Grandkhan
Telvanni Master Wizard
SKNES IV: Came in like a snekking ball
pre-snekIOT
- Thread starter SouthernKing
- Start date
Zappericus
Euro scumbag
SKNES IV: Not a single snek given
Seon
Not An Evil Liar
SKNES sneks in the grass
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
SKNES: SNEKS huehuehue
Shadowbound
Incorrugible
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2007
- Messages
- 4,079
1. Persia
2. Italy
3. Myanmar
SKNES IV: The Mirror of Princes
Thematically, begin every update with a short excerpt of a fictional in-setting work about what to do, or not to do, as a prince, relating to the conduct of players in the update.
2. Italy
3. Myanmar
SKNES IV: The Mirror of Princes
Thematically, begin every update with a short excerpt of a fictional in-setting work about what to do, or not to do, as a prince, relating to the conduct of players in the update.
thomas.berubeg
Wandering the World
I like this.
SouthernKing
crickety cricket
I think that's a great idea and I might use it
Immaculate
unerring
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2003
- Messages
- 7,623
So is it fair to assume that the following nations have been assigned?
Scotland: Bair the Normal
Bulgaria: Tolni
Albion: Thomas.Berubeg
???: Reus
???: EQandCivFanatic
Scotland: Bair the Normal
Bulgaria: Tolni
Albion: Thomas.Berubeg
???: Reus
???: EQandCivFanatic
thomas.berubeg
Wandering the World
Is it safe to assume that Albionese is pretty much OTL English?
SouthernKing
crickety cricket
Yeah, it is.
Pretty much. Maybe a little more French/-influenced.
christos200
Never tell me the odds
What nations have been assigned so far?
thomas.berubeg
Wandering the World
And Mexico is albionese?
SouthernKing
crickety cricket
Just those; I don't want to assign others until I have backgrounds posted
Yes
Robert Can't
Éponine
1 Brittany
2 Pamplona
3 Armenia
4 Anatolia
2 Pamplona
3 Armenia
4 Anatolia
SouthernKing
crickety cricket
So I promised to post something "tomorrow" 2 days ago. Except I actually meant tomorrow from somewhere where it was already the 3rd, so I'd be able to post it on the 4th here! Something like that 
Anyway:
South Asia!
A succession of strong Hindu dynasties - the Tomaras and Palas amongst them - in the Gangetic plain had been able to lock Islam out of the majority of the India subcontinent for centuries. With a few minor exceptions, Islam did not progress much further than the Indus Valley, ruled from the stronghold of Multan. (In the 11th century, this region became the frontier of the Kara-Khanid realm, during whose rule a number of Turkic tribes were settled in the region; they mingled with the locals the Punjab is still largely populated by their descendants today.)
The rise of one Paxto tribe in the early 16th century changed all this. Formerly, the Abdali had been little more than a local power serving whichever Persian dynasty was able to extend influence into Afghanistan. However, during a brief Persian interregnum in the 1500s and 1510s, a Abdali chief named Ali Nadim took advantage of the power vacuum to attempt to stake a claim for independence. Unfortunately for him, as soon as the Persians recovered, they struck back and defeated Ali Nadim, taking his lands. Defeated but not destroyed, Ali Nadim's army fled southeast into India - conquering a large part of the north before his death in 1540, and thus founding the Abdalid Empire. Ali Nadim's son, Shahriyar, continued to expand the empire, aggressively expanding into South India and integrating Karnataka and Andhra into the centralised imperial bureaucracy; he even appointed Hindus to posts in Hindu-majority areas, and so forth. In addition, he transformed the crumbling ancient capital of Lal Kot - also known as Delhi - into a magnificent city, Jahanpanah, "refuge of the world," worthy of being the capital of one of the largest and wealthiest empires India had ever seen.
The ensuing golden age of culture did not last, as dynastic infighting and the empire's overextension started to make itself apparent, and after 1650 followed a half-century of general decline interspersed with not infrequent periods of civil war. By the start of the 18th century, an empire that had stretched from Bactria to Bengal and Kerala had been reduced to just Northwest India. However, this may not be terminal. The empire is now back on its feet under the steady rule of a new and able shahenshah, who has been able to breathe into it new life, reforming the corrupt old bureaucracy and rebuilding what has been lost. Perhaps an Abdalid renaissance is even in the cards.
