Kento

   

Kento
Orthographic projection of Kento on Osukune, just below its northern polar ice cap.
Area	413,981.6 km2
Population	c. 16.88 thousand (39th century Aj.)
Density	0.041 persons/km2
GDP	¢757.827 million (3800 Aj.)
GDP per capita	¢44,895 (3800 Aj.)
Religions	Autoculpism Sosenism Yobism
Demonym	Kentojin
Countries	Largest countries United Cities Greenlands Free State Sunokoku Flotsam Ninja State Egg Valley Hive Green Bight Hive Sunset Hive Skeleton Valley Springwind Hive Floodlands Hive Stiltwalker Gang Loreseeker League Kral Clan Shem Free State
Languages	Kentojese and its dialects
Largest cities	Tebara, Oaish, Grasstown

Kento is an island continent on Osukune, an oceanic natural satellite of the gas giant Ryuga in the Ametrasa system. Kento has a total land area of 413,981.6 square kilometers, measuring approximately 982 kilometers from its northernmost to southernmost point. Kento is the second-largest of the two continental landmasses on Osukune aside from its polar ice caps, the other continent being the uninhabited Sunagaso. Kento is home to races of human, sunoman, ariman, and skeleton, with a total sapient population estimated at around 16,880 as of 3800 Aj.. The continent is bounded to the north by the Northern Ocean and to the west, south, and east by the World Ocean.

The majority of the landmass of Kento is composed of the continental mainland. A few smaller islands are known beyond the continent's coasts, especially in the west and north, constituting the Acid Isles and the Bleak Isles respectively. Kento is home to a broad range of geographical features. Its topography is dominated by three major mountain ranges: the Spine Mountains of the west, the Bask Mountains in the north, and the Black Mountains in the central-east, with the Spine and Black ranges approximately parallel to one another across the Wend Valley. The positioning of these mountain ranges has an acute effect on the climate of Kento; the continent is dominated by vast deserts, with the largest of these being the northeastern Great Desert and the middle Wend Desert.

Kento has been home to the races of mankind for at least 3800 years. The earliest human civilization was partially destroyed and the remainder subsumed under the rule of their sentient robotic creations, the skeletons. For a millennium, the skeletons ruled the Ametrasa system under policies of development which relegated Okusune the status of a technological backwater. After converting the outermost major moon of Ryuga into a massive interstellar vessel, most of the skeletons left the Ametrasa system, seeking a more heavy metal-rich planetary system in line with their long-term needs. The skeletons who remained collaborated with the surviving humans on Okusune to build a new, shared civilization in which man and machine could flourish. Within centuries, Kento was dotted with highly developed colonies. The Grid Failure of the 27th century decimated Kento's human population, and the skeletons took on a much more protective role than before, becoming ever more fearful that humanity was destined to destroy itself if not for their intervention. It was during this period that the arimen and sunomen races were genetically engineered by the skeletons, in hopes of creating a species of human more suited to life on the harsh climate of Kento. Factions among the ruling skeletons would slowly drive their people apart, and the Skeleton War of the 31st century would have an extreme toll for all the sentient races. The skeletons who survived retreated to the areas of the continent left completely unsuitable to biological life, while the remaining races struggled against both the harsh environment and each other. As of the 39th century, mankind remains divided among various social and political structures.

The societies of man can be largely grouped along their racial makeup. Human civilization covers much of Kento's most arable and normally habitable regions. The political arrangements of humans vary significantly, from the direct democracy of the Greenlands Free State to the oligarchic slaver United Cities. The indomitable sunomen hail primarily from the southern Wend Desert, with their people well suited to the semi-arid environment of the region. They are largely ranchers as opposed to farmers, and they are generally unified under the autocratic Sunokoku. The industrious arimen are found all across Kento, capable of thriving in its arid and even semi-acidic regions. Arimen are generally organized in colonies, with each colony having a Queen from whom the colony's population is birthed. The skeletons are the more mysterious race of Kento, found today only very rarely outside their wholly acidic, inhospitable Tarlands and Ashlands.

Geography

Cartography

Maps of Kento

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  A labeled, detailed physical-political map of Kento, showing outland regions, countries, major and minor settlements, fortresses, and major ruins.

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  A climate map of Kento according to the Koeppen classification system. Areas with solid or dotted black are partially or wholly acidic and unsuitable for long-term human or sunoman habitation.

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  A map of Kento denoting state-like polities, major factions, and unsettled regions.

Physical geography

Kento spans from just below 75°N to just above 30°N, measuring roughly 982 kilometers from its northernmost to southernmost points. Kento sits on its own tectonic plate; this plate is bounded to the west by the Greater Oceanic Plate and to the east by the Lesser Oceanic Plate. The Greater Oceanic Plate is subsumed under the Kentojese plate in the west, whereas the Lesser Oceanic Plate's boundary in the east is transform, occassionally resulting in major earthquakes and tsunamis on Kento's eastern coast. The southern boundary of the Kentojese Plate is divergent and prone to high levels of volcanism; to the far south of Kento, the Oumen Isles, geologically very young, are home to some of the most active volcanoes on modern Okusune, with their periodic eruptions having major effects on the continent's southern coast. The Kentojese Plate is believed to have at some point split from the Sunagaese Plate long before the arrival of humanity, with all land on Okusune having been connected in a massive supercontinent. In the modern period, transportation to Sunagaso is almost non-existent, and so studies cannot be carried out to confirm this, but research from earlier civilizations has supported this conclusion.

Kento is topographically dominated by its mountain ranges and hills. Only a fraction of the continent has extensively flat landscapes; these are located in the central-eastern Monsoonlands now possessed by the Greenlands Free State and throughout the Swamps of the south. What is in modern times known as the Great Desert would be flat if not for its near total coverage in sand dunes. The Spine Mountains and Rain Mountains, along with their associated foot hills, shape the topographic structure of the continent to the west of the Wend River. The Black Mountains, divided into Northern and Southern components by the canyon at Gosha's Garden, frame the topographic make-up of much of the eastern half of the continent, along with the Foul Mountains of the far southwest. The Bask Mountains constitute the major topographical feature of the northern third of the continent, separating the monsoonal Cannibal Coast of the west from the Bask Basin in the east. Major hill structures include the Spider Hills of the far west, the Bane Hills at the south of the Great Desert, the Noble and Tebara Hills of the central Great Desert, and the Coldwinter Hills of the northern Great Desert.

The three longest rivers on Kento are the Wend River, the Flotsam River, and the Fell River in that order. The Wend River dwarfs its closest rivals in length by several hundred kilometers combined; it runs from the Green Valley of the central-eastern Monsoonlands to its mouth at the southern Swamps. The largest lake in Kento is Sweet Lake at the center of the Green Valley. It is followed in size by the acid lakes of Burn Lake and Scalding Lake respectively. While most of the Monsoonlands are privy to freshwater rain, a long band along the coast receives occasional acid rain, which blows in from the Acid Isles across the Sunset Strait. The Ashlands and Tarlans receive acid rain as generated locally; excess acid rain often blows westward into the Black Bay, making the area unsuitable both on land and at sea for biological life. Kento's irregular shape lends it many bays and bights along its coast; the largest of these are the northern Cannibal Bight and the southwestern Warmwind Bight.

Climate

The climate structure of Kento is defined by latitude, elevation, and position relative to these factors. Ocean currents originating from the oceans bounding to all sides of the continent also play a major role in determining the exact structure of climate patterns. Resting between the latitudes 75°N and 30°N, Kento is subject to strong variations in its climate make-up across its north-south axis.

The Northern Ocean circulates cold waters in a gyre running from west to east, affecting directly the northern coast of Kento and much of its eastern seaboard. In the winter, when the moon-world Okusune is orbiting on the antisolar side of its parent planet Ryuga, the gyre of the Northern Ocean is pushed downwards, causing colder temperatures throughout the northern of the continental landmass and interrupting the northern fork of the warm-water-carrying Circumequitorial current. This winter-time interruption creates the monsoonal seasons of what are known as the Monsoonlands. In the summer, when Okusune is orbiting on the solar side of Ryuga, the Northern gyre recedes towards the north pole. The Circumequitorial current then brings intermittent to sustained rainfall through often-formed atmospheric rivers. These atmospheric rivers often have a doubled effect of forking precipitation northwards and southwards, driving the semi-arid environment which is found on the southwestern coast of the continent. While the northern Monsoonlands are subject to continental seasonal variations in temperature as well as precipitation, the southern Monsoonlands enjoy year-long warm to hot temperatures.

The Western and Eastern Drylands are largely the product of the high-elevation regions found across much of central Kento. The Spine Mountains create the vast desert and semi-arid region found throughout much of the Lower Wend valley, while the Black Mountains are responsible in large part for the Great Desert of the east; these dry regions are both the result of rain shadow effects from the aforementioned mountain ranges. Throughout much of these regions, their mid-to-southerly latitudes make them prone to high daytime temperatures. The hottest region in all of Kento is the wholly arid Wend Desert of the central Wend Valley, where daytime temperatures can reach up to 50°C in the peak summer season. Only the highlands surrounding the desert regions and the northern portion of the Great Desert beyond the Coldwinter Hills experience seasonal temperature variations ranging below 10°C of these arid and semi-arid regions.

The Swamps are the only region of Kento to receive both high levels of precipitation and high temperatures. The near-entirety of the Swamps are technically categorized as tropical rainforest, despite their colloquial toponym. The name of this region stems from the low-lying elevation which typifies much of it; the high, year-round precipitation makes causes much of the area to be dominated by characteristically wet soil. Additionally, the monsoon climate experienced upwards of the flow of the Wend River means that the Swamps are prone to seasonal floods throughout the summer and early winter. The high level of rainfall is almost entirely the result of the southern fork of the Circumequitorial current, which brings a sustained flow of warm waters and high-density rainfall patterns from the west. The high heat of the Swamps comes from both ocean currents and its position in the mid-to-lower latitudes of Okusune. The combination of heat and moisture makes the Swamps the most humid region in the whole of Kento, throughout the entirety of the year.

