Evermornan
The Evermornans are, as the name implies, the native human and human-adjacent inhabitants of Planet Evermorn. Dilligent, driven, traditional, and family-oriented, the Evermornans have made a name for themselves in the Sealed Kingdoms region through their rapid acquisition of technology and military prowess.
Culture
Shared customary codes and values
Evermornans regard the Code of Evermorn as the preeminant treatise on their culture's legal doctrine. Other elements of their cultural ethos come from the Ancestral Codex, a weighty tome that explicated the tenets of Ancestral Patronism, the primary religious belief system among the Evermornan peoples. Evermornan philosophy revolves around a combination of virtue ethics and the emulation of the best traits of mytho-historical figures known as the Matrons and Patrons. Reliability, loyalty, honorability, dilligence, proactivity, respect for traditions, and the ability to reign in ones emotions to accomplish one's goals are all well-regarded traits among Evermornans.
Common Dress code
As Evermorn is a cool, damp world, much of the Evermornan wardrobe is focussed around protecting the wearer from the elements. Evermornans often dress in several layers of clothing in solid colors or with subtle geometric motifs. The outermost layer, including a light jacket and trousers, often feature sharp creases or box pleats both because the parallel lines created are desired as an aesthetic flourish and because this serves to put a larger number of fabric layers between the wearer and the chill outer air. Traditional Evermornan dress is not considered complete without a set of woodblock sandals or clogs, though these have largely been supplanted by synthetic, closed toe footwear when not attending formal functions.
In modern times, small pleats and seams are used to conceal wearable technology, such as antennae, sensors, and interface peripherals for the card computers carried by most Evermornans in day-to-day life. Those expecting to travel in space may opt to wear a base layer of smart fabric that can pull skin-tight in response to exposure to vaccuum. In this second case, piping along the limbs serves to pull the fabric tight and as channels for air from a small reserve tank; a stowed hood can be pulled from the back collar over the head to create an inflatable bubble helmet.
Art & Architecture
Evermornan archictecture, even in the days before modern technology, skewed towards the massive and monumental. Towers and pyramids were both common forms, as the former afforded a great view of the landscape and allowed fires set near the base to heat the whole structure through convection, while the later proved quite durable, scalable, and resistant to the crush of winter snows. Tapestries, carpets, and hanging banners of cloth were all used to retain heat and stifle the echoes that would tend to form in the vaults of such strucutres. If wood was available, smaller structures would be constructed of whole logs, with the inner surfaces carved to provide any decorative flourishes. In outdoor spaces, stone statuary was used to commemorate important figures or historical events, with bronze eventually supplanting stone when metallurgy became sufficiently advanced to allow this.
In more modern times, Evermornans build huge arcologies that blossom into extensive underground vaults beneath the surface level. While the cloth furnishings remain largely unchanged, the inner walls of these structures are instead painted with vibrant natural or astronomical vistas to give the impression of being outside even when many hundreds of feet below ground. Evermornan architecture aims to be as self-sustaining and multiply-redundant as possible - a response to a history plagued by warfare.
Evermornan literary and musical arts are generally considered to have surpassed their visual arts. The circuitous route by which Evermornans rose to prominence on their world and then on the interstellar stage, coupled with many influences imported from the Periphery, have given Evermornan storytellers a rich cultural palette to draw from in the course of their craft. At the same time, the advent of machine learning has somewhat stifled what was once a vibrant painting and hand illustration industry, while mineral auto-fabricators programmed with computer-aided design software have turned carving and sculpting into more the realm of historical reenactments. Where visual arts are concerned, Evermornan artists like to work on nautical or mountainous scenes, as these two environments have had a heavy influence on the evermornan way of life.
