Couple of people asked (even if one of them lives with me IRL and doesn't quite count
), so here is a quick patchwork of Shore People ethnography, some of which I planned ahead and some of which came out in play.
One of my unused ideas for Dawn 1 was a member of an almost-gone, isolated tribe without metalworking technology, sort of drawing on bits and bobs of the life story of
Ishi, that unhappily famous survivor of the California genocide. I pulled that idea out again for this game but then decided playing someone really in Ishi's position (and doing a fair job with it) would be much too dark for me right now, so instead I made Ko a member of a tribe who might be in danger of that fate, but weren't there yet. In retrospect, I'm also glad I went with this variation because it meant I avoided too much overlap with Kaze's or the late lamented Taochusu's archetypes.
Then I stirred in some ningyo lore from 1e canon, because why not.
Notes on the Shore People:
The People live isolated on a rocky peninsula, with steep hills and thick forest to the north, overgrown marshes to the west, and open sea to the south and east. Unbeknownst to the People, outsiders call this stretch of coast the Lonely Shore because it's so rarely visited. (In many decades, or possibly a couple of centuries, their home will be the site of a city called Mura Sabishii Toshi—unless we've changed history too much for that already.) They live by gathering wild roots and plants, doing a little hunting of game and birds in the wooded foothills, and—mostly—fishing and shellfish gathering from their catamarans in the ocean sound that lies between their land and the sacred island a few miles to the south. (If things go according to canon, this island will be Morehei Island some day, and later the sunken Sea-King's Palace; right now it has no name in human language, and it's taboo for the people to spend the night there.)
The people live together in a few large roundhouses, keep no livestock except for some scraggly dogs, and have never learned the secret magic of metallurgy—there is little metal to be found near their home, anyway, but they have plenty of wood and ivory for working and volcanic stone for knapping. Their stories and rituals honor the land and sea spirits they know up-close, Suitengu and Isora and the small nature kami; besides the Sun and Moon, they don’t think very much about gods too big to be their neighbors. They are a tough People, and they mostly keep to themselves.
There used to be more of them, or at least that is what the elders say. If you hike up and down the pebbly coast, you can find the places where other clusters of roundhouses were, though you have to know what to look for; only the shallow pit foundations and some rocks blackened in old fires are left now. Strangers came overland from the north, or by sea from the south (or maybe both?), and carried the young people away as thralls, they say. Then there was sickness, and the fish schools came smaller and less often, and the Moon grew angry and brought huge storm tides that violently reshaped parts of the coastline, sweeping some of the people away. The population of Ko's village has actually swelled somewhat during her lifetime, as people from other parts of the coast abandoned their shrinking settlements, but it's now the only substantial cluster of roundhouses where once there were many villages along the shore.
Social organization:
The People are divided into exogamous moieties--that is, two sort-of-clans whose members aren't allowed to marry within the same group, and must choose mates from the opposite moiety (or outsiders, though outsiders are a rare sight). Moiety membership is inherited from one's mother. Ko is a member of the Starfish moiety; the other one is Jasper moiety.
They live in large roundhouses made of thatch/straw walls and roof over a permanent wooden frame, sort of inspired by
Jomon pit houses and the
homes of some indigenous people in what's now the southern US. Houses belong to matrilineal extended-family units (which means everyone born in the roundhouse is of the same moiety). Ko's is Pearl Roundhouse, known for their skilled divers. The houses are headed by a matriarch and her closest male relative (usually a brother, sometimes a son or cousin). Beyond that, there's no formal 'leadership' structure among the People; the heads of all the roundhouses in a village might gather to discuss an important decision, or the People might choose to listen to the experienced authority on whatever the subject is, such as a shaman for spiritual matters or the elder fishermen for seafaring questions.
The People do practice marriage, but it's often
walking marriage, in which a man spends some nights with a woman in her roundhouse but returns to his own family during the day. Wives can also visit husbands, but it's extremely improper for a woman to actually give birth or care for her children in the child's father's roundhouse. Couples who want to live together (or younger adult family members who just want some more personal space) sometimes build smaller satellite houses, though formally, they still belong to the roundhouses of their birth. Under extraordinary circumstances one of these satellite dwellings might become a new named roundhouse of its own. Given the People's dwindling population, though, this hasn't happened for a while. In fact, refugees from other villages whose roundhouses no longer exist have actually merged with some of the houses in Ko's village.
Stories:
Ko is cripplingly bad at all social rolls, so she was never called on to tell the tales of her people! However, I did have about a million tabs open with stories I planned to draw on if I really needed to--particularly Native American/First Nations legends, especially from Northwest and Northeast coastal people, but also some European selkie stories and the
Hagoromo tale. Why so many shape-changers? Well, for one thing, selkies and tennin and bear wives/husbands are cool... but also, the People have some contact with ningyo, and according to at least one canon story
ningyo can take human form, though it's apparently not that easy. I decided the People might
understand the ningyo shape-change in this way, with a "cloak" or skin of scales that the ningyo takes off and puts back on again (though whether or not it
actually works that way is not my call).
No wonder Ko was so appalled by the tale of the bog hags, who use a horrible but superficially similar form of magic.
I did include the following very sketch-outliney tale in Ko's character backstory.
Ko’s favorite of these used to be the tale of how the ancestor of Pearl house found a wife:
One summer day, a young man went walking on the shore and came upon a marvelous cloth hanging from the bushes, as brilliant and multicolored as mother-of-pearl, as strong as shark leather, and as soft as the finest woven fabric. The young man folded the cloth up and put it in his bag, meaning to show this wonder to the other people of the village. As he kept walking along the beach, he next came upon a beautiful young woman bathing in the shallow water. Without knowing her name, or her mother, or even her moiety, the young man fell in love with the woman on first sight. He invited the woman back to the village to share a meal, she agreed, and one thing led to another, so that the stranger-woman stayed in the village and the young man forgot all about the wonderful cloth. The woman seemed happy among the people during the day, although every night at sunset she walked along the beach alone and came back with the marks of salty tears on her cheeks. Within a year she bore twins. At this, the young man’s uncles told him that he must build his wife a house, since she had no kin of her own, and it isn’t right for children to grow up in their father’s family’s roundhouse. So the young man dug a foundation and raised the walls and roof, and on a proper day, his family helped to fill the house with all it needed. On that day, as the young man and woman were arranging her new home, the woman opened the blanket-box and saw, folded carefully away, the marvelous cloth the colors of mother-of-pearl. Her face became very pale, and she shook out the cloth, wrapped it around herself, and walked out of the village and straight into the sea until she disappeared under the waves, never to be seen again on land or in human shape. Thus the first aunt and uncle of Pearl house grew up without a mother to nurse them. But the ningyo of the sea were interested in the People ever after, and each group would occasionally do small favors for the other.