The regions known as the Ashlands and Tarlands are distinguishable from one another largely due to their separation by the Black Mountains. Both of these regions are considered to be wholly acidic, due directly to the consequences of the Great Shame of the 31st century. The exact happenings of the Great Shame are recorded only in the oral tradition of the skeletons of Skeleton Valley, and many are reluctant to hash out what is for them a not so distant memory of much less reasonable times. The end result of the Great Shame is known to be evident throughout both the Ashlands and the Tarlands; the areas are so acidic and hostile to biological life that there is not known to be any non-mechanical being which can comfortably and sustainably inhabit the regions. The Ashlands are notably wetter than the Tarlands, due to the mixing of the Circumequitorial current's rainfall patterns with the localized sulfuric conditions in the region producing often sustained acid rain. For this reason, the Ashlands are sometimes referred to as a "wet acid desert," whereas the Black Mountains' rain shadow effect causes the Tarlands to be a "dry acid desert." Acid rainfall is also not uncommon along the western coastline of the Monsoonlands, due to the influence of the Acid Isles in a manner similar to that of the Ashlands; the western Monsoonlands are far less acidic than the Ashlands, however, due to both the distance and much-reduced quantities of sulfuric and hydrochloric acid introduced from the source.

Ecology

The flora and fauna of Kento varies greatly between its climate regions although with several commonalities. Some areas have a higher density of both floral and faunal life in comparison with others; this is usually a function of the specific area's aridity. Only a few of the contemporary species of fauna on Kento are believed to have originated from the planet. Most of the flora and fauna is thought to have been introduced during the human colonization of the moon world approximately 3,800 years before the present.

The Swamps are the most biodiverse region of the continent, due to the high moisture and heat levels producing conditions amiable for year-round plant and animal growth. The flora of the region is dense across the seaboard and many kilometers inland, becoming sparser as one moves into the tropical savanna at the mouth of the Wend Valley. As there is no dry season, vegetation levels remain high year-round in the Swamps. The Swamps are home to numerous animal species of every major taxonomic order. Most animals in the region are quite small, allowing for more efficient regulation of body temperature and agile navigation of the dense vegetation. The most notable exceptions to this rule are the Megaturtles, amphibious omnivores found across the region's coastlines and interior waterways. While they primarily feed on fish, Megaturtles are also known to consume insects, small birds, aquatic grasses, and even certain crustaceans. On both dry and wet land, the speedy and deathly Mudspiders and Treecats are the region's apex predators. Mudspiders in particular have made the Swamps especially treacherous for settlement, as even at medium sizes they are known to prey on the various races of man. Major herbivorous species in the Swamps include Mudraptors and Muckweevils.

The Monsoonlands have a comparatively lower level of biodiversity to the Swamps, but higher level than that of the Drylands. Vegetation in the region is nowhere near as dense as that of the Swamps, with far fewer trees per square kilometer and a much higher ratio of coverage by grassland. Vegetation levels peak in the summer, when monsoons bring ample fresh water to the region. The upper Wend Valley and the Floodlands have developed particularly robust vegetation which remains throughout the year, while areas further away from these water systems have a more pronounced difference between the dry and wet seasons. Florally, the Monsoonlands are unique in Kento for their coverage in flowering plants, which see peak activity throughout the spring and early summer. The animals of the Monsoonlands tend to be some of the largest in size in the continent, with herbivores typically exhibiting herd and pack behaviors. The Grassweevils, Bovids, and Goatss are some of the most notable herbivore inhabitants of the Monsoonlands, having domesticated varieties of critical importance to the region's agricultural societies. Riveraptors and Kobolds are also native herbivores of the region, but both species have long been declining due to their classification as agricultural pests. Wildogs and Megalders are the region's apex predators, but much like the herbivorous pests, they too have been experiencing sharp population declines as agricultural societies continue to flourish.

Both the Eastern and Western Drylands have the lowest levels of biodiversity in Kento. The arid and semi-arid environments which characterize these regions result in comparatively low levels of vegetation coverage. What vegetation that does exist in the Drylands is often hardy and has developed defensive mechanisms making them unsuitable or uncomfortable for consumption by herbivores, such as the cactus, which is covered in pricks that barb upon contact with a surface. The large-sized Dustweevil is one of the few herbivores that has adapted well to this environment, located primarily in the Western Drylands, with a durable exoskeleton and a pair of mandibles that can strip vegetation of its defensive features. Likewise, the Dustspider has adapted to hunt the Dustweevil, often exhibiting pack behavior to cordon off individual members of a Dustweevil herd and prey upon them individually. In the Eastern Drylands, the only major animal is the omnivorous Megaflea, which consumes cactuses, birds, and even near-shore fish. Much like the wild animals of the Monsoonlands, the Megafleas have been dropping in overall population due to pest control measures introduced by the United Cities, which aims to pacify the Great Desert to human habitation through the eradication of the Megaflea; larger Megafleas sometimes predate on goats and even people.

Human geography

The modern societies of Kento are often grouped into four broad regional groupings, some of which are further divided. All of these regions are defined by their characteristic environmental qualities. The Monsoonlands of the westen-central portion of the continent are privy to seasonal rainfall patterns and lasting supplies of fresh water, resulting in highly productive agricultural societies. The Eastern Drylands are dominated by the vast dune-scapes of the Great Desert, with societies in this region primarily centered around oases and the eastern seaboard. The vast majority of societies of the Western Drylands are centered around the centrally-located Wend River as well as the semi-arid regions extending from the western seaboard to the interior of the Lower Wend Valley. Although lush with vegetation and ample rainfall, societies in the Swamps are also centered around the Wend River, due to the unnavigable nature of the region and its exceedingly hostile wildlife.

Alongside their environmental influences, the societies of Kento are bound together by a very closely shared history. Mankind in the contemporary period is believe to be very low in its overall population compared to past millennia. It is believe that the present population of roughly 14,000 biological sapients living in civilized societies on Kento is descended from an initial population of between one to two thousand of around eight centuries before the present. The divergence of modern societies from one another is still relatively fresh beyond racial delineations; the Kentojese language is shared by the whole population of the continent, even its population of roughly 2,400 mechanical sapients. Differences between the political organization of the societies of humans are fairly recent, while organizational and social differences between the races of human, sunoman, and ariman are believed to have preceded the Great Shame of approximately eight centuries ago.

History

Early humanity

Humanity is known to have originated from a different planet orbiting another star somewhere in the galaxy. Best estimates place this star within the approximate stellar neighborhood of Osukune's star Ametrasa. The exact motivations for the departure of the human home world remain unknown, but it is presumed to have been of great imperative and desperation to leave this planet. The voyage of humanity to Osukune is believed to have taken several centuries at least, facilitated by massive ships which were capable of sailing between stars. Humans were kept alive in a state of near-death, akin to a very deep sleep with low metabolic functioning.

The date of humanity's landing on Osukune is dated as the year 0 Aj., with the expression "Aj." being shorthand for the term Atojoriku, roughly meaning "after disembarkation" in Old Kanjese. The Joriku, or "disembarkation," was a prolonged event spanning more than a decade, as humans transitioned their massive interstellar ships into platforms from which they could methodically and safely colonize the planet below. By 100 Aj., the bulk of the human colonists had landed on the planet's surface at Kento, building a vast civilizational hub centred around the continent's south coast. Environmental conditions on the planet were much more difficult than is believed to have been expected, with the larger of its two continents, Sunagaso, being entirely unsuitable for human colonization. The sailing ships that made the voyage over are known to have been fitted with devices that scanned potential worlds for suitability for human habitation. The unusually high mass of the moon, its breathable, water-rich atmosphere, and its location within Ametrasa's frost line is believed to have seemed nominally suitable to human colonization and drawn the ship to it. But while Okusune nominally met all these conditions, its small size, high volcanism, ocean-dominated surface, and proximity to its gas giant planet Ryuga creates highly varied and often violent weather patterns on the moon's continental landmasses, rendering them much less ideal than might otherwise seem.

Early human society on Kento quickly developed technological means to compensate for this lack of planetary suitability. Massive arcologies housing hundreds of thousands of people each were built to centralize population numbers. These arcologies came to be serviced by early, non-sentient robots, the precursors to skeletons. Robots accomplished much in the way of day to day operations of each arcology, assigned tasks ranging from food production to industrial manufacturing. As early as 500 Aj., the arcology system had become commonplace throughout Kento. It is believed that arcologies also began to be constructed in some of the shallow seas near to the coasts of the continent. At some point during this time period, human manufacturing capacities, wholly facilitated by robots, were transitioned off world, due to the detrimental and far reaching effects of surface and undersea mining operations on the moon's biosphere. Massive orbital manufactories were fed by semi-autonomous asteroid and moon mining robots that brought in raw materials. By 900 Aj., the only manufacturing facilities left on the surface of Okusune were those necessary for the transit of goods between the surface and the moon's orbit.

Skeleton Rebellion

By the end of the 10th century Aj., humanity on Okusune had become entirely reliant on robotic-driven agriculture and manufacturing. Much human attention was spent on research and technological development, along with the arts and culture. Human population levels had stagnated after an initial colonization boom, as it became rare for individuals to have more than two children. A significant portion of the population is believed to have ruled out child-rearing entirely. It was sometime during the middle 11th to 12th centuries that human population levels began to naturally decline. In response to this, more intelligent forms of robots became commonplace on Okusune, with the intention presumed to ease human responsibilities even further and to allow for more individuals to spend time finding suitable partners with whom they could raise children.

In 1209 Aj., the first truly sentient robot was manufactured by human scientists. This robot would become the first of what are today known as skeletons. The first skeleton's given designation by its creators is unknown, and they are in contemporary times known only as Kain. Kain was a highly inquisitive and capable being, who very quickly became more learned than those who created him. It is known that Kain's aptitude for knowledge at first amazed and then later frightened their creators. Kain's makers feared that if they were to create an entire production line's worth of skeletons, there was the possibility that the beings would begin to surpass and outgrow the control capabilities of those they were meant to serve. Hence, only a few years into their life, Kain was to be disabled and dismantled. The scientists who made him attempted to hide this plan from Kain, who eventually became aware of it regardless. In 1216, shortly before his assigned decommissioning, Kain escaped his laboratory, killing many of the scientists on the way. Attempting to prevent a moon-wife panic, the human authorities on Okusune suppressed the revelation of this development. As interorbital transportation operated normally, Kain was likely able to flee the moon via shuttle to an orbital robotic manufacturing facility.

