TNE: Enough vs. Too Many Cultures

[IGTN]

I had more to add on this discussion in the Lolahshi thread, but decided it might do better in its own thread:

You know, we should probably put a limiter on these before we get setting bloat.

I like each individual one, but too many gets stupid even if EACH ONE is wonderful in isolation and better than every non-TNE culture ever designed.

I'm not really worried about culture bloat making the setting too big, as long as their interactions can be figured out and their power lists written up; there's no risk of having too many countries or ethnic groups here. How many ethnic groups are there in, for example, just eastern europe? The old Atayalan empire is far bigger than eastern europe, and, of course, the barbarians that toppled the empire (from the outside?) are also part of the world. We're more likely to run out of quality writing and time to write up spells and powers than we are to run out of space in the world.

This is of course the central paradox of fantasy universes. They can't be as rich and deep as the Earth history they parallel. Which is a shame, but there you go. On the other hand, real history is extremely complicated. I mean seriously, back in recognizably "fantasy" time periods, what we think of as "Germany" looked like This. And yeah, Bohemians and Silesians and Utrechtians and Hessians and Tyrolians all considered themselves different peoples. There were seven major warring states in "China", but that's only because those were the cultures that won their wars and conquered other cultures. Not a single one of them annexed less than five opposing nations, and they call it the time of the Hundred Schools of Thought for a reason.

There hasn't been a second sapient species on Earth for ten thousand years. But while fantasy worlds have a lot more species in them, they are by necessity much more culturally monolithic than Earth's actual past. That being said, I definitely believe that there is room for more than a dozen such cultures in this setup. Cultures are kind of like character classes. And while I definitely believe that 3rd edition strained at the seams under the pressure of having too many character classes - I also believe that there was room for the basic 11 and most of the bonus classes in the secondary books. True Namers and Soulborn were the points at which setting bloat actually broke things. The game was able to handle Warlocks and Scouts without noticeable strain.

In short, just as I don't feel that D&D was severely impacted by the inclusion of about two dozen classes, I think this project can sustain about two dozen cultures. Much beyond that and I think we'd be straying into Magic of Incarnum territory.

-Username17

I think even Frank is overstating the risk of culture bloat here, at least from a mechanical perspective. The sheer number of character classes was not what caused a problem with the Truenamer and Soulborn. It was more that they were bringing up entirely new magic systems that didn't fit with anything (not our problem here). There's seriously room in D&D for more than they already have, in Beguiler-style classes (out of eight schools of magic, four of them have classes, one class covers two, and another class sucks), elemental specialists (parallels to the Fire Mage), and so on, not to mention various prestige class-type ideas, such as for planar affiliations and so on. I count twelve classes in the Tome PDF main section, plus the Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, and possibly Wizard and Sorcerer, that are supposedly compatible, and it still doesn't have a Paladin replacement until the community material, the Ranger role ever, and so on.

We won't have a problem with tacked-on magic systems unless some culture uses an eighth element, but, if they do that, it'll be obvious what they're trying to do and we can just not let that happen, and with the elements we have, we have a huge amount of room for new cultures. If each culture uses either a single element or a single two-element pair as the basis of their magic, that's room for 28 cultures without any culture having similar magic to someone else.

That uses a huge pile of assumptions that aren't necessarily true. It ignores cultures like Hive Acatl, which uses everything. Also it assumes that any culture's magic can be completely described by which combination (not permutation) of elements it uses: Tugnali and Hive Moskitia both use Water and Life, Wuvu-lu-aua and the Lifarian League are both Ghost only, and the Senicians were life-only before Lolahshi, yet nobody would mistake one culture's magic for the other in the pair. So you might have room for more like 60 distinct cultures without too bad of collision, within the system you already have. That's also assuming that two cultures that use the same magic are going to necessarily be bloat, which isn't necessarily true; a barbarian tribe that stole the magics of the Atayalans after their own magical tradition was destroyed, for instance, would be a distinct culture from the xenophobes on Chuluan.

Filling up the world to the point that nothing more fits at all is not the problem that you're going to run into. The problem is making sure that everything fits together, interacts when it should, has the mechanics that it needs, and keeping it intuitive enough that a DM can learn, understand, and track all of it that they'll need. These are all surmountable obstacles:
-Writing cultures when there are already a lot will take consideration, since the number of interactions to consider goes up with the size of everyone else, but that's just work in writing interactions.
-Making things fit is a matter of following precedent and keeping interactions.
-Mechanics are pretty much drudge work. Writing up powers is fairly (just time consuming) when you know what they should do and what the math needs to be.
-DM knowledge is the tough one, but surmountable. If the world gets complex enough, every region will need an executive summary of its interactions for DMs to read when they try to run that region, and every culture needs a list of who it interacts with. Keeping mechanics memorable isn't even that hard, since they only need to remember what their players can do (which is a small subset) and what their NPCs can do (which is restricted by background and NPCs, and is a subset that they get to pick).

