Because of the questions Britton was asking, we were able to develop the Xi'an culture so much more. Why don't we talk a little bit about what we know about the Xi'an culture now and, if we can, a little bit about what we're thinking about moving towards?

Sure. Exploring. One of the things he really pushed us towards would be developing a Xi'an model for interpersonal relationships. So family, romantic relationships, anything you can think of, like professional, sexual, whatever. And one of the things we really dug down into was to figure out how Xi'an would approach the idea of romance. Because as Britt pointed out, that's something that I'm sure the players want to know about, because if you're reading about them, writing fiction, figuring out how they interact with each other, you have to know at least a little bit about that. And because of the way their family works and the way they reproduce, the idea of sex is not really related to romantic relationships for Xi'an. Mating is just, you know how Vulcans do Pon Farr every seven years? It's sort of like that. Mating doesn't really have anything to do with romance. What matters within their culture is deep, long interpersonal relationships. And so Xi'an will normally have, I'd say, around two or three constant romantic partners that they choose to spend their lives with. And they kind of develop their interpersonal family around that little clutch. And most of them will stick together, if they really like someone. You know how we get married to one person? They kind of get married to three people. And it may or may not last their entire lives, but the idea is that it's something that's not entered into lightly. It's something that is supposed to be lifelong, and you spend your time helping your partner and living your life with them. And because of Britt, we were able to develop that as a team in lore.

Yeah, their idea of family, their word for family, "pyahai", does not equate directly to what we have in human culture, even several hundred years in the future. So if they were asking us about our family, they would only have the term pyahai to use to talk about it. But again, you're kind of almost there in understanding each other culturally when you're using a word like that where there's no exact equivalent. But it's been a lot of fun to figure out where they do have exact parallels with us. I mean, if you're a truck driver on a Xi'an world, it's just like being a truck driver anywhere else in the 'verse. But if you're starting to talk about your family or the kinship terms, because of the fact of the mating process and the society being matriarchal, and really the mothers and the grandmothers only being super important in any kind of genetic history or your genealogy, there aren't any real fathers on the genealogical tree. You're just dealing with who your mother and your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother and your great-great-great-grandmother are. They live so long that you can have multiple maternal grandmother people back on your tree and you still know them. It goes back generations and generations even during your lifetime. So there are all kinds of interesting things about the kinship system and their terms for mother and father, because there is a biological father, of course. But they don't conform directly to our ideas of mother and father, and they have different diminutive terms and different names for different members of the pyahai, because you could have a sibling who is not your biological sibling. That could happen very easily in a pyahai. There are all of these quasi-siblings, like stepbrothers and stepsisters. The only word we have for it is step, but when we stick step on sister, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing to us that it would mean to them, because the biological nature of it is not so important.

No, no. It's all about the interpersonal relationships and far, far less about biology. A lot of our family terms are related to who is your biological parent, who is your biological mother, but they don't care too much about that. And this isn't to say that they don't have male Xi'an role models in their lives. Within the pyahai, they have the romantic partners of their mother, or aunties and uncles, who are pretty much the cultural equivalent to fathers that we would have.

Right, exactly. But you could easily end up with two of them, for example.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, you could have a mom and two dads or two moms or three moms and one dad who's not always there because he's technically a part of a different line, so you don't see him all the time. So there are all kinds of cultural things that go on, and those need to have a reflection in the language, and that's one area in language where we do get very specific things going on. We do get very different things from what we would have in English or what you'd have in French going on, because they do have very, very different systems, very different relationships.