North King
blech
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2004
- Messages
- 18,165
A golden banner of stars unfurls over a world where men live and die. Here lie the ruins of many a nation, great and small. Here will more glorious nations yet rise.
The most distant myths tell of a time when the Ancestors wandered the earth. They were ruled by the World Soul until its murder, and then they were free – free to populate the earth. Choosing a fertile and well watered river delta, the Seshweay rose to prominence.
An obscure and difficult people, the Seshweay got along with few, if any of their neighbors. Rivalry was compounded by their refusal to acknowledge others as men at all; their wars were all waged in the name of spreading humanity. Intense xenophobia fueled a rapid expansion; even though the cities were fairly disunited, they grew to contain the entirety of the Sesh River Delta, and even several hundred miles to the south of that as well.
Early in their history, another tribe, the Arkage took the development of agriculture for their own, and founded a minor city to the south of the delta’s civilization. It was none too powerful, but it would have a significant impact on events in the future.
The Arkage called the Seshweay the Graknids, and fought numerous wars against the southernmost members of that larger civilization. Fortunately, the disunion of the Seshweay meant the Arkage could keep them at bay, at least for the early years. Indeed, some Arkage took the opportunity to found several other cities, including the powerful Nestad.
Nestad itself was able to intermarry with some of the Graknid ruling class, and thus established dynastic ties with the largest delta city, called either Jara or Seis. However, this took it into direct conflict with the hybrid city of Fakr, which, although not technically Sesh in ancestry, was certainly Sesh in arrogance. Fakr took the opportunity of a Seisian king’s death to attempt the occupation of the city. This brought it into a tremendous conflict with the Nestadans, which expanded when the general Crakus, exiled from Seis, took a barbarian horde into the Delta.
A complicated conflict blew the Delta to pieces, with first Nestad, then Fakr, then Seis all being sacked in turn. This naturally allowed the Arkage to suddenly rise to prominence, with the result that there were three major powers left in the region: the Seshweay, the Arkage, and the barbarian Craknids, who were still a plague, and held a massive slave underclass as well. Strangely enough, the most populous, the Seshweay, were the weakest, due mostly to their utter disunity.
Fortunately for the Seshweay, twin cultural forces surfaced around this time period. The first was simply known as “Unity”; it was a religious movement in the ancestor worship of the area that preached the union of the cities of the Sesh, and reserved war for the nonhumans outside their borders. This was coupled with the movement of “Moralism”, which was a highly democratic set of ideals (at least for the Seshweay themselves), and further solidified their unitary nature.
These triggered political and military reforms towards more republican governments rather than the traditional oligarchies, plus the idea of the citizen soldier. The latter was sorely needed, as it turned out, for their neighbors had not remained static, either.
The Seshweay also launched several overseas expeditions at this time to relieve the population pressure in their heartland. Colonies were founded on the northern lands of Esay, however these failed due to hostile natives, combined with the perennial difficulties of trade through the contested delta.
Meanwhile, the Arkage had absorbed the Craknids through a series of clever diplomatic and military moves. The Craknid culture merged somewhat with the Arkage, leading to a large underclass of slaves watched over by a semi-professional army, equal in quality to the Seshweay.
Both sides were thus locked in a struggle to the death, with neither triumphing. Due to the nature of the Seshweay religion, this could only result in the utter destruction of one civilization or another; there would be no peace with subhumans. Large slave armies were raised on both sides, and city after city was razed. The wars continued on without end; peace was an abnormality. It was clear to both sides that this could not last forever, especially as they occupied the same river valley.
In the later end of the period, however, the balance of power began to shift.
New cultures began to rise, including the desert people of the Bahrai to the south, who had long been raided as a source of slaves by both of the larger nations. At some point, they switched to raiders themselves, taking slaves from other tribes to be sold to both the Seshweay and the Arkage. The great trading city of Magha was in fact an anchoring point for the end of a vast trade network that extended through the known world.
