This video is brought to you by Campfire Blaze,
more on that later. Also, stay tuned for an announcement about
the conlang database project, links in description. Since I posted my conlang showcase videos,
Iāve received a great many questions about the cultures that speak my conlangs and the
world they exist in. So today weāre going to have a quick look over the Refugium, my
oldest and probably most fleshed-out worldbuilding project that I havenāt abandoned yet. I
started working on the first version of the Refugium sometime in 2011, originally to serve
as both a sort of thought-experiment and as well as a setting for tabletop RPGs, but at
some point, I came up with an idea for a unifying storyline that tied the setting together,
which I steadily began writing up into a book. But then I got distracted from the story by
the worldbuildingā¦and then I got distracted from the worldbuilding by the conlangingā¦
until today, when the Refugium mainly just serves as my linguistic playground, home to
all except one of my conlangs. The Refugium has been through a tremendous amount of revision
over the years, and I still update and change it on a pretty frequent basis as I inevitably
grow to hate my older ideas. There are also certain aspects of the world that I canāt
reveal just yet, in the off-chance that I ever get around to actually writing that story
I was working on, but hereās a brief overview of some of the basic elements of the Refugium.
First of all, the name āThe Refugiumā has no reality within the setting itself,
thatās just what I call it for reasons weāll get into later, but to the inhabitants, itās
simply called āthe worldā. Very importantly, the Refugium is *not* a planet. Itās an
area of land illuminated by a single, unmoving sun. The land itself is, for all intents and
purposes, flat, although itās unknown exactly what size or shape it is, again, for reasons
weāll get to soon. The sun remains fixed at the very center of the Refugium, floating
1000 kilometers above ground level. Crucially, the sun is not a star, itās a source of
energy that is inherently magical in nature. In fact, there are no stars in the sky at
all, the sun is the only source of natural light. The sun is also very small, only about
100 meters across, but it still shines brightly enough to illuminate an area roughly 6000
kilometers in radius. Since the sun never changes position, the further one gets from
the center of the world, the lower the sun appears in the sky, such that the central
regions, which extend up to 1000 kilometers from the center of the world, experience the
equivalent of constant noon-time sun, and the far regions, beyond 4500 kilometers from
the center of the world, experience perpetual evening. Between these two zones lie the umbral
regions, the only parts of the world to experience a day/night cycle. The equivalent of night
is created by a circle of five āmoonsā, each one 25 kilometers in diameter, which
cast a shadow over the umbral regions as they pass in front of the sun. The length of a
single day is measured from the moment of totality of one moonās eclipse to that of
the following moon, a period that lasts exactly 24 hours. Thereās also a smaller sixth moon
that circles the circumference of the umbral regions, taking 360 days to make one complete
revolution. This outer moon also aligns with the white
inner moon at midnight on the last day of the twelfth month, marking the beginning of
the new year in the standard calendar. By convention, most maps are drawn such that
the line of syzygy between the outer moon, inner white moon, and the sun is vertical.
