The Canopy
Current Prompt:
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Winter is Coming
As the days get shorter, the forest gets colder. Winter can be a severe place for Canopians, but can also be beautiful and cozy. What steps does your Canopian take to prepare for cooler weather ahead? Do they have plants to protect, stores to preserve, or cold friends to knit sweaters for? Draw or write about your Canopian preparing for winter.
The Great Trees are not the spindly things that we might call by that word. Perhaps the nearest we can describe them is to say that they are like our Redwoods: in their vast canopies is a separate forest, as vibrant and diverse as the floor far below. On spreading buttresses the decaying matter of a thousand years of growth create soil and thus islands of lush plains, where orchards and thickets grow, and here the People live.
Building great villages that sprawl as much vertically as horizontally, they live lives that are simple, but that are increasingly subjected to the pressures of progress. The herds of silksquirrels provide them with fabric and rope, the farmers tend the arboreal fields and paddies, and the hunters, assisted by the fierce and loyal statta, snare and shoot the birds and beasts that roam the treetops and skin them with knives of wood and coveted stone. The Descenders, the brave few, find their way to the forest floor where few tread, and here they slay strange things and bring back clay and flint and obsidian. Ritualists sing their songs and heal the wounds of worried mothers, and civilization is, in a word, vibrant.
But factions splinter among the tree tops, and against a backdrop of fear for the greater purpose of the People, against a rising tide of anxiety and power struggles, the People work, and love, and learn, and pursue their goals.
What if we had never descended from the trees? What if we had stood upright among the branches, and wielded tools and numbered the stars, and learned to build societies in the highest reaches of the forest? What if ours was not an earthbound existence, but an arboreal one?
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THIS IS THE CANOPY
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The Canopy is a laidback, self-guided, open-ended ARPG. Our philosophy is that your story is what you make it, and so is your game. You can set your own goals and pursue them as rigorously or as casually as you like, and we are open to all levels of skill, style, and approach. Writers and artists alike are welcome to explore the world of the Canopy and have fun leveling up, earning rewards, and playing in a mostly hands-off environment.
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