock-funeral for the old self) they will be placed into a deep sleep and the priests will complete their work. A month later, exactly one year after beginning the process, the applicant will emerge, declare a new name for themselves, and a big party will commence.
Bicycles are commonplace.
There is an MSF analog to the Muppets.
The spiritual potency of swords is sufficient to make sword-mastery a field separate from normal combat. Anyone can train to use a sword, but sword-mastery is magic.
A shared space program, with members around the Mare and beyond, is currently in the planning stages. The planners hope to provide an alternative to the currently limited and wizard-dominated moon access The first human (and crow) in orbit won't be for another twenty years or so, but the plans are already in motion.
Wizards who make the journey to the moon generally do it in one of two ways: in a fabulous personal vessel arrayed with gorgeous gossamer sails and all the fineries they can afford, or by just launching their tower like a rocket.
I am still undecided about the contents of the rest of the solar system in MSF, other than there are five planets visible from earth, analogs for Mercury and Jupiter, and probably one for Mars.
There is a code of religions laws for the slaughter of animals in many regions. Butchers form their own cult.
Colloquially, magic can be called the Arts and Crafts - the Arts being wizardry, and the Crafts being various folk traditions and so on. There is a meaningful difference in approach to the two, in the way Tolkien differentiated domination and mastery. (This is why wizardry is very dangerous and tends to get really fucked up pretty quick.)
There are eight major holidays over the course of the year, four Folk Days at the beginning of the seasons and four Gods' Days on the solstices and equinoxes. They are, in order: Mother's Day (Spring Equinox, beginning of the new year) > Beltane > Father's Day / Midsummer (Summer Solstice) > Lunasa > Children's Day (Autumnal Equinox) > Sawin / Goblinwatch > Midwintermas / Yule / Hearthnight (Winter Solstice) > Imbolg.
The average lifespan, outside of regions currently beset by horrible shit, is well into the 80s, and it's not unheard of to reach 120.
End of life care, when not provided by the family, is handled by the House of the Heron.
Since wide-scale industry is a one-way ticket to the Folk fucking your shit up and/or an emergence event for Hell, nearly all goods are hand-made. But since craftspeople are typically skilled in the Craft (as one would expect), this means that it's not much of a penalty.
Points where rivers converge are called "marriages" - towns at these locations typically have a festival in the summer where the marriage vows of the river spirits are renewed, as well as those of the attendants.
Children are often instructed at a young age that, if lost, find the nearest elephant and ask for help.
The greater Hespermontane language family doesn't have dedicated words for husband or wife - those are just the word for spouse with an optional gendered affix, and the word for spouse is much more literally "beloved" or "[recipient of] heart's labor".
A contemporary description of the Sable Maid: "Her build is that of one who spent her formative years chasing goats and shoveling mule shit, shorter by a hand-span than most of her soldiers and stout-shouldered. As with her countrymen, her skin is dark and her eyes have an epicanth fold. She keeps her hair shaved down, contrary to the braids fashionable in Orlei. Her habit of wearing black clothing on and off the battlefield is considered so ordinary by the soldiers that most do not notice the affectation at all."
The Maid's title had a pesky habit of getting mistranslated multiple times during the war, leading to several embarrassing incidents with foreign officials making some ill-founded presumptions ("maid" being translated with connotations of "virgin" rather than "young woman" being the most common).
The Maid was wounded four times during the War - once by being thrown from her horse, once from an arrow, once from a grenado, and one incident that is unspecified in the battle report.
As the Maid kept her personal life private, and soldiers love nothing more than gossip, speculation and rumor about her was rampant. Especially about her love life (she had only ever confirmed a "an ordinary farmgirl's antics" in passing.) Perhaps two or three of her lieutenants knew the truth of the matter - one of them, Alexandra of Themiskrya, said on her death bed that the Maid had at least one lover during the war, and that every guess she had ever heard of their identity was wrong.
There is an apocryphal account of the Maid participating in a peacock play (kin to a drag show) during the War to keep morale up with the troops she was accompanying at the time. The details are obscure and contradictory, and there is no consensus on where, when, or with what group it was performed.
Most medical magic focuses on preventative care and treatment of disease, and grows more dangerous and less reliable the more complex the procedure is to be - magical alteration of flesh will very often trigger the development of tumors. The hands of a capable surgeon remain the best chance at victory in cases of severe injury. It is theoretically possible to treat mental illness through magic, but such a procedure is considered both unacceptably dangerous and unspeakably invasive for providing no benefit over what might be gained through good counsel and carefully-chosen pharmaceuticals.
The large reddish splotch on the moon is said to be a blood splatter from the Daemonomachy.
Amazonian culture puts great importance on the concept of arete. No matter what you do, strive for personal excellence. Be the very best, like no one ever was.
The Thermodon plains are home to a large species of predatory insect that comes in semi-regular swarms. Like an angry cicada the size of a shetland pony. With a human face. This is a major part of why the amazons have maintained a martial culture. That and the occasional wars with the Dragon Republics and the buruq.
The Attercanths are more difficult to cross than the Dayrmonts, being younger and higher. Most traffic goes through one of three main passes, one of which is controlled by Lilu-Voya. If you don't want to have to deal with mountains, you're going to have to take a boat and hop around. There's reliable service between the Arivienne in the west and the Dragon Republics and Themiskyra in the east.
Shit I need to make up a city at the mouth of the Arivienne, don't I. Uh, shit. Okay port at major river's mouth, NSR and Orlei to the north, easy access by water to Acephavara, Themiskyra, etc. I know on one map I have Di Valeo placed there but I typically imagine it a short ways up the river since the NSRs power base is skeleton labor not boats. Okay. Hrm. Name can wait. Let's make it big on dolphins, they don't get a lot of play in the world. Dual human-dolphin government. Dolphins are bastards, so a certain amount of shady business and skeeze is to be expected. Dolphin mobsters. There's a city with dolphin mobsters at the mouth of the Arivienne.
The Attercanths have an etymology that is more-or-less "the spider's spine". I have thought of nothing else to go with that, but I thought I should let you know.
As one might surmise by the fact that Pen works in a used bookstore, books are cheap, literacy is high, and there is a bustling printing scene.
Ports along the southern Hespermont have a lot of cultural influence from Vanidiyos and the other Acephavaran cities, since a lot of refugees from the south settled there after the War.
The inhabitants of the upper Avirienne (Orlei, etc) originally migrated there from the Belt, though that was a very long time ago and there's basically no remaining connection - much of their cultural influence is from the Eostremont.
I had said long ago that the main script used in the Hespermont was Deseret, but holy shit Mkhedruli is so nice to look at, absolutely gorgeous letters 10/10.
The Hespermont has three major ancient culture families - the Longhouse Culture in the north, the Forest Peoples in the mountains, and the Mound-Raiser Culture from the Low Country. All three mix in the middle regions along the Mora-Pono river valley and the Hill Country. Migrations, drift, and social upheaval have diversified and varied these, but the influence remains strong long after those cultures transitioned into new forms.
Lu's journey west towards the Crown of the World has more variations than any other part of the story cycle (being naturally episodic, everyone has their own additions for how Lu fought such-and-such local monster or met so-and-so local Folk), but they still tend to fall into four main branches, defined by whether or not Tubalkhan is present and whether or not there are any additional long term companions (such as Bristlehead Zhu, Raven, or Friar Redbeard)
Early childhood education is typically handled by the elders in the community. More formalized schooling comes later.
I imagine the visual aesthetic of the Hespermont is along the lines we get in Breath of the Wild, where it's got rather geographically mixed vibes. Appalachia by way of Ghibli. You can see it in things like Pen and Tam's clothing (Peter did such a good job holy cow), or like how the ways people interact with the Folk has some significant Shinto influence.
The most popular sports in the Hespermont are baseball, soccer, lacrosse, and wizardball. The latter of these is the only one that gets up to what we'd consider professional-grade production, on account of there being wizards involved.
Wizards don't rule the world because the mentality necessary for wizardry is terrible for long-term planning or organization, and will inevitably bring wizards into conflict with other wizards. The only stable magocracies are in Tanniclen (where the Queens are powerful enough to keep all the other wizards in line) in Pelai (where the Adzat and Obet conclaves keep each other locked in stalemate), and in the Magelands (which is anarchic, and utterly divorced from reality anyway). Elsewise, the wizard will be a flash in the pan, and typically start a war while they're at it.
