By his own request under the GDPR (2018) regulations, I have deleted user okimEywaanuser and all his posts and information from this board.

Posting here for transparency.

Cartographer Applications

Interested in cartography? Willing to dedicate time to creating a new IDU map? Then apply below to be the IDU’s next cartographer!

We are presently seeking a new cartographer following the resignation of [nation]Sanctaria[/nation]. The new cartographer will need to make a new map from scratch, so it will require a significant time commitment.

If you are interested in becoming the IDU’s next cartographer, please answer the questions below, after which you may be contacted with further questions. Thank you for your interest in the position!

Hello everyone,

Since the upcoming race to fill the former Emperor's seat on the Obsidian Throne is shaping up to be a bit complex, I decided to start an OOC thread to facilitate discussion and/or planning. (Private discussions can still take place via Discord.)

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Some useful references:

IC thread

Factbook link on how the Xiomeran government and election process work

List of the candidates that have an actual chance of winning, out of the 75 who have actually put in a bid

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Beginning now, the process of choosing a new Emperor by a council of 500 experts (ihuicatl) will begin. The way it works is simple: the various candidates will make their case for why they should be chosen, and then a series of votes will be chosen. The first round will narrow the field from 75 candidates to 37. The second round will narrow it further, from 37 to 18. The third round will cut the field from 18 to 9. The fourth round will make more cuts, from 9 to 4. The fifth round will bring up the top two candidates, and then a final round of voting will decide who the next Emperor (or Empress) is.

I don't plan to RP the first three rounds of voting at all, save for possibly some minor background setting. Only the top four candidates I've already described in the breakdown posted earlier have any realistic chance of winning at all, and the early votes will be mostly formalities and narrowing down the field. The period during these first three rounds will be your chance, if you want to, to try to influence the voters deciding who the next Emperor will be. If you haven't done so by the final round, it will probably be too late at that point.

How you can influence the vote:

1) You can make RP posts about trying to sway the voters on the council of experts to vote for your preferred candidate. This can be done overtly, by making a formal announcement about who your nation supports and making a public appeal to the voters to pick that candidate. This can also be done covertly, by finding ways to influence the voters behind the scenes. Bribery, offering business deals, offering other kinds of favors, or blackmail (if you have dirt on a particular voter) are all acceptable and common ways to get them to vote for who you want.

2) You can also approach one of the four candidates directly and try to get them to drop out, or offer them inducements/ask for inducements in return for supporting their bid for the throne. Again, bribery, blackmail, and favors are all acceptable; the actual candidates will be much harder to influence though, so bear that in mind.

3) A third approach can be to try to influence the Xiomeran public to back a particular candidate, which will put pressure on the council of experts to vote a certain way. While the Xiomeran system is relatively harder to influence through public opinion than a democracy would be, it is not immune. You can plant news stories, pay for ads, barrage social media with "support" for a candidate (or negative coverage of a candidate you dislike), etc.

The only thing I do not want to see in the RP is anyone using violence on any of the voters, or on the candidates themselves. Anything else, you're welcome to ask here or via Discord.

Location
The section of this nation that is located in the IDU basically occupies a peninsula extending southwards from the South Continent’s southern coast. It is not this nation’s main territory, which centres in the area that the name would presumably lead you to expect on a more RL-like version of Earth instead: This is just an outlying territory, called ‘Diamant', which the nation’s people reached using their advanced spacecraft.
(The nation’s player and people say that they travelled across the stars, to a different solar system, and that — although they agree with me about wildlife from Earth ending up here — the physical similarities between this planet and Earth [and between their solar systems, too] are just a happy coincidence: I think, however, that their vessels’ ‘interstellar’ drive must actually have turned out to be an ‘inter-dimensional’ one that moved them between two alternative versions of the same solar system instead. We’ll probably have to agree to disagree about this…)

The 'Basic Presumptions & Overview’ from which I am currently working place this nation approximately from 6[sup]o[/sup]S to 9[sup]o[/sup]S, with a maximum width of approximately 2 degrees of longitude: This would give it a N-S distance of around 210 standard miles, and a maximum E-W distance of around 150 standard miles, unless a “Tardis Effect” applies and it’s actually bigger on the inside than on the outside.
From what I remember of the region’s old topographical map, and as agreed by this nation’s player, there is a line of mountains running roughly N-S through the peninsula. I see that OOC the CTEd nation which formerly occupied these lands (although IC memories have presumably been retconned to say that it, like so many other CTEd nations, never existed at all…) apparently had one of its main cities on the eastern coast: This version of the peninsula is being retconned, however, to have all of its best “habitable” areas in the west instead. This change seems advisable due to the change in latitude involved now that we’ve expanded the map’s presumed scale, and I’m calling it a side-effect of whatever cosmic incident caused the latter retconned alteration in the structure of Reality… Making this change means that the “habitable” areas now all in the west are shielded from some of the equatorial rains and heat — and from hurricanes — by those mountains. The western side has a ‘dry season’ & ‘wet season’, but due to the different pattern of lands & seas these are be less extreme than those in RL experienced by [e.g.] India (i.e. the ‘Monsoons’).

