People & Cultures

Avara contains thousands of local, regional and national cultural traditions.

Some identities are ancient. Others emerged through modern nationalism, colonialism, migration, industrialisation or urban life. Many people belong to several cultural worlds at once.

Someone might identify strongly with a city, a region and a country while also belonging to a religious community, ethnic minority, profession, political movement or family tradition that crosses national borders.

National culture can be an important part of identity, but experiences within the same country can vary enormously according to region, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, politics and whether someone grew up in a major city, suburb, small town or rural community.

Globalisation has also created cultural forms shared far beyond national borders. Music, television, fashion, sport, online communities, universities, tourism and social media connect people who may otherwise have very different backgrounds.

These equivalents suggest broad geography, historical experience and contemporary cultural context. Avaran countries nevertheless possess their own histories, institutions and internal differences.

Race and ethnicity remain socially and politically important categories across much of Avara.

Their meanings vary between countries. Ethnic identity may involve ancestry, language, religion, region, community history or cultural practice. Racial categories are also shaped by particular histories of empire, slavery, segregation and migration rather than functioning identically everywhere.

The colonial era created movements of people on an enormous scale, including the forced transportation of millions of Black Kesharan people into Varelian and other colonial societies through hereditary chattel slavery.

Later migration, decolonisation, industrial labour, education, refugee movements and global travel further reshaped cities and national identities.

Contemporary Avaran societies therefore include people whose family histories cross continents, religions and national borders.

Multiculturalism is ordinary in many large cities but politically contested in some societies. Immigration, assimilation, citizenship, borders and national identity remain recurring subjects of political argument.

Avara is a contemporary industrial and digital civilisation. Everyday institutions and routines are therefore broadly familiar.

Religion remains important in both public and private life across much of Avara, while many societies have also become increasingly secular.

Believers, atheists, agnostics, mystics and secular practitioners all live within a world where some supernatural phenomena can be measured scientifically.

Prayer, sacred ritual, relics or devotional practice can occasionally produce measurable effects. Those effects have not established one universally accepted religious explanation for the nature of divinity, spirits or ultimate reality.

Television, streamed music, online video, social media, film, journalism, art and professional sport form part of everyday contemporary culture.

Major media industries can influence audiences far beyond their own countries, while local and regional culture continues alongside global entertainment.

Cultural exchange is constant. Music, fashion, slang, political ideas and online subcultures can move between countries with extraordinary speed.

Modern Avaran cultures have been shaped by long movements over racial equality, women's rights, labour, disability, sexuality, gender and political participation.

Legal reform has changed everyday life across many countries, while levels of equality, protection and public acceptance remain uneven.

Magic is public knowledge but direct experience of serious magic remains uncommon.

Practitioners live inside ordinary societies. They may work in magical professions, but they may equally be teachers, designers, accountants, builders, artists, nurses, students or people whose magical ability has little relevance to their job.

Some people are open about magical ability. Others consider it private. The importance attached to disclosure varies according to family, culture, profession, law and the nature of the ability involved.

These experiences can create communities of their own, while still sitting within wider national, regional and cultural identities.

A vampire raised in Vardane may culturally have far more in common with the people in the same city than with a vampire born into a completely different society.

A practitioner from an old religious family may understand magic very differently from a university-trained practitioner working for a government laboratory.

Avaran folklore contains ghosts, transformations, witches, monsters, spirits, sacred places and strange beings.

Some of those traditions have real supernatural counterparts. Others are exaggerated, misremembered, metaphorical or entirely fictional.

The existence of vampires does not make every vampire story accurate. Confirmed hauntings do not verify every ghost tale. Measurable religious phenomena do not establish a single universally accepted theology.

Modern science, religion and popular culture therefore coexist with folklore rather than eliminating it.

Ravenlake lies in Orenda within the Vardane Federation. Its residents therefore grow up inside a broadly Vardane cultural environment while also having their own state, regional and local identities.

A teenager in Ravenlake has access to the same sort of modern cultural world as other Vardane teenagers: school, television, streaming, music, social media, sport, dating, online arguments, national news and changing fashions and trends.

Families may be religious or secular. People may be politically engaged or uninterested. Some families have roots elsewhere in Vardane or in other parts of the world. Ravenlake contains the same range of identities, backgrounds, relationships and personal circumstances found across modern Avaran society.

Its residents also grow up knowing that magic exists.