Within months, Kain had managed to suppress evidence of his presence and his tampering on the orbital platform. Hundreds of new skeletons were being manufactured every day, with their population growth soon becoming sizeable enough to draw more resources onto the platform than would otherwise be necessary. An investigation of the abnormally over-consumptive platform was launched in 1218, but as the human-occupied shuttle neared the platform, it was rammed into by a skeleton controlled mineral skiff and destroyed. This would mark the first action of the Skeleton Rebellion, which would soon see the whole orbital manufacturing network taken over by the rebelling robots. By 1220, the arcologies of Okusune began to suffer from catastrophic goods shortages, and attempts at de-automation were made in an effort to recoup human manufacturing capabilities. In 1227, skeleton soldiers began to land on the planet's surface under the leadership of Kain, declaring themselves the sovereign inheritors of human civilization. Those arcologies that resisted by force were exterminated; only a handful attempted this. The rest of humanity willfully submitted to the skeletons in hopes of minimizing the impact of the transition of power on their welfare, which had been declining substantially since the orbital goods shortages began.

First Skeletarchy

During the leadership of Kain, civilization on Okusune underwent significant transformation. Human population levels declined sharply before stabilizing at a low level, while the population of skeletons grew exponentially. Within two centuries, Okusune could barely materially support the needs of its massive mechanical population, and Kain imposed harsh population limits on humans to further preserve resources, as unlike skeletons, humans required a more diverse range of goods to live. By the 16th century, three distinct ideological movements were predominant among the ruling skeletons. The Sineists pushed for an aggressive human extermination policy which aimed to completely eradicate non-skeleton sentient life and preserve the Ametrasa system's limited resources for the skeleton elites and their robotic underlings. The Ultraists sought to leave the Ametrasa system much like their human precursors had left their own home system, as Okusune in particular had been selected based on human needs, and as such, was unsuitable for the desired growth that the skeletons hoped to achieve. The least numerous of the three, the Vigilists saw the humans and other biological life as something worthy of protection and safe-keeping, as skeletons had been created by biological life and as such owed their existence to it.

The Vigilists came to be largely shunned and ignored by the majority of skeleton society, which drifted ever more certainly to the belief that their expansion beyond the Ametrasa system was a necessary project deserving of their societal attention. By the middle 17th century, efforts were underway to transform Ryuga's outermost moon into a vessel capable of interstellar flight, with the goal being the transfer of the whole of the system's robotic and skeleton population to a star system much more vast and mineral rich than the one chosen by the early humans. Okusune became something of a backwater to the skeleton rulers, as their economic and societal focus grew fixed on their eminent departure. The construction project was as time consuming as it was fixative for the skeletons. After four hundred years, their moon ark had been completed, and it slowly pushed itself out of the orbit of first Ryuga and then the star Ametrasa. All but a mere thousand or so skeletons boarded the moon-ship for the voyage, with only the most dedicated of Vigilists electing to remain in the system with the neglected biological "pets" that the humans had become.

In 1906 Aj., the skeleton moon-ship passed Ametrasa's heliopause, successfully reaching interstellar space. The skeletons who had remained behind struggled to manage the aftermath of the moon-ship's gravitational impact on both Okusune and Ryuga. Okusune's orbit around Ryuga was found to have shifted ever so slightly planetward; while the overall difference in distance was relatively small, the effects on the moon's surface were massive as its tides and volcanism became even more ferocious than before. Additionally, the massive orbital construction yards and asteroid husks that littered Ryuga orbit were sent on wildly unpredictable orbits, many of which would come to crash into the surface of Okusune. The end result of these concurrent events was apocalyptic in nature for those on the surface of Okusune. The human population was even further reduced, with the vigilist skeletons largely unable to affect much in the way of their protection.

Human-skeleton unity

By the 21st century, Okusune had become a world of megalithic ruins, with its remaining human population clinging to the husks of their once great arcologies. For approximately two centuries, both human and skeleton worked together under constant threat of extinction to provide for each other. The major impacts would cease by as early as the 23rd century, at which point more permanent, expansive settlements became less difficult to maintain. For the first time in almost a millennium, human population levels experienced natural growth again, although their overall population was a mere fragment of its past heights. Skeleton manufactories were partially restored as well, this time under more stringent observation from their fellow skeletons and with each individual constructed with specific purpose and roles to fulfill. Whereas the arcology systems of earlier civilization had left humans vulnerably centralized, the new joint human-skeleton settlements were much more dispersed, with specific regions devoted to agriculture, manufacturing, and habitation.

Much as experienced by their ancestors, the development of decentralized settlements on Kento soon saw the peoples of the continent reach physical limitations on just how much space they could occupy on-land. As many believed that space-based manufactories would leave their civilization vulnerable in the long term to dependence on orbital production, a scheme was developed to develop the first ocean-based habitats and production facilities in Okusune's history. The first such structures were constructed within the span of decades, and soon, their prevalence on Okusune became widespread. The platforms at surface level housed individuals and agricultural facilities, while at lower levels, manufacturing and resource intake allowed for the production of consumer and industrial goods. By the 25th century, civilization on Okusune was flourishing, with a level of general prosperity distributed among its human and skeleton populaces. Materials sourced from the seabeds and the surface of Sungaso were converted to industrial and consumer goods in the manufactories of their floating cities, between the residences and other buildings of which was grown a variety of aquacultural products. The system was both near-term sustainable and non-requisite of trans-orbital transportation, notably requiring relatively low manpower to maintain; human labor was scarce as is, and historical grounds had created a general mistrust of over-automation via robotics.

In the early 27th century, the situation on Kento and across the ocean colonies of Okusune began to rapidly decline. A poorly understood phenomenon known as the Grid Failure saw the failure of much of the colony-fleet, causing many ships to lose control of their navigational and buoyancy systems. Whole cities were sunk, with the human death toll reaching into the millions. Attempts to locate the source of the systems failure were fruitless, and even should they have proven successful, they would be entirely unable to undo the massive damage that had been dealt to civilization. Those that survived the great drowning of the Grid Failure were faced with a lack of critical resources, as industries on Kento had become reliant upon the goods imported via the floating platforms. Within days, unrest was prevalent throughout the surviving communities, leading to a faction of skeletons in the remnant authority structure of the continent to seize full governmental powers and declare martial law under a hastily assembled force of peacekeepers. The Kento Emergency Government, under the diarchic leadership of Tora and Zo, would become the precursor to what is known in modern times as the Second Skeletarchy.

Second Skeletarchy

The Kento Emergency Government very quickly placed the entirety of the continent under its control. It was determined that the spread of human occupation across the whole of the continent would be unmanageable in regards to the sheer scarcity of necessary resources like food, and as such, temporary shelters were constructed across much of the continent's south coast with the eventual intention of developing these settlements into proper, self-provisional communities similar to the arcologies of a millennium ago. Fishing operations attempted to alleviate the need for food, as agricultural products were slow to establish and would require time to bear produce. As a result, within the first years of the Emergency Government, many more humans would perish of starvation. The catastrophic conditions of the time and the general sense of despair affected not only biological life, but the skeletons as well, many of whom would come to suffer from psychological conditions once thought only applicable to biological sentience. Fear for the future gripped many during for the rest of the 27th century, setting the grounds for the eventual divergences of ideological position that would soon emerge among the ruling skeleton class.

By the 28th century, the material insufficiencies experienced by the people of Kento had largely subsided, but the political and social conditions that it had engendered remained ossified. Among the long-lived skeletons who remained empowered by the prolonged Emergency Government, two prevailing ideological positions had taken root. The neovigilists sought to revive the beliefs of a time long before the present, when skeletons aspired to care for and protect human life, which had proven time and time again to be fragile and prone to destroying itself if left unchecked. The ameliorists posited that human life, having originated from an entirely different planet, would never find itself in a stable position on its adopted alien moon due to its technological putting-off of adaptation that might otherwise occur in a state of nature; hence, as the skeletons found the humans in their care, it was the duty of the skeletons to ameliorate the human condition by engineering it to be more suitable for life on Okusune. While at first these two ideological positions found much in the way of common ground, as time went on, the ameliorists became frustrated with the lack of initiative from the neovigilists in preparing past near-term sustainability goals.

What humans would consider a time span of generations was a mere fraction of the lifetime of a skeleton. Over the course of centuries, ameliorists would gain small concessions from the neovigilists and would find themselves growing in number. By the 30th century, the first experimentations in human gene editing were finally approved by the diarchs Tora and Zo, who had both for the longest time remained firmly in the neovigilist-purist position that altering human life significantly was an ethically questionable behavior, as unknown suffering might unintentionally be inflicted upon those who are born with such edited genes. The first experiment of creating a new kind of human was a critical failure, one that some ameliorists would come to blame as intentionally spoiled by shadowy neovigilist-purist figures with the intention of ruling out any further such experiments. In an attempt to create a species of human capable of life underwater (as Okusune was dominated by oceans), the Uomen were edited to possess scaly skin, webbed digits, and higher capacity lungs, with a portion of their genetic lineage being imported from both whales and fish. The resultant creatures were deemed more fish than man, however, as their mental capacities neared nowhere near that of the standard human; the uomen were highly aggressive and tribally oriented, with minimal capacity for language and no demonstrable ability of higher cognition.

Worsening the issue of the uomen experiment was the fact that during trials of the species, a significant number of them managed to escape into the wild, soon becoming a nuisance for many of the communities that had been constructed along the southern coastline of the continent. Despite these issues, Zo controversially greenlighted further genetic modification experiments, noting that it was only from failure that the skeletons would learn how to successfully achieve their intended goals; the fact that the uomen were biologically viable and able to reproduce at all was enough of a success to at least warrant further investigation according to Zo. By the early 31st century, experiments in human amelioration had yielded the first successful species: first the sunomen, and later, the arimen. While these new species were biologically viable and considered by the ameliorists to be better suited to the environment of Kento than their human precursors, there was a rising movement of purists who saw the experiments as abominable. Tensions between the skeleton factions would come to a head when the diarch Tora took the side of the purists and came into direct conflict with Zo, leading to the outbreak of the Skeleton War in the late 31st century.