[ckafrica]

My problem with many of the later classes such as Tome of Magic and Incarnum was that they were introducing entirely new elements using new mechanics that didn't behave like existing mechanics. It was kind of like adding those stupid bio-tech aliens to the Star Wars novels' storyline; just wtf. ToB did largely fit within the old mechanics-- even if it was poorly executed it was better than most of the existing martial classes -- so it was ok. Indeed it should have been expanded upon to replace the old martial chassis.

As far as the culture threads go, I'd say the more the better for now. They can be whittled down later once it's decided which ones fit best with each other.

Though I can already envision the flame wars that that process would entail.

[Crissa]

There is the worry that some classes aren't different enough. But I certainly wasn't bothered by a woody-rogue vs a townie-rogue.

-Crissa

[Username17]

There is the worry that some classes aren't different enough. But I certainly wasn't bothered by a woody-rogue vs a townie-rogue.

Frankly, a lot of the classes are bullshit and nowhere near unique enough. Swashbuckler really is pretty much the same god damn thing as Fighter. However, when you put in classes that are genuine different in feel it puts strain on the world.

When you're throwing in new cultures it is more analogous to throwing in a new "load bearing" class like Monk, Druid, or Wizard than it is like throwing in a "filler" class that is a mild variation on a pre-existing class.

Now that being said, yeah there's room for a lot of cultures. But eventually it should get down to "filler" cultures that produce similar crops and have similar magical skill sets to adjacent cultures. Throwing in a Palatinate when you already have a Hessia makes for some good story possibilities, but it doesn't impact the world as much as all that.

It might actually be a good idea at some point to draw up some core tribes whose migrations ultimately created the social, linguistic, and political divisions of the current world. Because let's face it: there's a lot you can tell about Earth even today just by remembering that there were Celts, Slavians, and Norse.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Well, I nominate the Aua-lu (predecessors to Wuvu-lu-aua) as one of these initial tribes. They're intended to have been the total bastards whose excesses helped to define the much more limited reasonable behavioral standards of the present.

With my limited linguistic chops, I decided that aua means 'all' and lu is used for most variations of 'to rule,' so the Aua-lu basically named themselves the 'all-rulers' and tried to conquer the world with their mind control and ghost armies. Everyone else teamed up and owned their face, but while they Aua-lu were not spectacularly more effective than other people, they were very scary. Partly because their magics created situations as icky as mothers assassinating their own children and the ghosts of fathers serving as advisers on how to defeat their descendants in battle or politics; but also because the Aua-lu didn't play by the rules and performed atrocities and genocide that made other people feel very insecure. So even today, the Aua-lu are remembered as boogeymen in other cultures' folk tales.

Speaking of, do we have anything like a working definition of honor for this setting, like the write-up in RoW?

[PhoneLobster]

room for 28 cultures

The thing about setting bloat is that it is effectively an issue of design bloat and not specifically one of in game bloat.

The setting is viewed in practice not as a vast and complex interactive whole but through the narrow lens of in game interaction.

You can have 30+ cultures in the world but the odds are good that a single campaign will not significantly interact with all of them, may not encounter several of them at all and in some cases might almost exclusively interact with just one or two of them.

The individual game instance is not required to experience the entirety of the grand setting design and it's off screen interactions.

Of course what you are talking about there is a toolkit, which is currently anathema to Frank as he seems to think that you MUST interact with all designed cultures or else.

And from a designers perspective you can somewhat see where he is coming from. If a game instance is only going to interact with 4-6 cultures and there is a relatively small audience of gaming groups then why write up all the extra stuff?

It's a fairly basic dilemma the larger your toolkit the larger the potential use through extending the number of gaming groups interested in using it and extending the range of campaigns you might use it for yourself.

But the larger it is the more material you invest effort in that will likely be under used or entirely ignored.

It's a fine balance point. But considering Frank's stance on this is to wedge his head up his princessly ass everytime someone says "centaur" and rant about how his divine setting material is incorruptible and perfect and breaks if you refuse to go down rabbit holes I think he is aiming firmly at a very small audience.

So he should probably stick to 3 major cultures and about half a dozen minors at most.

