Culture Creation Challenge #1

A

Arcadia

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Greetings folks, I'm Arcadia, an avid chat roleplayer and content designer, and today's challenge is gonna be something different to what I usually post! Today, we're going to design a culture, and each week this challenge could get harder or easier depending on the week before! So today's challenge, we'll start off easy.

CHALLENGE RATING: Today's Difficulty is a * Challenge (One Star), meaning there is a challenge and one stipulation.

Today's Challenge is:

*Design a High Fantasy Culture.

Today's Rules are:

*The culture must have at least one deity.

Information examples;
  1. How the culture is structured in regards to power, who rules it? A patriarchy, matriarchy, or is it anarchy?
  2. What festivals does this culture have? What does the culture celebrate?
  3. What is the culture's economical foundation? Does it sell food, jewels, or jobs?

I hope you have fun attempting this challenge! :D
 
The Stormjörm city state, due to its remote location on the Lillängen isles, have caused quite a scandal in the anthropological circles. After the publishing of Guggenschneiderheimel's expedition's report paper, many departments of respected academical institutions have became veritable battlefields, the respective department's scholars often divided into at least two groups. One side finds the report genuine, citing the previous publications of Plithunius, Sarka and Denub, where each author outlines a very similar culture to the one Guggenschneiderheimel discovered. The other group considers Plithius a fool, Sarka a charlatan, Denub a fake and Guggenschneiderheimel and his bunch of merry postgraduate students a group of drunkards, who spent the grant money for the expedition drinking, dicing and investing into women of questionable morals, and who later, when the money ran dry, spend the last night before deadline feverishly putting together the most preposterous stack of manure the frontal journals and annals of anthropology have ever seen.

The root of the issue lies in the deity the Stormjörm people worship. Guggenschneiderheimel reports that the people worship a dwarf sheep looking god called Stabekk. The god, as they believe, created the world from it's wool, during the even known as The Great Shearing. The wool fell into the Water, where the dirt was washed away, and created land. The now clean wool rose, white and pure as mathematical truth, and made the clouds, sun, moon, and all those shiny bits in the sky.

The locals had no answer why the sheep was struck with dwarfism, or how this crumble of mythology was enough to form a whole religion. The naysayers point out that, assuming Guggenschneiderheimel did not made it up completely, the locals must have made it up themselves as a joke to the silly foreigners, who walked around and were asking silly questions. The dwarfism, thus, can be explained with need to quickly produce large amount of idols in short amount of time.

The locals told Guggenschneiderheimel that their faith was more than satisfying. You can extrapolate the God's behaviour from reactions of the actual sheep. Ask them for better weather, or for bountiful harvest. The sheep will simply keep on grazing, ignoring you completely. Thus, the religion was a very economical one, with predictable miracles, that is, none. Guggenschneiderheimel reports he has never before encountered more peaceful and overall happy society anywhere else in the explored universe.

Naturally, this discovery, if true, will possibly lead to dispute of the van Helmholtz principle. It is inconceivable that a a set of deities that would include such a logical and rational god could be the source of the whole sum of observed magic in the universe.