North King
blech
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2004
- Messages
- 18,165
RACE NAME: Pohm
Pohm is of course a derivative of the actual name the species has for itself, which actually sounds more like p [low whistle] mmmm, which most other creatures have a hard time doing with any kind of efficiency; there exists a whole language which is essentially generalized mashing together of the various Pohm languages for offworlders.
APPEARANCE:
The sapients themselves look rather like massive starfish with four arms, a meter and a half in diameter. They have superficial bilateral symmetry across three planes: the arms are identical across the body, and the front and back have no distinguishing features. Appearances are somewhat deceptive here; specialized organs underneath the surface are usually located on one side or the other.
The brain, however, exists as a ring or disc-shaped organ in the exact middle of the creature, protected by its only true bones. Blowholes are located between each of the arms, through which they breathe water (and, to a limited degree, smell). Each arm ends in a small mouth, and the arm as a whole can grip most any object. They can hear sound being by far their most important sense through sensitive organs ringing the main body.
As intelligent as one would expect a space-faring race to be, the Pohm are especially brilliant at synthesizing new information, tactics and strategy, spatial-visualization and three dimensions, and music. They are rather poor at fine manipulation and detail-work, though technology has of late made up for that. Visual acuity is practically nil, and they are completely colorblind, but as they live in an ocean, this is unsurprising.
The typical psyche of the species (though individual results may vary wildly) follows the following path: a social, non-territorial being fighting, when it occurs, is more often over resources than to capture land with the supreme confidence, aggressiveness and patience of a pack hunter, though at the same time, a little paranoid, empathic, and defiant.
CIVILIZATION NAME: No real unified structure, though the Qenim Concord is probably your best bet if you want us to take you to our leader. The other states will eventually come to shine in the stories I write.
LOCATION: G/H, leftmost of the three stars.
HISTORY:
It almost goes without saying that for the vast majority of their civilized years, the Pohm have been divided into many struggling factions. The thing is, for the Pohm, unlike what is apparently the case of most of the spacefaring races in this galaxy, the division has gone on to the present day. A condensed history will be offered here (OOC: keep in mind that this is rather like someone distilling Earths five thousand year history plus about five hundred future years into a few paragraphs).
Metin has three major shallow, continental seas which are the primary homes for Pohm: a southern, a northern, and a far western. Civilization first developed in the South, along a narrow shallow strip that was bordered on one side by a trench and on another by land. The sheer length of it made it highly divided. When civilization finally spread to the south of that continent on the other side of the mountain chain, the large empire of Betik consolidated and tried to spread northwards under many dynasties. The middle of the continent was rarely a base of power; the north remained divided and sent the first voyages over the deep into the true oceans.
Civilization thus overtook the North; it quickly became a series of colonies. The West was also discovered at this time, though being smaller it was not viewed as being of much use. Settler colonies in the North, particularly Thun began to cast off their ties to the powerful old empires of the South, and the old empires collapsed into brutal infighting that degenerated into some of the most horrific wars Metin has ever seen. Thun joined in the fight, as did Betik; when the dust settled little had changed besides a general weakening of all powers involved, the toppling of a few of the worse regimes, and widespread, long-term desires for peace.
There remain Betik and Thun at the top of the superpowers list, while Kekim, Okitim and Enutu (old colonial regimes) are still great powers. There are also numerous Independent states, each of various levels of association with the superpowers. The Qenim Concord is a diplomatic arena which ended the last Great War and through which most legal diplomatic actions are taken, though it is far from an effective unifying power. Each of the great powers has expanded into space with varying degrees of success, and the solar system is thoroughly colonized. Wormhole-based FTL travel has only recently been developed.
At the fringe of colonized space: in the asteroids, comet shield, moons, rings of gas giants perhaps even inside gas giants there are numerous criminals, pirates, and fugitives from authority, whose occasional attacks on shipping have proved an annoying drain on the economy. The drug trade remains a rather massive problem for the civilized powers, for the variety of stimulant that the Pohm are fond of grows rather better in hydroponics domes than on the planet itself. The everpresent conflict between these and the great powers has yet to be resolved to anyones satisfaction.
CULTURE:
Vibrant and varied, as one might expect from a world with thousands of years of history.
Generally, the society of the Pohm has a lot of support structures for the disadvantaged or underprivileged. Those that fall outside of these structures are usually ignored by the government and turn to a life of crime. Interpersonal loyalty is extremely strong, and most communities are extremely social rare indeed is the Pohm who knows nothing of his immediate neighbors (even in this increasingly high tech world). Status is rarely much of an issue; there are leaders and followers and the mass in the middle usually doesnt have much in the way of class consciousness.