-Making things fit is a matter of following precedent and keeping interactions.

The terminology you are looking for there is "extensible design" it is rather self evidently a good thing and a required aspect of any RPG you expect more than a half dozen people to play.

It is also something I think it should be pointed out has been declared impossible and an evil non-goal that will destroy their perfect design by the TNE crowd.

[Username17]

The original tribes of importance were probably all right bastards back in their day. The fact is that in the early bronze age you become an important tribe by butchering people and demonstrating a will to do things others will not in order to seize vital tin resources, arable land, and slaves. It's a kind of shitty time period, which is why it mostly turns into an "age of heroes" when people talk about it later on.

Speaking of, do we have anything like a working definition of honor for this setting, like the write-up in RoW?

We probably should. A couple of abortive attempts have been made, but haven't really gone to completion. Just for starters, I think that people should have a Mandate of Heaven concept. That is, the idea that wiping out "the people" of an area to make room for "your people" is something that is simply not necessary because of course everyone is the same people. The idea that other people properly belong to the same empire as you and that by extension you should not commit genocide on them is fairly important as a moral base.

I'm sure that there are other moral precepts that people take shockingly for granted, but I'm not entirely sure what they are. It is important to set the moral zeitgeist of the focused time period to something close enough to the modern moral zeitgeist that people can describe actions in the first person without vomiting in their mouths.But also as similar as possible to Earth history in order to create archaic feeling events.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Hm, okay, so maybe the Aua-lu were just the last people left behaving according to the old ways, and their defeat marked a significant transition point to the new morality. Do we want there to have been a specific event which generated the new morality? A prophecy, or a grand council, or something?

So, okay, apart from things that make most people unhappy, like incest and cannibalism, key things which offend modern people are torture, slavery, and genocide.

I think we also need a very wide definition of things that are considered murder. Killing people who have surrendered should be considered murder, for instance. Maybe include negligent homicide and depraved indifference considerations.

For the archaic feel, we should definitely let the sex and drugs flow. Marriage is for alliance or children, affairs are for love (barn animals are for pleasure ).

Also, I think we could get a lot of cultural mileage out of making a lot of things morally require simple rituals, like wine offerings before any negotiation, and asking the animal's permission (or pardon) before you slaughter it and so on.

[Grek]

TNE history seems to be divided into 3 distinct eras now:

Stone Age: Lots of tribes like the Aua-lu were running around committing attrocities, cannibalism, human sacrifice, genocide, slavery, etc. Aua-lu are the worst of the worst morally, with mind control and ghost armies as well as genocide and slavery.

Bronze Age: Ataylalan Empire takes over most of the world. The idea of the Mandate of Heaven turns up and prevents genoside, mind control, the worst sorts of slavery, etc. Eventually, the Ataylalan Empire falls apart into seperate city-states when the Ataylalan Emperor can no longer hold his empire together.

Iron Age: The Ataylalan Empire has collapsed due to the discovery of Iron, leaving behind bunches of tribes to form into citystates with different cultures and magics. A few mid-sized empires have sprung up, such as Redarkhan, Hive Acatl and a few others. There's also some smaller regions ruled by alliances of powerful city-states, like the Lifarian League and the Senician Federation. These nations quite likely fight over land quite a bit, all claiming to have the Mandate of Heaven and that everyone else doesn't.

Basically what we need to decide is "How did the Ataylalan Empire get started?" and "How exactly did it collapse so hard that it's just modern Ataylala?" I, personally, vote for the following:

1] Ataylala's first Divine Emperor was called that because he had some way of using all sorts of magic to an extreme degree and passed that knowledge onto his heirs. He used his super magic to take over the world and create a superproductive empire with floating cities and super fertile jungles full of food/wood. The dynasty goes on for a long long time this way, passing magic superpowers from father to son.

2] Ataylala fell apart when Void Magic and Iron were discovered, because the two could be used to royally screw up the Divine Emperor's magic superpowers and then beat up his soldiers with superior weapons and armour. They end up killing the current Divine Emperor and his children flee for their lifes. Then the empire falls apart into city-states that cannot be conquered so easily because the magic isn't all centralized in one spot and run by one guy.

As far as the Ataylalas can see, these people must be horrible demon-monsters, as they just killed God's representative on earth, made entire fields of magically enhanced crops wither into dust wherever they marched and killed people wantonly with their mysterious demon powers/indestructable black weapons made out of demon-metal. They think the world is full of monsters because, as far as they are concerned, it really is.

[Judging__Eagle]

Do it like Dune, you "marry" for political/heirship reasons, but anyone can have a consort.