Another kingdom, that of Jania, rose quickly to the northeast of the greater Arkage nation; it was composed of refugees from the wars, and discontented splinter regions of the old kingdom. With their excellent position on the sea, they were much better able to take advantage of trade than their cousins, and were much better at negotiating for it than the aloof Seshweay. Profits rolled in, and a colony was established at the crucial Straits of Kargan.
The Kingdom of Mahid to the north was populated by the descendants of the old tribes that had thrown out the Seshweay colonists. On the end of the great Luska Road that led deep into the desert, the port city served as an important trading stop.
To the west, meanwhile, a large group of barbarians is on the move. The steppe people of the Satarai were the first to make a functional chariot, and this military innovation led their army to numerous victories over the neighboring tribes. A group of seven tribes originating on the Rath Tephas (Field Eternal), they have crushed all in their path, and burned their way to the northernmost branch of the River Sesh. They have yet to be tested in battle against either the Bahrai or the Seshweay, but they could prove a potent force in the future of the river valley.
The Arkage were able to establish trade with a southern people known as the Kingdom of Serat, which brought them much in the way of additional capital to continue waging their wars. In addition, it was thought that they could perhaps prove to be a valuable ally in the continuing wars, if they could be convinced of that fact...
The Serat were, in fact, the child of the ancient Salgaron culture, which had been established in the most ancient days. These people founded their civilization along the long, winding Had River, on the edge of the Senet Desert.
The Salgaron were a hardy desert people to begin with, but they found their lands ideal for growing grain; it was in these lands, perhaps, that people first settled into cities. In any case, the Salgaron were united fairly early by a despot who relied on the spears of his warriors to keep himself in power. While central control meant they avoided the bloody split that had plagued the northern delta, they were seriously hampered in their development; eventually offshoots secured their independence.
Thus, the kingdom of Serat grew to be a conduit of trade between the two cradles, and rapidly became almost as powerful, if not more so, than the nation of Salgaron itself.
This led the King of Salgaron to explore other avenues of expansion: sailing down the River Had, he found himself pulled into conflict with the Hu’ut people. A strange, babbling people, the Hu’ut had been locked in a civil war between two rival religious doctrines, with a monotheistic cult finally winning in the end. The vicious war was punctuated by a slave revolt that ended in the emigration of a large part of the labor base; thus trade was initiated with the west for slaves to man the farms.
In any case, Hu’ut quickly turned hostile at the attempts of the Salgaroni King to bring them into his fold, and bloody wars raged over the frontier. Eventually, the Hu’ut united themselves under a single ruler as well, Geupopultopu II, who met the Salgaroni in battle at the city of Jahip and drove them back.
The conquest of Jahip and the subsequent assimilation of the people there led to a longstanding rivalry between the Salgaron and the Hu’ut. Both nations are centralized monarchies, and both dream of the rule of the entirety of the Had River. There may come a time when one or the other is wiped out by war.
New contacts, however, were forged by both kings late in the period.
Palmyra was a tiny kingdom of little note on the shores of the Kainoan Sea before someone discovered the valuable metal tin in the mountains to the south. Vital for the making of bronze, the staple working metal of the entire known world, tin fetched an incredibly high price in most markets; this single discovery made Palmyra rich. However, at the same time, this discovery naturally made them a target in the eyes of the power hungry Hu’ut kings. Only skilled leadership by a line of Palmyran kings was able to maintain their independence by playing off the rivalry between Hu’ut and Salgaron.
The Farou, meanwhile, were a people devoted to the idea of freedom. They had, in fact, conquered the slaveholding kingdom of Salei centuries before, and their presence prevented their neighbors the Trilui from overtly trading slaves. This mentality set them directly at odds with the slaveholding society of Hu’ut. In fact, the Farou were later determined to be the descendants of the slave revolt in Hu’ut many centuries ago. Still, due to the fairly strong nature of both powers, an uneasy peace existed between them for the moment.
