A Futile Gesture

[Jehoshua]

seconded.

 

[Lord of Elves]

So this is very rough. I am going to go digging around for the original Jason-style map with cities, though if worst comes to worst I will just go through removing the borders and such from the map I used for my last NES which has the cities on it. I'm debating changing up the map we use for the game ... this should just give y'all an idea of how your borders will look.

Spoiler :

 

[Double A]

This is some real approximate crap.

Spoiler :

edit: disregard this probably, had a better idea

 

[Danwar]

Why is there a state in Mexico? I changed my signup already.

 

[Jehoshua]

hmm... Il Papa Imperator should get more of central france and Switzerland methinks. The EU gets a lot with Germany and Poland and has more access to expansion elsewhere.

 

[Ailedhoo]

Taiwan is set for NPC status? I for one would approve.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Why is there a state in Mexico? I changed my signup already.

Yeah u right. I might keep it there tho

 

[Lord of Elves]

EDIT: Double-posting is apparently still a thing

 

[Crezth]

大曛帝國
Empire of the Great Xun
Great Twilight Empire​

"The people are of supreme importance; the altars of the gods of earth and grain come next; last comes the ruler. That is why he who gains the confidence of the multitudinous people will be Emperor... When a feudal lord endangers the altars of the gods of earth and grain, he should be replaced. When the sacrificial animals are sleek, the offerings are clean and the sacrifices are observed at due times, and yet floods and droughts come by the agency of heaven, then the altars should be replaced." - Mencius

Government
Celestial Absolute Monarchy - The Great Xun is ruled by an Emperor called "Huangdi" who claims to be the Blessed Progeny of Heaven. The succession is restrained to members of the Qiu family, rulers of the Xun Dynasty, and allows men and women to inherit property and pass on the name of the imperial house. The Emperor rules with the assistance of a bureaucracy, a system called guanliao zhi, operated by elite counselors, who must pass tests in theology, history, and martial skill to gain office. The counselors help operate the organs of the imperial state, but large portions of the empire are ruled by nobility who pay tax to prefectorial governors who are usually local lords that have been granted a viceroyalty by the emperor. The highest rank of this landed nobility that is not of the Imperial Dynasty is the gōng, equivalent to a medieval European duke. Throughout the realm, most gōng are descended from warrior families that served the Qiu during the era of conquest. Of the gōng, particularly prestigious are the hóu, who were entrusted with border realms and whose freedom to pursue their own policy and build their own armies allows them to handle local threats in an empire the size of the Great Xun.

History
The Empire of the Great Xun originated from the fiefs and properties of a Xibei tribe in Dunhuang called Qiu. It is alleged that, in ancient times, Dunhuang was part of a great empire of all under heaven known as China, and that this empire was destroyed by man's hubris. In the deserts, steppes, and mountains of Hexi, the Qiu made their legacy as a family of warlords, commanding ever-growing armies of mounted warriors that swept over their enemies like a flood. The exact history of the Qiu, for this reason, is unclear; The Annals of Qiu describe an "era of conquest" during which the majority of the Great Xun's realm was acquired. Emphasizing nepotism and installing regional landed governors in conquered realms, the merciless mounted armies of the Qiu established a large steppe empire in three lifetimes, starting with Hua the Conqueror, continuing with Ling the Great, and finishing with Mingyue the Wise.

Hua the Conqueror is so-called for first rallying her army in Dunhuang and conquering first the lands of Yutian and then the Tibetan plateau, defeating the legendary Zhangbo warriors in the Battle of Keshenmier and defeating and killing the King of Yarkand in personal combat. Her system of conquest and her genius for battle allowed her to carve out a kingdom and dispatch her rivals so that by the time she passed away and was succeeded by her second son, Qiu Ling Mao, the realm was already quite secure. Despite some scheming nobility who had served Hua with distinction and sought to usurp the realm after her death, Ling broke their backs through deft political maneuvering and statecraft. Ling formalized the Laws of the Realm that insured appropriate punishments for treasonous scheming as well as instituted the first high offices of state. After ten years on the throne, Ling led armies in further conquests that extended the dominion of the Qiu over Transoxiana. After his death, he was posthumously named Ling the Great.

But it wasn't until the ascension of Qiu Mingyue that the Great Xun was formed. Mingyue was a learned scholar, an avid collector of books and relics from the old times; a hobby that aroused quite a great deal of suspicion among the faithful superstitious. However, her key interest was theology, and she contributed her translations and readings of ancient Chinese and Indian philosophy to a new liturgy; these contributions doused a great deal of criticism that claimed she was delving into occultism, by wisely focusing on practical questions regarding government and society. She expounded a great deal on the works of Han Feizi, Confucius, Mencius, and energized a revival of fa jia philosophy. It was expected that the gōng of the realm read and memorize these works if they were to sit on Mingyue's personal council; those who did were empowered with proselytizing this philosophy as well as the important concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which Mingyue claimed the House of Qiu had a right to.