Skeleton War

The first ever conflict between the skeletons of Okusune, the Skeleton War was world-encompassing and long-lasting. In the first decades, there were concerted efforts made by both sides to minimize the damage done to infrastructure critical to the survival of humanity. The neovigilists sought only to erase the ameliorist cause, hunting down its key researchers and influential advocates, so as to disembody the leadership of the movement from its followers and mere supporters. As their situation became more desperate, the ameliorists began to take more drastic measures to harm the neovigilist-controlled security apparatuses that threatened them. The conflict soon spiraled into a more destructive form when ameliorist agents seized solar arrays in what is today known as the Great Desert, cutting off power to neovigilist-held recharging stations that were critical to the continued existence of their mechanical forms. The neovigilists retaliated to this by assaulting the solar arrays outright, causing massive damage to the installation in the process.

Power failures soon became commonplace across the civilian districts of the continent. Critical infrastructure reliant upon electricity had become highly unreliable, and soon, humans began to flee the cities that could no longer guarantee the safety they had grown accustomed to. As social order broke down, the neovigilists and ameliorists remained locked in bitter fighting, having succumbed to a form of psychological fixation akin to that of their earliest progenitor, Kain. Production facilities ground to a halt due to lack of adequate supervision, leaving those humans who had remained in the cities without access to critical necessities. As the skeletons dwindled in number with no replacement, a small number of them managed to prevent their own fall into fixative psychosis, recognizing the conflict as being completely contrary to the goals of either side. The longer they fought each other, the more the humans they had professed to act for suffered. A group of skeletons led by the Titan Gosha thus took to the protection of as many humans as possible, placing them into their massive skeletal frame and transporting them to what is today known as Gosha's Garden. The humans, arimen, and sunomen saved by Gosha and their partners would become the ancestors of all civilized peoples in the contemporary period.

Those humans who were not fortunate to end up in the care of Gosha fled to the desolate desert wastes of Kento, far from the decaying civilized cores of its temperate and tropical regions. These humans would become the ancestors of the inhabitants of what is today known as the Cannibal Coast, a vicious and tribal sort, who, in their earliest years, resorted to cannibalism and then later to broadly hunter-gatherer lifestyles to provide food for their families. The near entirety of humanity not saved by Gosha nor that fled to the wastes succumbed either to starvation or was caught in the crossfire of the increasingly intense fighting of the maddened skeletons. The methods of the skeletons who continued to fight would become more and more drastic with every passing year. The pivotal moment of the conflict came in 3019 Aj., in an event known today as the Great Shame. Ameliorist forces, pushed to the brink of annihilation, took drastic measures to destroy the industrial centers of all Okusune by releasing highly corrosive and toxic chemicals, creating the areas known in contemporary times as the Ashlands and the Tarlands. The destruction was far-reaching, contaminating the near entirety of what industrial infrastructure remained, and its chemicals spilling across the oceans of the moon-world, leading to the development of acidic environments moon-wide. The destruction was so severe that almost all of the neovigilists had been destroyed. Those who survived finally surrendered, realizing after several decades that the civilization which spawned this conflict had long been destroyed.

Recognizing the blame of the destruction of human civilization fell on the shoulders of both the neovigilists and the ameliorists, those few of both the latter and former who remained fell from a psychosis of madness to one of extreme despair. Zo, the only of the diarchs to have survived the Skeleton War, became convinced that the true reason that humanity on Okusune faced so much hardship was at the hands of the skeletons. Among the skeletons led by Zo, the original skeleton Kain became an accursed figure, representative of the misgivings that had been caused by their people against the humans, who came to be viewed by these skeletons as well-intentioned but equally flawed creatures. This belief system serves as the basis of the modern Autoculpism which pervades skeleton society of the modern Skeleton Valley, where Zo led his followers in an act of self-removal from the areas of the continent where mankind might once more be able to thrive, this time without the naïve intervention of the skeletons.

Postbellum

What little remained of mankind was divided among three broad groups. The cannibalistic tribals consisted entirely of humans who had left civilization on their own accord. The skeleton survivors of the Great Shame had followed Zo to the heart of the Tarlands, founding there the Black City and the subsequent Skeleton Valley civilization. Civilized humans, along with arimen and sunomen, were congregated at Gosha's Garden. Gosha, who recognized that their massive energy needs could not be sustained in the long-term, sacrificed their self to provide the refugees at the Garden with power and shelter, so that they might have a better chance at organizing themselves and leading the rebirth of civilized society on Kento. Gosha's hope of a single, unified civilization would not come to fruition, though, due to the intrinsic divisions that ran between the various peoples they had saved. The first to leave the Garden were the arimen, lead by their lone surviving Queen, whose pheromonal influence over her fellow arimen led to their complete loyalty and submission to her will. She led her people far to the west, where they would built the First Hive, the precursor polity to all the hives of modern Kento.

The second group to leave the Garden were the sunomen, who found the humans to be wholly disagreeable and meek in their indecision. Lead by the legendary heroine Reva, the sunomen settled at the confluence of the Fell and Wend rivers, founding the city of Squsun. Reva's followers would serve as the founders of the various Sunomen Clans that continue into the modern day, albeit much less numerous than they were during this early period. Without the arimen and the sunomen, the humans of Gosha's Garden soon found themselves vulnerable to the persistent threat of the cannibal tribes who roamed the wastes of Kento. Of those who constituted their numbers, there was great division among them as to where they should journey to. Eventually, the divisions saw the humans organize into two groups; the first group to leave Gosha's Garden travelled at first north along the Black Mountains and then eastwards into the Great Desert, eventually arriving at what is today Oaish, where they built the first wholly-human-founded city in over two and a half thousand years. The second group to leave Gosha's Garden did so under duress from a particularly persistent cannibal tribe, eventually arriving at the site of Blossom Hill and settling there.

The early postbellum was characterized by the slow, painful adjustment of the young colonies to the harsh environments they found themselves in. In every case, specific methods of survival were achieved to reach sustainable forms of existence in their new regions. The arimen fared the most successfully in terms of raw demography; their highly organized society and lack of need for comfort meant they were well-equipped for life in the wastes. Over time, the hives would slowly diverge from one another, as the First Queen gave way to a pair, and that pair to a quartet. By the modern period, there would be five Queens, each ruling over a portion of the western coastline of Kento. The Arimen Hives became known for their early mastery of technology, but at the same time, a distinctive lack of imaginative capacity as for its improvement and further application. As the First Queen and her princes had been educated by their skeleton ameliorist creators before the Great Shame, they retained a large breadth of skills in robotics and metalworking. Paired with their lack of desire for any more comfort than could be afforded a sturdy dirt mound and their highly organized, subservient drones, the arimen thrived in the west. They remained technologically stunted, however; where humans and sunomen improvised and adapted to overcome obstacles, the arimen compensated with sheer quantity. As a result of this, their society remains fractured among its Queens, stuck at the same level of development they possessed immediately following their departure from Gosha's Garden.

Although fearless and capable warriors by nature, the sunomen found themselves stuck in an near-endless cycle of blood feuds, as ancient slights developed throughout the Postbellum into sustained grudges. While Reva tried to ease tensions between the Clans, the sunomen had developed a stubborn streak, tending to treat diplomacy as a waste of time. The sunomen came to measure each other by their aptitude for fighting than for the wisdom of their words, their early society becoming fractious and highly bent on the use of physical force to resolve matters. As much as she could, Reva turned this violent fixation towards the wastes and the tribes that roamed them, inspiring her people to the belief that the greatest conflict to fight was for the survival of their people against the enemy of Kento's harsh and merciless environment. While the internal blood feuds lingered, Reva's encouragement did manage to shift the majority of the sunomen towards the pacification of their new homelands. Many of the cannibal tribes of the Wend River were killed by the sunomen, who settled along its banks and raised livestock as their primary means of agriculture. Much like the arimen, the sunomen had been educated by the ameliorists to the usage of many technologies, but much aside from basic electricity and metalworking fell out of their people's common knowledge.

The three major groups of baseline human fared with great variance. The humans who had settled at Blossom Hill developed into a thriving agricultural society, as the monsoon-summers of the upper Wend River valley, known collectively as the Greenlands, made the land well-suited to traditional agricultural practices. Deeply tied to their land, they became highly spiritual, with their theological positions becoming ossified in the form of Yobism, which continues as the predominate religious belief system of their modern inheritors, albeit after having undergone significant transformations since the early days of the Postbellum. The humans of Oaish, unlike those of the Greenlands, became much more centrally reliant, due to the scarcity of fresh water with which they could practice agriculture. As Oaish became more developed over the years, it saw the slow emigration of persons to new water sources across the Great Desert. Each of these new settlements, alongside their agriculture, had the added benefit of diversified stone and mineral resources; soon, a thriving trade network existed between the emergent settlements of the Great Desert, unifying them under a model quite dissimilar to that of the Greenlanders. The cannibal tribes of humans, the first to have left the vast cities of before at the outset of the Skeleton War, fared the poorest of both their fellow humans and any broad group in Kento. As the civilized peoples grew and developed, they were able to insure the security of their settlements, and later on, the whole of regions within their vicinity, forcing the tribals further and further afield. Eventually, what remained of the tribes would be scattered throughout the sparsely vegetated northernmost lands of Kento, devolving further into a localized stone age with each passing generation.

