I think the an abhuman invasion would be potentially feasible, but not as an army, as a mass migration. The European armies didn’t do all that well against the Native Americans’ confederations for hundreds of years, but once mass migration started, the Natives were essentially trying to hold back the sea. Even the Comanche, who might have been the best horsemen on earth, couldn’t resist once the frontiersmen killed all the buffalo.
A Homesteading Act for all New Hegemony citizens might do what formal armies couldn’t. Unless there’s some lore I don’t know, I don’t see how they could stop millions upon millions of desperate people pouring over the border and chopping down the forests.
Well, abhumans are just a bit OP in the setting. They have widespread self-sacrifice theurgy and strengthened animalistic bodies due to said theurgy. They’re also all kind of united, even if decentralised.
Sure, but they’d be outnumbered what, 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 50 to 1?
Roman armies were far better than the Germanic migrants and the Romans outnumbered them overall as a society. The Roman Empire was 40 million people and the war bands were 10,000 to 20,000 people each typically, grouping into larger armies occasionally. The Romans still couldn’t stop them in the end. This situation would be the reverse numerically. A mass migration is such concentrated economic and military pressure that it was almost impossible to stop before 20th century weapons came into play.
Of course, if abhumans are migrating into a country that’s in the process of adopting self-sacrifice theurgy, it’s entirely possible to recruit them instead of fighting them. Just like the Germans.
The abhumans aren’t migrating, unless there’s lore I don’t know. It’d be the reverse. If there’s not enough land to feed all the hegemony citizens once harrowing got banned, it could be the policy of the MC’s new empire to promote mass migration into the abhuman lands, to take their land and solve the food crisis.
Essentially taking the millions of people who would starve, and saying “here’s a bunch of weapons, tools, and some food, go south and whatever you can take and farm for 5 years is yours for free. Win or die”
Havenstone mentioned that the abhuman population is currently dependent on buying Karagond grain, and wouldn’t starve, but would suffer significant social shakeups if that went away. So yes, I can see a migration of abhumans into Karagond territory.
Right but that potential abhuman movement is largely irrelevant to the age-defining trend. If harrowing gets banned, a mass migration must occur unless another miracle fertilizer comes about. The hegemony simply doesn’t have enough land for its population, without harrowing, so they have to get a huge amount more and transport millions of people to farm it. Given the map above, there are two options, Hallasur or the Abhuman Confederation.
Hm. The abhuman lands don’t seem to be able to support a population expansion either, though - if you’re moving to a land that’s also starving, you’re not really improving your situation.
Which means that, in short, banning theurgy entirely across all of the Hegemony is going to be functionally impossible (as Havenstone hinted) - there’ll be some localities and groups that get their act together enough to keep the Harrower going, often feeding it with refugees from less-organized areas.
We don’t know what the full potential of the abhuman’s land is with mass farming. Their society is not built off of mass agriculture, iirc. It’s like the American West. It supported a few million Natives, but once fully farmed in the 1800s it supported many times that number.
Another interesting topic is that banning harrowing outright should probably increase the MC’s military capabilities even during the revolution period because it creates a “burn the boats” scenario. Like Cortes in Mexico
If the Shayardine helots know the only way to survive starvation without harrowing is to conquer and get more land from the rest of the Hegemony still in Karagond control, they should be much more willing to sign up and fight. Particularly if the MC creates a land-for-service scheme for veterans.
There are a couple factors you may be missing in this calculus:
Geographical barriers to mass migration: The Seracca Federation has been described as chiefly deserts and jungles: a vast desert south of Shayard, and then spice-rich jungle (as an aside, the oddity of this description with Cerlota calling M’kyar a “daughter of the plains”, has been the object of some of my wilder speculations in the past).
Consequently, any overland mass migration first needs to traverse a desert, suffering all the accompanying attrition, before it can even reach a place that would need to first be deforested while fighting a technologically superior indigenous population before any meaningful settlement can be established.
Coastal settlements by ship may be more viable, but run into problems of scale and access.