Sexual relations are rather good. There is no strong division between the sexes, and embryos are matured almost entirely outside of the bodies of either gender (though they still rely on their mothers there to replenish their nourishment). Flirting and romance are perfectly acceptable on Metin, but they are rather prudish when it comes to the act of copulation itself, which for a Pohm is an extremely messy affair and liable to ruin the day of an unwilling bystander.
Religion is a common idea on Metin, and though many in the modern world are atheist or agnostic as might be expected, still plenty adhere to the old faiths, which are too numerous to list or even describe briefly.
The corpus of literature is suitably enormous, though much of it is oral rather than written. There tends to be a lot of dark and deeply philosophical vision in the work of Pohm. Indeed, owing to the fact that written, mass literature is largely a niche market among them, there is very little in the way of trash most of that function is taken up (quite gleefully) by the oral storytellers and television performers.
Art is beloved by all. The visual arts suffered a lot from the fact that Pohm are colorblind and dont usually think with sight to begin with (where humans might picture something, Pohm as often associate something very viscerally with how it sounds and feels). There is some painting, but more beloved is sculpture, especially sculpture that a being can pick up and feel. Even the writing is occasionally three dimensional, though with electronics this largely disappeared.
By far the most important art is music: they adore this above all others. Their own voices are marvelous to behold. Sighs, clicks, hums and whistles moving in perfect chords. It is said that they never speak; they only sing. Numerous instruments have become a traditional part of their music, and their orchestras are wildly popular. Most Pohm have at least tried to learn one instrument. It is said that singing badly is a capital crime on Metin. This is a joke. Mostly.
Economically, they certainly have trade, exchange, and other such ideas. Money is omnipresent, and unbacked by any commodity, and there are corporations of a sort (more on that when... well, to be honest, when I think through it; economics was not high on my list of priorities). As previously noted, theres a large criminal presence.
GOVERNMENT:
Government has developed far since the Pohm began their existence, and to detail its niceties would add unnecessarily to this novel-length post. Republics and dictatorships both have their place here, and there is a significant international regard for freedom. It should be noted that governments are generally personality driven, and even republics usually have a strong leader.
Betik: republic in the sense that theres an elected body, but effectively a dictatorship.
Thun: republic, the closest thing to an Empire of Good on this world, if Good is defined purely in terms of individual rights.
Kekim: straight up dictatorship; initiated the last Great War and nearly lost catastrophically. Has since undergone a lot of reform.
Okitim: more an oligarchy than anything else; republic in theory.
Enutu: a republic of sorts, free from corruption, though under a rather heavy bureaucratic burden.
Independent states: a baffling, manifold array of democracies, dictatorships, oligarchies, and corporatocracies.
Criminals: Guess.
DOMESTIC POLICY:
Pohm are unlike humans in that they are much less averse to overthrowing a regime that is actively bad for them, and they often have a lot of reciprocity of loyalty. Thus governments, even out and out rule-by-force dictatorships, usually treat their people rather well. Standards of living do vary, and the various levels of government intrusiveness are present from nation to nation, but even the worst current Pohm dictatorship probably wouldnt qualify as a dystopia. However, due to the problem that organized crime is posing in the new space age, Pohm governments are beginning to seriously crack down on illegal activities.
XENOPOLICY:
Other races have of course barely entered into the minds of the average Pohm, but the governments, as you might expect, do have a vague plan for dealing with them: to capture the initiative, find positions of strength from which to negotiate, and avoid pissing people off or getting pissed on. Pohm would likely enter any engagement with a mixture of measured caution, curiosity, and patience.
The fact that there are numerous minor factions in the Pohms space territories might complicate things, however.
PERSONAL NAMES:
This would be quite a task. Ill come to it later.
PLANET NAMES:
The home planet is named Metin (low hum, click, falling hum)
More local planets to come later.
STAR NAMES:
The home stars name is Keen (click, high whistle falling to low hum).
Ill name the stars as I reach them.
SHIP NAMES:
Basically, since the Pohm language is such a mess to transliterate, Ill probably use their English translations more often than their transliterations. Unless, of course, the concepts are untranslatable.
Additional background I excised to make the above easier to read quickly:
...Sorry for the novel...
