Behind the scenes

Why Nuitai exists

A vast, bright, colorful water world of scattered islands with colossal wonders on the horizon, inspired by the nature, cultures and mythology of the Pacific.

That's how I describe it. I'm building it for a turn-based RPG, and everything on this site is a step toward that game. It's all a work in progress.

It started with Final Fantasy X, about twenty years ago, and with being tired of fantasy that's always dark, cold and medieval European. I made Nuitai the opposite on purpose: bright water, warm islands, and cultures fantasy rarely visits, Polynesia and maritime Southeast Asia above all.

I got the idea from One Piece that every island should have its own premise, so sailing to a new one feels like opening a new book. And a small country like Kiribati, a few hundred square miles of land scattered over a huge sea, is how I want the map to feel: a little land in a lot of ocean.

The circle

Before I knew it had a name, I drew a circle on a map of the real world: Hawaii, down to New Zealand, across to maritime Southeast Asia and up to Japan. That circle turned out to be almost exactly the Pacific Ring of Fire, the ring of volcanoes around the ocean. That's my circle!

So the ring became my rule. Every inspiration comes from inside it, the ring and everything it encloses. Anything from outside has to arrive by sea through a place on the ring, the way India's faiths reached Bali. That's how the Bandari bring a Hindu and Buddhist inheritance into the islands.

The rule cuts things too. Haitian Vodou was part of the dark Matua look for a long time, and I took it out because Haiti is outside the ring. I only ever wanted the look, and the ring has its own macabre ancestor traditions I can draw on instead: the Toraja of Sulawesi and the carvers of the Sepik.

Laid out as a ring around a whirlpool, Nuitai is about the size of the whole Pacific. The directions mostly match the real ocean, but I stretched the distances to the west and south to close the ring.

Small choices with a story

Light is La, not Ra

The Māori word for the sun is rā. Written Ra, it read too much like the Egyptian sun god, so the element is La, and Ra is only how the people of Matua say it.

Ata used to be Aku

The god of darkness and fear was renamed partly to get away from Aku, the villain of Samurai Jack. Ata means shadow in Samoan and Māori.

Kulāiwi, the starting island

Hawaiian for homeland. Taken apart, the word means something like "plain of bones," and I chose it for the whole word, not its pieces.

Magic is kinesthetic

Every spell needs a motion or a breath. A tied-up mage can't cast. I picked the word even though it sounds like a school learning style, because it says exactly what I mean.

No drawn map is canon

The real map is a table: every region's direction, distance in miles and width. A program draws the pictures from that table, so a picture can never disagree with the world. The island shapes on the maps are invented.

"Fluxx rules"

After the card game: the stronger a move, the more of a wildcard it should be. Paku's Tidal Wave hits every enemy, then washes his own party around, Paku included.

No MP

I was never a fan of MP. Moves have waits and cooldowns instead of a magic bar.

People are not Pokémon

Monsters have elemental weaknesses. People do not.

Paku is not Maui

Paku's look comes from Garp in One Piece first, then Whitebeard, Might Guy and All Might. Disney's Maui is the look I stay away from.

Eight hundred years

The Bandari arrived eight centuries ago, around the time the real Polynesian long voyages between Hawaii and Tahiti were about to end for good. Far enough back that nobody alive can settle an argument about the homeland they came from.

Shaka's face is never shown

Art shows his symbols, the sun and his sword in the sand, or his back. It borrows from early Buddhist art, which showed the Buddha only through symbols. And Shaka died choking on breadfruit, a plain death at the end of a sage's life, the way the Buddha died after a meal of spoiled food.

The secrets the wiki keeps

The Luminary of Kota Emas. The old Luminary is dead, and the temple is hiding it. The new Luminary, Tahji, is a child of about eight and a gaja, one of the elephant people, chosen by a test the way a reincarnation is found. The priest who repeats his words is the one really ruling. The curtain and the story of an illness go further than the tradition of the veiled face: they hide how young he is.

The model is the Fifth Dalai Lama, whose death in 1682 his regent hid for about fifteen years.

Still not settled: what it costs when the secret comes out, and whether the old Luminary was a gaja too.

Not canon yet

Ideas I've written down and like, but haven't decided on yet.

• The sky people never left. The ruins show coiling, feathered, wingless serpents on every wall, and everyone took them for decoration. In this draft the Lanigata are those serpents, and the long shapes that turn slowly above the clouds, the ones sailors point out to their children, are them. Still alive, and nobody knows.
• Pua'a, the god who bled. A boar god of animals and mortals, the only god known to bleed, and already dead. Every island tells his death differently: drunk wrestling, an eating contest. Everyone who hears it says, "Yes, that sounds like him."
• The boar people in the chants. The oldest migration chants list tusked, red-haired ancestors who stayed behind on a shore no chart records.

Loose threads

• The sun is crowded. Six gods and beasts have some claim on the sun or its light. I'm keeping that on purpose, because it's what splits the faith of Māla in two. My one rule is not to add a seventh.
• Pirates from a lost homeland. One article says the pirates raided the coasts of Bandar, but nobody has reached Bandar in eight hundred years. The likely fix: the pirates came over with the fleets, and today's crews are their heirs.

Still undecided

Questions about the world I haven't answered yet, easiest first.

• Gaps on the village's new pages
• Quiet LGBT moments for four characters
• Kailo's stances change names when he learns Lelua
• When Sarjana's water stance becomes Cermin Air
• The Bandari's lost first settlement
• A Kota Emas question for the main plot
• How Kamego and Malalo relate
• What does an element add to a move that is not an attack?
• Can anyone hit every enemy alone?
• Whose stats does a combo use?
• When do combos unlock?
• Weapons: does unarmed take a slot?
• What Sarjana could not answer
• Who does Damar command?
• How high is the floating continent, and how big is the world?
• Ren's backstory, and where she was raised
• Why did the Bandari touch the Fire Islands and Matua less?
• The sarimanok's real name
• The missing subtitles, and in-world words for the English names
• How are the shared words spelled?
• Does Kota Emas borrow Malacca's founding legend?
• What does Kulāiwi live on, and how Hawaiian is it?
• Can Shadow attack on its own?
• What does each region have that others want?
• Leilagi's tail
• Accents outside Nuitai'lo
• Does Sarjana stay Manusia?
• Pōhaku Nui's festivals
• Damar's crusade, begun in Lanuloa
• Do elements break effects along the triangles?
• Pōhaku Nui's path and the seasons' names
• Are the Nagas grounded Lanigata?
• Nuitagata as two lineages and a north to south gradient
• Do the Cindaku have stripes before they turn?
• Summons: how do Callers call the dead into a fight?
• How was Samedō learned from the Manogata?
• Damar's hidden Sarpic martial art, and a seventh element
• Who governs a Nuitagata village?
• Who sits where in society
• Does an element raise a stat, and which one?
• What is placed inside the regions?
• New gods
• New species and new locations
• The undersea city near the Kame Kingdom: where, what it is called, what it keeps
• The otter people of Tokelau: their name, their islands, their art
• Temples for the gods and shrines for the guardian beasts
• What does a Caller's pact cost?
• How did the Bandari crossing go?
• Is Mana one force among six, or everything?
• A mirror world through the whirlpool
• Politics, economics and social structure
• Divine animal ancestors, one per people

Old pictures

When I change something about the world, a picture made before the change can end up wrong: a face that should never be shown, or a god drawn who shouldn't be. I take those off the wiki and keep them on their own page until they're redrawn.

The old pictures