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Basic Ecotypes
The nation’s natural habitats are basically arranged in a series of strips, running approximately north-south parallel to each other and mostly widest (where the nation as a whole is) in the north. Between the opens seas in the west and the open (and stormier) seas in the east, these, are:

Coral reefs

Coastal waters, sheltered to some extent by the reefs, and some enclosed as lagoons; some of these areas include ‘seagrass meadows’.

Shoreline: mostly consists of sandy beaches, although near the peninsula’s southern tip a branch of the mountains reaches the shore and provides both cliff-backed coves and offshore islets where (with reasonably safety from land-based predators) sea-lions emerge from the water to breed or just to rest.

Coastal plain: This is mostly covered by forests that are ‘tropical evergreen’ but are not actually ‘rainforest’.

Inland plains: There is a fairly gentle & long slope from the coast up to the actual foothills of the mountainous spine. Tropical evergreen forests extend inland along the river valleys, but further from the waters (inland and/or uphill) they shade through ‘tropical seasonal forest’ (including ‘thorn forest’) and scrub into wooded savannah, and then into open grassland. Some areas have sandy soils, low in both nutrients and moisture, within which those transitions in vegetation occur over shorter distances.
There is a significant area of marshland where two of the main rivers that join these plains meet, inland from the coastal forests, which usually undergoes flooding during the ‘west season’ to become a wider swamp. This area is generally considered to mark a “boundary” between the northern and central sections of those plains.
For approximately the southern one-third of the peninsula’s length, the seasonal forests & scrub inland from the coast merge almost directly with those of the mountain’s foothills, with little or no wooded savannah — let alone open grassland — in between.

Foothills: The last of the rain brought by winds from the east flows down from the mountains “behind” these, allowing the river valleys and the hills’ lower slopes to bear more wooded savannah, scrub, or even woodland, than generally exists along the stretches of the same rivers that flow through the open plains below. (Some areas may be suitable for growing Coffee.)

Mountain slopes (western side): These become steeper after the foothills, but still typically less so than on the eastern side. Scrub exist near the base but becomes patchier with height, leading into a predominantly grassy cover that includes quite sizeable stretches of relatively level ‘meadows’ in places. There are patches of scrub and even small trees in hollows where water can temporarily collect, but then there are also expanses of bare or almost-bare rock where the surface is so close to vertical that plants — and soil itself — cannot sit there easily.

Mountain summits: The almost-continuous cover of vegetation that exists lower down is replaced by scattered clumps, as one gets close to the snow-line (on any mountains high enough to have one…), and the seed-bearing plants largely give way to more primitive types.

Mountain slopes (eastern side): With much more water & a bit more warmth available, there is only a relatively thin belt of meadow before the ‘scrub belt’ starts. Bamboo, and “giant” forms of both heather and stinging nettles, are common members of the latter level’s plant communities. Below this is a belt of ‘’cloud forest’, where lower temperatures at higher altitudes cause humid air rising from below to release much of its moisture, resulting in extensive fogs and a considerable reduction in the direct sunlight received by plants: This is thickest in the ‘saddles’ between peaks, or other hollows, where that moisture is likeliest to be deposited, and may be “broken” by areas of direct connection between the two adjacent belts in between those. Ferns and mosses fare relatively well alongside the seed-bearing plants in these damp — but not too sunny — conditions. Below this, again, is a belt of ‘tropical montane rainforest’, largely containing species of trees that are better adapted to steeper slopes & thinner soils than are those of the lowlands.

Coastal plain: This is basically covered by ‘tropical lowland rainforest’. Its relative narrowness, combined with the way in which it slopes towards the sea, means that it has numerous small rivers but these don’t manage to combine into just a few large ones as would happen in larger & flatter expanses of this habitat (such as the RL basins of the Amazon or the Congo…): These conditions also mean that there are no large expanses of ‘flooded forest’ or swamps such as would also occur in larger & flatter rainforests. However, there is an intermittent line of lakes & swampy areas running parallel to — and only a few miles inland from — the middle half of the coastline [more-or-less], because a seam of relatively soft rock reaches the surface here and has been eroded more deeply than the harder rocks to either side. To the south of this, much of the area between the mountains and the shore is occupied by a ‘karst’ landscape of heavily-eroded limestone with some quite spectacular landscape features (including at least one major set of caves, containing an underground river).

Shore: Much of the eastern coast is formed by cliffs, although fairly low ones, where relatively soft rocks have been eroded away leaving more resistant strata along the modern shore. Some of these have ‘wave-cut platforms’ at their bases. There are some lower areas, where certain rivers meet the sea and at this coast’s northern end where the main rock-types are different, and these have mangrove swamps present. Coral is relatively scarce here, compared to the more sheltered western side, but some smallish outcrops do occur particularly offshore from the karst region.