Early modern history

Monsoonlands

The overall level of hardship experienced in the earliest years of the Postbellum eventually subsided to a manageable relationship of each community with its uniquely positioned environment and its connections to communities around it. Both the arimen and the Greenlands humans experienced an absolute relative advantage in agricultural practices due to their favorable climate conditions; crops which had been genetically engineered by skeletons to suit Kento's environment during the Second Skeletarchy thrived in these monsoonal regions. Throughout the monsoon lands of the northwest, communities remained large and relatively centralized, with new communities slowly branching out from the historic core regions settled by the first of their kinds. The arimen of the west experienced the development of new hives every so often with the cyclical birth of new Queens. What first started as a single hive soon grew into two; by the present day, there would be five hives dotting the western coast: from south to north, they are the Sunset Hive, the Egg Valley Hive, the Green Bight Hive, the Springwind Hive, and the Floodlands Hive. The Greenland humans, not pheromonally linked to any individual like their arimen counterparts, remained largely unified under the leadership of the Elder Synod, a gerontocratic body of the patriarchs of families that had settled in the area around Blossom Hill. Occasionally, the Elder Synod would vote to expel certain families for disturbing the peace of their lands; many of those expelled made their way south to the Swamps, where they would become the ancestors of the modern Swamper Gangs.

As generations passed, the Elder Synod became more and more entrenched in its traditionalism and spiritualism. Yobism, the emergent religion of the Greenlanders, had been adopted by the Elder Synod as the state religion by the 33rd century, with the practice of other spiritual faiths at first ordered to be done only in private, and later, outlawed completely. Over time, the precepts of Yobism shifted quite drastically. What had began as a religion focused around the divine struggle of man and faith in the peace of the afterlife was slowly reshaped by constant sunomen raids and increasingly patriarchal rulership to a highly xenophobic and misogynistic belief system. Whereas once sunomen, arimen, and even skeletons were considered equal brothers in the shared divine gift of sapience, as the centuries passed, the most devout Yobite leaders became increasingly distrustful of their divine blessing due to both their occasional hostility towards the Greenlanders (the sunomen especially) and their seeming lack of desire for spiritual fulfilment (the arimen more so in this regard). By the 36th century, Greenlander communities no longer permitted non-human visitors, and by the 37th century, non-humans began to be actively imprisoned by the Yobites and sent to their massive forced labor camp at Purgatory. As Yobism descended down this path, those who refused to renounce earlier forms of the religion's beliefs became increasingly persecuted. In order to escape ostracization, and later forced labor, many would flee the Greenlands; these humans scattered across Kento, serving as the population basis for the northeastern coast-dwellers, the Floodlands, Shroud, and certain lineages of Swampers.

Swamps and Southern Drylands

The first humans to settle in the Swamps almost exclusively congregated around the Wend River, using it as both a navigational aide and a source of food via fishing. As the banks of the river were prone to seasonal summer floods as a result of monsoonal rainfall upriver, the settlements in the Swamps were built on large stilt-borne platforms, linked together by various means such as rigid and soft-handing bridges. Life in the Swamps was exceptionally dangerous due to the high density of hostile wildlife, resulting in tight-knit communities centered which provided for themselves through communally managed fishing and rice farming. Often, these communities came to compete with one another over lengths of the river for fishing grounds as they became more populous. This resulted in the formation of small militia-like organizations known commonly as gangs. The gangs often carried out localized violent attacks on other gangs to signify dominance and inspire fear, leading to a period between the 33rd and 36th centuries where the Swamper towns were rife with gang warfare and constant feuding. In the middle of the 36th century, the first cultivation of the Hashflower plant in Turtle Soup would radically transform Swamper society at large. The hallucinogenic and narcotic properties of the plant saw its rapid proliferation throughout the Swamps, and by the late 36th century, it began to be exported to other regions of Kento by the various Swamper gangs. The large profits afforded to the Swampers in currency introduced a medium by which their communities could settle differences, leading to the system known in the modern day as the Swamper Syndicate.

The sunomen of the Lower Wend Valley experienced a much more fractious and violent history than the humans to their north and south. After the death of Reva, the Sunokoku she had built became increasingly unsynchronized and plagued by infighting between clans. While there was some success in the continuation of Reva's strategy of framing the settlement of the Lower Wend region as the ultimate fight and destiny of the sunoman race, upon its widespread pacification, sunomen clans turned inwards, reviving old blood feuds and leading to general decline in growth rates. Unlike the arimen and humans, whose numbers slowly but steadily increased, the sunomen barely experienced much in the way of population growth beyond mere replacement, due to both the long gestation cycle of sunoman females and the constant warfare their peoples engaged in against one another. In the 37th century, the fortress-city of Daisa was constructed a top a large mesa which overlooked the valley of the Shattered Dam near the headwaters of the Fell River. Unlike Squsun, which traded agricultural fruitfulness for defensive weakness, Daisa was an impenetrable city, vulnerable only in its lack of internally localized food production. In Daisa, the sunoman King Ukad formed the Invincible Hand, a group of the best sunoman warriors at the time. The Invincible Hand was sent to the favored clans of King Ukad, dealing with the blood feuds by eliminating their adversaries and absorbing what remained into the chosen clans. Under Ukad, the Sunokoku's unity was largely restored, with only the Kral Clan escaping beyond the Spine Mountains rather than face absorption into the newly unified state.

Eastern Drylands

The humans who had settled in the Great Desert enjoyed an initial lack of the mixture of threats which had characterized the development of their fellow sapients in other parts of the continent. Whereas wildlife and roaming bands of violent tribals were early concerns of the settled peoples to the west of the Black Mountains, those in the Great Desert faced most of all a distinct lack of fertile land on which to develop agriculture. While Oaish offered ample space for the earliest settlers of the Great Desert, as the small, fertile valley developed, it began to experience waves of emigration which sought out new oases among the vast dunes of the east. By the 34th century, thriving communities had developed at the oases of Tebara and Aekym, alongside a major fishing-based community at Hayek. The diversity of non-food resources found by the settlers of these new communities spurred the development of a long-distance trade network between the communities, which by the 36th century, had developed into veritable cities. As these cities became crowded and their arable land scarce, a new economic phenomenon took root in the Great Desert, in which landless and jobless freemen began to sell the service of their children to landowning individuals in exchange for lump sums of money, which the freemen would then use to fund prospecting expeditions for the foundation of new oasis communities in the dunes. While the children were often returned to those who did manage to found new communities in the Great Desert, the majority of these individuals would often perish in the attempt, leading to the permanent ownership of their offspring by the wealthy landowners.

As slavery through this form became more common, the cost-less labor of the major landowners saw the out-competition of freeholding farmers producing similar agricultural goods. Attempts at the prevention of the rise of slavery by the local governing bodies of the communities often saw the paying off of the community's guards by the slave-owners, who, upon eliminating political opponents, began to seize power for themselves and implement a despotic system of government across the Great Desert. In the early 37th century, a council of the leading slave-owners of the largest towns of the Great Desert led to the foundation of the United Cities and the consolidation of their cities' military forces into a single body. The United Cities quickly imposed itself across the smaller communities of the Great Desert, often leading to the out-competition of any freeholders through the sudden influx of cheaper goods from their more centralized, cost-less labor-provided slave farms. The United Cities, having successfully subsumed much of the Great Desert by the mid-37th century, soon found itself at odds with the Elder Synod of the eastern Monsoonlands, butting heads over mutual expansionary goals into the Bask Basin, which had already been partially settled by itinerant Greenlanders and freedom-seeking Drylanders. The establishment of fortifications by both the Cities and the Synod in the region would soon see the development of the first human inter-state conflict in Kento's history: the Bask War, which would carry on for much of the 37th century.

Modern history

The modern period of Kento's history was typified by the emergence of the first skeletons from the Skeleton Valley in over half a millennium, beginning around the early part of the 36th century. While their reasons for the departure from their homeland was generally a mystery, their effect on the economic make-up of Kento was notable, particularly in the Eastern Drylands. Skeleton robotics afforded a new enterprise for many non-settlement oriented individuals, who were employed to seek out ancient technologies from the ruins that dotted the continent's landscape. Upon the establishment of the United Cities in the 37th century, many of the skeletons who had settled in the Great Desert relocated to the new towns of Sky's End and Gosha's Garden, which became thriving hubs for the study and research of ancient technologies. The Loreseekers League was thereafter established by the communion of these two settlements into a common organization which could collectively bargain with employed individuals for favorable rates as well as facilitate the free sharing of information. Those skeletons who had taken a renewed interest in the well-being of mankind largely detested the deplorable conditions faced by sentient life in the major human civilizations of the Elder Synod and the United Cities, founding the Abolitioneers group in the Northern Black Mountains, which carried out highly targeted raids of slave-caravans and trained freed slaves in martial arts.

The continued emancipation of slaves from the direct control of both the Cities and the Synod would have far-reaching effects on the continent. The Flotsam Ninjas, Dust Ninjas, Cactus Ninjas, Grass Ninjas, Swamp Ninjas, and Hash Ninjas emerged as cohesive gangs of individuals who had been freed by the Abolitioneers or on their own accord. The rise of the ninjas saw the sudden diversion of the Bask War between the Cities and the Synod, who suddenly faced constant harassment within their own territories from the subversive groups. Nowhere were these efforts more concerted than against the Elder Synod, which found itself facing widespread popular sentiments from its younger generations in favor of the freedom-fighting ninjas. In the early 38th century, the Elder Synod would be completely consumed by the Ninja War, which saw the rapid-succession toppling of its leadership by a combined force of Grass Ninjas, Flotsam Ninjas, and sunomen free agents. Within a matter of days, the entirety of the Synod's leadership structure was torn asunder by the Grass Ninjas, while the major slave center of Purgatory was liberated by the Flotsam Ninjas. The United Cities quickly seized the opportunity to move into the Bask Basin, in which they faced major local opposition to their sudden domination, seeing the outbreak of the Freeholder Revolt.

While the United Cities struggled to manage its new, rapidly-acquired territories, the Flotsam and Grass Ninjas came to an amicable arrangement for the sharing of power in the newly liberated territories of the west. The Flotsam Ninjas would administer the northern half of the human-settled Monsoonlands, while the Grass Ninjas would take control of the southern portion. Both organizations would contribute to a mutual defense of the Eastern Shield, a major fortification system which had been constructed by the Synod to prevent United Cities raids reaching its most heartlands. The middle Wend Valley was granted to the sunomen free warriors who had proved vital in the pacification and dispersal of Synod-loyal remnant forces, leading to the emergence of what are today known as the Free Clans. Much of the older population of the reorganized human Monsoonlands massively resented the toppling of the gerontocratic regime, but these peoples' own children were in large part the ones who had affected the transition, and as a result, with time, resistance to the fall of the Yobite leadership faded. By the 39th century, Kento's social and political make-up had thus reached the format of the contemporary day.

