The Tarluskani Empire

Half a century after the Scorching, a man named Isram united the Tarluskani tribes dwelling in the desert north of the Khanates. He named himself Warlord Isram and directed his horde southward, conquering the city-states and enslaving the populace.

After the Khanite subjugation, Isram transitioned to Reyja, declaring her rule the first of the Tarluskani Empire. She gave the tribes of her most trusted supporters command over a city each before marching her forces south through Saharjin to invade Deliverance. She perished in the siege of Avondown, Deliverance’s final stronghold, and her wife’s ward, Arbab, took command of the Empire. They renamed Avondown ‘Reyjadin’ in Reyja’s honor and distributed command of the newly-conquered provinces over to their most trusted generals before returning to the Empire’s capital, Tarlusya.

The Empire resembles a constellation of loosely-aligned districts, each governed by a single tribe. While all pay fealty to Emperor Rajj, the tribes frequently squabble with each other when unsupervised. Each tribe has a specific glyph marking their flags, armor, and official seals.

A Tarluskani’s tribal heritage is central to their identity. It determines their allies, their enemies, and their sacred stories. Acting honorably is crucial; their behavior reflects on how others will view their tribe. Disputing a Tarluskani’s honor can only be resolved with a swift apology or a duel to the death. Disrespecting an entire tribe usually leads to a far more unpleasant fate.

While most in Deliverance avoided slavery, almost all in the former Khanite city-states are still enslaved. Non-ethnic Tarluskani, both slaves and freefolk, can join a tribe through a decade of military service to the Empire.

The Islands of Korg

The islands of Korg stand between the Sea of Shadows and the wide ocean beyond. When the Tarluskani invaded the Azure Sultanate, the surviving Khanite bureaucrats and merchants fled to Korg. There, they established an independent principality, sustained through piracy. These immigrants became the Pirate Sovereigns of Tal Afar. While they initially preyed only on Tarluskani vessels, their principles have eroded with time.

          The Pirate Sovereigns keep to themselves, playing intrigues against one another and plotting the next big adventure, leaving the ordinary folks in Korg free to do whatever they please. Consequently, no one in Korg cares what or how someone fucks, provided they do not make a mess. As emotional attachments provide an obvious vulnerability, those in committed relationships (queer or otherwise) work to keep them quiet.

          As the center for piracy, Korg caters to a rough crowd. While many children are born in Korg, few survive to adulthood. Those that do were often nourished on the tall and not-so-tall tales traded among the more seasoned pirates.

The Khanates

As a reference for my players, I'm posting publicly some general overview information about each of the large regions they currently know about.

North of Saharjin, but south of the northern desert lies a constellation of city-states known as the Khanates. While currently the seat of the Tarluskani Empire, before the Scorching these cities were part of the Azure Sultanate. A Khan ruled each city-state, advised by an army of ministers. Constantly feuding, each city vied for influence with both the Azure Sultan and the mystic Threnna peoples from Saharjin. The Tarluskani took advantage of the Scorching’s devastation and quickly overran the city-states, enslaving all their citizens.

All Khanites are branded, usually on their forehead or cheek. Slaves have three choices: toil in slavery until death, enlist in the Tarluskani military to be freed after ten years, or escape and flee slave-catchers forever. Escaped or freed slaves often hide their tattoo with scarring or a new tattoo.

Most Khanites have adopted the customs and dress of the Tarluskani and study the Myths of Fiája. Consequently, little remains of the culture of the Azure Sultanate. Some activists work to revive the practices of the Azure Sultanate, but the Tarluskani government takes a dim view of such efforts.

Nationalism

What does it mean to model nationalism in an RPG context? Certainly this idea goes far beyond anything Gygax or Wizards considered, and a search for D&D and nationalism does not bring you anywhere you want to go.

If I am considering modeling a new concept in my game (i.e. not an extension of something already present but a wholly new idea), if needs to fulfill a couple of basic criteria.

1). It makes the game more engrossing/enriches my world.

2). It does not infringe on anything I already have in place

3). I can expand upon it later.

2 and 3 are solved by default here. 1 is the tricky one. This thought process stems from a comment I left on Alexis' blog about the bard. In it, I commented that rather than create a bunch of bard-specific rules, the bard's abilities let them affect culture and politics, so we need rules about culture and politics (in this case, nationalism is the starting example).