The terms āNorth, South, East, and Westā, arenāt used in the Refugium; all compasses
point toward the sun. Almost every language in the Refugium has a word for āin the direction
of the sunā, and another word for āaway from the sunā, and many also distinguish
more specific directions based on the positions of the moons. The fact that the sun is stationary
also means that there are no seasons within the Refugium, and the climate in any given
area is very stable. The closer one gets to the sun, the warmer the climate becomes, with
an average day in the central regions being around 30-40 degrees, while in most areas
of the far regions, the temperatures hovers around freezing. Proximity to the sun is also
correlated with increased levels of precipitation; the temperature gradient and the absence of
the Coriolis effect creates a single circulation cell, whereby a constant cold breeze blows
from the far regions toward the sun, releasing rain as the air warms up. Directly beneath
the Sun is the aptly named Plateau of the Sun, an expanse of craggy mountains and highlands,
with the tallest peaks reaching over 5,000 meters above sea level. The people of the
central regions believe that the gods live atop the Plateau, and thus consider it sacred
ground where no mortal is permitted to tread. The area surrounding the Plateau is dominated
by montane cloud forests and dense jungles. The coast is constantly battered by huge storms
blowing from the great ocean, creating enormous tracts of swampland and feeding huge river
systems, while moving further inland, the vegetation becomes sparser, transitioning
into tropical savannah and eventually an enormous desert on the other side of the sun. The Refugiumās
biosphere is based on an alternate natural history of earth. Many clades weāre familiar
with in the real world, like cats, dogs, sharks, crocodiles, and insects, donāt exist, and
are instead replaced by clades that in our world have gone extinct, like creodonts, mesonychids,
placoderms, labyrinthodonts, and trilobites. Plus, there are also many clades in the Refugium
that have never existed in our world, like flying spiders, flightless bats, and whale-sized
seals. Along those same lines, there are also humans in the Refugium, but they come in a
much greater variety of races, ethnicities, and, depending on how exactly you define them,
species than humans in the real world. Another important thing to mention is that the Refugium
has no ādefaultā time period considered the present day. Human civilization existed
within the Refugium in some form for at least 6000 years, during which time, they developed
all the way from hunter-gatherers up to a sort of post-industrial modern era, after
which, due to certain events, their ultimate fate is unknown. For the purposes of this
video, weāll focus on the world and cultures as they existed within the first few thousand
years of human history. While the central regions are home to many different ethnicities,
the most populous are the ThirÄan peoples, who migrated from the nearby ThirÄan subcontinent
quite early on in history. Some of these ThirÄans would settle along the two great rivers, the
Vurkh and the Atezu, around which was founded the Empire of the Sun and the territory of
Tsannur. The Empire of the Sun is the largest and longest-lasting empire in human history,
although it did fracture, collapse, and reform at least 6 times during the several millennia
for which it existed. As their name suggests, they worship and revere the sun, which they
believe to be the father of the gods overseeing the world. The Empire is a ruthless authoritarian
theocracy, believing themselves to be the chosen people of the Sun god, and that all
other cultures have forgotten or forsaken their creator, and so it is therefore the
Empireās sacred duty to conquer them and to reunify the world under the dominion of
the Sun. Throughout its history, Tsannurās greatest rival was the ThirÄan Empire, with
whom they ironically share a common ancestry. ThirÄa exists mostly within the umbral regions,
and has a generally mild climate, with temperatures ranging from 15-20 degrees near the coasts
to about 5 degrees near the border of the far-regions. Because there are no seasons,
deciduous trees donāt exist in the Refugium, so the ThirÄan forests are instead comprised
of palms, cycads, and mixed conifer species. Within the last few tens of millions of years,
ThirÄa and Tsannur have undergone a degree of faunal interchange, such that many clades
originally endemic to ThirÄa, like mustelids, titanotheres, and entelodonts, have spread
into Tsannur, and many clades from Tsannur, like creodonts, glyptodonts, and astrapotheres,
have crossed over into ThirÄa. The people of the ThirÄan ethnic group tend to be quite
tall, and have dark hair, dark eyes, and beige to honey-colored skin, though those inhabiting
the central regions tend towards darker skin tones. Human settlement on ThirÄa began as
a series of independent city states which later allied and unified into a single nation.