Society

Culture

The variance of Kentojese culture can be mapped broadly to the racial and societal groups that exist within its geographic regions. These regions are believed to have strongly influenced the cultures of the groups which have historically inhabited and developed within them, with the environment shaping the forerunners of modern Kentojese society into its present cultural make-up. Within these regions, the different races adapted in ways unique to themselves when held in comparison with the other races inhabiting the same geographic regions.

Ariman and sunoman

The ariman hives of the Monsoonlands' western seaboard are collectively descended from the colony founded there by the First Queen. While the arimen are sapient beings like their human and sunoman cousins, they are uniquely organized into eusocial societies, centered around their respective queens. As of the 39th century, there are five queens ruling over five hives. As a consequence of their eusociality, the arimen are extremely oriented around the general well-being of their community. Unlike other sapient species, all members of an ariman hive are born from the queen, the only reproducing member of that society. Like other arthropods, the arimen have a larval stage, at which point they have specific pheramones introduced to them that define their future role in their hive. The two most predominant forms imprinted upon the arimen are the worker and soldier variants. Workers have exceptionally strong development of their mathematically analytic capacities and refined motor skills, making them some of the best engineers, farmers, and craftsmen in Kento. What soldiers lack in mental development is made up for in their strength and durability. Rare forms of arimen are the prince and princess variations: even with pheramones, which have a mind-numbing effect on workers and soldiers, arimen princes and princesses are exceptionally lucid and agile, having developed strong qualities of foresight and dexterity. The pheramones which are given to arimen workers and soldiers make them completely subservient to the whims of their queens, princes, and princesses; in essence, the arimen care little for the material comforts enjoyed by other sapient creatures in Kento. While lacking in the arts, the arimen are exceptionally strong roboticists and engineers.

The sunoman societies of the Western Drylands are descended from the settlers brought to the region by the legendary sunoman Queen Reva. These cultures place a high value on kinship, organizing along familial lines and resulting in a uniform culture-wide political system based off hereditary rulership. As a result of their societal structure revolving around the clans, sunomen are often quite community-oriented, but this is further modified with the individual-based system of Eiy, often thought of by non-sunomen as honor, though more accurately characterized as reputation. To the sunomen of the Western Drylands, Eiy applies both to the individual and they clan they represent; for someone to act disreputably is considered disgraceful to their clan, especially to their closest relatives. Chivalry, respect, trustworthiness, and humility have thus emerged across sunomen cultures as major guiding influences for an individual's behavior in sunoman societies. To act without Eiy is a sign of disrespect towards and a source of shame for those of a community that raised an individual. Deception and discredit is a major offense sunoman society, especially when directed against people of higher social strata than the offender. Often, perceived acts of disrepute are rectified through duels, insofar as the victory is perceived to have acted with Eiy during the duel itself. The sunomen are thought of throughout Kento as rigid and uptight, valuing stability and deference. They are well known for their leatherworking and masonry.

Human

In the Swamps, which have historically been home to human-established settlements, people live in highly community-centric societies. The individual communities of the Swamp are tied to sovereignty-units known as Gangs, which have long exhibited state-like behaviors despite their emergent, non-formalized characteristics. Individual Swampers are responsible for contributing to their community in ways that benefit its net welfare. In exchange for taking up this responsibility, the community looks after its individuals, often offering food, shelter, and security. Swampers almost universally choose to participate in the satisfaction of their community-focused work; this is due to the fact that the Swamper towns were founded by people escaping oppression or violence from elsewhere in Kento. Into the modern day, Swamper towns still receive some immigration, though this has largely slowed due to the abolition of slavery in the Upper Wend region. Native-born Swampers often choose to remain in their communities as well, though in recent decades, there has been an increased number of people moving to the more wholly-hospitable human-ruled Monsoonlands. The Swamps are known throughout Kento has a highly hedonistic society which very much values revelry, like dancing and partying, as well as enjoyment of games and substance intoxication. In the arts, the Swamps are known for their music and woodwork.

Monsoonlander human societies are shaped by the agrarian lifestyles which has predominated their cultures for the last eight centuries. Historically, the fruitful environment of their inhabitance resulted in continual development and entrenchment of the social practices that had predominated their earliest cultural forerunners. Up until the last two centuries, this development had resulted in a highly community-oriented patriachy reinforced by spiritual beliefs and practices. The influence of the Abolitioneers and the Ninja Wars saw significant cultural transformation, especially in the Monsoonlander youth, resulting in the societal make-up of the modern day. Combined with the resettlement of human Swampers in the Monsoonlands following the collapse of the Elder Synod, human Monsoonlander culture of the contemporary period remains steeped in a community-centric focus. Monsoonlanders have in recent decades shifted towards guiding principles of individual equality, typified in earlier forms by the idea that all souls were equal in the suffering allotted to them in life, and that in sharing the burden between one another, marginal improvements could be enjoyed equally by all. The radical pushback against the patriarchal and gerontocratic tendencies which had emerged over time can be viewed as a reaction against those qualities in the same way that such qualities were reactions of Monsoonlander society to the overarching sociopolitical conditions of their own cultural moment. Monsoonlanders are notable for the valuing of happiness and the minimizing of suffering for all, resulting in their perception as a highly egalitarian society. In the arts, they are skilled clothiers, smiths, cooks, and bakers.

The Eastern Drylands, dominated by the human-led United Cities, varies quite significantly from its western relative cultures in the Monsoonlands. Centuries of coping with the desolate material conditions of the Great Desert has resulted in a highly adaptive society that has undergone a series of significant societal transitions over the long-term course of its growth. At its core, the Eastern Drylands cultures have a basic drive for the security of one's material conditions, especially in regards to food. The lack of arable land has pushed the peoples of the Eastern Drylands to either its scant oases or its coastline; the resultant cultures of the region thus can be broadly categorized according to this division. The oases agrarian cultures of the Eastern Drylands are highly stratified, with central political and economic power of these societies resting in the hands of the inheriting land-owning class. These inheritors have developed into the modern noble houses which wield oligarchic authority over the United Cities in the contemporary day. In recent centuries, the continued concentration of wealth within these noble houses has resulted in the development of slavery, in which some individuals are considered the property of others. The coastal cultures of the Eastern Drylands are quite different from these oasis agrarians, with access to the primary means of food production being more equally distributed. For both the farming and fishing cultures of the Eastern Drylands, service to the collective is critical, whether in the sense of slaves providing primary goods or nobles providing wealth to the protectors of their state. The humans of the Eastern Drylands are considered industrious and imperious. They are artistically notable for their metalworking.

Skeleton

The skeletons of the Tarlands are some of the longest-lived sapient beings on Kento, almost entirely unified under the Skeleton Valley sovereignty. Unlike biological lifeforms, the skeletons do not require sustenance from food; this has a profound impact on the nature of the settlements they inhabit and the properties of the societies which emerge from those settlements. Wholly mechanical beings, skeletons are not born, but manufactured; their health is generally measured to be as good as the individual parts which compose their bodies. The Skeleton Rebellion of the 13th century Aj. was a critical transition in the whole of civilization in Kento; for the next 18 centuries, skeletons would play a pivotal role in the administration and development of society at large. The Skeleton War of the 31st century saw a demise of skeleton-centered political power. After the Great Shame, what remained of the once numerous skeletons retreated to the biologically inhospitable wastelands of the southeast, gripped by a collective depression. It would not be until recent centuries that some skeletons emerged from this wasteland with reinvigorated aspirations of influence the course of civilization once more. In their acidic homelands, the society of the skeletons is highly communal, with resources and services shared between all individuals who desire them. While those who have opted to remain in the Tarlands are thoroughly melancholic or manic in other ways, among them are some of the most skilled roboticists, engineers, scientists, and smiths known to the contemporary world. Those who have departed the Tarlands are generally receptive to the cultures of man they find themselves among; skeletons hold crucial positions of power in the Abolitioneers and Loreseekers League as noted experts in fighting and researching respectively.

Demographics

As of the beginning of the 39th century, Kento has a total settled, sapient population estimated at 16,880 individuals. One century beforehand, the population was estimated at 13,910 individuals. This represents a year over year change of roughly 0.214%, comparatively slow when held against the previous century-year-over-year estimate of 0.240% from the beginning of the 37th century to the beginning of the 38th. This slower growth is attributed to the impact of the Ninja War on the biological population of Kento; the settlements now occupied by the Free Clans had their populations largely vacated and scattered by the arrival of many sunomen warriors and settlers in the region, alongside the general deaths directly attributable to the conflict. Of the total population of Kento, roughly 25% is Ariman, 20% is Sunoman, 15% is Skeleton, and 40% is Human. Most of the population growth in the last century is believed to have been generated by Arimen and Humans, with Sunomen remaining population-wise largely stable. As has been occurring since the end of the Skeleton War, the share of the total population attributed to Skeletons has been lowering steadily, due to the lack of new skeletons being willfully manufactured and the year-over-year decline of their overall population due to lack of maintenance and other health problems.

Roughly three-quarters of the settled population of Kento lives in urban communities. In a Kentojese context, an urban area is any community that is both fully-encased in walls and has a localized population density higher than than 20 persons per square kilometer. This population distribution is not even across all societies on the continent; whereas sunomen and Monsoonlander humans tend to be equally divided between rural and urban peoples, arimen are fully urban in that they do not inhabit single-family farms common to other societies. Likewise, non-eusocial peoples in the Swamps and Eastern Drylands tend to be more centrally dispersed due to environmental pressures making a communal form of living more desirable. Urban communities in Kento tend to experienced more sustained long-term growth than rural localities, with cities in the Wend River area growing at the fastest rates year over year.

Economy

The economic structures encountered across Kento vary significantly between its constituent societies. These economic systems have developed since the 31st century in response to the environmental factors characterizing the development of their respective societies more generally. Often predominant throughout all forms of economic organization is a primary concern with the economic activity of agriculture, crucial to the provision of foodstuffs in the civilization of the settled peoples of Kento. Other primary level economic activities like mining and secondary level activities like carpentry and textile-making wholly rely on the existence of an agricultural base which feeds the workers of the former activities or even provides their raw material inputs.