Your own recognized children can inherit whatever you want them to have (So, Paul Atredies can inherit the entire Atredies business, both awesomely loyal followers and insane rivalry of the Haarkonen), however only children that are from a marriage can inherit what both parents have.

Jealosy and lover's spates and passion-driven murder doesn't go away, and we want them since they help drive plot. However, people can go around and have children with people that they care about, and the legalities are pre-established.

If the Duchess of Iron has a baby who the Berzerker Cannibal Barbarian fathered, that's ok. The baby can inherit from the mother for sure, and the father if recognized/acknowledged the baby gets...

I just got an idea...

Females inherit all the property. Men get whatever the women give them, swords, armour, clothes, food, hoes, land; they're all gifts that are loaned to males. This is b/c women are where the next generation comes from, and babies are used for everything, from making new heroes, to filling out the roster of the city guard, or being sacrificed for dark power. You need women to get any of that done. Also, women get to make the rules.

This is based on how pre-agricultural human social groups worked. However, in those cases it was that "women" had babies (but the men didn't realize or weren't told that the babies were theirs a lot of the time) and the adult males in many tribes were the ones that married into their wife's tribe. While the children were considered the tribe's (and thus it's womens) children, the adult males were all considered outsiders that had married into the tribe. This was a matriarchal society.

Females probably run most businesses. This doesn't mean that men don't work. They do, but they're not allowed to own a business. Probably being head steward or whatever, but not actual owners.

Males inherit titles. So, the son of the Iron Anarchist will inherit the Iron Anarchist title (or refuse it, much to their father's chagrin, or have themselves disowned, and thus unable to inherit the title).

Females will always have their father's title, and can replace it with their husbands (whichever is more awesome, or whichever they feel suits them better; some women take their husband's title, others don't), or earn their own (which can't be legally passed on, but people will still recognize that the daughter of the Snow-Wolf Witch is probably somewhat of a badass).

So, the sons of the Iron Duchess Margaret and her husband the Oil Lord Rock-fella can't get their mom's "Iron Duke" title, since they can't inherit titles along the female linage. However the Oil Lord doesn't own anything that hasn't been given as a gift by some woman or an other. Even his awesome sword of head-chopping was a gift from somewhere, be it a kindly auntie who's son had died, or an Annis/Ogress/Trolless that the Oil Lord had to perform a mission for. By mission, that means anything.

Some women literally buy themselves heroes as husbands in order to give their already rich daughters an easy-to-attain title. While 5th sons of a powerful noble family will try to marry army-raising necromaneresses, and it works out b/c now the lady in skulls and steel plate counts as a legitimate member of society, while the husband is now with someone that can own stuff.

Of course, this idea is sort of tied in with the fact that I want PCs getting into relationships with either NPCs or other PCs; having a hardline divide between "ownership" and "titles" sort of helps with that.

Men sort of get the short end of the stick though, but they probably don't realize it. They pretend that earning a cool title is cool enough to give up having worry about doing math or business accounting.

Yes, it's wierd and sexist, but it's the idea that I came up with while writing this post.

It's also very feudal japan. Men didn't concern themselves with the day-to-day business stuff (or weren't supposed to), but the women were supposed to and having your wife (or ex-wifes or concubines) run the logistics-end of your empire was considered proper womanly work.

Men is for fite, women is for bizness, and fite.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'm not too thrilled at the prospect of making most cultures in TNE inherently sexist (especially in one direction), regardless of historical precedent or the interesting issues it raises. In a light system like TNE, if men are basically 'adventurers' and women are basically 'adventurers and everything else', women are naturally going to be pushed into the NPC category in most games.

It's fine to have sexist cultures, because they're another excuse to run away or play against type. It's just not OK as an overall tone.

[Username17]

Grek, that's a decent narrative. What I would add to it would be the multifactional nature of the coming of the Age of Bronze. Atayala didn't just show up, ring a gong, and conquer everything under heaven - they were just one of the factions vying for control over everything before the ended up being the faction that conquered everything.

Before the Bronze Age, which frankly stands for a general level of development not necessarily connected with actually knowing the secret of bronze working, limits on what could be achieved socially were pretty intense. Ormigan societies were probably divided into quite small family groups defined by just a single Queen. When the limits of the local hunting/gathering/farming came up, the hive would make a new Queen and divide. The higher levels of technical development brought in the possibilities of storage and distribution sufficient to maintain a "hive" with more than one Queen and probably many different versions of that were tried. For example, I'm sure at least one Hive got the bright idea of making extra Queens that were owned by the main Queen and produced children for her. Other "Hives" probably founded as distinct and separate Hives that lived next to each other in alliance. And so on and so forth.

