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W'hoorn cultural exchange
Decheerans have one, now we can too!
Mostly this is meant to be a place to hammer out what we know and/or have cooked up/seen cooked up regarding Benu Wen culture, W'hoorn in general, etc.
To start off, I've been playing Crorr as someone who's just a bit of a hedonist in terms of wanting exotic foods and other indulgences (though he doesn't trust mind-altering substances like Leesa and synthahol.) up to and including rather shamelessly and brazenly appraising just about everyone he meets in his head for what he's mentally cataloguing as 'bunkability'.
At the other end of the scale, he doesn't really 'get' monogamy or wanting to limit himself/force others to limit themselves to one partner, romantically or for bunking. He recognizes that other people aren't W'hoorn and that they have different cultures, he just assumes that the W'hoorn way is the best way and doesn't understand why people might not agree. I've had him joke that people who're being mouthy and abrasive are
trying to flirt, using what he describes as backwater, rural, antiquated
courting behavior, which implies that at one point in history it was
actually the norm.
Of note: some of the shops in Vertenalith are dedicated to things like fancy clothes and sweets. One of the sweets available is a candy ry'nari soldier, which seems to imply a softening of some if not all of the cultural tension. One of the W'hoorn NPCs in Litharge sort of stole the aesthetic I was gonna go for with Crorr, amber-eyed, stoic, paternal type. It definitely feels right that in the modern era at least some W'hoorn are turning their aggression and competitive spirit toward commercial, industrial, or other pursuits where the focus is less on physically beating on one another and more on doing so metaphorically. With Crorr this is manifesting at the moment as him pushing himself toward the upper echelons of interstellar commerce and captaincy.
Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
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But having atyipical parents, he doesn't have the same aggression or drive for competition that other W'hoorn might. He does take pride in his accomplishments. He's definitely slightly claustrophobic and thinks of the W'hoorn gods as inspiration, more than having any true belief.
Obviously, physical combat would be a big deal in this sport, since if you lose a fight mid-air and get grounded or KO'd, your team is down a player for the rest of the game. If you want to pass the ball to a teammate, they need to be on top of a pillar (or gliding nearby, and have really good catching skills) so they can catch it and glide somewhere else with it. If there's no one to pass to, you better shoot the ball quick or get ready for someone on the other team to come fight you for possession. Since the W'hoorn can't fly outright, getting up the pillars quickly is one of the most valuable skills that a player can have - and staying on the pillar, or diving to another amid contention, is the other most valuable. Some W'hoorn are strong enough jumpers to just leap up the stairs, straight up the side of the pillar, rather than climbing them in sequence around the pillar, and this is completely allowed.
If the ball touches the ground, to prevent a player from grounding themselves trying to recover it, it is considered out of play and relaunched straight up in the air, center field, to put it back into play.
Any form of unarmed combat is acceptable in game with the exception of anything that outright kills an opposing player. No armor, weapons, or game materials are provided with the exception of the field and the game ball. Players are restricted to their own body and personal strength while playing, with no artificial assistance allowed - this includes performance enhancers, weapons, armor, jetpacks, or anything else that didn't grow on/in your body naturally.
And now that that's out of the way and you've had a chance to grab the brain bleach. Roaring is more likely. As I understand it, only two species of big cat is capable of purring, the cheetah and the cougar, and both of them are solitary hunters rather than familial/pack hunters. We can still see traces of the Pride roots in modern W'hoorn as presented in the bits we have so it's not hard to imagine them having descended from a species that needed the roars to communicate and locate one another. Though as was pointed out earlier, the sector is deep into the genetic modification and, for want of a better term, transhumanistic roads, so it's not inconceivable that some would have had their larynx modified to allow for a purr instead.
Both of the sports presented are possible without flight, and in fact the one I proposed might actually have been harder for a fully airborne race to develop since the final objectives and the entire last phase is ground-based. If the platforms are stacked right and are close enough to each other, it might even be harder to play if you're trying to fly. It's a good thing for newer players to remember though, and it is mentioned in the race description that they can't fly, but still tend to build upwards and include spots to glide and swoop from.