Pohm is of course a derivative of the actual name the species has for itself, which actually sounds more like p [low whistle] mmmm, which most other creatures have a hard time doing with any kind of efficiency; there exists a whole language which is essentially generalized mashing together of the various Pohm languages for offworlders.
APPEARANCE:
The sapients themselves look rather like massive starfish with four arms, a meter and a half in diameter. They have superficial bilateral symmetry across three planes: the arms are identical across the body, and the front and back have no distinguishing features. Appearances are somewhat deceptive here; specialized organs underneath the surface are usually located on one side or the other.
The brain, however, exists as a ring or disc-shaped organ in the exact middle of the creature, protected by its only true bones. Blowholes are located between each of the arms, through which they breathe water (and, to a limited degree, smell). Each arm ends in a small mouth, and the arm as a whole can grip most any object. They can hear sound being by far their most important sense through sensitive organs ringing the main body.
As intelligent as one would expect a space-faring race to be, the Pohm are especially brilliant at synthesizing new information, tactics and strategy, spatial-visualization and three dimensions, and music. They are rather poor at fine manipulation and detail-work, though technology has of late made up for that. Visual acuity is practically nil, and they are completely colorblind, but as they live in an ocean, this is unsurprising.
The typical psyche of the species (though individual results may vary wildly) follows the following path: a social, non-territorial being fighting, when it occurs, is more often over resources than to capture land with the supreme confidence, aggressiveness and patience of a pack hunter, though at the same time, a little paranoid, empathic, and defiant.
CIVILIZATION NAME: No real unified structure, though the Qenim Concord is probably your best bet if you want us to take you to our leader. The other states will eventually come to shine in the stories I write.
LOCATION: G/H, leftmost of the three stars.
HISTORY:
It almost goes without saying that for the vast majority of their civilized years, the Pohm have been divided into many struggling factions. The thing is, for the Pohm, unlike what is apparently the case of most of the spacefaring races in this galaxy, the division has gone on to the present day. A condensed history will be offered here (OOC: keep in mind that this is rather like someone distilling Earths five thousand year history plus about five hundred future years into a few paragraphs).
Metin has three major shallow, continental seas which are the primary homes for Pohm: a southern, a northern, and a far western. Civilization first developed in the South, along a narrow shallow strip that was bordered on one side by a trench and on another by land. The sheer length of it made it highly divided. When civilization finally spread to the south of that continent on the other side of the mountain chain, the large empire of Betik consolidated and tried to spread northwards under many dynasties. The middle of the continent was rarely a base of power; the north remained divided and sent the first voyages over the deep into the true oceans.
Civilization thus overtook the North; it quickly became a series of colonies. The West was also discovered at this time, though being smaller it was not viewed as being of much use. Settler colonies in the North, particularly Thun began to cast off their ties to the powerful old empires of the South, and the old empires collapsed into brutal infighting that degenerated into some of the most horrific wars Metin has ever seen. Thun joined in the fight, as did Betik; when the dust settled little had changed besides a general weakening of all powers involved, the toppling of a few of the worse regimes, and widespread, long-term desires for peace.
There remain Betik and Thun at the top of the superpowers list, while Kekim, Okitim and Enutu (old colonial regimes) are still great powers. There are also numerous Independent states, each of various levels of association with the superpowers. The Qenim Concord is a diplomatic arena which ended the last Great War and through which most legal diplomatic actions are taken, though it is far from an effective unifying power. Each of the great powers has expanded into space with varying degrees of success, and the solar system is thoroughly colonized. Wormhole-based FTL travel has only recently been developed.
At the fringe of colonized space: in the asteroids, comet shield, moons, rings of gas giants perhaps even inside gas giants there are numerous criminals, pirates, and fugitives from authority, whose occasional attacks on shipping have proved an annoying drain on the economy. The drug trade remains a rather massive problem for the civilized powers, for the variety of stimulant that the Pohm are fond of grows rather better in hydroponics domes than on the planet itself. The everpresent conflict between these and the great powers has yet to be resolved to anyones satisfaction.
CULTURE:
Vibrant and varied, as one might expect from a world with thousands of years of history.
Generally, the society of the Pohm has a lot of support structures for the disadvantaged or underprivileged. Those that fall outside of these structures are usually ignored by the government and turn to a life of crime. Interpersonal loyalty is extremely strong, and most communities are extremely social rare indeed is the Pohm who knows nothing of his immediate neighbors (even in this increasingly high tech world). Status is rarely much of an issue; there are leaders and followers and the mass in the middle usually doesnt have much in the way of class consciousness.
