Society of Rafa is a cooperative storytelling game where you play as a Rafa, a healer, tasked with caring for the health of your community and maintaining the relationship with the area’s spirits.

The Village of Kahal #

You live in Kahal, a small minority-majority village of mainly Avodai folk. The Avodai are an ethno-religious group often persecuted by the dominant Lumdai culture. Kahal is a poor but vibrant center of study and Avodai life. As you walk through its streets, you see brightly painted homes, hear raucous debate bellowing from the House of Study, and feel the rush of children running past you in play. You smell the loaves baking in the Communal Oven where villagers stand around gossiping as Baker Ahava and her assistant Leila work. Kahal’s residents are mostly craftfolks, farmers, and scholars.

Local Surroundings #

Kahal has hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters with occasional snow flurries. Fields filled with orange and apple trees, wheat, vegetables, and grape vines surround Kahal on three sides. Kahal is famous among the Avodai for its excellent hard cider. Lumdai villages dot the farmlands, and Kahal shares the Wednesday market with its three closest neighbors. The city of Terida is a two hour bike ride northwest in the Bay of La’ja. To the east of Kahal is the Altir forest, leading to the Alterra Mountains that grace the skyline with their white peaks. Fresh mountain water flows down along the Tazmaya River to the sea to the southwest. 

The Society of Rafa #

The Society of Rafa is a core Avodai institution. Rafa live and work in small Rafa Circles from the House of Healing, just outside of town on the largest plot of land owned by the Avodai. The House of Healing’s library is bursting with the largest collection of books on botany and medicine in the region, and its gardens are filled with medicinal plants. In relation to one another, the Rafa are said to tend to the Body and the Mind, while Rebas see to the Way and the Soul.

Energy Bending for Healing #

Traditionally, members of the Society of Rafa are the only Avodai allowed to manipulate nature’s energies because magic is seen as distributing the Light’s Will unless performed to save a life. Recently, the lines between acceptable and forbidden uses of Rafa knowledge have blurred. The New Avodai Society is at the forefront of modernizing Avodai practices and applying Rafa techniques to the growing fields of engineering and manufacturing to improve the lives and well-being of the community.

King Geoffroi of Fida expelled the founders of Kahal from his country 189 years ago, only 36 years after the community fled Za’rima at the threat of conversion. Governor Antonio Romano of Terida invited the refugees to settle in unoccupied land outside of Terida. The Governor saw benefit in the community’s connections to trade, strong healing tradition, and ability to work land that the Lumdai refused to farm. 

Spirit Neighbors #

The Avodai refugees only discovered why no humans lived in the area after they arrived. The land was teeming with mischievous spirits. With the Rafa taking the lead, the residents of Kahal learned to live side by side with the local spirits.

The governor barred Avodai from living in the city, which they could only enter during the day for trade. The government lifted this prohibition only forty-five years ago. However, the Terida government granted the Avodai community semi-autonomy to deal with internal governance and disputes. Since then, some young artists, intellectuals, and wealthy Avodai merchants moved to Terida, founding the Avodai Quarter which has expanded rapidly. This has led to greater Avodai integration into the broader society and much debate on what it means to be Avodai in the modern world.