In 1677, the Abdalid governor of Patna declared his independence from Jahanpanah. This moment is considered to be the birth of the modern state of Bihar. In 1681, after his death, the leadership of the country fell to his prime minister - a Theravada Buddhist, following in an intellectual Buddhist revival which had been ongoing in India through the Abdalid period, centred around the ancient university of Nalanda (which, conveniently enough, lies within Bihar's borders). Consolidating centralised rule over both Bihar and Bengal, the state is perhaps the Abdalids' main rival. Bihar today is clearly a rising power, undergoing a period of economic growth, coupled with rapid expansion of its major cities and drastic improvements in agriculture which have since started to spread through the rest of the subcontinent.
Nepal never quite came under Abdalid rule, but under a revitalised Malla dynasty who has also been able to centralise its realm, she has still taken advantage of the post-Abdalid lull in its corner of the world to expand slightly outwards. The kingdom is prosperous and peaceful today, even if it is starting to fall under increasing Bihari influence.
The Naga Kingdom is a result of Naga hill tribes migrating into the Assamese lowlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. At first, they found employment as soldiers serving local nobles; but as more followed them, the Nagas quickly grew in power, even carving out fiefs for themselves. In around 1670, the of lord of Guwahati was assassinated by his own Naga guards, who quickly took power, and together with other Nagas in the region, painstakingly carved out a fragile confederation. By all rights, it should be insignificant, but, located in a corner of the subcontinent few have reason to go to, lurid tales escape from the kingdom of human sacrifices to snakes, vivid snake-venom-induced forced vision quests as punishment, snakeskin farms, and other horrors. No one is quite sure how much truth there is here.
Central India fell into a vacuum after Abdalid rule in the region collapsed in the 1680s, with power splintering into the hands a scattered collection of petty states and tribal leaders, with surrounding states peering in. This changed in the 1690s, when one Shanti Devi, a Gondi tribal chieftess from near Raipur, abruptly came out of seemingly nowhere with military genius and a massive army, quickly subjugating most of the surrounding region. This was the birth of Gondwana, whose warrior-queen turned out to be a capable administrator as well, keeping the state well glued-together even a generation later. However, even with her abilities, compared to its neighbours, backwards and poor, and even Shanti Devi is shy about attempting to antagonise her more powerful Bihari and Asmaki neighbours, or the Maghrebis in the coast of Kalinga.
Khandesh is yet another Abdalid governorate which broke away in the 1680s. However, unlike Bihar or Karnataka, Khandesh could never truly pull itself together, as within a decade the realm was split by dynastic infighting and peasant unrest, some driven by "purist" Bhakti sects hostile to outsiders. It did not help that in 1699, an Egyptian fleet arrived and seized the port of Surat, thus breaking Khandesh's economic line to the sea. In the wake of these disasters, Khandesh began courting Albionese assistance in order to, and perhaps in hope of reclaiming Surat for itself.
Bhingar in turn broke away from Khandesh in 1701 during a sequence of wars, after a local strongman seized control of the eponymous fortress-city and carved out a kingdom for himself. But this raja soon found that he was faced with a resurgent Abdalids from the north and the monstrous Asmakis to the east. Left with little other choice, Bhingar has turned to neighbouring Karnataka for help, with this assistance has fallen under increasing Kannada influence.
One of the great social undercurrents of South India in the last century has been the rise to power of the Hindu Bhakti movement, focusing on the devotion of individual deities. This became popular perhaps in reaction to abortive attempts to spread Islam this far south in India. In the 1650s, a popular mystic and self-proclaimed guru and the leader of one Bhakti, Shaivist sect, with significant support from the military and local peasantry, seized power and declared that he would run his state in the name of Shiva. In an effort to further show their devotion to the world, he declared himself ruler of the name of an ancient mythological kingdom, Asmaka. This kingdom is a de facto theocracy which has since become a feared military power, expanding q. Asmaka, unlike most of famously pluralistic India, has become increasingly insular and orthodox in recent years, driving the Jain intellectuals and poets out of the court, and executing foreign Christian and Muslim missionaries. Paranoia runs deep through courts the rest of the subcontinent of Asmaki agents slitting throats in the night.
The Kannada city of Dharwad was little more than a dusty roadside rest stop known for its sweetmaking tradition and little else. That is, until Shahriyar established the Abdalid regional governorship there. By the 1650s, it had become a thriving city of half a million. In 1652, the regional governor exited the Empire to become the centre of the newly independent state of Karnataka. Karnataka has prospered since independence. Even with the looming threat of Asmaka nearby, Karnataka has become an economic power, thanks to its thriving and cosmopolitan trade port of Mangaluru, and Karnataka's people have started adopting many of the same agricultural advances seen in Bihar.
