Dragon Wife City Culture pt. 1: Art

The City of the Dragon Wives boasts a culture that is a frankenstein-meld of hundreds of different pre-armageddon traditions. Wedded to it are the blossomed ideals and values of a world stuck in an unending apocalypse. When survival is the only thing that matters, the human mind changes, compartmentalizes, and exaggerates. Despite this, it finds a way all the same.

There are four cultural pillars for these people. They are, in order described:

• ART, their method of communication, recording history, and catharsis.
• HUNTING, the foundation of both their religion, their method of survival, and more catharsis.
• LABOR, farming the floating gardens, maintaining the hunt-blocks, and filtering the lake.
• WORSHIP, for there is no medicine as strong as religion to make the terrible bearable.

These four pillars are one of the only reasons the city-state has not descended into absolute anarchy, and serve as the big targets for the Hyena Ka conspiracies. Below, each pillar is given a number of points to help understand the world. The author encourages you to alter the points, throw some out, or add more as you want--they are guidelines in every definition.

ART

• Art is the city's primary method of communication. Words are pictures. Pictures are made through heliography.
• Heliography is the art of using glass and mirrors to burn stone with sunlight. See above for a heliograph.
• The deepness of the burn, its width, and the symbols themselves all construct a nuanced sentence. One mural can be as little as a poem stanza or as much as an essay.
• All children learn to read heliography, but the child itself must pursue it with their own fervor. They are taught by Spears of Heliographers (their term of venery) on one of their Sunburnt Workshops.
• Sunburnt Workshops are the names for the rock outcroppings that rise out of the lake water that surrounds the proper city. Spears of Heliographers live there, building different contraptions of glass and mirrors to improve their art and their words.
• Heliographers take commissions to burn messages and murals into personal tablets, the sides of bridges, and the sides of buildings.
• Each w orkshop has a different culture. Gold Bloods use symbols of sun-bleached bones while Blind Eyes believe that seeing the art ruins it. See Appendix __ for more.
• Not all who learn this art have to join a workshop. Many learn it for personal reasons, for forms of labor, or just to experiment with it. Skillful heliographs outside the workshops are sought after to write and transport hidden messages.
• There are other forms of art. Artisans who create clothing will reward gatherers or those who do something grand for the city with homespun cottons dyed in rich, rarely seen colors, such as purple or jade.
• Other artisans scrimshaw bones. Sacrifices and the natural dead have their flesh boiled off beforehand. The inscribed bones are believed to help the spirit find guidance, and decorate pyramid-temples and underwater catacombs. These areas are known as Hero Wombs.
• Another set of artisans focus on construction. They plan out city expansion and reduction, they craft weapons and tools, they cast jewelry and help gatherers sort their tomb-stolen treasures. They are widely considered to be heroes in the city for the services their art provides.
• Those who make art just for fun are stereotyped as being escapists and as dreamers. This stereotype is half true.
• Those who make art-in-service are stereotyped as almost being noble or mentally elevated. This stereotype, too, is half true.