It was this claim that laid the foundations of the current Xun state. She named her family's dynasty Xun meaning twilight or sunset, as her realm was west of historical China, which clearly was no longer ruled by a mandate of heaven anyway. To support the apparatus of spreading fa jia ideology, she created an administrative cadre of scholar-nobility to spread her teachings as well as operate the levers of state. Thus was the Great Xun established, the Mandate of Heaven claimed, and the apparatus of a new ideological government laid down. She moved her capital to Samarkand, building a mighty palace there that would be the seat of the heavenly government, called Xunjing (曛京; Capital of the Xun).

It has been three generations from Mingyue the Wise, the Yiquan Empress (一權皇帝). In the intervening time, the Great Xun has been occupied with lesser conquests and expeditions, attempting to dominate the Sindh river valley as well as the lands of Delhi in the south, and conquer the Pontic Steppe in the west, stopping at the swamps of Zaphorozhie and the forests of Moscovia (where the Xun's horse armies dare not tread). The Great Xun has also occasionally been occupied with internal rebellions, peasant uprisings, bandit incursions, and rival empires, but has thus far triumphed against all comers.

Now, in the reign of Qiu Yixuan, the Shanzhi Empress (善智皇帝), the Great Xun rules a large steppe empire with a formally established bureaucratic apparatus organized under fa jia philosophy and adapted forms of Chinese folk religion. Although many subjects do not subscribe to this religion, the tenets of fa jia are widespread and understood, and the authority of the Empress brooks little dissent. The descendants of the ruling nobility and their traditions, language, and communities constitute an ethnicity that calls itself Mūse, largely descended from Xibeiren and Sichuanese, and substantially different from the majority of the Empire's subjects. A balancing act between moral purity and pragmatic tolerance defines most of the government's effort to handle local traditions, as above all else, the Great Xun values peace, harmony, and prosperity in the realm. So long as order is kept and trade money flows, all is well.

 

[Nuka-sama]

Core territorries in yellow, stretch in brownish yellow

Stretch colonies

There are those who write, those who fight, those who rule, and those who serve

The Holy Kingdom is a powerful crusader state in Egypt and Jerusalem, with an emphasis on preserving Christian tradition. As the old governments collapsed, the rich turned to the safety that was religion, and many true believers funded powerful mercenary groups to take back the Holy Land.

The Holy Kingdom is ruled by the Pharaoh; a woman, blessedly untouched by the ravages of time and man. In her royal regalia, she reigns supreme over the various knightly orders that are sworn to serve her. Those orders are:

The Knights of Our Lady of Alexandria are primarily concerned with the affairs of the Scholastium. Inside the Great Library of Alexandria, hundreds of scholars are at work, writing down ancient texts, preserving knowledge, and rediscovering the ways of old.

The Holy Order of Saint Barbara are engineers, and their charge is that of preserving the Suez Canal. They have a close relationship with the Knights of Alexandria, but try to stay neutral within the politics of the Kingdom.

The Order of the Blessed Bernardine of Feltre are the bankers and financiers of the Kingdom. (If Constantinople is under my control, they will be headquartered there). They are everyone's friend and have the cash to back it up....so long as you remember to be their friend when they need you to be. Interested in expanding trade routes.

The Knightly Order of Saint George and their sister organization The Knightly Order of Saint Joan, are primarily based out of Jeruselum. They pursue expansionist policies.

The Commerce Guilds are rather powerful when taken together, and control much of the production within the Kingdom. The Order of the Blessed Bernardine is closely connected with the Guild.

We are a Catholic Kingdom

 

[Terran Empress]

More to come

 

[Lord of Elves]

Warfare

From the beginning, we knew that this war would never happen. After the hot war (the violence of conflict), after the cold war (the balance of terror), here comes the dead war – the unfrozen cold war – which leaves us to grapple with the corpse of war and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse which nobody from the Gulf has managed to revive. America, Saddam Hussein, and the Gulf powers are fighting over the corpse of war. - Jean Baudrillard

​

According to legend, before the fall, the armies of the ancient kings fielded horrible war machines and unleashed great iron birds and dragons that breathed fire and dropped eggs of brimstone from the skies. These days are long past. Though the secret of gunpowder has long spread from the associations of wizards and priests that once guarded it, it seems unlikely that any one living will again see the ancients' contraptions on the battlefield. The most powerful weapons fielded by most states are great siege cannons, though the most technologically sophisticated powers equip a few regiments of troops with unwieldy muskets which - according to swordsmen, anyway - are liable to backfire at any moment.