There is a middle ground where the Arts might be safely practiced without the slide into wizardry, by limiting the practice to a single sphere of influence. These traditions are typically appenced with -mancy, or are lumped into the general "magecraft" which replaces the limited scope with limited power.
The summoning of demons is actually the intentional creation of them; there are certain ritual acts developed to generate demons with specific traits. Normally one would think that no one would ever conceive of doing this, but desperate people will resort to desperate measures.
The Maid died when Darvatius stabbed her, not afterwards. What happened was an impossibility - a soul maintaining full coherence after bodily death, even if it was for less than a minute. Local Woman Too Angry To Die.
The world itself still doesn't have a name. This isn't really an issue, though I suppose it would be convenient at some point.
There's a form of comedic theater where the troupe members will draw names of gods from out of a hat and work their way through a given scenario
Hill Country weddings traditionally include the raising of a pavilion or tent for a re-enactment of Lu's proposal to Tubalkhan, the gifting of funeral garments to the spouses by their parents, and the exchange of honey cakes. And feasting and dancing and getting rip-roaring drunk, culminating in a very rowdy song detailing increasingly more outrageous/obscene/nonsensical sex acts the newlyweds will engage in. The newlyweds themselves usually start it off.
Despite what my prior writings may imply, there are major city-states in the Low Country and they are, in fact, interesting. I just haven't written about them yet. I know there's one that has a giant mysterious silver ORB floating above it.
The natural habitat of the sphinx is the library, though it must be admitted than any place a sphinx remains for long will eventually become a library. They are picky and often vain, always on the prowl for bigger collections and more baroque architecture. There is a city in high Dulyuk that is said to have been founded in the aftermath of catastrophe by a band of refugees stumbling across a sphinx den.
The nomadic maritime nations of the Belt lilifio are masters of the arts of windshaping and wavemaking, making them the greatest seafolk in the world. They have often called pirates, typically by those who are intruding upon their trading routes and rights, a label that is not accurate but embraced for amusement. These maritime nations practice crew-marriages and raise their children communally before they are married off to another fleet.
The nations in Amda are traditionally male-only in leadership (and thus, something of an anomaly). Long ago it was decided, after one too many wars of succession, that kings may only marry men and that their heirs are selected by adoption. Any biological children they might have are excluded from government positions.
The peoples of Ist treat the fall of their ancient predecessors, the devouring of the princes, and the Great Manticore itself, to be taboo. The city and its satellite settlements remain abandoned and the modern inhabitants of Ist live nomadic in the jungle. Outside study by Pelaian scholars has been brief and at a distance - despite voices urging to the contrary, more intrusive expeditions have not been mounted.
The most recent war in the Hespermont broke out ~twenty years ago (If Tam returning to Olen is thereabouts "now") in the north country, when the sorceror Anharugh Paur emerged from his tower and inflamed what would have been a mundane border dispute among the dayrdani strongholds into a catastrophe, complete with cults, demons, the works. Forces from Bensael and Draga were summoned to assist the campaign against him, and even then it took three years before he cast himself from his own tower. Molly Ironshanks served in this conflict prior to joining the Order of the Sable Maid, surviving both the Battle of Splintertooth Pass and the subsequent March to Yaran, and was part of the battalion that downed a Lord of War at Four Sticks Bridge.
Most of the Pelaian refugees that remained on this side of the ocean settled in Redgate, Bensael, or the stretch of river between. Pen's situation - getting adopted into a Hill Country family - was an anomaly brought about by a civil service overwhelmed with six hundred plus orphaned children at once and very few places to put them. Most of Pen's adolescent angst was centered on this.
Kvaare is the closest to an industrialized society as one can safely get in the world, a development that did not come without repeated instances of the Folk swooping in and ruining everyone's day. The roots of this are in the Golden Revolution's promises of lifting the masses out of poverty (and killing the aristos), and to a great extent they succeeded, if you're willing to overlook multiple factories getting outright eaten. Woo, gilded age, yaay.
The local flavor of religion in Se Tolahi is characterized as monotheism, which is not entirely correct but likewise not entirely wrong. They don't go as far as to say that the gods of man don't exist, just that those are interpretive facets of their universal motive force. It's rather esoteric and has a tendency for monasticism.
