Soltari.
And they had a culture already that was at war with the Duathi. They are a unique creature type as well, so I call them fair game.
There isn't a LOT to work with, but I do have the Rath art book, which says more about them than probably any other source we have.

*Dauthi

Well, you're the boss, and you've got the guide... what do you think? The soltari did occur to me right after cephalids, but I dismissed them because of our lack of information and their close tie to the plane, and to the Dauthi and the Thalakos.

Well, we're looking like we're likely to use Moonfolk and they have a pretty tightly defined tie to kamigawa.
I think what we need to do for both of them is to more or less Juice them.

Just distill the very essence of what defines both of them and then start to build up from that. I can provide the Soltari input if you'll do the Moonfolk.

... after I get some aspirin and food.

Soltari, Dauthi.

I was a Thalakos guy, myself.

The Thalakos always got less attention somehow... unfortunate.

I'm not sure what the essence of the Soltari IS though beyond... well... shadow and the battle with the war with the Dauthi.

I'll ponder over what we might do with the moonfolk. The tricky thing with them is keeping them moonfolk while expanding beyond the rabbit motif.

Also, we don't want to rehash the same sort of stuff Barinellos did with Elysium. So, refresh my memory, which pairing are we suggesting moonfolk for?

Also, Barinellos, I'm cool with having goblins. We can probably find a way to make them interesting beyond the usual MTG treatment of them.

WOMP. I forgot that they were on Elysium, too.

Actually, Barinellos, what did you do with the visuals for them on Elysium?

Moonfolk would be (Stillness/Motion-->U/R)=The Cosmos

Goblins representing Fate would be... different. Very different. But that has potential to be very interesting.

In that case, I definitely think the Tides are something we should play with. The eternal stillness of the moon juxtaposed with the constant motion of the tides. (Although honestly, I'd still like to have a Still Sea somewhere in this world, which would be a huge point of contention within the Moonfolk ranks.)

As for Goblins with fate, Red does have Wheel of Fate, so I think that works well.

Played up their ethereal waifishness and gave them overlarge eyes. Ivory skin and natural markings that I admittedly sort of stole from the Trill from Star Trek.
Since I put such a major focus on their visual acuity, taking it in a different direction would be smart.

Time, rather than Fate. Red DOES have the second most extra turn cards out of all of them... well, tied with artifacts.


I do feel I should remind everyone that being sailors and cartographers was a major aspect of the Moonfolk of Elysium.

I think, rather than focusing on dwelling on Islands, we should develop the idea of mountains as their homes, a place among the clouds.
Probably overlooking waters to play the blue connection.

The gods did forge continents before they created beings to inhabit them, so we could actually really play around a lot with some outlandish landscapes here if we wanted to. The one thing that we have to consider is to make the continents feel diversive, even if they are dominated by one or two primary biomes.

I think the problem I'm having is that soltari, moonfolk, kor, and vedalken occupy some pretty similar visual design space, and it's hard to push one in a particular direction to differentiate it from another without it turning into something very similar to a third. >_< Soltari, Kor, and Moonfolk are the worst offenders, but Soltari are also pretty similar visually to Vedalken.

I'm toying around with the idea of replacing Moonfolk hair with sort of like... mammalian tentacles. That could be an intriguingly weird look, I think. I'm definitely keeping big floppy ears because I love that visual and it's one thing that really dramatically distinguishes them from other races.

Also whoops, I don't know why I got it into my head that r/w was fate.

Time goblins? Interesting.

blugh, WHY? The big floppy ears was pretty explicitly the rabbit influence and without the cultural cues, it makes so little sense. It'd be like using the horns on Lorwyn as a common cue for elves. If you really want them then I won't struggle against it, but I will insist they get moved from the top of the head. I mean, there's a potential to develop a unique look with nontraditional ears, but we HAVE to get it away from the rabbit thing. (I mean, Zhiran has big buddha ears so... the ear thing can totally be done. By the same merit though, I'd want something different than big Buddha ears.)

The tentacles thing also feels really close to a cross of gorgons and kor too. Overall, I think it's just plunging too far into the weird aesthetic for them.

I've been considering what other lunar deities we can pick up as influences, but so far I haven't gotten further than Diana/Artemis, which feels super weird since she's a nature deity.
I suppose Hecate was also a lunar deity....
The biggest thing about using those influences is that OUR Cosmos deity is not limited to moon or sun, but the entirety of the sky.
Which... makes me think of the mythology involved actually. Rather than having created the Sun, I could see hir moving the actual WORLD next to a star and then making a moon. Or two. Or three. How many moons do we want?


