Nobu

## History

The Thinning of the Veil was not kind to the people of Nobugo. Magic surged through a culture that had little control over or experience with it. In the face of the unknown, dynasties fell. Civil unrest destroyed many homes, cities were abandoned, and the very land itself seemed to turn on its people.

The most curious effect of the Thinning was the affinity granted to the Nobugo people for fire magic. Nearly a third of the population found themselves connected to flame, and the sudden Gift proved dangerously volatile. Vast wildfires forced all but the most stubborn families towards the coast, where rebuilding eventually began. The Gift burned itself out as quickly as it came, with those knowledgeable in the ways of magic considering it like a typhoon of energy that raged through the population and left behind clear skies, the only evidence of it ever happening being the scorched earth.

The Nobugo arrived at the continental coast scattered across thousands of miles, pockets of refugees carrying what little they could salvage from their homes. The winter of that year thinned the population out further, and the Nobugo might have died out completely if not for the timely aid of the Southern Sinvali.

Sinval had not been hit nearly as hard by the Thinning, but the calamity had still hit their population, and an excess in their winter food stores became the saving grace for the Nobugo. The two cultures worked closely together for many years, as the Nobugo built new towns and learned new trades. The Sinvali taught them how to survive off the deeper sea, and the port towns grew as refugees flocked to their safety. However, the scattering of the Nobugo had fractured many of the ties that brought together the former nation.

It seemed each port city blamed the fall of Nobugo on something different, some great flaw they found with the government, or the beliefs of society. It was no longer refugees that the cities took in, but rather agreeable idealogues. Where one city might have espoused the virtues of charity, claiming Nobugo was destroyed because the people didn’t stand together, another city would hold to the idea that charity had softened the people, and each must care for their own interests first and foremost. These differences halted efforts made by city leaders to reunify, and each city would eventually ratify their own permanent government.

### Appearance

The people of the Nobu Coast are known for their dark brown hair, wide range of skin tones from pale to dark tan, and characteristic epicanthic folds around their eyes. The “swimmer’s physique” is common among the Nobu, with thinner frames yet defined musculature.

## Geography

The Nobu Coast stretches along what was once the eastern side of Dongsu, with the coastal portion of Ikhung as well as almost the entirety of Old Kumitari and the southeast of Shanliang. The more northern half of the coast is quite temperate, containing the last swathes of hardwood forest that survived the Great Burning a century ago. Heavy rain comes in the spring and summer, followed by early snows in autumn and long freezes in the winter. These long winters have led to the city-states appending a Winter Quarter and separate dock into their city infrastructure, as the fishers of the Summer Towns take their boats into port, contribute their share to the winter food stores, and settle into warmer city homes for the winter.

The Summer Towns are small settlements, often built much more primitively with straw and frond roofings and raised floors. Here, during the warm seasons, the common folk launch fishing trips deeper into the sea and return with large schools of fish, which are then preserved for the winter. The Summer Towns are rarely considered by the Nobu people to be their primary home, staying scarcely decorated and utilitarian. The towns are a place of work first and foremost. People spend days on the water, or in the woods, and the actual houses of the Summer Towns are just for sleeping.

The southern half of the Nobu Coast enjoys longer summers, allowing for more permanent residences, and milder winters. The land is covered by a diverse flora, stretching tree-covered mountains in Old Kumitari down into the wetland rainforest of Shanliang. The people of the southern coast enamour themselves with floating constructions, halves of major city-states being constructed on the water and blending into the ports. The great bay of Shanliang (now called Shan Bay) has moved its “coastline” out nearly a mile in some places, as two of the greatest city-states in the southern coast stare each other down across the water and expand their lattice network of floating homes and businesses.

In Old Kumitari, city-states were built to claim ownership of mountain passes from the coastline to inland. Sailing along the coast, one would see cities built at the nadir of two great mountains, guarding the only passable way inland for miles in either direction. Island fishing villages and entirely floating towns are uncommon, both do exist, though these settlements are always controlled and guarded by a city-state government.

## Culture

While each city-state has its various idiosyncrasies, many of the practices of the Nobugo culture are still ingrained, and can be found across the entire coast. It is still good etiquette to remove one’s shoes when inside a home, especially in the Summer Towns of the northern coast, where heavy rainfall turns the roads to muck, and the forested wetland of the southern coast. There, people have taken to wearing a raised, stilt-like type of sandal that raises them sometimes half a foot into the air, allowing room for the sandal to sink into deep mud and still keep the foot clean.

The traditional commoner clothing of Nobugo still persists in the southern coast, where garments of earthy color and neutral grays are the norm, but the northern coast, which has worked the closest with the Sinvali, have taken to more brightly colored robes as a consequence of the dye trade between Sinval and the northern city-states.

The dye trade has gone hand in hand with the development of the arts, as ample supplies of paint have allowed the visual art to thrive. Narrative painting, done on long, thin sheets of pressed paper, has become popular. These often tell stories of the time before the Thinning, old legends of the Nobugo people. Richer folk often have their thin paper walls painted in entirety, lending an extremely lavish feeling to the interior of their homes.