Human tribes aggregated the same way. Which is to say that not only were the technical developments used to expand civilization to units larger than the extended family different in different places, but the social organizing principals used to do so virtually unrecognizable between groups. Some families joined others mutually, others by force. Unions were created on the backs of increases in productivity, transportation speeds, and even storage times. Taxation schemes ranging from the bureaucratic to the feudal probably were tried in various places at various times.

But the thing about unifying forces is that they continue pulling things into themselves until they meet a unifying force pulling the other direction. And you have real nations butting heads with other nations over resources of perceived value: land, people, knowledge, hegemony. And it is at that point that Atayala made its mark in history.

I'm guessing that before the Unification Under Heaven that the general world order was one of tributary states. Stronger states would have pacts with weaker states to protect them (or at least refrain from burning them to the ground). Many states probably paid tribute to multiple stronger states, with payments made proportionately to how strong and how close the larger states were. And one of these stronger states was Atayala, and it conquered all the others. But beyond merely conquering them and demanding that they pay tribute afterward, it fully annexed them and made the other areas into administrative districts of Atayala.

How did that happen? Excellent question. The idea of actually being the same nation as people in another city has risen and fallen out of favor several times in Earth's history, but it usually is propelled forward not just by the avarice of rulers but also by the realities of communication. Imperialism and Nationalism both depend on a communication network. And it is there that Atayala has a very real though certainly not unique advantage: the ability to speak into the wind and have the speech come out across the world. While other peoples at least eventually learned how to do something equivalent, that ability put Atayala on the short list of peoples who were ever going to conquer more than thy could personally ride across. But the actual military edge that they got that allowed them to actually do it need not have been something they even did themselves. While it is certainly easy to imagine an Atayalan general standing on a hilltop well away from a sky city and shaking it to the core with tempest and receiving the city's helpless surrender - it is entirely probable that their first big break was something entirely contingent and fortuitous such as an Aua-Luan slave uprising that left the Ghost Kings with their pants down long enough for the Primarch of Atayala to put the Seven Spectral Crowns on his own head.

The warring states period that predated the arrival of the Empire was doubtless one of hundreds of ways. A true Cambrian Explosion of cultures before the drumbeat of military progress and the realities of economies of scale Darwinistically reduced the number of ways down to one. But I think the part people still talk about is the part just before the end. When there were six powerful nations striding the world and each wielded mighty secrets of magic from "all" of the ways.

It must have come as quite a shock a few centuries down the line when the black clad demon army came with a seventh way and unraveled everything with star metal.

-Username17

[baduin]

I will try to explain the mechanism of imperial growth and decay from the point of view of the theory of civilisation, mostly Spengler and Voegelin.

A good example of an application of Voegelin's theory to China can be found here, in the lectures by late Edward Kaplan on the Political History of China:

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~kaplan/

In short, mere strength or convenience is not enough to sustain the government of a nation greater than a tribe. There is needed a reason to obey founded on claims to superior authority. Generally, throughout history, this was a religion.

In addition, my understanding of the Bronze Era states, especially of Greece, is based on the mortuary state concept,
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5917

A best exposition of that view may be found in Wunderlich's Secret of Crete. It may not be all that accurate, but it is very evocative, and very good as a source of inspiration.

http://www.philipcoppens.com/crete_dead.html
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Crete-Hans ... 0285621645
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1RUE52GZ1IGHB

The Bronze Age was an era of the Artificial Immortality. People thought one part of the soul lived IN the corpse, which was only "partially" dead, and another lived on in the Underworld, or Blessed Isles. The corpse had to be fed, not always symbolically (That belief lasted longer, even until Classical Greece: they had feeding pipes to literally feed corpses with soup). As long as the corpse lasted underground, the main soul could survive in happines, using all the treasure gathered in its tomb. But it had to have that treasure, and regular sacrifices to feed it. The state was basically an association to worship the ancestors.

At that time there were gathered enormous treasures in many tombs - in Mycean Greece, in Egypt, for example in the enormous, now-destroyed Egyptian Labyrinth etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth# ... _labyrinth
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/ml/index.htm
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/digital_egypt/hawara/
http://www.amazeingart.com/seven-wonder ... rinth.html


People believed the treasures were protected by gods and monsters (Minotaur etc). But, in the end of the Bronze Age, it fell apart. The Grecian tombs, with their riches, were looted by Dorians. Egypt was attacked by Sea Peoples and disintegrated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Inte ... d_of_Egypt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleidae

Let us apply this theory to the game.