Most armies are levied by kings and emperors who call upon their vassals to supply them with men-at-arms from their townships and fields. These troops are drilled quickly in times of need and do not constitute armies, standing or professional, as much as mobs of peasants thrown against one another from either side of the battlefield by their superiors, who stand behind them ready to cut them down if they run in the wrong direction. Some republican states carry on a tradition of universal military service and have something resembling the standing armies of old, but these are the exception and not the rule. Still more common outside the bounds of settled areas are bands of raiders, often exiles from city-states or outlaws from some fief, though predictably nomadic peoples are scapegoated for the violence of these men and women.

Mercenary companies make up the last category of military institution, and are very common in areas where systems of currency - however tenuous and unregulated - have been established. Though better trained and more disciplined than the levees of state powers, mercenaries are more or less the dregs of society and have only the qualification of being good at killing people; they are seldom well-armed. An exception to this state of affairs are the most powerful mercenary companies which approach the status of guilds, or state institutions unto themselves, so influential are they in realpolitik. The most prolific employers of mercenaries are wizards, who seem to possess a grudging sort of respect for their practice, both groups being specialists of a kind.

 

[Lord of Elves]

The World Today

Spoiler :

​

In my deeply finite wisdom I have decided to make a different aesthetic choice with the map. @Nuka-sama what is your capital? @Terran Empress I will add you once I have more information about your application. @Jehoshua and @Omega124 I hope y'all are more satisfied with the division of land in Europe but we can talk about it.

 

[Bair_the_Normal]

No one in this world would be writing about this yet so take this with a grain of "third person omniscience" as well as a touch of "my capital is in the wrong place so here's something to go with letting you know."

Introducing a Novel Phonological Phenomenon in Tulunic Historical Etymologies​

ABSTRACT
A historic analysis of Tulunic languages reveals a unique phonological phenomenon where etymological metathesis occurs between an assonant intervocalic consonant and one of its adjacent vowels. While length in the standard language is considered phonemic for vowels, this covocalic metathesis does not seem to differentiate based on length variance; however, there is some evidence to suggest that different combinations and orders of vowel length can influence post-metathetic elision. This widespread phonological shift almost always results in the application of synaeresis between the newly adjacent vowels. Usually, this synaeresis manifests in the reduction of the two vowels into the long form of the duplicate phoneme. Covocalic metathesis does not seem to appear in diphthong-consonant-diphthong triads. Exceptions to the long-form reduction rule, as well as alternate metathetic behavior in non-standard dialects and sociolects are also discussed.

In other news, my capital is here:

Spoiler Capital :

 

[Jehoshua]

@Lord of Elves - looking better. Although if possible adding in the Maghreb coastal strip would be ideal as compensation for not getting a swathe of my claim [and to balance out the bulk of the EU]. The matter being of course up to your discretion.

 

[Lord of Elves]

@Lord of Elves - looking better. Although if possible adding in the Maghreb coastal strip would be ideal as compensation for not getting a swathe of my claim [and to balance out the bulk of the EU]. The matter being of course up to your discretion.

Yeah that's chill. So you know, the reason I worked the borders between you and Omega the way that I did is because I picture central France and the Rhineland as having a stronger tie to contemporary European Union economic/industrial centers than they do to the Vatican regardless of their religiosity. The regions under your control - to the exception of Marseilles, Lisbon and Barcelona which I picture as having some autonomy and being dens of sin because of it - are populated by good Catholics by and large and have been loyal to the Vatican for centuries now.

@Bair_the_Normal I'll be sure to fix your capital on the next map smh

HEY, if anyone is reading this and hasn't posted anything yet I want to say for the record that the most powerful and centralized states probably exist in Africa where the collapse of first world nations' economies was basically a good thing. These regions may even be industrializing!

 

[Double A]

why won't you answer me on discord you punk

 

[Lord of Elves]

why won't you answer me on discord you punk

I don't have discord open right now and I'm in geology lecture smh. For some reason CFC is incredibly slow for me and I'm not sure if it's just this old laptop or the site or what. I'll go load it up but I may not be able to talk for too long depending on when class ends and what's going on in my next class. Which will probably be nothing lol but we'll see

 

[Nuka-sama]

@Lord of Elves Alexandria

 

[Lord of Elves]

Spoiler :

Alright. So I've taken the liberty of adding some NPCs. These include the Kingdom of Chicago, the Gaelic Federation, the Republic of England (capital at Manchester), the Kingdom of England (capital at London), the Republic of Wales and the Republic of Cornwall, the Sultanate of Morocco and the Kingdom of Libya, which @Jehoshua will be glad to know is a client state of his for the moment.

 

[Double A]

I don't have discord open right now

Well, considering I messaged you on the 17th and 24th, it kinda sounds like this is true always.