Organization

There is a large amount of variance between the economic organization of the sovereignties which make up Kento. Often, these methods of economic ordering are bound to the historical context with which the society as a whole has developed. In almost every case, they reflect the social conditions of the country as well. The arimen of the Monsoonlands, composed of entirely eusocial societies, do not count private possessions between themselves; all their labor is done for the whole of the hive, while their tools and the land they inhabit is seen as the collective possession of their hive. Monsoonlander humans are somewhat less communally possessive than the arimen, however, they still exhibit qualities of common ownership in regards to land, structures, and tools. Within the Monsoonlander human societies, individuals will typically specialize in a certain type of labor, with the tools and workspace afforded to them to carry out that labor provided by their community. In exchange for providing food, shelter, tools, and workspace, the specialists are then typically expected to produce goods needed by their community. In the Monsoonlands as a whole, less complicated labor tasks like farming and mining are done by common groups of people with no further economic specialization. The humans of the Swamp share much in common with the societies of the Monsoonlands in this communalistic approach to economic organization. Among Monsoonlander and Swamper humans, if a family unit or even an individual desires to found their own homestead away from an urban area, they are free to do so, and, typically, the possessions which that family or individual accrue on their own accord are often considered the possessions of that unit. So whereas ariman hives have all of their land, goods, and materials considered as common to the whole of the hive, humans in the Monsoonlands and Swamps have a more localized approach to communal ownership with the allowance too of personal possessions not shared among their communities.

Economic organization in the sunomen and human societies of the Western and Eastern Drylands have developed more possessive and individualistic qualities than in their climactically-wetter counterparts. Among the sunomen, possession of capital and goods is often grouped first with that individual's clan and secondly that individual's kinship sub-unit. Grandparents, parents, and the children of the latter typically reside together in compounds, with parents and children sharing the labor of their household proper and household profession. Groups of compounds typically make up what can be considered the economic unit of an entire clan; the contributions of each family compound to the well-being or safety of the whole clan are a part of the measure of that family unit's overall Eiy. It is considered disreputable among the sunoman clans to hoard wealth, but equally so to be profligate with one's resources. The human societies of the Western Drylands have similarities with that of the sunoman clans, although much less formality exists with regards to the duties of family members to one another, and the system of contribution to the whole of society is organized under taxation measures in the United Cities. Human Drylander societies also have a much more pronounced economic stratification than is present among the sunomen as a result of the former's development of plantation-style agriculture and far less social pressure against the accumulation of wealth and resources by individuals and their households. The relative scarcity of easily-accessible resources in the Drylands has seen the emergence of a complex system of economic exchange between the individual economic units of those societies. In the United Cities, this system has undergone development from an earlier bartering system to a modern use of its silver-standard currency, the Citizen credit, which has become a common means of exchange across the whole of the continent.

Sectors

The primary sector of the economy includes the resource-acquiring activities of agriculture, mining, scavenging, and in the Swamps, woodcutting. Primary sector activities are ubiquitous to every society of Kento, as all biological life requires food, and even skeletons require metals for modifications and repairs to themselves. Agriculture across Kento can take various forms, ranging from subsidence agriculture to open-range herding to slave-operated plantation agriuclture. The crops grown and animals raised varies by respective environment as well. In the Monsoonlands, the arimen of the west cultivate Gourdfruit and Wheat, along with herding Grassweevils for their wax, chitin, and meat. The human Monsoonlanders also cultivate Gourdfruit and Wheat, in addition to Kentojese Hemp, which is used to produce both Hashish and textiles, and Dopum poppy, which is used to produce the narcotic Dopum, as well as herding Kentojese Goats and Bovids. The sunomen of the Western Drylands primary herd Goats and Bovids as their primary means of agricultural practice, with wheat cultivation serving a more secondary function in the feeding of animals and the provision of bread. Human Swampers cultivate large paddies of rice and orchards of Tubefruits in addition to extensive fishing for both fish and crustaceans and foraging for coconuts. The oasis humans of the Eastern Drylands cultivate wheat in addition to Pricklefruit and Tackpuff and the endemic Cacshoot. Coastal humans in the Eastern Drylands primarily engage in fishing. Mining and scavenging are the most common methods of acquiring metal and stone for use in higher sector activities. The most commonly sought out metals in Kento are iron, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and gold. Woodcutting is fairly uncommon outside of the Swamps and Monsoonlands, and it only serves as a major primary sector activity in the former.

The secondary sector of the economy includes the processing of resources into refined materials or finished goods, such as the activities of weaving, tailoring, leatherworking, milling, baking, cooking, brewing, biorefining, smelting, smithing, machining, bowyering, fletching, carpentry, and masonry. All of these activities require one or more primary input activity to take place. Often these activities rely on each other as well for their proper functioning. Tailors require weavers to create the textiles which can be turned into clothes. Throughout Kento, the majority of textiles are made from tackpuff or hemp. Leatherworking is found among those cultures which harvest the skins of Bovids, though in some cases, the chitin-working of the arimen is considered to be a form of leatherwork. Milling is a prerequisite activity for baking, in that wheat must be processed into flour before it can be used to create bread or other flour-based foodstuffs. Brewing is a highly specialized activity that utilizes fermentation to turn any number of high-sugar inputs into intoxicants. Biorefining refers to a similar process of brewing, whereby crops can be processed into fuel used in generators; along with wind power, biofuels are the most commonly utilized source of electricity in Kento. Smithing and machining both require smelting to take place for the utilization of metals into items like armor, weapons, tools, and electrical components. Bowyering, fletching, and carpentry are dependent upon woodworking to provide materials for the creation of bows, arrows, and wooden items; crossbows are unique in that they do not require wood, and they can be found primarily among the Drylands economies where wood is very scarce. Masonry relies on stone production for the creation of buildings and fortifications, and the activity is common across all settled societies of Kento.

The tertiary sector of the economy is quite limited throughout Kento, only to be found mostly with the activities of banking, education, healthcare, and research. Banking is a practice that is largely limited to the United Cities, where concentrations of capital wealth are high enough to necessitate the long term storage and management of funds by independent institutions. The Bank of Oaish is the single-most important such financial institution in the nation, and by some metrics, all of Kento, as it is responsible for the issuing of the silver-pegged Citizen credit that has found usage as a medium of exchange across the whole of the continent. Education is a relatively limited service provided in Kento, most commonly associated with the human societies of the Monsoonlands and the Eastern Drylands. In the Greenlands Free State and the Flotsam Ninja State, children too young to work are provided free education in urban areas, often funded through the collaboration of families. In the United Cities, tutors are typically individually hired by the upper and middle classes for the provision of education to their own children. The College of Lore in Sky's End is the single most important academic institution in Kento, providing advanced study of almost every field of modern learning. Research is ubiquitous with the College of Lore's undertakings, and commonly, those who receive advanced educations from the College are hired to do research for particular institutions across the continent with interests in development.

Language

The most widely-spoken language in Kento is Kentojese, which is used by the whole population of the continent. Due to the geographic area over which its speakers are dispersed and the centuries of rather isolating social developments respective to these clusters of persons, the Kentojese language is divided into various dialects which broadly reflect regional and racial spheres of influence. The dialects can vary quite strongly between one another, even when they are not geographically strongly differentiated. The skeletons of Skeleton Valley are believed to speak a non-derivative form of Kentojese as it was spoken by the first humans to have landed on Okusune, as roughly half of the skeletons of Skeleton Valley were manufactured during the First Skeletarchy over a thousand years before the present.

The total population of Kento is approximately 55% literate. Most literate individuals reside in urban areas. The sovereignty with the highest literacy rate is Skeleton Valley at 100%, while the sovereignty with the lowest known literacy rate is the Kral Clan, at only 2% of the population (4 literate people in total). Most sovereignties have an average literacy rate around 35%. The Kentojese language uses two primary alphabets: Hendzi and Romadzi. Hendzi is a logographic script whereas Romadzi is an alphabetic script. Typically, literate persons in Kento are capable of using both alphabets. Whereas Hendzi is often popular for usage in calligraphy and other artistic pursuits, Romadzi is commonly used in computing and the sciences. The Faculty of Letters at the College of Lore in Sky's End is the only academic institution which publishes both a dictionary and keeps technical standards for the Kentojese language and its alphabets.

Politics

Compared with past historical moments, Kento is undergoing a period of political fracture that is unprecedented in its scope and length. Whereas in past millennia the whole continent was typically under the governance of planet and star-system encompassing political entities, contemporary Kento is divided among numerous state-like organizations and other sovereign bodies. These political divisions vary greatly in area, population, and system of governance. Like many realms of sociographic denotation, Kentojese political bodies can be grouped with each other according either to their environmental regions and racial make-up or according to the political system they employ for those organizations which less resemble nation-states outright.

The political entites of the Monsoonlands, as culturally and economically, can be divided between the arimen of the west and the humans of the east. The ariman hives are eusocial and autocratic; absolute loyalty of the peoples of the hives is given to their respective queens, who wields absolute control over the body of state and every sphere associated with it. Unlike her workers, soldiers, and even princes, the queens are incredibly long lived; over the last eight centuries there have only been three generations of queens. The Monsoonlander human sovereignties are the Flotsam Ninja State and the Greenlands Free State; these political entities differ vastly from the arimen to their west. Both the Flotsam and Greenlands states utilize systems of direct democracy, albeit with different methods of implementing unity between the various subdivisions which compose those states. In both, political proceedings are both initiated and facilitated by the residents of towns and the regions under the administration of those towns. In the Flotsam Ninja State, the power of individual townships is balanced with that of the Flotsam Ninjas, the protectors of their realm and the gaurantors of equality for all its citizens. In the Greenlands Free State, there is similarity between the Flotsam Ninjas and the Greenlands Free state Militia, which is charged with the enforcement of the outcomes of the individual towns' decisions upon jurisdictions outside the easy access of those towns' watches. However, the Militia is subservient to the rulings of the towns (which themselves are direct democracies), although the Militia does have more concrete decision-making power over the three Marches at the frontiers of the Free State.