For their part, the Salgaroni were approached from the south by messengers from a distant kingdom: the Liealb people of Thearak.
Thearak was only the most powerful of the Liealban kingdoms, managing to conquer all the others; the ruler of this city titled himself Lord of the World in a somewhat grandiose fashion. However, at the time, King Ujjayad was quite justified in his delusion: there was no contact with the large nations of the north; his was the greatest power in the world. However, it just so happened that his emissaries, while looking for more nations to force the submission of, found something rather larger.
Still, Ujjayad was a pragmatist, and not one to throw away the chance. He signed a treaty of friendship with the Salgaroni king, and trade flowed back and forth between the two, with the Salt of Salgaron being exchanged for ivory from the far south.
Thearak got said ivory (and strange animals, to boot) from the twin cultures of the Uggor and the Duroc.
The Duroc were the more familiar of the two, mostly because of their proximity. At the mouth of the River Yensai, the fledgling nations of Urntor and Galcia were no great powers. However, in time, their northern offshoot, Asandar, rose to surpass them in wealth and power. Asandar was nearly as powerful as Thearak in some respects, but with the increasing greed of its kings, it overthrew the monarchy and became a republic instead: one of the few in the world.
The Uggor, for their part, were located on the very edge of civilization; their main kingdom of Krato was barely able to keep itself together. This fragility was exacerbated by the numerous squabbling families, whose goals were quite often at odds with one another. Regardless of this, they were able to secure a near monopoly on the production of ivory, which sold as a valuable trade product; they were also the sole nation in the world at the end of the period to have domesticated elephants.
These lands are isolated, of course, but they needn’t remain so forever. While there is but one mountain pass that leads to them, the entire sea is open, and there are many powers waiting to take advantage of this...
Storms rage among the four great peninsulas. Here several seafaring cultures collide: the Trilui, masters of the north, the golden Opulensi of the east, and the Hamakua, sailors of the south. Each has extended feelers into the others’ traditional spheres; this has naturally caused tensions, and more than one minor trade war.
The Trilui have a somewhat mystical basis for their sailing: myth tells that they must find their lost brothers across the sea. While this is mostly just a legend that is ignored by the vast majority of the populace, it still provides the Trilui with additional motivation to set sail. Not that they needed that; the vast majority of their populace find some sort of income off of the sea: either by directly participating in the voyages and the trade that comes with them, or by catering to the needs of sailors in the ports, or by producing goods for transport out of the nation.
In any case, with such close economic ties to the sea, they were able to hone their shipbuilding techniques from an early era, remaining at the forefront of development throughout the period. They adopted that which they did not develop from their rivals: by the end of the period, all three nations used the traditional square sails, which allowed ships to follow the trade winds quite rapidly.
For their part, the Trilui explored northwards, and charted the first route across the Lovi Sea to the nations of Mahid and Arkage. Their holds loaded with oils, tins, and even some salt, they were able to make huge profits by selling these and returning home with gold and incense. Eventually, they were able to discover a route to the north which netted them valuable tin from the Bosrttia and strange furs from the Ailuttorutto people, a slowly developing society. More exotic still were ambers from even further into the wild.
The Ailuttorutto were a curious people with a staccato way of speaking which confused the first explorers. However, the tongue proved easy enough to learn, and they found that the people were an industrious sort, with numerous small villages crowding the coasts. The primary trading center of Lutto itself had a bustling market full of the goods of the north, including slaves captured from raids into the interior. An expanding population was not quite supported by their own agriculture, stunted as it was by the shorter summers of these lands, and so the traders found it profitable to ship cheap grain up from the Sesh River in exchange for the valuable items sold there.
A few more curious devices were unicorn horns, strange tusks of ivory, and strange skins. The local merchants explained these particular goods came from the Ederru people, a tribe that was mostly savage, or so the stories went. More inquiries showed that even these people weren’t the source of the ivory, let alone the horns: these came from trade with even more northerly peoples, on what was supposedly a great Northern Ocean.
