Popping up briefly to answer questions that have come in since December. Thanks for your patience…being mostly off-forum has somewhat increased my productivity, and means that big Ch 2 update will be on its way sooner. 
If you want a taster, I just posted one over on the writers’ support thread.
I’ve got a couple of ideas for that, but won’t pin it down with confidence until I’m writing Ch 3.
Interesting idea. For now, I’ll say: possibly. We’ll see when the game gets to that scale.
It would have very low credibility (given the MC’s reputation) so I’m not sure the bluff would succeed.
Different things–I think we’ll see some attempts at theocracy and some at elevating righteous leaders (perhaps as puppets… but some priests will be happy not to have to play puppetmaster as long as the ruler is keeping to Canon, and as @Azthyme suggests, in many areas there won’t be puppets who have any more legitimacy than the priesthood itself can openly bestow).
An MC whose trauma response is dissociation will by definition feel that they’re losing track of who they are – but making heavy use of alibis and false identities will be even more disorienting.
I wouldn’t say it’s an exception. The tension is unresolved, even if the softness of the Leaguers’ nationalism results in a much softer “threat level” to the classical cosmpolitan vision. @Azthyme capably sketches the ways those tensions could play out in future.
You’d think! But as Freud rightly observed, that’s not how it tends to work in practice.
For most Shayardene nationalists, a Shayard-Erezza empire isn’t desirable–except for the ones who’d like to set up Shayard as an imperial power controlling its neighbors and eventually subsuming them into its superior culture. Mingling Shayard with Erezza on an equal basis (which is what moving the capital to Aveche would signify) would water down what’s special about Shayard.
Fun idea. I’m not sure if it’ll fit with the direction of G5, but we’ll see.
Stezyc is much more heavily dependent on the Shayard grain trade than Aveche, and so would have a lot more of its residents arguing pragmatically that it needs to be an integral part of any rising Shayardene empire. There’s also substantially less sense of a unifying Wiendish national identity than there is in Erezza (even though the latter is also still nascent at best).
The Veldrine Hills (not the city of Veldrin, which is still part of Shayard) are pretty thoroughly assimilated to Karagon at this point. Their widely-dispersed population wouldn’t welcome being annexed into the Shayard Reach.
No. Scarthe is 1500-ish square miles of highly valuable territory for anyone interested in naval domination of the Olossar. A condominium attempt over land that sizeable and strategic would never work out.
As a side note, while this is partly true, he’s better known for building Osterport and cementing Shayard’s control over its neighborhood–turning it from a city-state into a small state controlling the lower Serdre river valley. The point at which Shayard turned from a castle to a city is a little hazier. Have another taster of Draft Ch 2:
Summary
The fireside tales of the Irduin yeomanry are almost unintelligbly thick with old words that you don’t understand at all. Still, you recognize a few tales from their names and rhythms—like the legends of the Knights of the Gryphon.
Those tales are set more than seven centuries ago, in the age when wisards and monsters of Xaos freely roamed the land, no one yet knew to call on the Angels, and Shayard was just a small castle in the desert wastes. Listening to Aenor, you think she’s telling a story you heard many times growing up, in which the bold Knights do battle with the southern werebeasts and stop them from abducting Shayardene children. It was never clear to you if the Abhumans of the tale were supposed to be transforming the children or just eating them; you wonder wryly what M’kyar would say if you asked her.
Then Aenor reverently speaks the name of Charivert de Shayard: the earliest king whose name is known, the one who first took the Gryphon as his sigil and founded the Knights to bring order to the wild-lands. And all around the circle, the yeomanry murmur as one in their Mesnielic Shayarin: l’veru roye. The true king.
There’s a certain analogy to qualia in our normal experience, I think. How do I know that the telos you observe is subjectively the same as the telos I observe? I don’t–but whatever you observe, as long as you can change it using the same techniques I do, does it matter? It’s possible that we have totally different experiences of “red” and “yellow,” but as long as we agree that when we mix them it makes “orange,” we can still manage to paint the house.
Pretty much. I’m about to start writing the war stories you can hear in Irduin from Aunt Agarie de Irde (or her yeoman equerry Quaelle Charbonnier) and I expect it’ll sound a bit like that. On a similar note, here’s a cheery snippet I’ve already written from a witness to the Great Scouring of the Westriding:
Summary
"A thousand Theurges rained down fire for days, until there wasn’t a house or barn or tree standing for three hundred miles. We all saw folk we loved burn. My father died trying to salvage a bit of bread from a neighbor’s house. My sister was caught in a ditch by the roadside, just a little shallower than the one I was hiding in. Such a little difference.
“And when the fire had left us nowhere to shelter, great black clouds spiralled in from all sides like the Angels’ own vengeance, and opened up with rain. They say the sun didn’t shine over Parrit Town for ninety days. We could see the Phalangites on the far side of the rivers, dragging anyone they caught off to be Harrowed, so most of us hid and hoped to survive until the rains stopped. Folk filled their stomachs on mud, ash, or…whatever they could find.”
“$!{sweetoath}.” You feel @{ravenblood sick, with visions of the sawn-teeth leaping unbidden to mind|sick}.
“My brother and I lived a month like that before we got desperate enough to swim the Aldyer. By then, it was barely a river—so thick with silt, it was like crawling through a swamp, and it didn’t truly have banks any more, just mud and water for miles. Even so, we came within a hair of being caught by the Phalangites. They were still hunting along the river. Treating anyone who hadn’t abandoned their homes before the Scouring as if they were Cabelites.” Valere exhales slowly.
“They must not tell these stories in the Rim,” her nephew says hollowly. “Or they’d know already how their Commotion was going to end.”
I’d originally thought this would be possible…but at this point, I think there’s more than enough variability in Ch 2 already, and I’d rather finish it than add a new raft of *if companion options.
Good point! I’ll see about adding that.
The Hegemony has flown far enough out to assure itself that it’s not about to be surprise-attacked by invaders from any unknown continents in easy Theurgy range, but has been too focused on the powers on its borders to put a lot of resource into exploration.
Right – back to the grindstone!