The Thanjavur Confederacy is a grouping of a number of Tamil petty kingdoms - including Madurai, Mayilappur, Kanchi, and the ancient capital of Thanjavur - which never truly came under Abdalid rule. The current state evolved in the 17th century as these kings sought combined protection against the Abdalids; at first they had turned to Europeans, but once Leon collapsed, that option was no longer available. The Tamil cities have benefited quite nicely from trade, becoming very cosmopolitan and pluralistic in the process, but they are still wary of being targets for inland powers or for outsiders who would very much like Indian ports.
The Leonese were the first westerners to arrive in India; the Albionese took over for them several decades after Leon collapsed. The Francians used the chaos afte to establish their control over much of Kerala, becoming the base of their attempts to trade in Asia. Scandinavia, too, has tried to enter India, simultaneously establishing control of several coastal towns in Gujarat. Several other countries had attempted to establish. The Egyptians (in Surat) and Maghribis (in Katak) have since joined them.
I'll do SE Asia next since that's a logical next step.
Anyway:
South Asia!
A succession of strong Hindu dynasties - the Tomaras and Palas amongst them - in the Gangetic plain had been able to lock Islam out of the majority of the India subcontinent for centuries. With a few minor exceptions, Islam did not progress much further than the Indus Valley, ruled from the stronghold of Multan. (In the 11th century, this region became the frontier of the Kara-Khanid realm, during whose rule a number of Turkic tribes were settled in the region; they mingled with the locals the Punjab is still largely populated by their descendants today.)
The rise of one Paxto tribe in the early 16th century changed all this. Formerly, the Abdali had been little more than a local power serving whichever Persian dynasty was able to extend influence into Afghanistan. However, during a brief Persian interregnum in the 1500s and 1510s, a Abdali chief named Ali Nadim took advantage of the power vacuum to attempt to stake a claim for independence. Unfortunately for him, as soon as the Persians recovered, they struck back and defeated Ali Nadim, taking his lands. Defeated but not destroyed, Ali Nadim's army fled southeast into India - conquering a large part of the north before his death in 1540, and thus founding the Abdalid Empire. Ali Nadim's son, Shahriyar, continued to expand the empire, aggressively expanding into South India and integrating Karnataka and Andhra into the centralised imperial bureaucracy; he even appointed Hindus to posts in Hindu-majority areas, and so forth. In addition, he transformed the crumbling ancient capital of Lal Kot - also known as Delhi - into a magnificent city, Jahanpanah, "refuge of the world," worthy of being the capital of one of the largest and wealthiest empires India had ever seen.
The ensuing golden age of culture did not last, as dynastic infighting and the empire's overextension started to make itself apparent, and after 1650 followed a half-century of general decline interspersed with not infrequent periods of civil war. By the start of the 18th century, an empire that had stretched from Bactria to Bengal and Kerala had been reduced to just Northwest India. However, this may not be terminal. The empire is now back on its feet under the steady rule of a new and able shahenshah, who has been able to breathe into it new life, reforming the corrupt old bureaucracy and rebuilding what has been lost. Perhaps an Abdalid renaissance is even in the cards.
In 1677, the Abdalid governor of Patna declared his independence from Jahanpanah. This moment is considered to be the birth of the modern state of Bihar. In 1681, after his death, the leadership of the country fell to his prime minister - a Theravada Buddhist, following in an intellectual Buddhist revival which had been ongoing in India through the Abdalid period, centred around the ancient university of Nalanda (which, conveniently enough, lies within Bihar's borders). Consolidating centralised rule over both Bihar and Bengal, the state is perhaps the Abdalids' main rival. Bihar today is clearly a rising power, undergoing a period of economic growth, coupled with rapid expansion of its major cities and drastic improvements in agriculture which have since started to spread through the rest of the subcontinent.
Nepal never quite came under Abdalid rule, but under a revitalised Malla dynasty who has also been able to centralise its realm, she has still taken advantage of the post-Abdalid lull in its corner of the world to expand slightly outwards. The kingdom is prosperous and peaceful today, even if it is starting to fall under increasing Bihari influence.
The Naga Kingdom is a result of Naga hill tribes migrating into the Assamese lowlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. At first, they found employment as soldiers serving local nobles; but as more followed them, the Nagas quickly grew in power, even carving out fiefs for themselves. In around 1670, the of lord of Guwahati was assassinated by his own Naga guards, who quickly took power, and together with other Nagas in the region, painstakingly carved out a fragile confederation. By all rights, it should be insignificant, but, located in a corner of the subcontinent few have reason to go to, lurid tales escape from the kingdom of human sacrifices to snakes, vivid snake-venom-induced forced vision quests as punishment, snakeskin farms, and other horrors. No one is quite sure how much truth there is here.
