This page contains information on the Kelle's culture in Darryl's D&D game. It is a joint effort between Joshua Levy and Darryl Strom.
Until I come up with a name for it, the culture will be called "KC".
KCians are a sea faring people, who populate small island and coastal areas over a wide swath of ocean. They are excelent seamen, and self reliant. They do not have a strong warrior history, nor a history of trading and commerce. They dominate their area based on their ability to explore, populate, and survive in inhospitable and largely unknown areas.
KCians usually have dark skin, dark eyes, and black hair. They tend to be shorter than other, although they are not dwarves. They are almost never over six foot tall. Both men and women wear jewlery. Wrist bands, ankle bands, and arm bands are all common. Neclesses are rare, as are ear rings and finger rings. Jewlery is usually leather strings with beads, polished drift wood or shells strong on. Precious metals are extremely rare, and are usually used in place of the leather string. KCians in other lands tend to adopt the dress and jewlery of where they live. Often this is in addition to their KCian customs.
A few KCians are quite fat. These are often the KCians that people remember, so many hold that KCians are a rotund group of people.
KCian are polyeistic and fit into the European mythos system common in AD&D. They are different in that they focus on elementals. The four elements in KC religion are wind, water, land, and lava. KCians tend to be associated with one of these for elements. (Kellé is associated with lava.)
KC culture considers stability to be a primary goal, and has a natural dislike of things that change. Therefore, their gods and supernatural creatures do not change form, except for the evil ones. KCians don't like religions like Maya, whose gods change form all the time. Even for Greek gods -- which sometimes walk in different forms -- they prefer to think of these other forms as avatars. Unchanging alter egos of the gods, rather than different forms of the gods themselves.
KCians tend to eat pork and rabbit as their main meats.
KCians have a unique form of poetry/story telling, called joekoe. It is composed of four lines per phrase, although phrases at the end of sections might be longer (six or eight lines). Each line of a phrase must start with the same letter, and each must reference one of these subjects:
Elements (wind, water, land, lava)
Directions (North, South, East, West)
People (Blank, Pink, Yellow, Tan)
Natural Colors (blue "sky", green "seawater", pink/orange "sunset/rise", black "night")
etc.
So a phrase might be this:
While sitting at work, When the the phone spoke We were carried away, Waiting in a well lit room.
All lines start with "W". The first references place, which is a place, a reference to land. The second refers to speaking, which is a form of wind. The third speaks of being carried away, which is a property of water, while the last describes the room as "well lit", a reference to lava.
KCians speak a language of 9 consonants: s, d, f, k, l, m, z, t, and p, and 12 vowels: