Tiandi:Newcomer Guide

This is a guide meant primarily for newcomers, but can still be of use to people who have been in the region for a while.

Languages and naming
Ask in the group chat for help on language support, such as with the naming of countries. DO NOT USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE. If it is found that an app has a country name that was obviously derived from Google Translate, it will be rejected.

This often tends to be pretty difficult for people. The standard East Asian country name consists of two Chinese characters; a commonly used character at the end of a name is 國, meaning "country" e.g. China (中國, lit. central country). If you are going for a Japanese name, use the on-yomi (Chinese) readings.

Stat changes
If you would like to change your economic and/or population stats, please create a new app. This is so people cannot change how important or powerful they are without permission. If you do change your stats after acceptance without permission and it is noticed, your country will be removed from the map.

Beginner's to-do list

 * Create a wiki account
 * Add yourself to the who controls what page.
 * Create a wiki page for your nation
 * Choose an anthem
 * Design a flag

Who and what is East Asian? What is Sinju?
East Asian refers to the.

National symbols
The idea of national anthems, national flags, and so on are 19th and 20th century products of modern nationalism originating in Europe. Since these are fun to have, and since nationalism will probably also develop in Tiandi, we will keep these.

Flags and seals
Most of us will be using horizontal flags for reasons of convenience. Almost every country should have their flags based on what we define as Sinjuan or East Asian conventions, including non-East Asian nations.

Standard flag formats include: Seal on sheet Flower on sheet Country's name or abbreviation on sheet

Common motifs include: Flowers Characters

Do not include: Five-pointed stars (exception for Europeans) European heraldry (exception for Europeans)

Anthems
Almost every country should have their anthems based on what we define as Sinjuan or East Asian conventions, including non-East Asian nations.

Basic lore overview
Modern humans first emerged 300,000 years ago.

The strongest historical powers in Sinju in the past 500 years have been Jeongmi, Meisaan, Fusen, and Nukigurun.

Jeongmi and Meisaan alongside their allies emerged victorious in the Great Eulhae War, while Fusen, Nukigurun, and other major powers such as Habchuash lost. This is our rough equivalent to WWII. The Congress of Nations was formed and mass-scale decolonization started after this war.

Today, the world is somewhat multipolar, though the Sinju Union, Jeongmi being the most powerful member, controls most of the world's wealth. Powerful states today include Jeongmi, Meisaan, Fusen, Nukigurun, Matobo, Mennefer, and Yahuimilco.

Worldbuilding
Important Tiandi terms and concepts

Religion
Religion in Tiandi is largely carried over from what religion was like in IRL pre-modern East Asia.

Religion historically operated very differently in East Asia than it did in the west. In fact, the concept of religion in the Western sense was foreign to East Asia until after events such as the and. There were no organized religions, and if any religions were seen as getting too powerful, they would be seen as a threat and suppressed.

Partly due to the lack of any organized religion, there were no strict separations of religions; people outside of religious specialists such as monks did not identify with religions, and beliefs from different traditions were syncretized as these differing beliefs were seen as non-contradictory and often difficult to separate from one another. In fact, Imperial Japan initially had an incredibly difficult time trying to officially separate what was considered Buddhism and what was considered Shinto after it tried to define religions in a western sense after the Meiji Restoration. This is also why even modern East Asian states such as Japan and Korea have a terrible time when compiling religious statistics for their censuses.

I recommend using this religiosity graph instead of listing Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional beliefs such as Shinto separately.

Perhaps because of this, there were no religious wars in East Asia. There will also likely be little to no religious wars in Sinju.

East Asian religions are also typically non-evangelical, which has major consequences for the spread of these religions into colonies.

Language
Countries outside of West Yoju would not use the Latin or Cyrillic scripts in Tiandi, so do not have your nation use these if outside the area. The most common script worldwide would be Hangul, which would be associated with modernity.

Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters should ideally be used for all official purposes where Chinese characters are used. Characters present solely in or  should ideally not be used. ICly, text will be written in the traditional vertical right-left. When top-down is not possible, horizontal right-left is also permissible. On the wiki, horizontal right-left is preferred for use in articles when it comes to Hangul, kana, and Chinese characters.

Dates
For dates, we use the, a form of the Chinese lunisolar calendar, instead of the Gregorian calendar. These months are referred to with their Korean names.

Also, we will refer to the first month as Irwol (一月) instead of Jeongwol (正月) and the final month as Sibiwol (十二月) instead of Nabwol (臘月) when writing in English.

(someone turn this into a table?) Irwol (1月) Iwol (2月) Samwol (3月) Sawol (4月) Owol (5月) Yuwol (6月) Chirwol (7月) Parwol (8月) Guwol (9月) Siwol (10月) Sibirwol (11月) Sibiwol (12月)

Things to keep in mind:
 * Each month will have 29 or 30 days. Thus, do not have events occurring on the 31st of a month.
 * There will be leap months roughly every three years. For leap months, add "yun" to the front of a month e.g. Yunsawol (follows Sawol).
 * Yuwol, not Yugwol, and Siwol, not Sibwol.

When writing for current events such as in the news thread, you can easily look up what day it is today on Google. Date format when writing can be flexible, since we are writing in English and different English speaking countries have different formats.

Thus, Iwol 28, 2021 28 Iwol, 2021 are both fine.

General resources

 * Tiandi Spreadsheet
 * Who controls what
 * Tiandi Anthems
 * Tiandi:Templates Tutorial