I was figuring more along the lines of its sect fell upon harder times than others, and died out. But hey, collaboration

Ooo... dead religion. I like it!

Sorry for my absence, I was kinda hurt on Wednesday and haven't been able to sit in a chair long enough to type any sort of message.

A valley with a straight east-west axis which allowed one to track the movement of the sun throughout the day would certainly deserve such a name.

Now all we need is guided tours. Nothing improves a derelict temple complex like guided tours.

But before that, an actual religion. Deities? Holy books? Prophets? Artefacts? Other holy sites?

Guys, I want in.

*spawns Hallow in the deepest recess of the abandoned temple complex with a rope and a 9ft pole*

quoting Hurq:

A valley with a straight east-west axis which allowed one to track the movement of the sun throughout the day would certainly deserve such a name.

Ooo, I like it. so the whole valley could be named valley of the sun as well as the city. I'm sure people can tell them apart by context.

quoting Rhetorica:

Now all we need is guided tours. Nothing improves a derelict temple complex like guided tours.
But before that, an actual religion. Deities? Holy books? Prophets? Artefacts? Other holy sites?

I like the idea.

quoting Hallow XIII:

Guys, I want in.

I hereby officially dub you contributor. May you honor your king and country. for great justice and all that what

Okay, dames an' fellas. feeling sharing time: It'd be great if someone were to actually contribute something, as in make another entry on the wiki; about the religion and the holy books or about the small town of whitewood or about some other city or even about pseudo-japan or something. I mean, from hurq's OP I got the feeling that this was to be like a dynamic collab where people just, you know, posted things into existence. And while I've fun making stuff like the city and the map and whatnot, I feel kind of like the only one doing it. sooooo yeah =/

Collabs that are too dynamic produce epileptic products.

Anyway, for reasons of <I cannot manipulate graphics> I can't do much but offer extraneous opinions on things like geography (extraneous opinion #1: find the biggest river in the area and plaster its banks with cities) but I will be happy to do things like spread maps for language families (haplogroup map, anyone???) because that's ~*only*~ splotching paint if that power be vested in me. Generally this sort of high-level stuff because I have some sort of compulsion about ***CONSISTENCY*** and if the fundamentals stand the details tend to not be as haphazard as they would otherwise be.

If anyone knows about climate and whatnot and feels like assisting me in my quest to obey the orders of my OCD help would be welcome.

Torco do you think you could hook me up with a version of the world map that has latitude (ideally in ten-degree steps) marked on it?

And for your convenience, the 20th parallel which runs through our area above as it is on Earth, lazily drawn by me:

help this climate shit is hard

I'm still gonna try to actually produce a proper climate map but I'm running into accuracy problems due to <the map is too small> and <I NEED MORE ELEVATION INFO> so I'm just gonna half-ass it (not that anybody would care?) and maybe I'm gonna have it up before the week is over.

For now let it be known that Umam lies in Köppen climate zone Cfa, which means hot summers, mild winters, and as far as I can tell a lot of rain the entire year.

I'd suggest simplifying the climate map a bit, combine similar regions which are not present in our current area of focus (both distancewise and heighthwise). I also suspect this might be what you mean by half-assing. And I applaud you for doing this; as you say, shit's hard.

Okay. I'm thinking I want to step up my contributions to this, and thus is prompted a question of how. There are three things I'm itching to do—start on the Maldisian language family, describe the Valley of the Suns (based on the stuff we've already got here), and put a village on the big island out in the bay, as a trading partner of Umam. Does anyone have dibs on a general Valley of the Suns article?

I'd had a thought or two regarding the island myself, namely that it could be host to a rival of Umam. Easy enough to work into a friendly and/or trading rivalry.

I second putting a rival on the island, even though I haven't thought of the details of what it would be like yet.

I've just been waiting for someone to post even a phonology so that I have some names I can work with. I really hate writing out "City X" and things like that, and I'm not much good at conlanging, so I don't want to set a precedent that others would have to work around.

Well... phonology is not my forté, but we can start with the letters people have used so far. So... go take a look! (Suggestions and complaints welcome.)

(Yes, it's white bread levels of plain. I'm serious about the suggestions and complaints.)

It is also full of madness. The introduction says there is no voicing contrast but you list two series of plosives, and then there is

"The typical orthography for these vowels is /m n ŋ p b t d k g s z h r l/ <m n n p p dd k k s s h r l>."

Did you perhaps write this while excessively tired?

No voicing contrast in writing.

It's... yeah, I dunno. I wanted to express that they were completely interchangeable allophones. Feel a way to suggest a better solution!