Border and Boundaries and Beyonds
Discussions of Cobrin’Seil often default to talking about Countries and cities. This is reasonable, as cities are so full of people who are willing to write things down and Countries are likely to spend time and effort ensuring everyone knows what they are. After all, if nobody knows that you’re a Country, you probably aren’t a Country. Countries are a shared fiction that everyone agrees to, and there are some complications in Cobrin’Seil that come from the exceptions to this rule. There are some Countries with strange political situations exacerbated by the insistence that a Country doesn’t exist (such as Visente refusing to acknowledge the nation-state of Hecsenfore as a body politic), or worse that a Country nobody can agree upon does exist (such as treaties with the land occupied by the ruin of Selpera, despite that land being absolutely blasted dry and mostly full of magical radiation).
That the world is a container of Countries which recognise one another and assert their importance over spaces defined on a map is very much a Human one. Some researchers resist this description, and want to use the term statocentricity to force the conversation to consider this structure necessarily unrelated from Humans. Still, the number one culture responsible for the current modern idea of Countries are Human cultures, and historically speaking, they have not been good at recognising other ways people organise their lives and communities.
The three largest and most commonly known forms of these non-Country bodies are:
Orc Accords, wide-spread populations with shared communal goals but little communal demand for power.
Elvish Homesteads, large central locations that sustain a population without a need for external support.
Gnoll Trails, the paths of Gnolls that aggressively defend their borders before moving on for sometimes years at a time.
Content Warnings: There’s an attempt to make the language in this article discussing non-Human cultures not feel like racist biological field notes, but I can’t promise I’ve done a perfect job. There shouldn’t be any mention of material I’d normall consider triggering but if you don’t like this kind of framing.
Engagement Warning: At the time of writing this warning, this draft is over seven thousand words long. What’s more each section features a list of example spaces to be that are designed to excite the imagination when you’re thinking about places you can be from or things you can do to make your character cool – but, as presented, are ultimately just piles of Proper Nouns in a Dungeons & Dragons setting you’re pobably not playing in. Basically, this is a chonky one.
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