Now, I will be the first to admit that nationalism is a problematic word to apply to the middle ages, really to any European-based civilization until the 19th century. However, the same kinds of identification that occurs in nationalism does appear in different time periods - it'd be religious fervor, devotion to the feudal lord, commitment to the city-state, etc. So, really what this rule needs to represent is the degree to which the populace is strongly attached to whatever thing they hold onto.

Necessarily, this comes in two forms: cultural and personal. Personal is easy - an individual's feelings about the subject of devotion. Cultural represents the degree to which "nationalism" is baked into the customs and behaviors constructed by that culture - it sets the baseline for all of the culture's members, from which their personal values will deviate.

OK, great. But how do we apply that in practice?

Nationalism extends through its display of power - a force that can visibly accomplish things is more valuable/believable than one that can't (or is not seen as effective). So, our model of nationalism is also a model of state power distributed geographically. State power will be concentrated in capitals and around national symbols (sites that display the power of the state or commemorate previous actions (successfully) taken by the state). [I think we can already see the role of a bard in this construct] and radiate outward, losing strength with each iteration (and losing additional strength when applying to a population somehow removed from that of the governing body, racially, religiously, or so on).

Of course, state power is opposed by other cultural myths, concretized in resistance symbols - sites where other narratives hold sway and act against the state narrative.

The next question is to determine how distance affects nationalism. Each site (whether pro-state or anti-state) has a fairly limited geographic spread - affecting only the community that interacts with it on a fairly regular basis. In my 20-mi map, that means a site directly influences its hex and the neighboring ones.

Ideas of nationalism are most important in urban and suburban populations - rural folks are unlikely to harbor strong opinions on the issue because it simply doesn't affect them (they'll be farming no matter who's in charge) - and it makes some sense that nationalism and similar ideas travel along economic routes (as the symbols of nationalism will travel along these pathways as well).

So, we could think of nationalism as an economic good (governed by the trade system) but produced at a variety of locations (not just markets). A reference of nationalism exists wherever:

1): some monument to the state exists (palaces, fortresses, etc.)

2): the state triumphed in a (major) conflict (The Alamo)

a) either within the past 100 years or

b) one of those wars that will go down in the history books (War of the Ring, 30 Years Wars, etc.)

A reference of counternationalism exists wherever:

1): a monument to state excess, corruption, or violence exists (The Alamo)

2): the resistance thwarted outright or delayed state victory, subject to the same constraints as before

Now, 1) and 2) could be conflated into the same place. Each such location contributes either 1 nationalism or 1 counternationalism.

However, the ethnicity and faith of the dominant population affects the value of this reference. If ideology in question does not directly affect the ethnic/religious majority, the reference's value is 1. If it interacts in a positive way, the value increases by 1/3 per relevant factor. If it interacts negatively, the value is halved for each relevant factor. So, the Tarluskani Empire invaded the Southern Kingdoms and outlawed their religion. A site supporting the Tarluskani Empire in the Southern Kingdoms would only provide a nationalism reference of 1/2/2=.25. A resistance site, however, would have a nationalism reference of 1*4/3*4/3=16/9=1.7778.

The ratio of nationalism to counternationalism determines the general attitude of people in the city of interest towards the idea of nationalism/counternationalism. Clearly, if the ratio is some number greater than 1, nationalism rules and if it is close to 0, counternationalism rules (and a value of roughly 1 indicates ambivalence). Pulling some numbers out of a hat:

Nationalistic	Ambivalent	Counternationalistic
Ratio>1.5	1.49>ratio>.51	.5>ratio

Bards, interacting with this system, can increase the references produced by a location by calling popular attention to the site and the nationalist (or counternationalist) monuments/victories there. They could decrease the references produced by spreading a counternarrative discrediting the official (or resistance) story surrounding the site.

Thoughts?

The Brass Orchids

I'm taking a brief break from my Bard series to write about one of the factions in my world.  It's the least 'traditional' of all the factions, and it's been tricky to wrap my head around them.

First, some background information.  Before the Tarluskani invaded and founded the Tarluskani Empire, the Confederacy was home to 30 feuding city-states.  The region was resource-abundance and the wars were petty affairs, so life in the cities was very stable.  Because of the stability and prosperity of the area, urban folks had the time and resources to support the arts - architecture, ceramics, cooking, drawing, literature, music, performing arts, sculpture, and swordplay, and artists would often compete to bring pride to their home city-state.