Well, the way I've been thinking about it is actually NOT doing the colors that follow the god that made them, but remaining true to the singular color and splitting devotion between two domains.
For goblins, they would be shaped by Time, but they would follow the principles of Chaos and Motion.... which sounds a LOOOOOOT like goblins, don't it?

The idea is that I didn't want these to have to fall into two colors. They can splash others, certainly, but I want to remain true to keeping the characteristic races of their color.

Well, if you have better ideas, I'm all ears (ha ha ha) but moonfolk just aren't distinct enough as a Thing in my opinion to work visually without strong reference to their Kamigawa origins, regardless of whether or not it makes "sense." The ears are literally the only thing about them that's distinctive visually. Without them they're blue Kor.

On Elysium, I played up the inexplicable markings on their skin, but that feels like a misplay here.
The biggest issue with how they first turned up is just how narrow that was.

What if... we did bifurcated elongated ears on the side of their heads? Like really narrow long cartilage that forms a sideways V over their ear canals?
I'm somewhat of the opinion that we need to expand their hair color options too, but... I could understand that being shot down.

Edit: urgh... never mind, I hate that idea the more I think about it.
We can still do long curving ears, but I'm adamant that they not be on their hairline. Following the same shape as they curve over the place the ear normally would has enough of a visual thread that I think people would get it.

Oddly enough too, but the japanese weren't the only ones with the hare myth apparently. The Hindu believe the moon is associated with a hare as well.

Okay, so I've been doing some thinking, and putting pieces together to more easily think about this. For the overarching gods, we have Time, Fate, Cosmos and the World, but still seem to need the Substance/Void god. What about Eternity? We could play around with some cyclical stuff there. I'm personally thinking this deity would be female.


Okay, so if that's what we're doing (which makes good sense to me) Then we have the following to work with:

White: Order and Substance
Blue: One and Stillness
Black: Death and Void
Red: Chaos and Motion
Green: Life and All

With this in mind, I think we should consider some variety of insect people for Green. The Nantuko, although I think we can go with a different name. It will play into the proliferation of life, as well as connect to a hive-mind sort of existence.

For Black, what do you think of the idea of Aven, but maybe stylized as Buzzards?

For White, I think Loxodon are a possibility. I think Moonfolk still works well for Blue, and I agree that Goblins fit well with Red here.

What do people think?

Speaking of all this... what does Zhiran actually look like?

A lot of the Kamigawa designs were really weird

I actually was thinking of expanding on the hair colors as well. I was definitely thinking of them as being more... furry than their Kamigawa equivalents, with a wider variety of pelt tones (while still using white skin). The idea behind the solid forms on their heads in place of hair was to take the long, flowing hair styles of Kamigawa moonfolk and make them more a permanent fixture. Like... tentacles probably isn't a great descriptor because they'd be more like thick ribbons, I guess...

Of course now Kor can have all sorts of hair colors too so lolol guess that's another distinguishing feature down. [grinds teeth] Honestly, the more I think about it the less I like the Zendikar redesign of Kor, because the original Kor were more lionlike and blue and weird and just very distinctive. I think the Zendikar redesigns lost some of that.

I think part of the reason I'm so interested in making them... well... weirder is that I've always thought, since I was a kid, that the "slap some weird shapes on the face of someone who otherwise is basically a human" was really boring and lazy alien design. What can I say? I discovered Star Wars before Star Trek. Whatever the value of the two, Wars just fundamentally had WAY more interesting creature design.

I'm cool with the big ears being moved to more normal ear placement, though. It's the bigness more than the placement I care about, and part of the bigness factor is that the most interesting part of the Moonfolk visually to my mind is the fact that they've got all this floaty, flowy stuff attached to them.

The other trick, of course, is keeping them from sliding into Soltari territory, and creating distinctive Soltari designs that still feel like Soltari without them turning into Kor or Moonfolk... >.<

@Raven:

When you lay them out that way, yeah, Loxodon or Rhoxes would make a lot of sense for white. Order and Substance? Sounds pretty Loxodonish. Although I worry that they're a bit out of the size range for characteristic races.

Death and Void coooould be Vulture Aven but I kind of feel like that covers Death but misses Void, which is the part of the pair with the more interesting potential, I think.

I could see Nantuko working, yeah. It's been a LONG time since I've seen anyone use insect people in anything for Magic. Maybe this is the place?

Heh, maybe we should just ditch Soltari and replace them with Dauthi for Death and Void. It'd fit...

Although I am, as stated, a Thalakos guy, I think I could support this choice. I do love Shadow and feel like it could be integrated differently, so I do think this is a possible place to explore that.

Eternity could work in some interesting ways. I'd still want to sort of hammer some stuff out, but that feels fairly evocative.
I'm... also kind of following the thought of having the gods be non-gendered beings, capable of being both genders if they so choose, which would do some interesting gender binaries in their domains.
Like, Life is feminine, but Death is masculine, but Fate is neither, yet dominant. A triple aspect.

Totally killing the insect people thing.
For all the weird stuff we might do with visuals, I want to keep a basic humanoid shape to this and insect people are right out of that.

Loxodon suffer the same problem as centaurs. They're too big for characteristic. They're 2 at the lowest, but most commonly 3.


I'm really not sold on the idea of furry moonfolk. I'd rather go the opposite direction entirely rather than have them have pelts. For one, that just seems really disconnected to a general concept, or entirely TOO connected to the rabbit motif again.

On your other note though, that I could see a bit better... kinda. It wouldn't be cartilage, still keratin, right? I mean, like ribbons of hair works for me, but I would worry about how thick and layered it'd end up being. I don't want the moonfolk to end up going full on 80's hair band coiffure here. Actually, why not just give them dreadlocks? I sort of like that idea...

... I feel like we should make them freckled. Though they'd freckle in different colors than what our melanin causes.

I would have preferred they kept some of their features too, but even back then, they had in mind that it was mutations that came from what they ate, since whatever they fished out of the sky was more or less swimming in aether.

We can totally agree on that then. I'm good with that change.

The Soltari physical features are actually a LOT different.
They have these elongated skulls that go straight up rather than back, they have, functionally, no noses and they get these weird protrusions in places.

To be completely candid, Szat and I have had a plane floating in the back of the aether for a while that uses Beetlefolk. I've basically tapped out huge portions of that as well, but like I said, I want the basic silhouettes to remain humanoid. They all have to have a basic shape that could theoretically share a commonality. It's the details the gods couldn't agree on, but the overall shape should remain.

It's... a possibility to consider, but we have virtually nothing to work with when it comes to the Dauthi. They didn't have a common form and the Rath book entry pretty much straight says that they've gone completely insane, so we don't even have any insight into their culture or whatever remains of it.


About 7 feet tall, pale pale blue skin with thick whorls of tattoos like a Maori. Thick bushy beard, eyebrows, and long hair, all dark silver, and long buddha-esque ears, also covered in tats.
His limbs are a little longer than human normal, but his fingers particularly are overlong, despite his hands giving off the impression of strength.

I can get behind this. I thought you had thrown out some genders for the gods earlier, which is why I mentioned it, but yeah, I think genderless gods and gendered avatars could work in some pretty interesting ways.


I'm not sure I get the point of this, but if that's what you want, that's fine. So for humanoid green we have humans, elves, catfolk, giants (which I think would be too close to your use of Giants in Elysium) and possibly Rhox, but again, same problem as the Loxodon.

Well, it feeds into the origin myth. They all have the approximate same shape because they all come from the same origin in the gods' minds. Garbled memories of the same precursor species.

I did suggest Satyrs earlier, but nobody really said anything to that. Catfolk could work, though that starts edging into the really extended portion of the silhouette.

I'm starting to think we might need to go ahead and add humans as the abortive "first beings" that caused the argument to start with.

I feel like I shouldn't even have to tell you what I feel about fluidly gendered characters of any sort???

Subverting expectations and having one of the binaries not be a traditional western post-industrial gender binary but something... else, could be very, very interesting.

And Nantuko fail to make it into a world design yet again


I'm up for making them freckled, for sure. That's a cool design. Perhaps the freckles could form sort of a mosaic-like variant of the patterns we see elsewhere in the Multiverse?

The problem with dreads is that it looks a bit too close to Kor. I keep coming back to that as a possibility but it just feels like it's not distinct enough.

Keratin ribbons would be interesting, I think, and they wouldn't have to be thick--not that many strands, just enough to provide the interesting visual. I don't think it would look too 80s band...

Sweet. That's good then. So, we've got long side ears and freckles for starters, then maybe the hair and maybe the freckle mosaic. That's starting to seem Moonfolk-but-not-Kamigawa-moonfolk.

Weird protrusions? I like weird protrusions.


Bwomp.


Buddha ears.

You magnificent bastard, that's brilliant. Like that took my breath away when I read it.

Also, hey, now I know what Zhiran looks like! That's helpful!

Satyrs are an interesting possibility, though I don't know how well they fit Life and All. Catfolk would potentially fit that a little bit better.

I mean stereotypically elves fit that slot... do we want elves here? Or are we elf-averse? Elverse?