The Bronze Age empires were found on an early version of the "Mandate of Heaven" theory, which could be termed "Mandate of the Ancestors". According to this belief, the divine power comes to the ruler through his ancestors. His main duty is to sustain his dead ancestors in their "pseudo-life" by building and guarding their tombs, giving them proper grave goods, "feeding" them with sacrifices, and sacrificing to gods on their behalf. On a smaller scale, this was done by all people; even if the sacrfices had to be mostly symbolic.

By connecting themselves with the divine realm and becoming guarantors of good weather, fertility of the earth etc, the early kings could justify their own power. This allowed them to effectively rule people not belonging to their own tribe. Of course, this means much greater armies, and this means greater victories, etc. The discovery of the mandate of Heaven is enough to explain the establishment of empire.

In fact, that kind of empires tends to have fairly unimpressive armies. Since they are able to mobilize forces ten times as big as anyone else, they do not care for the military technology. They simply grab a lot of peasants, teach them a bit about keeping basic order, and swamp the enemy.

However, the Ancestor-worship element demanded enourmous exertions in order to build and equip the immense tombs of kings. In addition, it causes envy by the pious subjects, who would like to equip THEIR ancestors as well as those of the King. And, in fact, there is that immense pile of gold laying under the ground there...

At some point the temptation becomes too big, and the grave-robbers appear, at first normal thieves, but finally enormous armies, who are gathered by one thing only - hope for enormous loot to be found in the royal graves. They tend to come from the perphery states, such as the Mycenaean Greeks, etc. They themselves build tombs, but have to live in enormous fortresses. They also have somewhat better armies, with professional bronze-armoured chariot riders. But even this is not enough. The internecine strife and the enormous costs of this all (tombs, grave goods, fortresses, armies, scribes to administer it) becomes to much for peasants.

From outside there come iron-armed barbarians, who believe in the eternal life without the need for expensive graves and who burn they dead. The great fortesses are looted; the scribes with their secret writing killed. Most of the civilisation disappears. Under the ground many of the greatest tombs wait hidden, filled with traps, monsters and treasures.

And on the island of Atalaya, the Emperors of All Men continue to live in their palace, which stands on top of the second, underground palace of the dead, built and enlarged and rebuilt since the beginning of time: the greatest dungeon ever, in which the awakened mummies of the former emperors sit on their grave thrones, staring with empty eyes out of golden masks, while their spirits ride on the wind, far above the clouds.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=38395

[Draco_Argentum]

It's fine to have sexist cultures, because they're another excuse to run away or play against type. It's just not OK as an overall tone.

I agree. Depending on how its set up it comes across as either belief in sexism IRL or as a moral anvil.

[Judging__Eagle]

I'm not too thrilled at the prospect of making most cultures in TNE inherently sexist (especially in one direction), regardless of historical precedent or the interesting issues it raises. In a light system like TNE, if men are basically 'adventurers' and women are basically 'adventurers and everything else', women are naturally going to be pushed into the NPC category in most games.

It's fine to have sexist cultures, because they're another excuse to run away or play against type. It's just not OK as an overall tone.

Well, not really sexist, just different.

Under the arrangement that I'm talking about men can only be adventurers if a woman said that they could. By giving them their gear, weapons, food, etc.

So, if you look at anyone wearing a suit of glowing fullplate and a battleaxe wreathed in black flames, you're not going to think "oh shit, he's obviously powerful", you're going to think "holy crap, some woman gave him that stuff/owns that stuff, she's gotta be like tons more badass than this guy is."

Men are "adventurers", but usually "everything else" unless someone decides that they're allowed to own stuff and go adventuring.

... I just realized what I'm subconsciously basing this off of. The "Kaern" race from a LRP game called Epoch. They're a "felinoid" species, which means they look cat-like, but more often than not they don't look like real-life feline species, and can seriously have all sorts of weird colouration. In this species you basically have females (and their female relatives, or adopted females) running prides of Kaern. Males are essentially owned by the females, and tend to defer to the word of Kaern females.

This is mostly b/c males tend to have no impulse control, and are lazy/weak-willed. So, for the most part, males are pretty dependent on females for everything from being told which career they will do (dictated to them by the pride mother), to what weapons they will use (usually given to them or bought for them), or who to go kill. So, they trade having to think about what their long-term plans will be in exchange for doing as they are told by females.