Each city state is ruled over by an AnkÄli, or King, all of whom wield a fair amount of
local power but are still serve under the AnkÄliÅri, or High King, who rules from
the capital, which was originally Ankotska, the oldest and largest city state, but that
changed when the thriving port city of NekÄchta gained enough social and military influence
to rival it. The dialect of the Classical ThirÄan language spoken in NekÄchta became
a prestige dialect for many centuries thereafter. Although the cultural exchange between the
ThirÄa and the Empire of the Sun was initially somewhat peaceful, it soon erupted into a
series of wars that lasted for several centuries. Though ostensibly fought over control of the
EritÅskan sea and the surrounding territories, the war was also largely motivated by the
two empiresā ideological differences. Unlike the Empire of the Sun, the ThirÄan Empire
believes itās possible for one to earn their way into nobility through deeds rather than
merely by virtue of their bloodline, an idea which the Empire of the Sun finds inherently
blasphemous. Also unlike the Empire of the Sun, who consider the traditions handed down
from their ancestors to be sacred and that every other culture in the world is intrinsically
sinful, the ThirÄans place a great deal of value on innovation and progress, and are
willing assimilate the knowledge and customs of other peoples. The war between the two
empires motivated many technological advancements and defined major aspects of their respective
cultures, but who ultimately won the war and what happened afterward is a story for another
time. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, separated from Tsannur by a volcanic
mountain range is a vast tract of grasslands, savannah, and floodplains, a land that the
Empire of the Sun calls āPfekkadzgunā. Here live the Sumaāa, one of the least populous
varieties of human, found nowhere else in the world. Theyāre also some of the tallest
humans, with both men and women averaging over six feet in height, and they tend to
be broad-framed, strong, and stoic. They live in terraced cities presided over by a number
of ruling clans that constantly vie for local power. Their society is highly agrarian, making
use of sophisticated systems of permaculture; instead of using traditional farming methods
of clearing the land of its resident species to make room for crops and livestock, the
Sumaāa instead work with and modify the local ecosystem, implementing techniques such
as agroforestry, rotational grazing, and constructed wetlands, which allow them to harvest resources
from the land without damaging it. This predilection for permaculture is closely tied to their
religion; the sumaāa believe the world itself is alive, and is sustained by invisible currents
of vital energy that permeate the landscape like the blood vessels in an animal. The flow
of this energy is said to be influenced by various aspects of the environment, such as
the topography, weather, distribution of water and minerals, and relative abundance of different
species within any given area. The Sumaāa organize their infrastructure in such a way
as to accumulate as much of this life energy as possible, planning their cities to maximize
the flow of energy through them, digging canals and planting gardens to manipulate the path
of the energy currents, and erecting stone obelisks to mark where currents converge.
The sumaāa have a very strong cultural and racial identity, and are a highly isolationist
people, but they do engage in some trade with the nearby territory of Oqolaam across the
Indigo sea. Oqolaam is a warm, wet land with mangroves and swamps along its sunward coasts
and forests of podocarp and fern trees further inland. As the continent has been isolated
from the mainland for at least 30 million years, itās home to a unique assemblage
of flora and fauna, including chalicotheres, afrotheres, and terror birds, which are found
nowhere else in the world. The Oqolaayo are usually quite short, averaging between 5-5Ā½
feet tall, and have taupe to ochre colored skin, and short hair among both men and women,
with body and facial hair being virtually absent. The Oqolaayo civilization first developed
along the Imaqaayu river and the surrounding wetlands. To navigate the waterways, they
rapidly developed technologies for making rafts and canoes, and to help build cities
in the wetlands, they developed sophisticated means of water management like moats, aqueducts,
and pumps. Once they expanded their territory to the coast, it wasnāt long before they
colonized the many islands scattered across the Indigo sea and became a prominent maritime
power. The capital of Hal-hamaat is one of the largest
and wealthiest ports in the world, often called āthe heart of the Indigo seaā. It is said
that among its floating markets and ornate plazas can be found any commodity imaginable,
attracting traders and voyagers from all across the sea. The Oqolaayo have a great love of
poetry, music, art, and self-expression; most individuals bear at least one tattoo to mark
a significant life experience or accomplishment, and learning to play the hliwaltuu, a national
instrument recognized throughout the world as a symbol of Oqolaayo culture, is considered
an essential aspect of education. Sharing the continent with the Oqolaayo are the the
Kāama peoples, the most genetically distinct variety of humans, unable to breed with any
other race. They have lanky gracile bodies, long arms, and large jaws, and are often stereotyped
as being savage and monstrous by other humans. The Kāama mostly live within the forests
and foothills of their homeland of Tiipu-kāama, where the limestone bedrock has been eroded
into stone forests, sink holes, and caverns. Many of the larger Kāama settlements are
built within and around these landforms, connected by a network of stone roads through the densely
forested valleys. Because the limestone bedrock is so porous, any water on the surface quickly
seeps into subterranean drainage basins and aquifers, making conventional farming difficult.
