Memories of the Ship

In Jorune: Evolutions, during character creation, a player creates their home village. Their village is a piece of the setting over which they have authority. It is a natural extension of the way a player get to determine narrative facts about your character (background, traits, history, appearance, personality) in traditional D&D. Think of the creation of the village as part of the character creation process, representing a PC's background and origin. It's a little piece of the world that the player gets to contribute at the outset.

This is a possibility that is under-utilized in most retro-games. In some retro-games, like Beyond the Wall, or Mutant Year Zero (not really a retro-game but adjacent), there is collaborative world-building of the home village or elements of the setting. But what I'm doing here is different insofar as the individual player has control over the creation of this element of the world. To be clear, I think this happens naturally in games, since for example, a player will often have narrative control over their family or circumstances of upbringing. You could think of what I'm doing here as formalizing and extending the unintended spillover of individual character creation to facts about the setting.

Once a player has developed their village by answering the prompts below, the village exists in the game world. They may from that point on choose to have new characters come from this village. If anyone else wishes to bring a new pc from the village, they must the creator's permission to do so. You will find below a series of tables players can roll on for inspiration in answering the prompts. But they do not need to roll on these tables! They may instead simply make something up, select the results from the tables that please them, or use the tables as templates and sources of inspiration for their own imaginings. The village is theirs; they may make of it what they will. 

The four questions, or prompts, about your village are:

1. Through what honest trade do the people of your village eke out a living?

2. What memory of the ship does your village preserve?

3. What is noteworthy about your village?

4. What is your village’s name?

Question 1: Through what honest trades do the people of your village eke out a living? 

By Dyson

Through the sweat of their brow and their craft, handed down from each generation to the next, the villagers eke out a living from this alien world. What honest trade do the villagers practice? These trades come with some kind of bonus, usually a skill. 

1d100	Honest Trade	Bonus Skill or Item	Region
1-10	Durlig (giant turnip) Farming	Frentren	Gauss Valley
11-20	Jorune Crop Farming	Indivee	Gauss Valley
21-24	Earth Crop Farming	Storytelling	Upper Sobayid
25	Flower Farming	Biology	Upper Sobayid
26-28	Brewing or Winemaking	Contact (Tavern Owner or Wine Connossieur)	Sychill
29-34	Hunting and Trappping (Forest)	Survival (Woods)	Glounda
35-37	Hunting and Trapping (Marsh)	Survival (Marsh)	Upper Sobayid
38-45	Logging	Melee Weapon Proficiency (Heavy)	Glounda
46-50	Foraging	Limilates	Glounda
51-60	Fishing	Sailing	Lusail
61	Pearl Diving	Tikoq	Lusail
62-66	Crystal Miner	Crystals	Khodre
67-75	Miner (Metal or Stone)	Caving	Upper Sobayid
76-80	Thombo Breeders	Riding (Land)	Glounda
81-82	Bochugon (big pack animal) Breeders	Melee Weapon Proficiency (Whipping)	Upper Sobayid
83	Talmaron Breeders	Riding (Sky)	Essanja
84-88	Pottery	Contact (Collector)	Essanja
89-90	Silk Weaving	Start with 500 gemules worth of cushindell silk to sell	Lusail
91-95	Blacksmithing	Start with any metal weapon	Upper Sobayid
96-00	Tanning	Start with light armor (leather)	Glounda

Question 2: What memory of the ship does your village preserve?

Your village carries with it some memory of the Ship. This is some ritual, practice, game, story, or object that has been passed down through countless generations from the original travelers. It is misunderstood and shrouded in antiquity, a distant echo of life of the travelers, a half-memory of humanity’s futuristic past. What is it? This table can get you started by telling you what kind of thing is remembered, but the details are up to you. 

1d10	Memory of the Ship
1	Holiday
2	Ritual (Mourning, Birth, Marriage, Rite of Passage)
3	Convention (Naming, Vocabulary, Modes of Address)
4	Sport or Game
5	Art or Craft
6	Knowledge
7	Cuisine
8	Fashion
9	Story
10	Relic

Question 3: What is noteworthy about your village?

There is something (other than the memory of the ship) that sets your village apart and makes it noteworthy (not necessarily in a good way). Think of it as a shorthand through which people might refer to the place you are from, e.g. “Oh, you’re from that village by the abandoned chalk mines where everybody died of white lung?”

1d20	Unusual Feature
1	Remarkable natural landmark nearby  (waterfall, cenotaphs, rock formations, etc.)
2	Memorable statue or (possibly ruined) buildings
3	Famous explorer or military hero from the village
4	Great storyteller or skilled artisan lives in the village
5	Potent muadra lives in the village or nearby
6	Talented inventor (iscin) lives in the village or nearby
7	Mind-numbingly poor
8	Extreme prejudice against post-humans
9	Very tolerant of post-humans
10	Mixed human/iscin race population
11	Mixed human/post-human population
12	Harsh and overbearing drenn lords it over village
13	Forward looking drenn encourages many village “improvements”
14	Village Kimmit run democratically, somehow not drenn dominated
15	Strong isho religion
16	Strong kerrel or etton religion
17	New age cult in or near the village
18	Frontier settlement subject to cruagar (cougar people) raids
19	Site of historic massacre (by ramian, cruagar, or human)
20	Friendly relations with enemy of humanity (cruagar, acubon, or ramian)

Question 4: What is your village’s name? 

Lastly, you need to give your village a name. The names of some villages follow the same pattern as the names of people. So, the names of Earth cities and towns, possibly mis-spelled (e.g. "Monerey"), are fair game, or Barsoom fantabulous names (e.g. "Ardoth", "Miedrinth"). Another possibility is to give your village a utilitarian or literal name, like Crossroads, Harvest, or Bitter End.  

A Sample Village

Here is a sample village I just rolled up with these results: 

• Honest Toil: logging
• Memory of the ship: naming convention
• Noteworthy Feature: forward looking drenn encourages many village "improvements"
• Name: I decided to call it Zydor, following the barsoomish naming convention. 

Here's my writeup of it.

Zydor

Zydor is a small isolated village on the outskirts of Glounda Forest. The villagers are mostly lumberjacks, logging pine and redwood from the outer rim of this vast and dangerous wood, on the watch for scrabbling tarro infestations and the deafening roar of the dhar corondron. The town of log cabins is built around a central square, the House of the Tablet, a colorfully painted, wooden shrine. Within a holy artifact, the Tablet of the Elements, is displayed. It is a large rectangular piece of shining silver metal, hard but surprisingly light. It has been painstakingly scored, likely with a beam cutter, to depict a series of boxes arounds words and numbers. The Keeper of the Tablet teaches that these are the true names of all secret essences mastery of which allowed the travelers to transmute one element into another. Each person in the village takes a first name from Tablet of the Elements upon reaching maturity. The village kimmit is dominated by Selenium Rogers, a former tauther from the village who thinks of himself as an intellectual and amateur iscin. He has tried to "modernize" many of the practices and traditions of the village, which he calls "superstitions and blind custom", with mixed success at best. His most recent scheme involved the importation of expensive earth crop seeds--many years worth of cletch--that he cajoled villagers into planting and tending on the theory that they would grow into abundant crop of rare and valuable fruits in this soil. All died but for a few stunted apple trees in what the village now calls "Selenium's Orchard".