Coastal waters, less sheltered (and narrower) than those on the western side, shading quite quickly back into open seas.

Tlālacuetztla, the capital of Xiomera, was normally an incredibly bustling and crowded city, full of frenetic activity. But on the 12th of October, beginning at 8:30 am, the greatest metropolis in the entire Empire came to an eerily silent halt.

Cities across Xiomera were experiencing the same phenomenon, for one reason. The time had come for the Xiomeran Empire to bid farewell to the man who had ruled it for almost twenty years.

Beginning at 8:30 am, a long motorcade carrying the Emperor's body left the Palace of Flowers to travel through Montelin and into downtown Tlālacuetztla to carry his body to the Huēyi Teōcalli, the great temple to Huītzilōpōchtli. Crowds lined the entire motorcade path; some waved Xiomeran flags, while others carried pictures of the Emperor in various noble poses. Many people could be seen crying as the motorcade traveled down streets with lightposts draped in black and flying the Xiomeran flag as well.

If anyone had had a mind to protest or try to disrupt the motorcade and its carefully choreographed spectacle for television, the presence of huge numbers of police and soldiers, all dressed in their finest uniforms but carrying weapons that were anything but ceremonial, would have caused any such thoughts to be quickly put in the back of one's mind and best forgotten. The rather rough response to the protest at the Palace of Flowers just weeks earlier would no doubt still be weighing heavily on the minds of those who didn't find the day of Topilpopoca's funeral a reason to mourn.

At the Huēyi Teōcalli, the crowds thronged outside in silent mourning as the motorcade entered the temple grounds. After the motorcade, a steady stream of limousines bearing high officials, family members and foreign dignitaries would enter the grounds.

As guests arrived, they were escorted to designated seating areas in the main temple. Family members were seated up front, followed by Xiomeran officials, and foreign dignitaries right behind them. As the soft buzz and murmur of people finding their seats finally came to an end, a series of bells were rung. A man draped in long golden robes, with a severe face, walked onto the dais at the front of the temple. He strode to the front of the dais and raised his hands above his head. The excellent acoustics of the Huēyi Teōcalli - and the microphone he discreetly wore - ensured everyone in the temple could hear him, and that the domestic and foreign media who had been allowed inside to broadcast the event could as well.

"People of Xiomera, and foreign dignitaries who have come to pay respect. I am Atlhuitzcoatl, high priest of Huītzilōpōchtli and keeper of the sacred Huēyi Teōcalli. We have come today to mark the end of the life of the great Emperor Topilpopoca. While a great man has fallen, the great Empire he was privileged to lead has not. If we truly seek to honor his memory and his legacy, as his soul prepares to face the nine challenges on his path to the underworld, let us prepare to face the challenges that Xiomera faces after he has fallen with the same power and honor that the great Emperor will no doubt show on his own path."

At this moment, the darkened area behind Atlhuitzcoatl was suddenly bathed in bright light, which reflected off of a golden altar with stunning brilliance. On the altar, the body of Topilpopoca lay, draped in jaguar skins, feathers from many birds, and fine jewelry. Surrounding the Emperor's body around the altar were the things he would need for his trip to the underworld: food, drink, clothes, tools, weapons, and fine valuables to serve as gifts for the lord of the underworld who would receive his soul.

As the body of Topilpopoca was illuminated, Atlhuitzcoatl raised his hands again and began reciting a series of prayers in Huenyan, to the accompaniment of drums and the soft chanting of other priests.

In the area of benches closest to the altar, Yauhmi and Texōccoatl, the wife and son of Topilpopoca, looked up at the altar. Both of their faces bore a mixture of mourning and determination in their expressions. Behind them in the next row of benches, Tepilcayotl nodded his head soberly as the rest of the Cabinet stood stonefaced.

"As the great Emperor Topilpopoca begins his journey to Mictlān, let us prepare him for the challenges ahead." The priest of Huītzilōpōchtli then turned to the body of Topilpopoca, closing his eyes and pouring water from a jeweled vase over his head. Atlhuitzcoatl then placed a jade stone under the Emperor's tongue. He then began placing pieces of amatl tree bark paper upon the Emperor's body.

"With this water, we return Topilpopoca to the womb of the earth. With this jade, we provide his soul the wealth needed to make the trip to Mictlān. With this paper of amatl, we provide him what is needed for safe passage past the nine challenges of the underworld. With these offerings, we commend the soul and spirit of Topilpopoca to its final resting place, and provide him all that is needed to ensure his return."

Atlhuitzcoatl then walked in front of the altar, raising his hands dramatically as he walked forward. With a sudden whoosh, the pyre on top of the altar burst into flames. As the flames rose to life, a large curtain then fell behind Atlhuitzcoatl, sparing the audience the sight of the actual cremation.

It was enough for the audience to know that Topilpopoca, the Emperor of Xiomera, was now truly gone, on his long trip to the underworld. The crowd would then be given a moment to somberly pay his departing soul respect in their thoughts.