Design note: I am still figuring out precisely how the inhabitants of MSF talk about gender and relationships, since they have a very different (read: far less toxic) cultural background than our current day and age (ie, no great divide between the queer and heteronormative). Still a work in progress, unlikely to be world-changingly radical, might involve conlanging experiments.
One of the reasons that wizards are so dangerous is the ease by which they can get people on their side, without using much of the Art at all. It's an unfortunate, seemingly hard-coded weakness in humans: if someone comes along offering what we want, all they really need to do is make people believe that they can deliver. And when you're desperate, and they have phenomenal cosmic power, you believe it, even if you know that it never works out.
Bensael is based in a large part on Pittsburgh (sitting at a river junction in the hill country), and most blatantly with the towers of the Black and White Queens - they're just fantasy versions of the UPMC tower and Cathedral of Learning.
Common Folk of the Hill Country: Mouldywarps, Forest Folk, Kodama, Nymphs, Dryads, River Sprites, Brownies, Goblins, Moth-Folk, Trolls, Spookums, Hidebehinds, The Great Stone Collossi.
The common calendar has zodiac associations for month (12), year (12), and century (6). I only have the last one decided on - centuries are Leviathan, Behemoth, Simiurgh, Kraken, Dragon, and Monkey King. I will avoid giving exact years whenever possible, which is about every opportunity that isn't an event in the life of a POV character.
The Hill Country is fossil-rich territory - trilobites, ammonites, and weird little plants galore. They're common enough that they're used for decoration, and you're liable to find them just walking around in the woods.
Some wizards of the Tranquility Academy have floated the idea of purposefully adjusting the orbit of the moon so that it matches up with the solar calendar. Everyone else (even other wizards!) rightfully tells them that this is a terrible idea.
Pen once did a gig as a swimsuit model (the clothier in Olen has a raffle every summer, winner gets their picture put up in the window. She still has the poster somewhere in the apartment.)
Farming models tend heavily towards agroforestry, companion planting, and other sustainable methods in cooperation with friendlier varieties of Folk (nymphs, mostly).
The postal service works with but is ultimately independent of government. It's honestly closer to a cult. They wear winged hats and coats with eagles emblazoned on them. They WILL deliver the mail on time.
One dragon is still alive: the Last King, who slumbers deep within the caverns of the Hollowhorn.
Where it's relevant, folks will draw a distinction between "train time" and "sun time" and switch between the two depending on the situation. The latter is translated into the canonical hours and varies according to what the sun's like at that time of year.
When all attempts at justice have failed, the victims still have the recourse of the erinyes. Whatever Lu said or did to make this delicate truce with the furies, the stories do not say - only that she was terrified of what she saw within their cave.
The names used for Folk are human-derived. They have none of their own. In truth the nature of individuality among the Folk is a bit strange, as some definitely have it, many don't, and some grow into it. The very powerful and those that hang around humans a lot tend to be more individualized.
The largest settlement of Lilu on the surface is Lilu-voya in the Attercanths, but other sizable urban populations exist in the Rift, Odzho, Red Point, and Panutaru.
The Dulyukhan are a cultural and ethnic isolate, and what is known about them comes through the peoples of Panutaru, who likewise keep to themselves. We can say of them this much with certainty: they tend towards short stature and broad shoulders like the dayrdani, their skin is reddish brown with dark spots on their shoulders and back, and their hair is short, soft, and silver-white, and covers much of their body. They speak very little, save with their eyes and their hands.
The twin sons of Lu and Tubalkhan, Emesh and Entu, are 100% just Kamina and Kittan. Nearly every story they feature in starts with them getting in a stupid contest of one-upmanship, and it's hilarious every time.
It's to be assumed that any given brothel will have at least a small shrine to one of the gods of sex workers and an attendant counselor-priest. Any place worth its name will provide both reproductive and psychological health support as well as the obvious.