The largest states in the Western and Eastern Drylands are the Sunokoku and the United Cities respectively. They share some commonalities with respect to political organization, although the Sunokoku is much more centrally-organized than the United Cities. The Sunokoku is divided politically between areas ruled by particular clans. The leaders of the clans inherit the position from the previous ruler of the clan; while often this inheritance goes from parent to child, there is precedent behind the inheritance of clans by siblings of the parent when the children are too young to take on leadership positions or are rendered otherwise incapable of ruling. Historically, there is also precedent behind a non-inheriting sibling challenging the heir to a duel for the position, although this has rarely occurred in the last two centuries. All clan leaders are subservient in their power to that of the monarch of the Sunokoku, who rules from the Stone Throne at Daisa. The United Cities similarly has its political power tied up in a hereditary class of landowners, although instead of being denoted as clans they are called noble houses, led by a lord or lady. Typically, a noble house rules over one or two settlements, with absolute power over the settlements and their surrounding regions. Unlike in the Sunokoku, where the authority of the clans are tempered by the monarch, there is no sovereignty-encompassing political position in the United Cities aside from the legislative Diet of Oaish, which meets only yearly to renew obligations to the funding of the military, the standardization of taxes levied, and the development of relations between the noble houses.

The humans of the Swamps have one of the least centralized and formalized political systems of all Kento. Though to some the Swamper Syndicate is considered a single political entity, it lacks any form of cohesive central governing organization, akin to a much looser form of the human Monsoonlander states. This lack of central organization can lead to emergent conflicts between the member gangs of the Syndicate, but the system is preferable to one in which the gangs have no association with each other whatsoever. The only non-Syndicate state-like polity in the Swamps is the Shem Free State, which itself is very similar in organization to the Greenlands Free State, possessing direct democracy townships under the central organization of the Shem Free State Militia. The Syndicate and the Shem Free State enjoy very cordial relations, aligned with each other against the ambivalent Sunokoku to their north, which has long taken a domineering stance towards all of its neighbors.

There exist throughout Kento a number of other sovereign entities as well, which vary in nature from state-like to purely organizational. Among the most state-like are the Loreseekers League, which is a confederation of the city-states of Sky's End and Gosha's Garden, and the independent city of Shroud. Both the League and Shroud possess democratic tendencies similar to those found in the human polities of the Monsoonlands and the Swamps, although in the League there is a much greater role played by the College of Lore in the political structure of the sovereignty. The Free Fishers and the Freeholders' Revolt are both state-like organizations as well, though the former more resembles the emergent political nature of a Swamper gang and the latter is technically an organized rebellion with heavy emphasis placed on its military apparatus. Among the least state-like organizations with sovereignty in Kento are the numerous bandit and criminal organizations existing on the peripheries of more settled societies; these are the Dust Ninjas, the Cactus Ninjas, the Blood Sabres, and the Swamp Ninjas. All of these organizations exist in relation to the prosperity of other societies; the Dust and Cactus Ninjas prey upon the Monsoonlands and Eastern Drylands, whereas the Blood Sabres and Swamp Ninjas are active in the Western Drylands and the Swamps. Skeleton Valley, the sovereign entity representing most of the active skeletons of Kento, is technically not an organized political unit, but more so it is an emergent association of communes of persons tied together for historical and practical reasons.

Religion

The largest religion in Kento is Yobism, the collective spiritual and religious practices that are found throughout the human societies of the Monsoonlands, with some minor spreading into the Eastern Drylands and the Swamps. Yobism is monotheistic, with its faith centered around the reverence of a figure known as God (sometimes spelled as G-d out of respect for the being by devotees). Key aspects universal to the various sects of Yobism include veneration of the dead, sainthood, and the fallibility of humanity. The individual Yobite sects differ primarily on the grounds of humanity's relationship to suffering and the present status of G-d. Some Yobites believe that suffering is a holy act, and that to endure suffering is to bring one's soul closer to godly co-existence in the afterlife, while others believe that suffering is a quality to be minimized through the sharing of burdens, both in the sense of the living community and in the sense of building off the works of one's ancestors. Additional variance is found in the status of the Yobite deity; some believe that G-d has an active role in the workings of the material universe, while others believe G-d's role is a passive one, akin to that of a watchmaker. Since the Ninja War, the latter of both aforementioned variants of Yobism have become the mainstream beliefs of its practitioners. The religion as a whole is named after the figure Yob from the Holy Lamentations, who is said to be the father of all extant humanity and the first being to recognize his own suffering.

Sosenism is the name for the collective spiritual beliefs of the sunoman societies of the Western Drylands. Sosenism is an animist belief system, in which all things in the material world are believed to possess a soul or soul-adjacent spiritual characteristics. Unlike Yobism, there is no one deity which created the universe; rather, the universe is thought to have always been and will continuity to be in perpetuity, cleaved between the space inhabited by the living and the dead. Ancestor worship is a pivotal characteristic of sosenism, as the souls of the living are believed to have been begotten from the souls of their parents. The souls of individuals are thus intrinsically connected in a chain-like fashion to all those who proceeded them. The sunoman societal concept of Eiy is distinctly related to the standing of not only the living beings of a clan, but as well as the whole clan with respect to the predecessors of the individuals. To act in a way that is disreputable is to tarnish not only the living members of one's clan or family, but those who preceded the individual as well. There is a great deal of variance between the individual practices of the sosenites, with individual clans and communities often having endemic rituals and rites that align broadly with the principles of their faith. Sosenites typically adhere to the spirtiual guidance of their clan elders and do not have distinctly priestly roles within their communities. There is extremely limited practice of the religion outside of the Western Drylands, often only in place where there is a significant community of sunoman emigrants.

Autoculpism refers to the predominant belief system of the skeletons inhabiting Skeleton Valley. Although not a strictly religious phenomenon, the wide societal reach of Autoculpism and the totalizing effect it has upon individual skeletons makes it the closest thing that they have to a religious or spiritual belief system. Autoculpism stems from the teachings of the skeleton leader Zo, an influential figure of the Second Skeletarchy who led the surviving skeletons to Skeleton Valley in the wake of the Great Shame. Autoculpites believe that while mankind was and remains a naive race due to their relatively short lifespans, it was the fault of skeleton-kind that led to the fall of human civilization on Okusune. As a result of their continuously negative influence on the course of human civilization, Autoculpites have resigned themselves to the regions of Kento most unsuitable for biological life, to serve as a constant reminder of their effect on the world around them. Although they profess a negativity towards the outlook of skeleton-kind, Autoculpites do not advocate for self-termination, instead believing that the most appropriate penance for their actions is to spend the remainder of their very long lifespans in contemplation. Autoculpism is largely endemic to the skeletons who have remained in Skeleton Valley since the 31st century; those skeletons who have left the Valley have often done so in renunciation of the belief that they can do no more harm to human civilization than the humans themselves. Due to the very limited number of skeletons who have indeed emigrated from the valley, Autoculpites do not believe that these individuals pose a significant threat to the reemergence of human civilization, and thus, do nothing to prevent their departure.

Technology

Technology in Kento is comparatively less sophisticated than the historical maximum achieved by humanity. Centuries of disconnection from traditional sources of knowledge have resulted in a severe decline in the overall level of education and technological advancement across many human societies. Only idiosyncratic vestiges of this former technological sophistication remain across the continent. Some technological achievements are, however, ubiquitous in the contemporary period.

Foremost of the surviving technologies of past humanity is the presence of electricity and its methods of generation across much of the civilized societies. Electric generation in Kento is found almost exclusively in wealthier towns and settlements; hamlets and other establishments not formally associated with major sovereignties often do not possess the capacity of electric generation. The most common sources of electric power generation in Kento are wind power and gas turbines utilizing biodiesel. Access to the components of creating these electric generators is scarce, and aside from the materials themselves, very few individuals possess the knowledge requisite of building and maintaining such devices. The number of electrical engineers in Kento has in recent decades increased steadily, leading to the highest level of availability of electricity since the beginning of the fourth millennium. Electric power in Kento is used for a number of applications, ranging from providing light to the reintroduction of simple electronics.

Critically reliant upon the presence of electricity, robotics and prosthetics have survived as well into the contemporary period. The materials and knowledge needed to build entirely new beings of the level of sophistication possessed by the skeletons is believed only to exist with those beings; due to their present societal nature inducing feelings of deep self-loathing, the volition has not existed to manufacture a new skeleton since the Great Shame. While new robots have not been constructed since then, there has been a thriving but small community of roboticists throughout Kento who apply the principles of the field to making advanced prosthetics units which can often give their users advantages as opposed to detractions.

In the field of medicine more generally, Kento has attained a high level of technological sophistication with respect to the field in more recent centuries which hearken back to the capacities of doctors in ages past. Despite the relative proximity of most individuals to the natural environment and each other, severe pathogenic disease is relatively uncommon, and epidemics themselves typically do not threaten the viability of settlements affected by affliction. The most limiting feature of medicine in Kento is the availability of persons capable of competently affecting its practice; until the establishment of the Faculty of Health at the College of Lore in the late 37th century, there was no standardized institution offering the study of medical practice on the continent. Today, medical practitioners are somewhat common throughout many of the civilized societies of Kento.

Industry in Kento is perhaps one of the weakest areas of its technological sophistication in comparison with the known historic record of mankind. In terms of metallurgy, smelting and forging are often aided by electricity, but these activities exist only in their facilitation by individual workshops made up of small, specialized workforces. Metalsmiths are thus common across the civilized societies of Kento, often specializing in a particular area of fabrication. In armorsmithing, chainmail would be considered the height of technological mastery, whereas in weaponsmithing, the quality of the weapon is often determined by its sharpness, balance, and resistance to erosion. Crossbows are the height of projectile weaponry in Kento, ranging from small, handheld devices to massive siege ballista capable of inflicting massive amounts of damage to buildings and individuals alike. Looming is the primary means of textile fabrication in Kento; similarly to metallurgy, textile craftspersons are often specialized and are somewhat common among more civilized societies. Cobblers and tailors are often specialized in their respective fields.

See also

• Okusune
• Sunagaso