Sexual relations are rather good. There is no strong division between the sexes, and embryos are matured almost entirely outside of the bodies of either gender (though they still rely on their mothers there to replenish their nourishment). Flirting and romance are perfectly acceptable on Metin, but they are rather prudish when it comes to the act of copulation itself, which for a Pohm is an extremely messy affair and liable to ruin the day of an unwilling bystander.
Religion is a common idea on Metin, and though many in the modern world are atheist or agnostic as might be expected, still plenty adhere to the old faiths, which are too numerous to list or even describe briefly.
The corpus of literature is suitably enormous, though much of it is oral rather than written. There tends to be a lot of dark and deeply philosophical vision in the work of Pohm. Indeed, owing to the fact that written, mass literature is largely a niche market among them, there is very little in the way of trash most of that function is taken up (quite gleefully) by the oral storytellers and television performers.
Art is beloved by all. The visual arts suffered a lot from the fact that Pohm are colorblind and dont usually think with sight to begin with (where humans might picture something, Pohm as often associate something very viscerally with how it sounds and feels). There is some painting, but more beloved is sculpture, especially sculpture that a being can pick up and feel. Even the writing is occasionally three dimensional, though with electronics this largely disappeared.
By far the most important art is music: they adore this above all others. Their own voices are marvelous to behold. Sighs, clicks, hums and whistles moving in perfect chords. It is said that they never speak; they only sing. Numerous instruments have become a traditional part of their music, and their orchestras are wildly popular. Most Pohm have at least tried to learn one instrument. It is said that singing badly is a capital crime on Metin. This is a joke. Mostly.
Economically, they certainly have trade, exchange, and other such ideas. Money is omnipresent, and unbacked by any commodity, and there are corporations of a sort (more on that when... well, to be honest, when I think through it; economics was not high on my list of priorities). As previously noted, theres a large criminal presence.
GOVERNMENT:
Government has developed far since the Pohm began their existence, and to detail its niceties would add unnecessarily to this novel-length post. Republics and dictatorships both have their place here, and there is a significant international regard for freedom. It should be noted that governments are generally personality driven, and even republics usually have a strong leader.
Betik: republic in the sense that theres an elected body, but effectively a dictatorship.
Thun: republic, the closest thing to an Empire of Good on this world, if Good is defined purely in terms of individual rights.
Kekim: straight up dictatorship; initiated the last Great War and nearly lost catastrophically. Has since undergone a lot of reform.
Okitim: more an oligarchy than anything else; republic in theory.
Enutu: a republic of sorts, free from corruption, though under a rather heavy bureaucratic burden.
Independent states: a baffling, manifold array of democracies, dictatorships, oligarchies, and corporatocracies.
Criminals: Guess.
DOMESTIC POLICY:
Pohm are unlike humans in that they are much less averse to overthrowing a regime that is actively bad for them, and they often have a lot of reciprocity of loyalty. Thus governments, even out and out rule-by-force dictatorships, usually treat their people rather well. Standards of living do vary, and the various levels of government intrusiveness are present from nation to nation, but even the worst current Pohm dictatorship probably wouldnt qualify as a dystopia. However, due to the problem that organized crime is posing in the new space age, Pohm governments are beginning to seriously crack down on illegal activities.
XENOPOLICY:
Other races have of course barely entered into the minds of the average Pohm, but the governments, as you might expect, do have a vague plan for dealing with them: to capture the initiative, find positions of strength from which to negotiate, and avoid pissing people off or getting pissed on. Pohm would likely enter any engagement with a mixture of measured caution, curiosity, and patience.
The fact that there are numerous minor factions in the Pohms space territories might complicate things, however.
PERSONAL NAMES:
This would be quite a task. Ill come to it later.
PLANET NAMES:
The home planet is named Metin (low hum, click, falling hum)
More local planets to come later.
STAR NAMES:
The home stars name is Keen (click, high whistle falling to low hum).
Ill name the stars as I reach them.
SHIP NAMES:
Basically, since the Pohm language is such a mess to transliterate, Ill probably use their English translations more often than their transliterations. Unless, of course, the concepts are untranslatable.
Additional background I excised to make the above easier to read quickly:
Spoiler see the section title; keep in mind that some of it is a work in progress and is not necessarily canon... :
...Sorry for the novel...
Welcome to the Galaxy partners!
I'm definitely trying my best to make things clear, but it would seem that I have failed, as both you and North King were unclear on things.