Funerary and Memorial customs
Evermornans regard it as important that the deceased be allowed to return to the natural cycle so that, in time, the essence of what they are can live on through the soil's gift of food to their families and communities. In modern times, this means that Evermornans prefer to be buried or decomposed on supercritical water reactors to create fertilizer. In spacecraft and in asteroid colonies, this preferrence has the added benefit of helping to ensure that precious vital elements - particularly phosphorus - are not lost. The deceased are wrapped head-to-toe in linens and eulogized in state before their final disposition, with Patronist clergy often reciting passages from the Ancestral Codex over the body to lionize the deceased persons best qualities in the context of the Patrons or Matrons that best embody those qualities.
Historical figures
Wurth Harkin and his crew, such as Shank Moswen and Aika Fenmount, are pivotal figures in the history of the Evermornan peoples. These individuals were stolen away by the Chitiquish Consortium only to return and spread the knowledge they learned in captivity to the scattered clans of Evermorn and, thereby, work to unite them under a single banner: the Cobalt Protectorate.
Ideals
Gender Ideals
Regardless of gender, all Evermornans are equal under the auspices of Protectorate law. Culturally, however, Evermornans do recognize certain gender norms relating to the management of family affairs, with men tacitly expected to be more involved with dangerous or overly physical work while women are tacitly expected to be more involved with nurturing, artistic, and other cultural pursuits. These are not hard boundaries, but they are significantly more pronounced in the colonies. In essence, the further a woman gets from the safe, well-developed heart of the Protectorate, the more likely she is to be encouraged away from anything with the potential to harm her (i.e. Cobalt Knight patrol duty) or reduce her fertility (i.e. fusion drive engineering). Regardless of context, however, it is considered gauche in Evermornan culture to belittle a pursuit simply because of it's gendered nature; the contributions of men and women are considered equally valid and important to the prosperity of their society.
Courtship Ideals
Evermornans are monogamous and place a high value on loyalty, mutual respect, and familial support in romantic relationships. While the vast majority of Evermornans do marry for love, marriage also has a political dimension to it in that the wife is inaugurated into the husband's clan and, thereby, that clan's legal jurisdiction. For clan-unaffiliated spouses, such as immigrants from the Periphery, marriage similarly bestows clan membership in the affiliated spouse's clan. Due to old customs involving the maintenance of clan ties and the importance of preventing inbreeding, Evermornans are culturally highly encouraged - though not mandated - to seek spouses from outside of their own clan.
The Cobalt Protectorate does not offer no-fault divorces, and this is as much a result of this system of courtship as it is a cause of its propetuation. Because marriages can be difficult to dissolve for more than just emotional reasons, Evermornans engage in long courtships before deciding to settle into the process of starting families. This had the effect of supressing birth rates for a long time, as long courtships often seemed at odds with the desire to grow one's carreer or improving one's merit score to support possible political ambitions. Recent work reforms and a improvement in the general mood of the culture have helped offset this effect in recent years.
Relationship Ideals
As with romantic partners, Evermornans place a high value on loyalty in their social relationships. This loyalty is shown in the form of a radical willingness to invest real stakes in the affairs of their compatriots, whether in terms of personal friends or in terms of organizations to which one belongs. Evermornan social connections are wide-reaching and can be complex as a result.
One notable effect of this attitude is that, when one Evermornan is aggrieved, his entire social network out to two or three steps of separation is also aggrieved. In previous eras, this kin-based social structure produced many inter-clan wars. Modern Evermornan intermarriage practices (see Courtship Ideals) have helped reduced the risk of such conflicts by extending networks of kin across the boundaries of clans that would otherwise have no other reason not to fight one another.
Major organizations
The Cobalt Protectorate is primarily an Evermornan state. Populations can also be found in the Cinnabar Hegemony, Republic of the Obsidian Shores, and various colonies spread throughout the Evermorn-Armoa Binary System and adjacent systems (such as Ibren). More still can be found in the various outreach programs among the worlds of the Peripheral Sphere, including Lepidos and Feldea.
by Hero Forge
by Hero Forge
by Hero Forge
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