When the Tarluskani invaded, they banned representational art and enslaved the entire population.  However, the artistic class still existed, just driven underground.  Using their art to embolden the spirit of the enslaved Confederates and strike back against their Tarluskani oppressors, the Brass Orchids (name stolen from Delaney's Dhalgren) were founded as an artistic resistance movement, creating massive murals overnight and sneaking instruments and figurines into slave pens all over the Confederacy.  Just creating art would not be enough, they knew, and so the duelists became assassins, striking down Tarluskani who abused their slaves and high-ranking military targets.

The faction is essentially a decentralized terrorist organization that sees itself as the defenders of an indigenous way of life uprooted by the Tarluskani some 80 years ago.  The bulk of the enslaved populace have acclimated to their slavery and while some see the Brass Orchids as young firebrands who mean well but only bring trouble down upon the very people they claim to protect, most see them as a threat more dangerous than their predictable Tarluskani masters.  More than anything else, the Brass Orchids are an ideology to which any can claim adherence.

They have vibes of the student's rebellion as expressed in Les Miserables with tinges of Modernist art - in other words, they are an organization entirely at odds with the early-Renaissance aesthetic of the rest of my world (along with the other terrorist organization, the Avondown Associates).  However, despite the anachronism, it is important to keep them.

The Avondown Associates are a group of Southerners, mostly former thieves, who are attempting to oust the Tarluskani from their city, now renamed Reyjadin.  When I first introduced my players to the world of Prodigy, I gave my party good reason to join them.  The slow realization that the party had aided and abetted racially-motivated terrorism (since the Southerners and Tarluskani are different ethnicities) made them incredibly uncomfortable, and it is important that my world be able to put players into that kind of position and force them to grapple with this issue, especially today, when terrorism has become a part of the Western consciousness.

Alexis recently wrote about the Senegalese slave trade and addressed placing the cruel realities often found in the real world within the game one.  I agree with him.  One of the central themes of the world of Prodigy is cultural intersection, which happens both positively and negatively.  It presents (and creates) gross injustices that a civic-minded party has to grapple with, and I've tried to give every culture, every faction, both a positive and a negative aspect.  The Brass Orchids are freedom fighters seeking a better world for the Confederates and are the only 'organization' in the world of Prodigy that sees art as more than mere entertainment (and would be able to take advantage of the work on bards I'm doing right now).  They can also be cruel and callous killers, willing to let the repercussions of their actions fall upon their people for the 'greater good'.  The party gets to decide whether the one balances the other, or not.

Guilds

For those of you who don't know, the time period referred to as 'medieval' stretches a rather huge swathe of time, beginning in the 5th century and ending in the 15th (thanks, Wikipedia!).  Lasting over a thousand years means that there are some rather significant differences between the early Middle Ages and the late Middle Ages in both technology and infrastructure.  For example, the Catholic Church did not dominate all of Europe until after Charlemagne's campaigns united Europe in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, and Luther's 99 Theses were nailed to the church door in the early 1500s.

On an economic level, over the Middle Ages, we see the rise of the guild system, which is essentially the beginning of the idea of a middle class.  In pure feudalism, there are two classes of people - the leader/protector class and the peasant/serf class.  As feudalism developed, the tiers expanded: the leader tier gained additional lower-status ranks (King to Duke to Marquess to Earl to Viscount to Baron in the English system), while the peasant group grew upwardly with the rise of towns and the increasing need for dedicated craftspeople.

The urban framework was one of the most important developments of this period (as opposed to the castle-town system wherein a central point of defense was surrounded by a few necessary industries (metalworkers, etc.) and enough fields to support the community), and I'm defining it as a densely populated geographical location where the primary occupation of the majority of its denizens is not agriculture in some form or another - that is, townspeople make their living through activities other than farming/food production.  Usually, this alternative occupation was a craft or trade of some kind where the individual bartered their particular skillset for coin (and then for food) - joiners built furniture, coopers barrels, masons foundations, etc.  Obviously, furniture, barrels, and foundations were made long before these dedicated craftspeople came along - most folks had enough know-how to cobble together what they needed.  What these artisans offered was an easier and (theoretically) higher-quality product allowing these noncrafters more time to devote to their primary trade.  We see the ramifications of this today when most of us have trouble repairing the utilities that enable our way of living (fixing a microwave oven, toilet, etc.) without calling an 'expert'.  The trades of plumber, electrician, and so on are the descendants of this artisan tradition.  Cooking is the most recent trade to be appropriated by craftspeople - many people still know how to cook, but that number is decreasing.

