The Cadaverous Earth

[Superfluous Crow]

Ilahna, sensing a node of memory in the once-palatial shell, lapsed into the trance-like state of chronoleurgic hypnosis, chasing echoes like fluttering bats in some unfathomable mnemonic cavern. Suddenly Siril bristled, hooted with avian-feline precognition

You do like fancy words don't you? :p

[LD]

I like the excerpt.

When writing, is the smorgasbord of unique words present in your head, or do you pause and open a thesaurus?

It seems that you are not only very good at imagining entire scenes in your head, but also are good at imagining them in a way that other human beings would not intuitively conceive.

I wonder how you would write a newspaper article reporting on something mundane, such as a musical concert, or a comedy show.

[Steerpike]

[ooc][blockquote=Cataclysmic Crow]You do like fancy words don't you?[/blockquote]I blame Mieville, Lovecraft, and Mervyn Peake.  They pretty much converted me to the lush approach, and convinced me that so-called "purple prose" isn't necessarily a bad thing, the way that some claim.  Most of my tastes skew this way: I'll take a gnarly gothic cathedral over a streamlined, minimalist, post-modern  structure any day.[blockquote=Light Dragon]When writing, is the smorgasbord of unique words present in your head, or do you pause and open a thesaurus?[/blockquote]Mostly present.  I've used a thesaurus before, but I don't use one much anymore; I remember one story I wrote when I was about seventeen - a really awful piece of work, actually, though quite long - where I looked up just about every word roughly synonymous for "shadowy" and "ornate," and pretty much absorbed those words into my vocabulary straight from the thesaurus.  The aforementioned writers have certainly expanded my vocabulary, though... like, I certainly wouldn't have used the word "cyclopean" before reading Lovecraft, for example.

I tend to write a bit more sparingly about the mundane, but it probably gets suffused with bits of purple prose.  My travel journal from Italy, for example, contains lots of lines like these: "At this point the pull of so much ancient grandeur was becoming almost oppresive."[/ooc]

[LD]

Thank you for the answer.

>>My travel journal from Italy, for example, contains lots of lines like these: "At this point the pull of so much ancient grandeur was becoming almost oppressive."

Oh that's sad. :o. I would have thought it would be difficult to tire of the Obelisks, the Mausoleums, the Capitoline Hill, the Colosseum, and St. Peter's. Rome is an amazing city. (But I suppose this discussion is off topic here.)

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Oh, I totally loved Rome - adored it.  That line is really the exception to the rule; there are always parts of every vacataion where you "hit the wall" or become momentarily jaded with things... that was a few days in, and I was trying to cram too many things into a single day, instead of organically deciding what to do or see.  I just thought it was a good line in terms of how I might describe something that does't have to do with post-apocalyptic fantasy weirdness.[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Added a brief bit about the Serrated Coast to te Occident section, and a very small storiette to Baranauskas.[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Also addded jinni; not sure if I'm happy with them.  They went through some other versions, and I think I like this one the best.[/ooc]

[LD]

The jinni '" also called the vulnerae or woundfolk '" are a strain of daeva said to have issued forth from a wound in the earth itself, released from an unfathomable oubliette with walls of stone, or perhaps of glyph-graven steel, or possibly of unthinkable and inhuman flesh; some say that this wound festered, and became the Suppuration (making the jinni forerunners or somehow kin to the oneiroi), others that the wound stands for an otherworldly portal (making the jinni demoniac), still others that the jinni are simply terrestrial troglodytes who were forced from their underground homeland in a mass-exodus by disaster or by some unknown, subterranean war. Whether born of aether, Hell, or cavern-kingdom the mysterious jinni have scattered themselves across the Cadaverous Earth over the aeons, ageless but apparently infertile, banding together in loose clans of opaque organization.

Jinni skins are stained shades of red, as if by gore; otherwise they resemble tall, powerfully built humans of androgynous sex. Their crude features are scrawled across their faces like a child's depiction of a nightmare: slit-like mouths, miniscule black eyes, almost porcine nostrils. Their flesh is hot to the touch, as if feverish, and through some quasi-eldritch means they can breathe gouts of sulphurous green flame. Most have some degree of talent with witchcraft.

Some jinni have a taste for human flesh, particularly when partially decomposed; these macabre creatures have been dubbed carrion-jinni. Most of the vulnerae dwell outside the Twilight Cities, reveling in the wild, lawless spaces of the world, but a few have spent centuries as decadents in the more cosmopolitan cities, such as Crepuscle. They are an arrogant, haughty people, typically, considering themselves the natural superiors to all mortal creatures; their codes are very rigid and utterly incomprehensible to outsiders, who often find themselves in breach of jinni creeds without realizing their error, though they are still (inevitably) punished for transgressions with typical jinni ruthlessness. However, jinni scorn the laws and codes of other species as beneath them, the rude artifices of lesser beings.