When I write about Lu and the other gods, I do so from the mainline Hepsermontane perspective. This is only one lens for the Gods of Man, and other cultures naturally have alternate interpretations. In the NSR, Lu is worshiped near-exclusively in her aspect of the grieving mother. In Themiskyra she is Tabiti Hipparctrix Panposiedonea, queen of horses and of the seas. In Draga and the Dragon Republics the solar church places greatest importance on the source of the Crown of Fire through which all the gods are fueled. Acephavara has the Headless One and the Six Lords of Struggle. And so on and so forth. Wherever you go, however, there will be acknowledgment that the Gods of Man are the Gods of Man, regardless of name or aspect.
Design note: When writing MSF material, I tend to have a sense of places as Near, Known, or Far as a vague sort of psychic distance between there and here. Near places are ones you interact with regularly. Known places you don't regularly interact with, but you know enough (ie, a blogpost or two) about them. Far places are mostly unknown to both reader and characters, but they are going on about their own business just like anyone else is. So for example, the NSR is Near, Ool is Known, and Se Tolahi is Far.
Elephants, Dolphins, and Corvids do not have any compact with the Folk, and don't interact with them in any way like humans do - humans need to be reminded of the relationships they have with the rest of the world through rite and ritual and story. The other families just know.
Regardless of what versions and what episodes are featured, the Cycle of Lu goes Journey to the West -> Theft of Fire -> The Journey Through Winter -> The Daemonomachy -> The Coming of Spring -> The Potbelly Hill Sermon.
The church of the gods of man is not a top-down organization. A priest's primary roles are caretaker of the local shrine (if I use church or chapel, it's a shrine that's got a proper nave and room for a decent number of people), community counsel (often taking the role of third party or advisor in disputes), and storyteller.
I have never actually read any of the relevant comics, but somehow the Red Law is in the same ballpark as the Anti-Life Equation and "inadvertently copied Jack Kirby" is a merit badge far as I am considered.
There is a common drug similar to cannabis in effect, except it has a nice spicy smell to it instead of smelling like someone decided to burn a sweat-soaked sock.
There's a very simple bit of spellwork to induce sensation of numbness + pain akin to an arm or a leg falling asleep. This can be used a both a schoolyard prank, and as a means of self defense.
Pankration is not a single discipline, but an umbrella term for the killing martial arts. Pankration is mastery of violence, as one masters an art, and is in its way magical.
The Eostremonti (or commonly the Plains People or an as-yet-undecided endonym) live inbetween and throughout Draga, the Republics, the Magelands, and the Amazonians. I haven't got much material for them yet, other than that they are a very old culture group, they are primarily sedentary agriculturalists in comparison to the seminomadic buruq and the more mixed amazons, and that they provided the root of what would become Draga and the Republics (and thus, the common Imperial aesthetic in this part of the world).
The guz is a legendary creature of variable description, though most folks claim that it is large and has blue-black feathers. It comes at night to steal you away, though why and to where is up for debate. As is its actual existence. It is normally considered frightful, but not necessarily hostile.
There is a species of catfish in the Low Country that not only can heave itself around on land for short distances, but is big enough to swallow small humans whole.
There are a few surviving members of the greater dragon family. These drakes are non-sapient, about the size of a crocodile, still have most of their feathers (nice and waterproof) and possess no fire breath (though they can heat up their mouths enough to cook meat within them.)
A research team of wizards (with access to a bathysphere) once found a large chunk of basalt in one of the deeper stretches of the Mare that appears to have been purposefully carved with whorling designs. They swear up and down it is a kind of message from the octopi, though if it is they are probably cross with us now for having stolen it.
Air travel is limited to the airships of the Magelanders, since they are the only people capable of the constant and consistent output of the Art to keep one afloat. These are classic "it's a galleon with balloons attached" airships. Since there are so few of them, they tend to operate on the whims of the Magelanders themselves, so there's rarely consistent destinations or schedules.
Messages can be sent instantly across the world using the troll-stones, though any such message will be both public to any other users of the troll-stones and ridicule by the trolls themselves.
There is in Colcie a beast of burden that looks like a small, thin rhinoceros with shaggy white hair. They don't adjust well to other climates and so are only very rarely seen by the rest of the world.
There is a variety of demon that comes from the worship of weapons; by those who cannot bear to put it upon a shelf and let it rust away, who believe the threat of violence to be peace, who lust for the power of death but refuses to shoulder its burden. For this reason weapons are bound with secret names to restrain their influence.