Comparative appeal: Shayard is the only archonty that borders the Federation, and it’s also the agricultural heartland of the continent. It’s the most capable of self-sustaining its population: I suspect people would rather fight for their place in the breadbasket than depart en masse for a desert. Migrations would tend to move towards Shayard, not away.
The argument you present makes much more sense against Halassur anyway, with the immense cost of life coming from how vulnerable these human waves would be, since the land on either side of the Ward is theoretically farmland (in the absence of devastating war), and Shayard is a long way away.
Time is not on the migrants’ side: You cite historical examples of “concentrated economic and military pressure that [are] almost impossible to stop” but there’s a clear stopping point: when they’ve starved.
It seems to me to be a strategy only for the most desperate, who have already been defeated and exiled by stronger powers and have nowhere else to run, who have lost all hope of surviving among other people. Death wearing a different coat. Which, ironically, is not so different from why people in the present day make the perilous journey south.
FWIW ‘desert’ and ‘plains’ can overlap as descriptors of the same lands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the northern federation looked something like this:
Yes, but that is exactly the situation the former hegemony would find itself in. Without harrowing ~40-80 million people will die depending on how efficient the blood tax is. There will be 10s of millions of desperate, starving people. Unless the MC can turn them outwards, they will probably destroy the MC’s empire entirely from the inside.
That’s assuming the MC is trying to rule a post-Thaumatarchy Hegemony. If it’s an independent Shayardene state, the issue becomes how to deal with all the refugees wanting to come in. And with your neighboring successor states that need your food.
I think that in theory Shayard could support its own pop without harrowing agriculture if it stopped exports. That’s obviously going to be completely unacceptable to everyone outside of Shayard though. So the choice is find a way to keep feeding them or to fend them off.
What I’m saying is that I suspect the people who’d decide crossing a desert to farm in a jungle while fighting ancient magical werewolf elves is a better idea than fighting to secure a farm in the best farmland on the continent are the people who have been so decisively defeated and societally outcast that they believe they have no hope of surviving so long as there is competition, and who would rather chase that slim hope than going down fighting.
My point is that I don’t see there being organic pressure for people to migrate south towards the Seracca Federation, nor do I see the promise of weapons and supplies changing that. If I was in that situation, I’d get supplies from the state and then immediately turn around and go back to the Rim or something.
What can bridge this gap is a higher purpose: the promise of salvation from a charismatic leader, a desire for revenge against the people who stood by and allowed all this to happen: that sort of thing. But that’s less choosing to win and more choosing to die.
See my third point.
I’d argue that desperation actively works against the migration pressures here; or rather, that it works to encourage migration towards Shayard, rather than away (as I stated at the end of my second point).
People are not migrating for the promise of wealth or independence: they would migrate because the alternative is not being able to eat tomorrow. That points towards the farmlands, not the desert and jungle.
You’re also probably severely underestimating the Seracca’s martial capabilities. We can see how M’kyar performs against reivers: she annihilates them.
If this was the case, then nobody would have left the East Coast of the US.
People literally left some of the best land on earth, crossed some of the harshest deserts and mountains on earth, and fought warriors who were better, more organized, and more vicious than magical elves to get free land.
We know it’s feasible because it already happened in real life, among people who were not nearly as desperate. Free land to farming people is such an incredibly powerful motivator.
Personally, I think it is far more likely that Shayard will see an invasion by the Seracca rather than the other way around. Disdain for the Hegemony might give way to panic once the grain trade collapses, especially if whatever government emerges in Shayard wishes to keep the grain for itself.
Given that everyone is probably going to be coming for an isolationist Shayard, the Serraca would probably be the easiest group to buy off by continuing to export to in order to secure the southern front for such a government.
Isolationist Shayard is such a terrible choice from a geo-political standpoint. It’s like squatting in Northwest India, some of the best land on the planet, and just hoping yet another conqueror doesn’t come down the mountain passes. Gonna get Timur’d so hard that Shayard will be nothing more than a memory
