Hey folks,

Welcome to DawnPowers season 3! As most of you know, the first post you’ll need to make before you start roleplay is your claim post. Your claim post establishes who your people are, while also asserting their territorial sphere, where their player’s RP has the Right of Minor Canon apply^1.

Please consult the following for what information to include in your claim post. Claims will open on 11AM EST on Friday the 11th of May.

Title of your Post: The name you want your culture referred to as on the culture map.

• Please abide by this, it makes the map making process easier.

Post Body:

• A claim post should, firstly, include a piece of roleplay that gives an overview of who your people are. What information you think is important here and how you present it is up to you: you can offer an oral history, a story of a migration, how their current state or leadership came to be, a creation myth, slice of life, etc. Be creative.

• A claim post should reference role play previously performed in the area of their claim. Such role play may include linguistic, religious or ancestral similarities with other nearby or historical claims. A player claiming in land with an existing playerless culture should very much weave that culture into their people's backstory, whether they are recent migrants, a former oppressed minority or a true successor people.

  • Early claimants of a region naturally won’t have existing cultures to reference. In this case, please explain your culture’s relation to their neighbours in a future post, or otherwise establish this relationship over time.

• A claim post MUST include a map depicting what territories your culture (and/or state, for later claims) is claiming. For now, claims will start with a maximum of two adjacent territories.

• A claim post should include an indication of what technologies your people have access to, nominating their primary and secondary starter tech sets and two personality techs. Please find starter techs here..

  • Refer to the various maps in the sidebar/wiki to confirm what resources may be available and useful to you.

• A claim post should indicate the real-world ethnicity/phenotype group of their people. For this, players should refer to the melanin map here - please read here for how best to interpret the melanin map and related allowances/restrictions.

• If you have a preference, please include a hexcode or colour name of what you'd like your colour to be on the map

• Offer a summary of what makes your cultures unique in as few words as possible, if you can think of something.

• You may also want to include your people’s ethnonym/demonym somewhere in the post, but this is optional.

• Once posted, please flair a claim with the green ‘Claim’ flair.

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1: The Right of Minor Canon is the right of whoever controls a territory to describe sensible geographic features for it. For example, someone controlling a major river delta may suggest how many distributaries it has and add minor tributaries, whilst someone controlling a desert has the right to place a number of oases in their territory. Things so established will become canon for future purposes. Please use your right sensibly, and don’t give yourself all the natural wonders of the world or wait until you’re invaded to establish that a marsh impedes movement. Also, please don’t retcon other people’s stuff if you happen to seize other people’s territory.

For contrast, the Right of Major canon is a matter for moderators and consensus. If a number of players agree on the location of a particular natural wonder or the name of a particular region and moderators have no issue with it, that may too become canon.