Okay, the votes are in! I don't plan on releasing the full results of most surveys, that would be tedious and not useful. However, for this first one, it might be helpful to see the results and explain how I use this data to make decisions for the characters.

For this first one, responses were highly varied. The three joke answers were set aside, and the remaining one (the whaling port) was considered and discarded. That left a three-way tie...not a great start, friends. In this situation, I use my own discretion. I looked ahead to the other responses, and decided to combine two of the most popular - our protagonist was raised on a farm outside a village on the edge of a great forest.

This next one had a clear winner, but was hardly decisive. Using my discretion, I interpreted this to mean that the protagonist was raised by a single parent within a larger community consisting of an extended family. The second parent was around when he was little, but disappeared before he had more than vague memories. This question also had the only write-in vote I considered (raised among siblings), but I felt the majority selection was more compelling.

This one was pretty clear, even if 27.6% is a paltry plurality. The sister is noticeably older, perhaps 31 to the protagonist's 23, and moved away when he was a teen.

At last, a clear winner. A decisive percentage of you envision our protagonist as having lived a secure but hard-working life on a modest yet successful farm.