Cosmopolitan Age

The Cosmopolitan Age on planet Teppala was a period of time characterized by poor living standards for human beings and a return to a subsistence based way o f life, and increased interaction with animals.

Background

In the centuries leading up to the Cosmopolitan Age, military and political power had been streamlined in the empire of Anzan, which controlled more than half of the human-habitable land in the world, and nearly all of its major cities. When Anzan was torn apart by civil war around 4200 AD, there was no foreign power waiting on the sidelines to take over its role in world affairs. Instead, humans simply no longer had a major military power.

With the collapse of Anzan, human civilization and cooperation fdewll apart. The mountain tribes such as Gala, Ihhai, Litila, and others, reverted to tribal rule instead of cooperating with the lowland powers around them. This meant that the tropics was now cut off from the northern civilization in what had been Repilia.

The period immediately preceding the collapse had seen the center of power shift markedly northward. From the tropics to the NW corner of the continent, as the climate warmed. The climate was still warming, but it was now mostly during winter instead of summer. This meant that the climate was also becoming more habitable fo other animals, including predators of humans.

Humans in the Cosmopolitan Age

Since human society fell apart early in this era, the resulting human societies had little in common. Nevertheless, they all shared some characteristics in common:

1. War was very uncommon, as humans had little to gain for their efforts.
2. Agriculture was mostly confined to the tropics, even though the climate of the north was warming.
3. Human population declined due to massive predation by wild animals. This was nothing new: it was just that the humans living in the areas where they were being eaten the fastest had been living in safe, walled-off cities when the food supply had been sufficient. Now almost all humans were rural and were easy prey for various animals, especially the firebird.
4. Humans began to participate in animals' wars whenever the animals' territory overlapped the humans'.
5. Technological progress was halted and in many areas went backward.

Humans were not at the top of the food chain. Indeed, they never had been, but as above, during the peaks of human civilization they had been able to hide out from predators in compact cities where even though the firebirds roaming the sky above would have no trouble finding a meal among the thousands of people in the city center, the humans were capable of fending off an attack when they were able to fight back as a team.

Humans generally avoided war, as they had little to gain from conquering a nearby territory and a lot to lose if they were unsucessful. The few wars they did participate in generally were not continuations of Anzan-era conflicts but new, ex nihilo conflicts resulting from happenstance environmental changes such as the flooding of the whole of the territory of a minor coastal tribe.

However, humans soon learned that they were not alone on their planet in their capactiy to fight wats. The dolphins of planet Teppala were unaffected by the collapse, and continued their slow but presistent war as if nothing had happened. THis war was against 2 major alliances of dolphins, oje living in coldf water and the other living in warm water. The dfolphin nations had strictly defined borders but no internal boundaries; all dolphins where werlcome anywhere n their own nation, but not in the other nation. There was no pacifistic neutral nation, but pacifists were also welcome in both nations.

The human societies that bordered water that was deep within the territory of each of the 2 folphin nations were unaffected by the war. But the boundary between the 2 was ever-shifting, and humans who were caught in between had to play very carefully as their boats could be bumped from blow by a dolphin if they were perceived to be allied with the wrong dolphins.

Interaction with firebirds

Firebirds were the chief prefdator of humans. The firebirds kept humans from settling muich of the western half of the continent, because this was where the firebirds were at their strongest and humans could not survive their attacks. Thus, many human settlements were located deep inland, in areas where it was difficult for humans to find food, because the firebirds could not tolerate the harsh climates of the interior. Firebirds nests were usually on islands.

However, some humans moved into the center of their predators' territory, and built settlements there, on the rationale that since the firebirds were prospering in those areas even without humans to prey on, they could probably work out an agreement with the firebirds which would allow humans to live there without having to wrry about being snatched up from their beds in the middle of the night and dropped into a nest to be torn apart by baby firebirds.

languages

Poswa only began to spread after 5547 A.D., meaning that non-Poswa names predominate for placenames. Khulls fractured rely on into over 100 daughters,but classical khulls was still known by many.

The rise of regional powers

The Ghosts of Comfort

The collapse of Anzan led to the reappearance of many weak, regional powers, whose territories were often defined by natural boundaries such as rivers and mountains. The Ghosts of Comfort were one exception to this pattern. The Ghosts were descendants of the Raspara who had ruled and abused their rivals for just a short time before their defeat a war in which they and their victims had been forced onto the same side. The Raspara had retreated to the wilderness, promising themselves that they would someday rise again. Now, with a new name, they had reappeared, and developed a new party platform.

Politics

Unlike the Raspara, the Ghosts accepted one achievement that had been invented by the weak, gullible Swamp Kids: democracy. Unlike the Swamp Kids, however, the Ghosts supported only a one-party democracy, with them in control. Furthermore, the people would not be allowed to vote against any Ghosts currently in power without that person's permission. Thus, the only power the voters had in the Ghosts' democracy was to choose between one Ghost and another, running for the same office, and only when both Ghost candidates agreed to obey the voters' decision.

Under the Ghost democracy, the president had the power to remove from power any other sitting official in the government, and thus had the same powers as the kings of rival empires. However they did not call their president a king because he was considered to be an elected official. Furthermore the president was open to removal by the people, though as above, only when he himself gave permission and volunteered to run in election (called "confirmation" by the Ghosts).

