About the world of Sawtooth

Sawtooth, Idaho is a city slightly larger than Twin Falls, with perhaps 50,000 residents. As a university town, much of the younger population is only living there temporarily, but it leads to the core of the town being fairly well-off. The University of Idaho, Sawtooth itself is the largest employer in the city, followed by the tech industry, and then manufacturing.

The Sawtooth city flag: the blue symbolizes the wide-open skies, the green represents the fertile fields to the east, the yellow symbolizes both the sun rising over the Sawtooth range, as well as the stone of the range itself, and the five peaks represent the five families who homesteaded in the area and incorporated the town.

This is a world populated by anthropomorphic animals. As such, there are certain rules that apply to the universe to maintain consistency.

There is no restriction on interspecies relationships, though it generally falls under the “queer” umbrella in-universe, perhaps as a holdover from when the ability to bear children was more important. There is no hybridization beyond what might be expected with animals in our world. That is, the offspring of a dog and a coyote would be a coydog, but a cat and a mink would not be able to reproduce.

Queer relationships and identities beyond species, while still thought of as minority identities, are more widely accepted due in part to this, certainly moreso than in America at time of writing.

“Domesticated” species (housecats, dogs, etc.) were, historically, a sign of noble birth. However, it has largely become discredited as anything beyond selective breeding from centuries past.

Sawtooth natives are Idaho native species. There are no “fictional” species (dragons, griffons, etc). While species plays a slight role in size, it is not extreme. For example, weasels would be shorter than wolves, but only by, say, a foot or so.

There are biological and anatomical considerations to be made: scent plays a larger role in the sensory landscape; anatomical differences in tails, genitalia, paws, etc. do exist; there are relatively few reptiles due to harsher winters; and so on.

There is no historical artificial origin story for multiple anthropomorphic species beyond parallel evolution. Species historically grouped together in clans, population exploded during the industrial evolution, and the concept of clans has largely been abandoned. Due to the evolutionary advantages of being able to digest high levels of protein and fat, only carnivores and omnivores have managed to evolve to this point.

The world of Sawtooth is open, and I freely invite anyone to write stories of their own set in the town of Sawtooth or the universe as a whole, with no limits. Because of the license, I ask only that any use of the characters in the stories be credited back to the original source.

Beyond that, the world is largely as it stands, including much of the same historical, literary, and geopolitical events. Should you be inclined to use this setting, feel free!