I’m not sure “democracy” is quite the right term. The most likely koinon model would as you later suggest be oligarchy, an elite council of (almost certainly unelected!) representatives sent by the member nations. The threat of gridlock in this oligarchy would for nearly any post-Hegemonic nation be a motivator to scrap the whole “koinon” idea and remain an independent principality, rather than agreeing to grant dictatorial powers to the Monarch of Shayard as a condition of joining your koinon.
A few things might change the picture. First, a nation that simply couldn’t feed itself in the wake of the Hegemony’s collapse and had no prospect of trading for its subsistence might be persuaded that joining a koinon (even an unjust one) with an agricultural surplus would be preferable to trying to conquer enough farmland to survive. As a real-world parallel, this would be like a somewhat more extreme version of the economic crisis that led Scotland to assent to the creation of the United Kingdom.
Second, a nation’s leadership might feel that its only plausible protection from external conquest was to annex itself to a stronger political entity. This could work either for or against your monarchical koinon, depending on the G5 circumstances.
Finally, you might be able to win the allegiance of weaker factions in each nation, who (a) have given up their hope of prevailing against the dominant local leadership using only their own resources, and (b) could be persuaded to accept your sovereignty in exchange for the assistance that strengthens them enough to seize power from the current rulers. A koinon of usurpers would be tough to form and hold together, but conceivable.
I read the Reddit post about the Warcraft Alliance when you shared it earlier. Seems to me to be a little odd but within the realm of plausibility – at any rate, enough thought has gone into explaining its oddest bits to keep my disbelief suspended. It’s a system with massive and obvious brittle points, notably the potential for a clash of authority between the High King and the independent sovereign heads of the member nations that could lead either back to “headless chicken” or autocracy. Or a NATO dynamic where Stormwind gets increasingly unhappy about the other Alliance members sheltering at low cost under their costly military umbrella (as we see from our world, the fact that Stormwind is the richest member and would be spending massively on its army anyway doesn’t cancel out this dynamic). Finally, because a couple of decades is more than enough time for a supreme commander to irretrievably screw up a war, I’m not sure I’d rely as much on the patience of longer-lived races as this system seems to. But I could swallow the idea that so far, all the key participants have maneuvered around its fragile points and made it work.
It’s worth noting that a system like this is the fruit of generations of adaptation and shared experience that have established some key points of consensus, e.g. we have x number of nations, among which Stormwind has the biggest army; we face a pretty consistent external threat from the Horde, and have more affinity with each other than we do with them; we suffer more from a fragmented Alliance than from yielding some sovereignty to the High King; etc.
In the immediate aftermath of an imperial collapse in the XoR gameworld, there’s going to be a lot less consensus on anything. “We have the strongest army” – maybe right now, but who’s to say we couldn’t change that? “We have the most food” – until the borders get redrawn. “The threat from Halassur is big enough to unite us” – or maybe we can make our peace with Halassur, and Shayard is the rapacious neighbor to worry about.
Not sure yet, but it’ll be a quite a few. It’s likely that Phrygia and others of her generation will have passed the torch by that point, one way or another.
I warmly recommend Seeing Like A State for a wide-ranging and readable summary of just how hard this is, and how many generations of work went into making populations “legible” by modern states. You’ll be able to see in G2 how far the Hegemony has got in this process. For all its precocious, magic-fuelled totalitarianism, it’s still a long way off from being able to carry out a precise count of its citizens.
I’d have thought that wherever you decide to drop your capital, you’ll want to have your Theurge training there too – put it somewhere else, and you’re significantly increasing the odds of that place eventually becoming the capital.
I don’t think there are any old Anglo-Saxon or Old French words for a place of education that don’t go back to Greek (as e.g. “school” does), and Lyceum or Lycee is the usual translation of Lykeion into English or French. Of the other possibilities you suggest, eglise and mynster are also both Greek words (ekklesia and monasterion) and Theurgic education is less churchly than words like “temple” would convey.
I agree that Christopher Lee was great, though I don’t think any of LotR’s villains are as iconic or central to its appeal as they are for (say) Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Batman – for my money, LotR’s strengths are all in its heroes (and Gollum). I don’t have any particularly interesting reasons that I found movie Aragorn roughly as appealing and memorable as Gimli or Legolas, rather than Gandalf-level. Just a gut reaction, not thought out.
No, she was a young noble and began Theurge training early. But as a Theurge, she’s fought the Halassurqs at the border and at sea. She was a deputy and possible successor to Ennearch Ilaria Lacevra, the only Erezziano among the Nine, who is responsible for overseeing (and, especially, allocating Theurges and blood to) the Hegemonic Navy.
If she were convinced that it really was the only way to strengthen Erezza against Halassur, rather than just being opportunistic exploitation by the big soft western neighbor, she could get behind it.
Let’s be clear: she will not easily be convinced of this.
I’m not planning to write any.
The Sami or Nenets never overran any empires that I’m aware of.
As I said, the Whends have no impending invasion to worry about.