Two Salt-Throned Alien Cultures

Over at Throne of Salt, Dan has set up a series of generators for making alien cultures, at least partial inspired by Ursula LeGuin's Hain Cycle of books and stories. Dan recommends choosing 3 of his 25 cultural trait tables, and maybe 1d3 mutations from Coins & Scrolls biological mutation list. I'm also going to assign each culture a trait from one of Melsonian Arts Council's planar culture generators.

These took quite a bit of thought to make coherent sense of, so I can't recommend trying to do this at the table. These procedures should be used during preparation only.
 
 
Culture 1 - The Skyminders
 
Danscape cultural traits - age, learning, rank
Age: "Transitions celebrated: child to youth, youth to adult, adult to elder."
Learning: "Learning must be active, rooted in traveling and interacting."
Rank: "Higher status means more trepannations, so as to let more spirits of the open sky into the mind."

Melsonian cultural trait - dress
Dress: "Nudity as social scale. The rich wear nothing while the poor dress in endless filthy layers. Nudity represents the access to warmth? The opposite may be true, where the rich wear clothes 'cos it's valuable, the poor are prevented. Like the the old Imperial Purple. Origins or traditions may be misty. Skin painting a distinct possibility."

Biological mutations - burst of speed, cilia lips, mirrored hands
Burst of Speed:  "Once per day, can double movement for 10 minutes."
Cilia Lips: "Wriggly. Seals food inside. Like kissing a millipede."
Mirrored Hands: "They swap sides."

The Skyminders' ancestors were fully aquatic, and their lowest classes are still required to dwell fully underwater, their minds closed to the sky. The working and middle classes live in partially flooded districts, the water level in any given neighborhood carefully indicating its status. Only the elites live fully on land, atop spires, in fact, to be closer to the sky-spirits and further from the sea.

The Skyminders' bodies and attires are as closely calibrated to their social position as their homes are. The elites have the entire tops of their skulls removed, so that their brains are fully opened to the air, and their minds fully opened to the sky-spirits. They alone are permitted to go nude. Beneath them, the middle classes may, over the course of a distinguished life, attain a filigree of trepannations, while a worker at the start of their career has only their fontanel open to the heavens. It is a crime to wear fewer clothes than the holes in one's head would indicate, and a mark of shame to wear more. The lowest classes go swaddled in public, with even their heads and faces wrapped tight to prevent them from polluting the sky-spirits by contact. Criminals are welded into a prison of metal masks and clothes that block them from the sky.

Outsiders, of course, are the lowest of all, though it is confusing that they arrive from on high, closer to the sky-spirits even than the highest of spire-dwelling elites. But they must be low, for are they not covered completely? Do they not wear impervious suits to separate themselves from the sky? Do they not bring their own gasses in tanks, so that they may breath without inhaling the sky?

Skyminders are born shelled, and as they age, shed their stiffer skins for the supple blubbery leather of adulthood. Each shedding is a great occasion, celebrated as fully as a new trepannation, or the glorious skull removal ceremony. Each upward (or downward) movement in status is also a going-away, it must be accompanied by travel to a new place, to be around others who now share one's new caste, and away from those who might remember one as they were before. The Skyminders' bodies still bear the signs of their aquatic past. Their hands are fins, their mouth adapted for bottom-feeding, their thick skin requiring no clothes to stay warm atop the coldest peaks.

Though outsiders are obviously the lowest of the low, still when they visit, they are sometimes allowed to accompany a Skyminder into areas where their level of clothedness would otherwise be forbidden. For though they must surely be great sinners and criminals to be locked in such suits and shunned from the heavens, still, the Skyminders appreciate the tales of anyone who has traveled so far.


Culture 2 - The Dragonkin
 
Danscape cultural traits - learning, child-rearing, work
Learning: "Oral histories and folklore, taught by extended family members."
Child-rearing: "Members of eunuch caste act as teachers and caretakers."
Work: "Labor ought serve the public good first, and the personal good second."
 
Melsonian cultural trait - family
Family: "All social engagement is official. Marriage ceremonies, friend ceremonies, enemy ceremonies. Most significant interactions must be played out within the confines of a relationship or else is considered illegal/immoral."
 
Biological mutations - snake tongue, the vapours
Snake Tongue: "Can extend up to 1'. "
The Vapours: "Your breath comes out in foggy white burps. -2 Stealth."

The Dragonkin are the descendants of dragons, those great firebreathing beasts that still dwell in the Kins' zoological gardens and nature preserves and on the Forbidden Continent. The Dragonkin still hatch from spherical amphibian eggs like their ancestors, and their juvenile forms look just like miniature dragons, until they metamorphose into their adult bodies.

Like the ancestral dragons, the Kin possess tongues that extend half their bodylength, and blazing chemical furnaces inside their chests that superheats any moisture they inhale past the boiling point, so that their breath comes out in a great billowing fog. The poets of the Dragonkin have always practiced a form of cloud calligraphy, using their long tongues to shape their exhalations into cloudforms that either mimic or provide ironic commentary on their words - although few lay Kin possess the skill to practice this art.

The dragons are a perpetual reminder to the Kin of their animal past, and so the Dragonkin place great importance on rules and rituals, the only things (or so they believe) that keep them from reverting to their ancestral brutality. The most fearsome monsters in Dragonkin folk tales are monsters with the hearts and minds of dragons hidden in the bodies of Kin.

The Dragonkin have ceremonies for all good behaviors - and any behavior not honored by the proper ceremony is automatically not good. Every interaction between business associates, friends, even family members, plays out in a choreographed ritual, a scripted dance that allows slight improvisation, but only within strict confines. There are rituals for working, for shopping, for eating and bathing, for sports and games, for love. Every ritual is for the benefit of others, for the good of the community of Kin.

To take any action outside the prescribed ritual, to perform any service purely for the good of oneself, is to give in to the beating heart of the dragon that races inside every Kin's breast; each step outside the path is a temptation to wander further and further away, to venture into the Forbidden Continent of the soul. The choreographers who devise new rituals are among the Kins' greatest artist, but they are also seen as heretics, their new dances perhaps invitations to enact the old and bestial ways.

The tales of the dragons, the history of the Kin, every dance and ritual, every useful skill, these are taught to the young by a blessed caste of sacred eunuchs, who perform a special rite just before the final metamorphosis into the Kin's mature and gendered forms. The eunuchs give up the chance to lay eggs or fertilize them, to become the matriarchs and paters of Kin society, in order to birth adult minds rather than infant bodies, in order to become the parents of civilization itself.

It took some time for the Dragonkin to recognize the morality of the outsiders, who wear Kin-shaped eggs over their entire bodies, for the outsiders' behavior did not initially conform to the Dragonkin's own ceremonies, and the ceremonies of the outsiders are strange and all but invisible to Kin eyes. Many Kin still fear the outsiders, who (though they have eunuchs) have no single caste that fulfills all the eunuchs' sacred duties. Many Kin fear that the outsiders, inside their strange eggshells, have the hearts of dragons, the secret sinful souls of the ancient monsters.