Allochthon's society is fairly diverse, considering that, for all cultural intents and purposes, the borders between the kingdoms did not actually dissolve. As such, many things tend to vary between parts of Allochthon. In one kingdom you may find serfs toiling in fields for the lady of their manor, while in another you may find peasants owning and working their own plots of land, and elsewhere still you might locate knights tilling their own fields while their land is not in peril. It can get fairly mixed up at times. Certain opinions and norms persist in most places, though. Here are some of them:
- The idea that noblewomen are best suited for administrative, financial and legal work of most kinds, while noblemen are more suited for military service, diplomacy and other active pursuits. The lower classes, naturally, are mostly suited for menial labor and acting as infantry. Of course, this is mostly rooted in tradition, and isn't a belief that is particularly deeply held in these fairly desperate days, especially as the Plagues force more men and women outside of their natural habitats and makes them turn to different work than what society used to expect of them. And it's not unusual for a mother of a family that has no daughters to train one of their sons in the ways of managing the estate upon inheritance if marriage is looking like an unlikely prospect.
- Deity worship is very uncontrolled and loose, and people usually worship whatever deity is most relevant to their daily lives or specific to the area they inhabit. Often when people move to other places, they tend to change their most worshipped gods as well.
- Most places in Allochthon do not look very favorably upon travelers, and hospitality is most certainly not sacred. Even a peasant is not beholden to grant a traveling nobleman from a land different than his own a place to stay the night in most places, though this does not mean that they will refuse the opportunity every time.
- Users of magic tend to be exceptions to the previous rule and many others, as common sense has it that, if somebody in your vicinity has superhuman, unnatural abilities that can possibly benefit you, you should go out of your way to be nice to them, particularly since magic users have been known to respond very poorly to attempts at persecution in the distant past.
Handy facts that one should remember about other parts of society are that, as a general rule, communities in the north and west are more hierarchical in nature, while the east and south has more closely-knit, familial communities, and that the overall level of civilization tends to decrease steadily as one moves away from the larger population centers and rivers. There are tales of some hunter-gatherer communities that have actually moved back into the deeper woods in response to the decline of organized society and the way that the Plagues seem to target civilization itself more than individual people.
Overall, though, it is hard to create a unified picture of Allochthon, since Allochthon itself is fragmented, and most of its parts operate completely independently from one another, with little to no input from the king these days, not that input from the king would necessarily be taken seriously there.
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Topic: Kingspawn of Allochthon: important question! (Read 19717 times)