Name: Tide
Race: Cicadas that form social groups (and are people, Cicada people?), with a twist. The nymphal cicada are active ambush predators(also proficient diggers), a favoured tactic being to dig large pits and chasing prey animals into them, supplemented by a diet of tree sap. The youngest cicadas, and thus smallest and slowest have to be particularly cunning and reliant on traps, instead of using their physical abilities to simply hunt down prey.
This led to a strange evolutionary quirk, where the first cicada instars have the highest intelligence, with the intelligence slowly detoriating with each molting, until the most drastic metamorphosis into the imago, gaining wings, switching from being omnivorous to only drinking tree sap, and having only the intelligence of particularly bright animals. The flights of the cicada, and their chorus songs are both extremely beautiful to the younger instars, and a source of horror at their own inevitable regression, with only the wonder of flight and laying the eggs of the next generation as small comforts of adulthood.
Religion: They believe that after death, cicada are reincarnated anew. They liken life and death to dreaming and waking. Just as a night's sleep may be filled with dreams of powerful drives, passion and wonder, only to slowly fade like mist before the sun once awake, so death is a time of sleep and dreaming, from which cicada awake once they hatch, slowly losing the power of the dream, and their intelligence with it, forgetting it's wonder, until they sleep again. Each nights sleep is seen as a microcosm of this larger cycle of life and death, a temporary return to the dream, yet even more ephemeral than the sleep of death.
A somewhat more complex and subtle expansion of this concept, is the cyclic nesting of dreams within a dream, with your previous life in fact being part of the deathdream for this dreamlife, that is part of the deathdream of the dreamlife after it. As such, along with the dreams themselves, you are forgetting your memories of your past life.
(Their beliefs are what caused the banishment of their tribe, since their parent tribe believed each moulting was part of a slow ascension to a higher plane of existence, with the lowered intelligence being caused due to getting less and less in tune with the base lowly current plane, until finally the adults fly up past the clouds, past the sky and sun and become spirits.)
Method of Ruling: A child shall lead them.
Sometimes a particularly large and special type of cicada egg is lain, a Paragon. These Paragons can survive being broken out of their eggs before they hatch naturally, thus entering the waking world while still being in the deathream. This state, known as the "Waking Dream" allows the paragon to access the skill, experience and knowledge of their past lives, as well as the mysterious powers of the dream. Whenever such Paragons are forced to be born, they become the leaders of the tribe. The forceful creation of the first Paragon was part of the chain of events that led to the schism with the original tribe and as such much is still unknown, including how moulting will effect the Waking Dream state, though it seems depressingly likely that it will break the waking dream.
Without a paragon, generally council of children will be chosen from the first instar of the tribe, generally by selecting those that managed to build the best traps in a competition.
Other: Sometimes non-paragons can temporarily enter waking dream states, especially during periods of high stress, particularly during battles. Generally they just gain the skills of their previous lives, rather than any mystical powers. This lesser waking dream state is generally called a "martial trance".
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Topic: [ISG] You are in control of a tribe! (Read 8477 times)