...Not at all what I was expecting.
Can they fly or float?

How does being ageless affect their society- that is, they should be some of the most knowledgeable and wise creatures of the world.

Has anything ever menaced their numbers?

It would seem that they started off strong (ex: 1,000,000) and have since dwindled- has that had much of an effect on the society?

Why was there never an age of the Jinni? Did the carrion-crawlers fight them off?

[Steerpike]

[ooc][blockquote=Light Dragon]...Not at all what I was expecting.[/blockquote]Is this a bad thing?

As for your other points, I added this:

"Jinni wisdom is legendary, because of their longevity, but they are a notoriously secretive race, guarding their histories jealously; occasionally certain parcels of information have been traded in exchange for land, weaponry, or large amounts of coin, but for the most part the jinni refuse to disclose share their knowledge with non-jinni.

Despite their reticence in divulging their racial history some details concerning the jinni Diaspora have been collected.  It seems clear that they have never been an excessively populous race, and the harsh toll of apocalypses that wracked the Cadaverous Earth during the Immolation and the Desiccation thinned their numbers harshly.  The imprecise documentation on the Membrane Wars suggests that the still powerful jinni clans fought as mercenaries in the conflict, though on which side is unclear; this titanic battle seems to have claimed many jinni lives, but also marks their peak of influence, with jinni commanders passing into the ever-glorious realm of myth, attaining true immortality.  Some encounters between demons and jinni have been noted, with the jinni frequently exhibiting fervent hostility, but others have spoken of less belligerent meetings.

During the cestoid Imperium they seem to have almost vanished, retreating into far corners of the world, realizing, perhaps, that they possessed insufficient strength to face the wormfolk head-on, but simultaneously refusing to bend the knee and submit to cestoid rule."

They dont' float.  I wanted very much to avoid any trace of camp/kitsch or etherealness that's been attached so thoroughly to the "genie" archetype.  I still kept elements, I think: the imprisonment, the clannish mentality, the agelessness, the associations with fire, etc.

I did add a bit on jinni witchcraft (they focus on skinchanging).[/ooc]

[LD]

>>They dont' float. I wanted very much to avoid any trace of camp/kitsch or etherealness that's been attached so thoroughly to the "genie" archetype. I still kept elements, I think: the imprisonment, the clannish mentality, the agelessness, the associations with fire, etc.

Oh. Floating is something I associated with Genies, (as is blueness- the blood red was a bit of a shocker) but I fully understand why you left it out. You did a very good job incorporating the archetypal qualities.

I will admit, I was a little saddened reading the Genie writeup the first time; but you are probably aware that I tend to like camp/kitsch/happy things.

But I can recognize good writing and good art. With the addition of your most recent post, I get a better feel for why the Jinni exist and how they exist. They are fully consistent with your world's image.

I can sort of imagine the Jinni, thousands of years after the fact, looking at old cave-drawings made thousands of years ago and chuckling and chiding each other. "Hey Olum, you sure were a jerk back in the third millennia, weren't you- look at that picture of you throttling that cow."

[Superfluous Crow]

well, if we consider genie to be both djinnies and efreeti (i seem to recall they are both mythological creatures and not just the works of WOTC; i might very well be wrong) then blood red should fit fine :)
Are the red spots and markings on their skin limited to a few places or is it more like a 50/50 between red color and skin or more?
When you mentioned them in the Zerda thread i was a bit anxious that Firesong would be turned into the home of all the weird semi-campy races; praying mantises, foxes and djinni living together or some such. But with the jinni writeup this imagined trifecta seems more balanced :)
How much do they use the flame breath? Is it a visual effect, or do they use it militarily? If so, is it more of an emergency weapon or could there be jinni flamebreather soldiers (or some such) who only fight with gouts of green flame?

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Jinni flame-breath could easily be used in combat.

The Firesong Marches are meant to have a slightly different flavor, but I definitely wanted to pull up at full-on cartoonishness.

And mantises as a camp race?[/ooc]

[Superfluous Crow]

No, not camp, sorry... I just didn't have the right word for it. But they do fall in the anthropomorph animal category and could easily fit in another setting as opposed to some of the others. That being said, i really like the mantids :p

[Steerpike]

[ooc]BTW, I was imagining the skin-colour to be sort of mottled shades of red; maybe I'll tweak the description...

Glad you like the mantids, Crow!  I've always thought thri-keen were a cool race, but I wanted them to feel and look a bit difefrent from them (CE has a lot in common with Dark Sun in general, really).[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Posted a small storiette in the Slaughter-lands section, which I plan to gradually add to to make a longer story.[/ooc]