Returning to the Middle Ages, these artisans formed organizations to fix prices, control the market, and disadvantage competing groups (a fusion of union and CEO).  Due to this, guilds gained rather considerable economic power very quickly, enough to influence the rising judicial system to pass laws favorable to the guilds (such as laws requiring a guild license in order to practice the guild trade).  Guilds created monopolies on most trade goods and eventually gained enough power to upset the feudal system and take over political, economic, and social control of European society (extending from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and into today).

The foundations of this guild takeover were laid during the Middle Ages with the rise of urban centers.  So, guilds deserve a rather important place in any historically-influenced fantasy setting referring to this time period.  Any cities existing outside the normative feudal framework were probably founded by wealthy guilds seeking a place to ply their trades without paying the hefty taxes levied by their noble overlords.  Within an urban center, guilds have as much or more influence as the local noble.

As the number of guilds grows in your setting and guilds splinter into more specialized organizations, friction will develop between groups as they compete for resources and markets - a brewer knows enough to make a passable wine, potentially undercutting the Vintner's Guild set price, which would destabilize the Vintner's Guild and garner power for the Brewer's Guild.  If the Vintner's Guild discovered what was happening, they might expand into the brewing of ales and beers or (more likely) hire some bruisers to smash up the guilty brewer's brewery.  The Brewer's Guild would retaliate, and all of a sudden we've a city-wide conflict between two wealthy, powerful groups each looking to hire men and women with a penchant for violence.  Starting to see why guilds are a useful component for your world?

The purpose of this post, however, was to look at how we might use combine guilds with Alexis' economic system.  As I understand it, Alexis' encyclopedic approach gives him references for goods, both raw and manufactured.  Since I don't have such a phenomenal resource for my made-up world, I need to improvise.  I have 2 choices: make it up - create a list of all the goods I wish to be available and then arbitrarily decide how many references each location has - or use these guilds - decide, based upon resource availability and synergy which guilds are in ascendance in each of my major population centers using my 0-3 scale for raw resource production, and use that as my reference or each affiliated trade good.

In case you hadn't guessed it, I'm going to go for the second approach.  This means that I need a list of guilds wherein each guild is broad enough to encompass the wide range of goods necessary for me to run my game yet specific enough that by choosing my guilds carefully I can start to give each city a unique flavor (having a metalsmithing guild, woodcrafting guild, stoneworking guild, and randomcrap guild would not be discerning enough, but having a tinsmith, coppersmith, zincsmith, bronzesmith, coppersmith, ironsmith, steelsmith, goldsmith, silversmith, pewtersmith, etc. is too specific).  I have my list and am in the process of implementing it.  We'll see how it works.

Prodigy Cultures

So, after choosing their race and rolling their aptitudes (essentially ability scores), my players look at the following table:

Human
Areinian	You are from the home of freedom and free enterprise.	Notches in Coercion, Elocution
Confederate	You were a Tarluskani slave.	Notches in Fortitude, Resilience
Korg	The sea is in your veins – you grew up in the lawless pirate capitol.	Notches in any Fighting Style, Sailing
Southerner	Hard work is no stranger to you.	Notches in Fortitude, Piety
Tarluskani	You are descended from the nomads of the Forbidding Waste.	Notches in one Tarluskani Fighting Style, Gymnastics
Archivist Trikosmos
Laborer	You were born to grow and nurture other beings.	Notches in Alchemy, Beastspeeech
Maker	Craftsmanship is your heritage.	Notches in Alchemy, Device Lore,
Thinker	Abstract thinking comes as easily as breathing.	Notches in Academics, Elocution
Bairnedred
Troubadour	You were a member of a traveling troupe of entertainers.	Notches in Gymnastics, Legerdemain
Nithya	You are a member of the friendlier Nithya tribe	Notches in two of: a Bairnedred Fighting Style, Beastspeech, Hunting, Alchemy, Sorcery
Equimeni	You spent your childhood in the Wildlands with your tribe.	Notches in one Equimeni Fighting Style, Stealth

Currently, these cultures are grouped by race, but as I look at how the different groups have meshed together (Yrsh, for example, is a swamp populated by humans, Bairnedred, and Equimeni, but I don't have a write-up for that culture/region yet) I'll retabulate all of this in a more neutral format.

