Reisende Terms of Kinship (Patreon)

Since I am going to use the Reisende culture (which I wrote notes on in a previous article, see link at end of this introduction) in my Start-11 campaign for Pathfinder 1st edition, "Heroes' Epoch," I have been thinking about their culture more. This has resulted in going down a rabbit hole on the ways Reisende describe relationships to others, which I have written up as Reisende terms of Kinship. I carefully didn't define what the actual Reisende language words in question were, because I'm not a trained linguist and my constructed language skills are amateur at best, but the concepts behind the fictional words that would exist are important when defining Reisende culture.

I already added this section to the Reisende main article, since that's where I always point my links to when I refer to them, but it's included here for people who only want to read the new content.

(Art by Bruno)

Terms of Kinship 

The Reisende generally use their own terms to describe their relationships to one another, even when speaking other languages. The Reisende words most often translated to mean ancestor, brother, cousin, daughter, descendant, father, mother, offspring, parent, sibling, sister, or son don't actually connote a blood relationship in Reisende languages. Instead they refer to how the speaker feels about the person described. Calling someone your sibling is to describe them as someone you consider part of your family, without defining a romantic attachment to them, though even Reisende with taboos against taking blood relatives as lovers might describe a unrelated lover who was also a close friend as their brother, cousin, sibling, or sister (or much less often as a offspring or parent, though most Reisende clans disapprove of having a lover you would describe as having a relationship you'd use those terms for, even if they were not blood relations).

In Reisende culture, who your blood-relatives are is much less important than who you consider family. If for some reason a blood-relation must be defined, the word to describe it is coupled with a term essentially meaning 'bloodline," so a bloodline mother is normally your biological mother, aunt, or grandmother. Similarly, if a relationship is one of clan duty, respect, or responsibility, a term is added that would translate as "clan," resulting in describing someone as your clan-sibling, clan-parent, clan-offspring, and so on. Some translators add "of the heart" to any Reisende relationship that is not based on biology or clan position, which Reisende think is silly, though not inaccurate.

Though most Reisende have the majority of their close friends and biological family within their own clan, that's neither a rule nor universal. A Reisende who travels out of the Northlands, in particular, may end up developing family-of-choice who are from other clans, or sit outside the clan structure entirely. If such a person is in another clan, the clan name is added to the description of the reltionship, resulting for example in a Reving Clan Reisende referring to their Bjornung-Brother, or even Bloodline-Bjornung-Brother if describing a biological sibling who was part of the Bjornung Clan.

Confusingly to outsiders, it's perfectly possible for a Reisende to describe one person as their clan-daughter, sister (of the heart), and bloodline mother. That would tell other Reisende that the person is someone who the speaker feels protective of and generally has some clan-based authority over, who is a friend the speaker considers a close equal in purely social situations, who also happens to be the woman who gave birth to them. To a Reisende, this is perfectly normal though the fact they are a clan-daughter and sister-of-the-heart is far more important than the fact they are the speaker's biological mother.

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All the product bundles at this link were created by friends and colleagues to help me cover my bills from fighting cancer. There are some GREAT products in there, and ever purchace is a big help- for me, personally.