In any case, the traders also found the people of the nation of Ferman, a desperately poor group who was sadly lacking in foodstuffs. The leaders had encouraged the pasturing of cattle and like kine, but this was utterly inadequate to support their booming population. Trilui traders introduced grains, which took rapid hold in the local climate; it was reckoned by some sailors that these people would no longer have any demand for grain in but a few years. A more valuable crop were the grapes that provided the Fermani with a great deal of income.
Unfortunately for the Trilui, there was competition in this Kern Sea, as it was called by most. The nation of Jania, an offshoot of the Arkage, had begun to build small trading fleets, which connected them with the Mahid across the Gulf of Weay. These Mahid were themselves in contact with the Nahsjad.
A desert people, the Nahsjad were based entirely on the trade centered around their twin roads of Luska and Ushka. The export of incense and exotic animals to fill the menageries of corpulent despots were the main way they earned the money to buy essentials such as food, and luxuries such as wine. The Jadhai Desert to which they were natives was filled with the sandstone buildings of these people, lying temporarily unoccupied, waiting for the next tribe to move in and make them their homes.
The Opulensi, for their part, were the primary exporters of spices in the known world. Priced extremely highly for their use as preservatives and flavoring, they were in high demand; this native product enabled them to join the trade network of the larger world. This, coupled with an expanding population and efficient farming, enabled the founding of several large states, including most notably Epichirisi and Ormiskos.
Inadvertently, however, the Opulensi began to export something quite apart from material goods.
This was the religion they had picked up from the Arta Xorti. Not formally named at this time, the ancient Meditation cult focused around the achievement of Iehor, or enlightenment. While disorganized and extremely decentralized, it was still finding itself to be extremely popular as one of the first transnational religions in the world.
The Arta Xorti, for their part, had expanded to the nearby islands and even the twin mainlands, founding several minor states, though Baharr was still regarded as the center of the world, and the place where Iehor was most easily achieved.
Meanwhile, the Opulensi found themselves at odds with the far reaching Trilui, and even more bizarrely with the extremely young and tiny trading “power” of Treha, a state which melded some aspects of Trilui, Farou, the Arta Xorti, and the Opulensi themselves. Some said that these rivals could only be countered by the extension of the trading network into the east, where the Opulensi reigned supreme. However, voyages beyond the Kbrilma Sea remained a risky proposition at best, only for the most foolhardy – or, as it happened, those who had achieved Iehor and were ready to die.
To round off the three trading powers, we come to the Hamakua, a strange people with a strange system of government that had three major levels: the national, the civic, and the clan. Each of these was mostly democratic, a rather alien concept to the kings of the north, though somewhat familiar to the Farou (and it would have been so to the Seshweay if they had allowed contact).
The Hamakua found themselves sadly restrained by the lack of good trading prospects in their region: they themselves only had superb timber, which, while important, especially for this sea based region, was not necessarily of extremely high value. Furthermore, there were few nations to the south which had to conduct their trade through them. While rumor spoke of a group of nations to the southwest, by the end of the period, the Hamakua still had not consistently rounded the stormy and challenging waters around Cape Manakea.
In truth, this world is still quite a raw one, unchanged over much the larger portion of its lands by the hand of civilization. While it has seen blood flow unrestrained in many places, most of history has yet to be written.
How shall the world change?
City Map
Economic Map (gold indicates intensive agriculture; brown pastoral societies; gray hunter-gatherers; red are trade routes; commodities are main exports)
Finally, of course, the Political Map
Story Bonuses
At this point, it is difficult to award tangible bonuses. However, nations whose leaders wrote stories did better than they otherwise would have done.
Neverwonagame: Increased territory and rapid union of the twin empires.
Vertinari118: Established the powerful Republic of Asandar.
Ninja_Dude: Created a viable kingdom on the edge of civilization.
OOC:
Let me know if you have questions or concerns.