Language

The Ghosts spoke Khulls, and were largely responsible for the stability of the Khulls language in their territory, whereas in other areas of the continent it had quickly divided into dozens of tribal languages. This was the language of their historical enemies, the Crystals, but in the decades leading up to the Collapse, war had become so intense that all old blood feuds had been settled and the war ended with the Crystals and the Raspara fighting on the same side.

Territory of the Ghosts

The Ghosts took power in the lands in which the Raspara had been best preserved; these lands were far to the west of their original homeland, and in fact consisted mostly of historically Crystal territory rather than historically Thunder territory. Here, even in the high latitudes, the winters were mild because of the proximity to the west coast, and summers were also warmer because of the low relative humidity of the onshore winds.

The Ghosts also achieved power in rural areas of what had been Thunder territory, but were blocked by the "Rempe" River (note: this is far to the east of the Hamster River). These areas had little carrying capacity for human civilization because its rivers were very far from each other, and the climate was fairly dry. Nevertheless, existing cities such as Lypelpyp survived the transition to Ghost rule relatively intact.

The Crystals

Shortly after the great Collapse, a civil war occurred in Paba. Here, the Crystals invaded Paba and rescued the Pabaps from their tormentors, even though they knew that nothing of benefit to the Crystals could come from this war. Thus, their role in the war was purely humanitarian.

After the Crystals succeeded in rescuing the Pabaps, the Pabap royal family transferred the ownership of the Pabap people to the Crystals. They announced that the Pabaps, who had been enslaved for more than 3000 years, would be enslaved for at least 3000 more, but now their masters would be the Crystals instead of other Pabaps. All of this was done without the Crystals' support, and many would-be slaveowners among the Crystals resisted; see Pusapom#Slavery and Lamuan languages.

Soon, however, civil war engulfed the Crystal homeland of Lobexon as well, because the Gems of Tebbala, a treasure central to the Crystal religion, had been stolen and the Crystal religion stated that without them no humans could achieve salvation. Many Crystals became hulihipuha, people who believed they were damned to eternal torment no matter how virtuous they were. These people often became very abusive slaveowners, since the practice of slavery had been opened up by the Pabaps themselves and the Pabaps were too weak to resist. This, in turn, led to the extension of Lobexon's civil war into Paba, and the Crystals found themselves simultaneously fighting off other Crystals and non-Crystal intruders who had come to rescue the Pabaps from the people who had rescued the Pabaps from their previous abusers.

The Sĕyepa religion

A new religion called Sĕyepa took hold in the Crystal Empire, as few Crystals were willing to continue belief in a religion that doomed all of its followers to Hell, and the prospect of recovering the Gems of Tebbala seemed more out of reach with each passing generation. This religion quickly became popular, and orthodox Crystals living in the Crystal Empire soon became afraid to profess their religion. The Sĕyepa believers considered themselves morally superior for various reasons, chief among them the fact that the orthodox Crystals enslaved innocent Pabaps and the Sĕyepa were self-sufficient.

Since the orthodox Crystals believed that they needed to recover the Gems, they could no longer tolerate living in the Crystal Empire, which had refused to dedicate any effort to that task. Thus the orthodox Crystals fled into Pabap territory, seeking to rebuild the Crystal Empire in Paba using Pabap slave labor. Mwanwhile, the Seyepa religion achieved nearly 100% support among the people of the original Crystal Empire (which had retained its name). Since the Ghosts of Comfort also lived in historically Crystal territory, the Ghosts and the Seyapists came into conflict with each other, but they stopped short of launching yet another civil war.

The Poswobs

Shortly after the announcement of eternal slavery, some Pabap families fled up the mountains, into the territory of aboriginal peoples such as the Galà, Ihhai, and Litila; of these, some continued further north into the temperate forests that lay on the other side of the great mountain range. This had once been the primary center of Raspara power, but when the bulk of the Raspara population had forfeited their land to fight for control of Baeba, far to the west, no new power had taken their place.

As Pabaps began spilling into the Raspara homeland, they realized that the large-bodied, military-oriented Raspara, who had sadistically abused their ancestors for their entire reign, posed little threat in the post-Collapse world. The Raspara were poorly organized now, and lived mostly in the wilderness rather than in cities. There was no longer a reliable way to identify a Raspara on sight; they no longer had distinctive clothes, nor a distinctive language; they were not even the largest minority in their territory. Most importantly, though, the Raspara here had given up their dreams of achieving an empire, and submitted to a lifestyle of subsistence hunting, focusing on maintaining their food supply and protecting their children from danger.

The Pabaps moving north came to adopt a new identity: the Poswobs, named after a type of skirt their women wore when the weather was warm. Like the Pabaps, the Poswobs supported pacifism and went to great lengths to protect themselves from more warlike rival tribes. Unlike the Pabaps, however, the Poswobs were not willing to submit to slavery, and preferred a life of extreme poverty in freedom to a safe and well-fed life of slavery. They thus had much in common with their historical enemies the Raspara, and many Raspara leaders married Poswob women as they moved closer together.

Another minority was the Moonshine people, who were also pacifistic. Most Moonshines here were nomadic, and therefore claimed no land of their own, and did not consider the various other peoples spilling into Moonshine territory to be invaders. The result of this was that the Moonshine people came to be associated with cold climates; Moonshines persisted in the warmer climates of the lowlands and the southern extremes of their territory, but they became a minority early on and often married out.