Excerpted from "A Catalog of Races of the Starmourn Sector"
The Ry'nari are a contentious, tribal race whose culture is underpinned by a complex series of alliances between extended families.
A gun-toting male Ry'nari.
| Societal structure | They live in a three-tiered structure. Family -> Tribe -> Horde. Family is what it sounds like. Tribes are collections of inter-related families, and a Horde is a collection of tribes allied together. |
| Treatment of 'others' | Mostly fine, though adults who haven't yet had children are regarded with a mixture of pity and disgust, and by middle-age, those without children are social pariahs. |
| Notable rituals | On the death of a horde leader, all the tribes gather for a multi-day bacchanalia called the Narangerel followed by selection of a new horde leader in a process called the Gomoran. Each of the tribes that wishes to contend for leadership puts forward a leader, and that leader assembles a group of six Ry'nari from his or her tribe. These groups of six then face off in combat, armed with ancient weapons, to determine who will lead the Horde. The prospective leaders themselves don't do battle - why kill off some of the strongest leaders in the Horde? |
| Home System | Valdorn |
|---|---|
| Homeworld | Hororeon |
| Capital city | Ostari |
| Lifespan | 100 years. |
| Preferred foods | They're biologically omnivores but, as you can discern from their their teeth - clearly evolved for shredding and ripping - meat is their preferred food. |
| Life priorities | Fostering a large family is a big one, perhaps driven by the fact that any children are more likely to die than survive their first two years. |
| Strong likes/dislikes | They have a strange relationship with music in that they don't appear to have the same kind of tonal recognition virtually all other sentient species do. Most music, to a Ry'nari, sounds like unstructured noise. Instead, they enjoy a type of atonal chanting called 'kave' whose individual words or phrases have no overt meaning, but which are meant to build a series of suggestions in the mind of the listener. |
A female Ry'nari wearing an AR monocle and accessing the commsphere.
| Social mobility | Economically, an enormous amount, but in terms of advancement in any kind of politics, you have to be part of a good family in a great tribe to have a chance to become a horde leader. However, the reality is that even socially 'low' individuals can wield great power by buying influence. |
|---|---|
| Entertainment | Nothing is more popular than a Narangerel and the following Gomoran, but the Ry'nari also, somewhat surprisingly to outsiders, revere abstract sculpture and are considered masters of it. |
| Government structure | Council of the Hordes - the Horde leaders make up the government. However, there have been times in the past when a single Horde leader has seized sole power. In particular, Harec Gankeot famously unified the hordes as Mogul and won the first war against the W'hoorn. They are currently ruled by a Mogul - Shima Sual (female). |
| Allies or enemies | The W'hoorn are a historical enemy of theirs, and few of the civilized races of Starmourn have seen as much conflict as the two have over the aeons. |
| Major sources of wealth | Production of the ubiquitous quantum power cell as well as huge architecture and engineering firms specializing in orbital structures. |
| Religion | They don't have a religion per-se, but they retain certain animist superstitions such that they're prone to feeling like objects have spirits and personalities, even when they "know" better. This leads them to occasionally treat items they are angry at like enemies to be broken...leading to said things being broken. |
The capital city Ostari. The Citadel of Hordes - the seat of their government - is the huge building on the left.
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