The music of the coast differs by region. The southern coast considers music a more collaborative art, gathering ensembles of single-tone instruments that are played as a group, known as gamelan. This includes a set of metal bars or pans, each tuned to a different pitch in a pentatonic scale, as well as gongs, hand-cymbals, and drums. The gamelan is mostly percussive, though is often accompanied by singing. The music is very improvisational.

The northern coast tends towards soloistic music, a traveler through the cities finding single players in sake-bars or spread across events, usually on stringed instruments. The dissonance between preferred music and the political tendencies of the areas are quite palpable, with historians remarking that though the northern coast tends more egalitarian and inclusive, it’s music focuses on the individual and their virtuosic skill, while the southern coast, far more isolationist and demure, enjoys music that showcases the communication and teamwork of a group.

### Food

The food of the Nobu Coast has taken on a much heavier emphasis on seafood, staples of the cuisine being deep sea redfish, shrimp, scallops, and albacore. Ocean plant life such as kelp and seaweed also makes up much of their diet, as well as fast-growing crops such as root vegetables like radishes that allow multiple crops per growing season and aren’t easily lost to weather. Pickling and fermentation techniques have advanced tenfold in the last century, as the Nobu learn how to best preserve their crops and catch. A common preservation is the making of fish-jerky with albacore, which is enjoyed year round as a snack or lunch with rice.

Rice, once a plentiful grain when the Nobugo occupied the greater mainland area near the coast, now comes mostly from the mountainous paddies around Old Kumitari, where rainfall is plentiful and terraced farming combined with mineral-rich soil allows enough to feed the cities, but the trade is heavily controlled by the cities in Old Kumitari and subject to high tariffs. As such, the cities on the very edges of the Nobu Coast, where tariffs are high, have taken to cultivating what was initially an invasive strain of barley that grows nearly anywhere and is used to make a sort of porridge, which takes the place of rice in many dishes.

Chopsticks are still used, though mostly in formal settings, as a vestigial remnant of the cuisine culture of Nobugo, but the common person mostly uses a simple wooden spoon, as the bowl style of meal is as popular as ever. Meals are usually enjoyed with tea or low-alcohol fermented grain beverages known as kuasa.

Animal husbandry is difficult in much of the coast, and as such, many of the Nobu have grown up without dairy products or livestock meat as part of their diet. The wealthier class of society is known to enjoy imports of poultry and red meat from other lands, as well as decadent dishes made rich with salted butter, and cream soups, but these cuisines should be considered outliers of the Nobu Coast.

### Festivals

In the northern coast, winter is the time of celebration, and a two week straight period of festivals is seen in many cities, called the Gathering. The cities are packed with people coming in from the Summer Towns, and this time of thronging markets and reunited families is seen by the northern Nobu as a blessing of the winter. Food has been stockpiled, and much of the workforce takes on different, less straining jobs such as weaving new clothes. The hustle and bustle of the summer months preparation is allowed to calm, hearths are filled with wood and burn warmth into the people, and the citizens of the northern coast rest their bodies. The Gathering happens about a month into winter, once the people have recuperated themselves from summer’s work, and it is a time of bonfires, candied sweets, and the arts. People compete to decorate the exterior of their homes, and the markets are filled with painters selling depictions of myth, musicians debuting their latest ballad, or weavers selling rugs and blankets with colorful designs. The city comes together during the Gathering, celebrating another successful summer and enjoying the company of their extended family and friends.

The southern coast does not put much stock in festivals, though they are known to congregate in smaller groups to celebrate the beginnings of each season. These Season’s Feasts are meant to be gatherings of those very close to you, and it is a great insult not to invite a good friend or close family member if one is throwing a Season’s Feast. Political figures use these feasts to curry favor with each other or to slight an ally over a disagreement, but for the common people, these gatherings are intimate and even sacred.

### Education

The people of the Nobu Coast, both the northern and southern sides, have placed a much heavier emphasis on a standard level of education among the everyman. Given that permanent residence outside of the cities is uncommon, the autumn and winter seasons are often used as schooling time. In the north, the children have come into the city from the Summer Towns, and congregate in schoolhouses where they are taught to read and write, as well as educated in basic magical literacy, a practice that was popularized due to fears of another Thinning. The written language of the Nobu has been largely simplified since the fall of Nobugo, with the total number of characters being reduced and much of the formal grammar being abandoned. Many southern cities have a unique dialect that has developed from their more insular policies, and conversely the northern cities have not many dialects but one single northern dialect.

### Magic

The magical aptitude of most Nobu has not changed much since before the Thinning. The culture remains largely without the Gift, though the more recent census of those able to touch magic has shown that the numbers are slowly climbing. Vestigial remnants of fire magic remain in some isolated bloodlines, families that during the Thinning were better able to control the sudden Gift, and thus did not burn themselves out as hard.

One northern city has made a business out of the Nobu’s desire to have the populace more magically literate, with a particularly strong bloodline of mages producing enchanted wands that allow those without the Gift to experience the sensation of touching magic. These wands are sold to the schools along the coast, where students are given brief opportunities to practice controlling the energy that the wands impart to them. The wands do not allow any corporeal effects to be produced, but are rather complex illusions.