As you can see, we have a name for each distinct culture, a snippet describing the culture, and then the practical benefits of hailing from that culture.  I make a note in the actual book that a character doesn't have to choose one of the cultures affiliated with their race - the race descriptor merely lists the dominant race in the culture - so a human baby adopted by the Bairnedred would probably choose either the Troubadour or Nithya culture.

In Prodigy, characters gain skill training from their culture - most Confederates, as Tarluskani slaves, are resistant to physical and mental abuse, so they are better at Fortitude and Resilience tasks.

Why do this? As a GM, you've needed to do all of this prep work to make the world ready for your players.  This is a way to bring your players in on it -  except for actual genetic advantages (ability score mods, etc.) everything else is determined by culture.

On Culture

Something that has always bothered me about D&D (especially the D&D 3.x that I grew up with) is that the game is hugely racist.  All elves are proficient in the longsword, rapier, shortbow, and longbow.  All dwarves and gnomes have combat training against giants and goblinoids.  No matter where your character comes from, no matter their life experience, all elves can use 'elven' weapons and all dwarves/gnomes have extensive combat training against a couple specific enemy groups.

This is ridiculous. Elves from the Wakaka forest where metal is scarce ought not to be proficient in the longsword and rapier but in the cudgel and katar. Dwarves from the Hillside clan who fend off human bandit raids every spring ought to be very good at killing humans, not the goblinoids who never stray near their hills.

Unfortunately, with my lack of experience with OD&D and AD&D, I don't know if either edition addressed this. I know that 3.x addressed it by adding 'racial variants': Sun elves and Hill dwarves and deep gnomes and a whole lot of nonsense. Somehow, differences in culture were turned into speciation. The root of the problem is that all of these new variants, these subspecies, are predicated on the idea that there is a monolithic model of what a DWARF is (I'm picking on dwarves here because I like them and think they can be better).

What is the model of a human? What is the representative symbol of humanity - which one person can represent all the diversity and variation of the human race? It's an impossible task. You can't pick just one person. You can't pick just two. Given any number of people, I can probably find you someone not represented there. So we can't use a person as a model for humanity, and therefore we can't use a single dwarf as a model for all dwarf-dom. What can we do instead? We talk about culture.  Culture can be broad enough to group a large number of people together but be granular enough that by quantifying cultural properties we don't do a disservice to swathes of group members.

Now, some might say that it is the diversity of culture that makes humans distinctive from dwarves, elves, gnomes, and the like.  I think that is laziness talking.  Why do you want dwarves everywhere to share the same cultural norms regardless of their specific circumstances?  Because it is really easy to say "that is a dwarf".  Tolkien had several different elf cultures - the Mirkwood elves differ rather significantly from the elves of Rivendell and Lothlorien, and that difference causes them to play, as a group of elves, a nonexistent role in the Lord of the Rings (yes, I know Legolas is of Mirkwood, but I'm talking about culture and groups).  Why isn't that standard for each race?

To talk about culture, we have to know what it is. There are several definitions of culture floating around. I'll use this one because it suits my gaming purposes: Culture is a stereotype about a group of people based upon shared customs and beliefs. And it is a stereotype, with all of the positive and negative baggage affiliated with that term. Some examples, filtered from my own personal experience.  Seattleites wear North Face jackets, scorn umbrella use, knowingly drink coffee that is too expensive, are unfailingly polite, often disinterested, think that environmental sustainability is important, and patronize the arts (all of them). New Yorkers usually dress in layers, are proud of knowing the New York the tourists don't know, are often gruff but kind, and prefer functional art (art that is communicative of a narrative rather than purely decorative stuff).   That is not to say that all Seattleites do this, nor all New Yorkers. But someone raised in Seattle culture would say, "yes, these are some things that people do here" and someone who identifies as a New Yorker would say "yes, many of us make those choices".

I'm getting off-topic. From a game perspective, from a world-generation perspective, culture is the practices and beliefs of a geographic region of people.  At the level I apply it, it is quite broad and generic (thinking of American vs. European vs. Asian cultures), but once we have these broad trends we can then zoom in (Seattle vs. New York).  People acting according to these cultural norms will differentiate, say, Arein from the Southern Kingdoms.  That difference in feel is the GM's responsibility.

Here's how it shakes down to the players.  After they choose their race (and roll aptitudes) players choose the culture in which their characters were raised.  This choice gives them skills and determines what fighting styles they can learn.  It can provide naming guidelines, hometowns, and connections to organizations already existing in the world of Prodigy.

We'll get to some examples next post.