As such, for most of their history, kāama agriculture has relied on techniques such
as rainwater harvesting and dense mulching to artificially increase soil retention, but
they eventually learned from the Oqolaayo how to construct pumps to bring groundwater
to the surface. The Kāama have a rich tradition of stoneworking, creating intricate handheld
tools out of obsidian, flint, and bone, and carving rock faces and hillsides into temples
and tombs. Although the Kāama are famed for their skill in hunting, they fear the
dark forests on the on the far side of the continent, which according to legend are inhabited
by all manner of monstrous creatures. But the furthest inhabited land from the sun is
the volcanic archipelago of Nhlogqwa, the only human territory to occur entirely within
the far regions. Most of the islands are little more than barren outcroppings of rocky tundra,
kept clear of trees by the dry climate and the occasional lava flow. Despite the perilous
conditions, however, human civilization has existed on Nhlogqwa longer than anywhere else
in the world; the archipelago is strewn with crumbling stone ruins of ancient settlements
that were abandoned or destroyed in volcanic eruptions, and the islands are dotted with
half-sunken shrines and monuments whose significance has long since been forgotten. To the mainlanders,
the islands have a reputation of remoteness, mysteriousness, bleakness, and, to many, fear,
but some ThirÄan merchants still come to the capital of Ithqunjaā to trade with the
native islanders. Since the frigid climate and barren rocky ground make growing crops
impractical, the Nhlogqwa survive on a diet of fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and seals.
They also use the inedible parts of these animals for scrimshaw, carving tools, weapons,
and talismans from shells and bones. But arguably their greatest forte is in masonry and engineering;
they use complex hypocausts and intricate plumbing systems to circulate the heat generated
from geothermal springs through a series of ducts within the floors and walls of their
dwellings, and they carve out great cisterns to collect scarce rainwater and snowmelt.
One of the great benefits to come from the islandersā dealings with the mainland was
the creation of their own writing system, with which they now transcribe elaborate records
of their history, culture, and mythology. This cultural exchange has also seen the ThirÄan
religions become widespread among the islanders, but thereās still a decent percentage of
the population that preserves their ancestral belief system, which revolves around meditation
and dreaming. The Nhlogqwa believe in many interconnected worlds beyond the physical,
accessible only through dreams and death. It is said that understanding and mastering
oneās dreams will help them navigate through the afterlife once they die, but those who
fail to attain this enlightenment are doomed to dwell forever in the darkness on the far
side of the islands. At a distance of about 6000 kilometers from the center of the world,
the light from the sun fades into near total darkness. The edges of the great ocean are
fringed with pack-ice, and the land at this distance is nothing but freezing, windswept
wasteland. Any human unlucky enough to find themselves here will die from the cold within
minutes. The regions within the darkness are known variously as the nightlands, the shadowlands,
or the outer darkness. Many say that staring into the darkness for too long will drive
one mad, but there are also tales from those claiming to have seen vast ineffable things
moving within the gloom. These reports are largely dismissed as apocryphal, but no one
whoās ventured into the Nightlands has ever returned, so what, if anything, exists within
the Nightlands, or even how far they extend, remains unknown. As far as anyone can determine,
the Refugium is the only place in all of existence capable of harboring life, and that is why
I call it the Refugium, as itās the only refuge for the inhabitants in the midst of
an otherwise forbidding, unknowable void, a tiny speck of light and life in a vast,
oppressive, all-encompassing cosmic darkness. So, those are some of the basic things to
know about of the Refugium. There are many other details of the world and its cultures
still left to explore, and like I said before, there are some things that I canāt talk
about just yet, but if you want to see more videos like this one let me know in the comments
below. And thanks to Campfire for Sponsoring this episode. Their brand new software Blaze,
which just launched this month, is a web-based application that helps you compile and organize
all of your writing and worldbuilding endeavors in one place. Blaze offers all of the features
of Campfire Pro, including character sheets, timelines, maps, magic systems, languages,
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module, and the ability to share and collaborate with other users in real time. In addition
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or yearly subscription, letting you customize your workspace to suit your specific writing
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description. Thanks also to the fans over on discord who helped out with the art for
this episode, links to the servers in the description. And once again, a massive thanks
to all the patrons whoās continued support makes videos like this possible. Thanks for
watching, and Iāll see you in the next video.
If he ever publishes that story, I would definitely love to read it.
Ngl, my fantasy has a few cultural features that happen to overlap with this. Back to the drawing board lol!
So it seems that we know that Neanderthals exist in this world as well.