Sounds like it, yup. Too bad most of us are so insular.

Sounds like you have good reason.

Yeah. They do take that to a little more of an extreme than actually helps, though, I think. Tigerfolk are dangerous, but they'd be less dangerous if they knew more about us. And it's not even worth asking if they'd like to move somewhere safer; they'd never go for it, too risky.

We were actually mostly the same way when the Valar suggested we move to Valinor where it was safe. There were exactly three people willing to give it a look.

You did end up going, though.

The three of them came back and talked with everyone else in the tribes for a very long time and convinced some people to try it. Not all of us. About half.

Mmhmm. That's the part I don't expect would happen with kobolds. Maybe with really good proof, or a very obviously safe way for the other kobolds to go check it out for themselves.

They could send the memories, but there wasn't a very straightforward way to go check.

That would help, though. As far as I know nobody in my world has anything like osanwë.

I think it helped a lot! And they brought some things back from Valinor to show everyone.

Yeah, that wouldn't work at all with kobolds, she grins wryly. Anything the right sort of impressive to get their attention would be taken the wrong way.

Oh? How so?

Oh. Heh. Kobolds make kind of bad neighbors, because we don't do ownership, and most kobolds don't understand that other people do, either, and like the challenge of trying to get hidden or guarded things. I don't, I know better, but if I'd brought some fancy thing back to my tribe and been excited about it, they'd assume I was showing off, not trying to tell them where they could get the same thing too.

Not even a concept of 'there's a place where I took these from'?

I could probably get that across but they'd be confused at why I was trying to, it's not usually a social activity like that.

That's interesting. By Cuivienen we had very communal concepts of property but 'there's more where this came from' would still be eminently comprehensible.

If there was a famine and I'd found a new food source, yeah, or something like that. But fancy new things are almost always just extra, not anything we need, so there's kind of an expectation that the person who found it isn't going to want to share the information, they're going to want to keep it to themselves to get as much status out of it as they can. There's some grey areas - we don't have metalworking at all and metal knives are really useful, so if someone finds a source of them they might share that, though it'd usually be with a few close friends rather than with the whole tribe - but I'd expect better luck waiting for someone to decide to follow me rather than convincing anyone, and I'd expect them to be very skittish about it when they did.

Makes sense. But they wouldn't be considered yours, other people could try stealing them from you?

Whatever I brought back to the tribe wouldn't be mine, it'd go into the tribe's stores - we play a hiding-and-finding game among ourselves, too, and a lot of the things used in that were originally taken from people outside the tribe. But I'd still get ... credit, standing in the eyes of the tribe, reputation... for bringing in something nice or useful or hard to get, if I was inclined to do that kind of thing and did it.

Without the idea of ownership kobolds don't have the idea of theft, either; taking something literally out of someone's hands or off their person is pretty rude, but anything short of that isn't going to bother anyone; trying to keep things for yourself will, though.

Yeah, sounds like another cultural difference. We get credit and standing in the eyes of the tribe for generosity, choosing to give things to people, and if anyone could take things then you couldn't think of a gift that was very suited to a friend and then make it for them and then give it to them.

We actually do manage something like that - not for standing in the tribe, but for personal relationship building, you figure out what the person likes and make a point of making sure it's available for them. Other people in the tribe get to have it too, but if you've figured out someone's favorite things and they're paying attention to you at all - and we live in small enough groups that it's pretty likely they will be - they'll notice sooner or later.

So maybe the difference has to do with group size, then. Or at least some of the difference.

Yeah, definitely. Kobold tribes don't get bigger than about a hundred fifty people - usually closer to a hundred - since with a tribe that size people start having too much trouble knowing their tribemates well enough to understand them or work with them, and the tribe ends up splitting.

I knew everyone in my tribe well enough to understand and work with them, before the Enemy tampered. 

She blinks. Very impressive.