Central India fell into a vacuum after Abdalid rule in the region collapsed in the 1680s, with power splintering into the hands a scattered collection of petty states and tribal leaders, with surrounding states peering in. This changed in the 1690s, when one Shanti Devi, a Gondi tribal chieftess from near Raipur, abruptly came out of seemingly nowhere with military genius and a massive army, quickly subjugating most of the surrounding region. This was the birth of Gondwana, whose warrior-queen turned out to be a capable administrator as well, keeping the state well glued-together even a generation later. However, even with her abilities, compared to its neighbours, backwards and poor, and even Shanti Devi is shy about attempting to antagonise her more powerful Bihari and Asmaki neighbours, or the Maghrebis in the coast of Kalinga.
Khandesh is yet another Abdalid governorate which broke away in the 1680s. However, unlike Bihar or Karnataka, Khandesh could never truly pull itself together, as within a decade the realm was split by dynastic infighting and peasant unrest, some driven by "purist" Bhakti sects hostile to outsiders. It did not help that in 1699, an Egyptian fleet arrived and seized the port of Surat, thus breaking Khandesh's economic line to the sea. In the wake of these disasters, Khandesh began courting Albionese assistance in order to, and perhaps in hope of reclaiming Surat for itself.
Bhingar in turn broke away from Khandesh in 1701 during a sequence of wars, after a local strongman seized control of the eponymous fortress-city and carved out a kingdom for himself. But this raja soon found that he was faced with a resurgent Abdalids from the north and the monstrous Asmakis to the east. Left with little other choice, Bhingar has turned to neighbouring Karnataka for help, with this assistance has fallen under increasing Kannada influence.
One of the great social undercurrents of South India in the last century has been the rise to power of the Hindu Bhakti movement, focusing on the devotion of individual deities. This became popular perhaps in reaction to abortive attempts to spread Islam this far south in India. In the 1650s, a popular mystic and self-proclaimed guru and the leader of one Bhakti, Shaivist sect, with significant support from the military and local peasantry, seized power and declared that he would run his state in the name of Shiva. In an effort to further show their devotion to the world, he declared himself ruler of the name of an ancient mythological kingdom, Asmaka. This kingdom is a de facto theocracy which has since become a feared military power, expanding q. Asmaka, unlike most of famously pluralistic India, has become increasingly insular and orthodox in recent years, driving the Jain intellectuals and poets out of the court, and executing foreign Christian and Muslim missionaries. Paranoia runs deep through courts the rest of the subcontinent of Asmaki agents slitting throats in the night.
The Kannada city of Dharwad was little more than a dusty roadside rest stop known for its sweetmaking tradition and little else. That is, until Shahriyar established the Abdalid regional governorship there. By the 1650s, it had become a thriving city of half a million. In 1652, the regional governor exited the Empire to become the centre of the newly independent state of Karnataka. Karnataka has prospered since independence. Even with the looming threat of Asmaka nearby, Karnataka has become an economic power, thanks to its thriving and cosmopolitan trade port of Mangaluru, and Karnataka's people have started adopting many of the same agricultural advances seen in Bihar.
The Thanjavur Confederacy is a grouping of a number of Tamil petty kingdoms - including Madurai, Mayilappur, Kanchi, and the ancient capital of Thanjavur - which never truly came under Abdalid rule. The current state evolved in the 17th century as these kings sought combined protection against the Abdalids; at first they had turned to Europeans, but once Leon collapsed, that option was no longer available. The Tamil cities have benefited quite nicely from trade, becoming very cosmopolitan and pluralistic in the process, but they are still wary of being targets for inland powers or for outsiders who would very much like Indian ports.
The Leonese were the first westerners to arrive in India; the Albionese took over for them several decades after Leon collapsed. The Francians used the chaos afte to establish their control over much of Kerala, becoming the base of their attempts to trade in Asia. Scandinavia, too, has tried to enter India, simultaneously establishing control of several coastal towns in Gujarat. Several other countries had attempted to establish. The Egyptians (in Surat) and Maghribis (in Katak) have since joined them.
I'll do SE Asia next since that's a logical next step.
Traveller76
Prince
All I can say is wow SK.
Omega124
Challenging Fate
Francia
Albion
Don't care after that
Albion
Don't care after that