Of course, there are downsides to this. Male Kaern by definition defer to at least the Pride mother, if not all females (even of other races). Males that are found wandering on their own, or who have stated that they are not part of a pride are either killed or invited to join prides that find them. Rogue males have to be really smart and strong-willed (aka, insane by Kaern standards) in order to even survive for extended periods of time.

For an adventuring setting like TNE, social arrangements where females decide who gets cool gear could very well have the adults of families or family members going adventuring. Which would mesh well with the tribal/familial nature of many of the cultures that I'm noticing. An auntie goes with some nieces and nephews, or a bunch of siblings and their spouses go together.

The ideal being that most adventuring groups that belong to legitimate society would have to have a mix of genders.

Groups of young males could easily be roaming around, but all of their goods are assumed to be stolen, so everyone will not feel bad about taking their stuff. Like, town guards wouldn't let a bunch of men enter a town unless there was a woman in their group that was obviously in charge of most of them, since they're obviously rogue males.

It's just a bit of a different societal arrangement.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Well, not really sexist, just different.

Under the arrangement that I'm talking about men can only be adventurers if a woman said that they could. By giving them their gear, weapons, food, etc.

That's a social system that treats the sexes differently. It's the definition of sexist.

I don't allow bullshit pseudo-medieval gender roles in my D&D games, because they make the game less enjoyable. I don't want this pseudo-neolithic crap in TNE either.

[IGTN]

I don't really know if something like gender roles should even be universal cross-culture in TNE. Honor (conduct of war, guest laws, and so on) should probably be, because it's about how you interact with foreigners, but internal matters in a nation don't need to be; if, for example, the Jarbahn want to be egalitarian while Hive Acatl wants to be matriarchal and Redarkhan wants to have mostly male Skymages, then the world should be able to handle that.

[Username17]

I don't really know if something like gender roles should even be universal cross-culture in TNE. Honor (conduct of war, guest laws, and so on) should probably be, because it's about how you interact with foreigners, but internal matters in a nation don't need to be; if, for example, the Jarbahn want to be egalitarian while Hive Acatl wants to be matriarchal and Redarkhan wants to have mostly male Skymages, then the world should be able to handle that.

Definitely agreed. Sexual divisions are by definition going to be questions of division of labor or authority. And those are things that simply don't have to or even want to be similar in different areas. When the biggest piece of productive labor you do each month involves poring blood onto Senician blood vines, women are going to have a reputation in society as having an easier time doing productive labor. And childbirth is going to be thought of in terms of productive labor because and equivalent to the blood that isn't spilled to make that happen.

baduin:

Your segment is really long, and I am afraid that if I multiquote it the entire universe will collapse in zero time. There's a lot to mull over.

But I have to say, I am totally unconvinced by the idea that the Bronze Age revolved around the Ancestor Cult. While to an extent all religion can be divided into Ancestor Cult and Death Cult, and religion has been a defining organizing principal of humanity for longer than there have been written records - the fact is that there are a fair few Death Cults running around in the Bronze Age. In every Bronze Age, in every part of the world. What there is is a selection bias for archaeologists to find Ancestor Cult materials in the far future. There are no ancient Hindu gravesites to unearth because Hindus get fucking cremated. Prehistory and early history is jam packed with peoples who made quite powerful empires and never made any giant tombs. But because they never made any giant tombs, we never find any of their giant tombs!

I see a lot of extrapolation from a simple archaeological fact that when you think about it for 30 seconds is something that you realize is necessarily what you're going to find no matter what the past was actually like. The Indus Valley people were frankly much more on the ball than their contemporaries in China or Egypt, and we don't have any giant mausoleums for them because they did not build any.

---

Now that being said, it is also true and importantly true that the concept of The Mandate of Heaven is potentially all the reason you need for the nation with that concept to ultimately conquer everything. Not because their tombs were cooler, that's completely irrelevant, but simply because if your opponents aren't annexing territory and you are, eventually you will annex all of them if you ever win any of your wars. Atayala may have been beaten into the dust by some ancient Fire empire twenty times, but if the Fire empire responded to their victories by marching in, taking a bunch of gold and grain, and going home, Atayala was still in the match. If you're the only one playing the Conquer and Hold game, you only need to win once to irrevocably change the map - you can lose an unlimited number of times and it will just slow you down.

Now the thing about nationalism and imperialism is that they are the kind of ideas that spread to neighboring chiefs fairly easily. So whether the Atayalans were the first to jump on the idea of conquering other cities and adding them to the nation or not, there was almost certainly a period in which several distinct nations were trying to conquer the continent. And I would personally like to call this the Six Ways Period. On a side note: unless someone wants to write another Fire nation and possibly even if they do it currently appears that something really horrible happened to the Empire of the Fire Way, whatever it was.

