Previous: An Overview of Gurutama Part 2
I promised to write more about the merfolk of Gurutama and here it is!
The Dawn of Worlds game that created Gurutama was actually our third attempt.
I’d played once with one friend so another person besides me would know the rules.
We tried it with the whole group, but we were unsatisfied with the way the world went.
There were two many weird races (cloud people, shapeshifting lizard people, etc) and large portions of the world were uninhabited and undeveloped.
We revised the way we were using the rules slightly and tried again.
That third game produced Gurutama.
The second game featured a large conflict between robot people called warforged and cow people called minotaurs.
An additional participant in this conflict were the sahuagin.
Sahuagin look like the image above. They are more full fish-human hybrid whereas the typical view of merfolk is a literal half fish half human.
My friend who made sahuagin in the first game carried over the underwater civilization to our second game and made the merfolk.
Wanting the merfolk to be even more involved in the world, he made them master traders of the world.
Like I said earlier, the merfolk worship Drolfo, god of the sea.
Drolfo performed miracles for the merfolk at the beginning of the world, so its likely that the merfolk are ruled by a theocracy.
It’s just as likely that the merfolk are ruled by the merchant class due to their trade focused culture.
I’d guess its an element of both, perhaps like India’s feud between the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes.
Brahmins rule through religious power and Kshatriyas through military power.
We never officially decided how that worked though.
I’d imagine the merfolk are viewed by the rest of Gurutama the same way the rest of Earth views the USA.
The USA is a powerful capitalist nation just like the merfolk.
The USA is cut off from most other countries by oceans just like the merfolk.
The USA interferes with other nations to secure benefits for itself just like the merfolk.
So, just like the USA but with more religion involved in government.
Next time I’ll talk about the humans of Gurutama!
-Mister Ed
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