Lore notes (draft)

Opawata County is built around Free Island, a small island at the heart of a little archipelago, where the county seat of Opawata stands. According to the lore ideas so far, the island served as a place of deportation: the colonists sent hundreds, even thousands, of Nokotha natives there. The deportees eventually rose up and freed themselves, and the settlement they founded took the name Opawata, an invented Nokotha word meaning "the hands untied" (the shore where one counts oneself, the first count of the free). Before the uprising, the colonial settlement was known as Port Liberty, a bitter irony for an island prison, and the name was dropped after the liberation. The county is meant to be turned toward Nokotha culture, which is still little highlighted in the names of the other towns, and its future place names can follow the same invented Nokotha vocabulary.