The people who speak Meoka have a government comprised of a council of representatives from the clans and from the guilds. The capital city is divided into zones associated with the clans. The majority of people only change clans if they marry over, or if they move into the city from the countryside. The countryside near the city has a couple regions that have clan territories inside the city that are very small, but strongly representative of the large areas outside the city. The countryside more distant from the city is nominally encompassed by and overseen by the clans represented in the city, but in practice people in the countryside feel little allegiance to or influence from the clan they supposedly belong to, and someone moving to the city can petition any clan for a dwelling and no one looks too hard into where exactly in the countryside they moved from. If their petition is granted their name is added to the register of clan members living in a particular structure and from then on that is their affiliation.
Within the clans people may live in family groups or separately. Most clans are very easygoing about this. In wealthier clans with enough property holdings, even older children can have their own residence if they want (of course it will be a small one, ideally close to their parents). Some clans have less residence space than others, and some have more strict rules than others, so these practices vary.
The majority of adults are represented in the council by their clan representative and by their guild representative on different interests.
There is a small population of people who are not associated with a clan, and they are considered to be disadvantaged and/or suspicious. It can be harder for them to gain apprenticeship, and they cannot follow “proper channels” to make a complaint heard by authorities, because that is typically done through a clan representative.
It is considered a standard practice for older children or young adults to apprentice with a guild-member in their chosen profession, and then join a guild as a working member. There are few types of gainful work that are unrepresented by a guild. Occasionally a group of workers will petition to split away from a larger guild to cover their specialty more specifically, or two guilds will agree to merge, but these types of changes are few and far between, as the guilds are entrenched and making changes requires multiple types of leadership to agree to it.
There is a guild of magicians, which holds a fair amount of power because it controls all the high-speed long-distance channels of communication. The magic practiced in this region is based in trances and dream states, and the effects it has tend to be related to transmission and gathering of information and healthcare diagnostics.
Among magicians, there is a fear of rogue mages who break the ethical standards set forth by the guild, because a skilled magician can secretly harass or influence another person through their dreams, or even set a compulsion in place without the target knowing about it. There are oral traditions that describe these practices, but guild mages declare publicly that these are lost techniques and that people have nothing to fear from magic users.
There are many folk tales about the origin of the world and other tales of the First Dreamer, her three closest friends, and eight other companions. Some believe they hold the truth of the past, and some see them as mere stories. Magic is considered to be the same force that the First Dreamer used to remake the world.
They do have flour mills but not the printing press… That may be just around the corner, but at the moment, calligraphy and scribes are considered prestigious and are required for any legal document or formal missive. Many guild scribes are also certified as notaries, so they keep records of their notarized work in case they are called to testify. The majority of paper they use is obtained in trade with the south.
The Meoka people export root vegetables, grains, flours, jams & jellies, fine weaving, silver jewelry, and astronomical information.
These people typically wear a thin cloth shirt with a long vest, tunic, or belted smock over it. They often wear a pair of baggy trousers gathered into a long cuff around leg from ankle to the lower calf, sometimes adorned by a gathered short skirt at the top that hangs out below the belted smock. Current fashion is for the tunic or smock to be pointed in the center front and back.
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