Are there any alien musical instruments or food planned?

Oh, we have so much food. Eventually, there'll be a Banu recipe book. Food is a special interest of Will and me both. So we have spent many a work hour developing the cuisine of the different alien species. Look forward to learning more next week.

And it's also one of these things that we have a little more liberty with as a writing team in the game, because unfortunately we don't yet have a way for you to taste things when you click on it. But music and stuff you can actually hear, and someone is actually going to have to build that music the way we describe it. So we have plans and ideas for that, but that'll take coordination down the road with those separate teams. But food, we can say this tastes like spicy beetles, and you just have to take our word for that.

Yeah, and even though we haven't specified a specific instrument, I know we have called out with the Xi'an that they do love a certain type of opera, which you could almost compare to very minimalist, modern classical music. It's very droney and drawn out since they have long lifespans, and it takes them to a meditative state. So we can describe that experience, and it would be like a day-long opera rather than a four or five hour opera. Yeah, we have ideas for where we would like to take that and some sound, but again, it's not something we would go out there and say it's got to be this specific instrument, at least at this point.

And we've talked a bit about the Tevarin having this unified chanting system as kind of a timekeeping and keeping everyone in lockstep for their movements and stuff, and so bringing all their voices together.

Yeah, it was about, again, because the Tevarin also came from a planet where they were besieged by a lot of predators, so the idea with their music was that it would be a lot of... The drum circle becomes kind of the classic example, but this idea that it's about augmenting your numbers to make it sound like you're a really big, fearsome thing. So it was that sort of coordinated, like I said, rhythmic type thing to amplify your size or boast about the size of, like, you don't want to come over here, there's a big thing here that will mess you up.

I like to imagine that the Tevarin can all harmonize with anyone, like John Denver could.

Spoiler alert, they are John Denver.

And the Banu didn't really have much of a music culture before they encountered the humans, and so they've taken to human music strongly, as it's a well-known fact that they enjoy karaoke. And also because of their less sensitive hearing, they really like music cranked to 11. And so it can be dangerous to go to a Banu concert.