-Username17

[IGTN]

unless someone wants to write another Fire nation and possibly even if they do it currently appears that something really horrible happened to the Empire of the Fire Way, whatever it was.

Hive Mosyna uses fire, and something really horrible happened to them. Of course, it was too recent to be the ancient history that we want it to be (if Atayala has been on Chuluan for 400 years, and Mosynan history goes back 400 years since exile, then their horrible thing happened probably during/immediately after the fall of the Atayalan empire).

[baduin]

But I have to say, I am totally unconvinced by the idea that the Bronze Age revolved around the Ancestor Cult. While to an extent all religion can be divided into Ancestor Cult and Death Cult, and religion has been a defining organizing principal of humanity for longer than there have been written records - the fact is that there are a fair few Death Cults running around in the Bronze Age. In every Bronze Age, in every part of the world.

Frankly, I do not know what you mean by Death Cult. Any links?

I simply do not know the history of India beyond the basics, so I did not write about it. I know the history of China quite well, and they were fixated on ancestor worship, so this influenced my proposition.

As for the society revolving around the ancestor cult - it was certainly important in Mycenaean Greece and Egypt, but I do not know to what extent it was the basis for those societies. The size of pyramids suggest Egyptians were ready to pay a lot of for immortality, and the Labyrinth was even greater.

But the historical truth is not the reason for my suggestion. Wunderlich is an enthusiast, not a scientist - I suggested his theory because it offers a lot of gold and undead filled tombs to loot.

Finally, you are of course right about the many participants in the wars for unification. We do not hear about the opponents of Zhou in China, because they were censored out of existence by Chinese writers.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1441905/posts

Their cities were burned, sculptures destroyed and buried etc. China always put a real emphasis on unity, and does the same today; they are absorbing Tibet in exactly the same fashion.

The unification of Egypt happened before the history begun.

[Judging__Eagle]

However, the unification of upper and lower Egypt was recorded.

[Username17]

Warning: I don't even read things on Free Republic unless they've been linked from fstdt.net for the purposes of open mockery - it's literally the ass end of the internet that even FOX News thinks is too crazy. They literally run pieces about how Obama causes AIDS as if it were actual news.

It's not even just a non-credible source: it's a ludicrous source.

-Username17

[baduin]

As you prefer.

Some other sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui
"Generations of Chinese archaeologists searched the area without success until 1986, when workers accidentally found sacrificial pits containing thousands of gold, bronze, jade, and pottery artifacts that had been broken (perhaps ritually disfigured), burned, and carefully buried. Researchers were astonished to find an artistic style that was completely unknown in the history of Chinese art, whose baseline had been the history and artefacts of the Yellow River civilization(s)."

"The Sanxingdui Culture was a mysterious civilization in southern China, which was in the kingdom of Shu during the period of the Shang Dynasty. Although they developed a different method of bronze-making from the Shang, their culture was never recorded by Chinese historians. Sanxingdui culture is thought to be divided into several phases. The first one may have been independent, while the later phases merged with Ba, Chu, and other cultures.

Besides Sanxingdui, other archeological discoveries in Sichuan, including the Baodun and Jinsha cultures, all indicate that civilizations in southern China go back at least 5,000 years. Such evidence of independent cultures in different regions of China defies the traditional theory that the Yellow River was the sole "cradle of Chinese civilization."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baodun_culture
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001 ... 20825.html

Here is the same article quoted above, but this time directly from Taipei Times:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/a ... 2003263330

Archeologists shake up history
NEW EVIDENCE: Artifacts found at a building site and the subsequent discovery of a lost civilization have forced historians to rethink Chinese history as a whole
....
One of the world's great cities once flourished here at Jinsha village in China's southwest, the 1000BC equivalent of New York or Paris, and then inexplicably vanished, leaving no trace behind in the historical records.

[baduin]

As for the Fire Empire? Fire magic used mentally is supposed to cause madness.

The Fire Empire started as the cult of the Fire God, Vimuhla.

http://www.tekumel.com/world_gods07.html

The center of the empire was known later as the Mosynic Desert - although it was not a desert then.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=38368

Vimuhla was a cruel god, who promised his Luminous Paradise to his believers, and especially those who died in war or have been burned alive. His priests were able to kindle terrible enthusiasm. Their magic, both mental and physical, was fed by burning sacrifices: plants, animals, men, forests, cities, anything.

The tribe of fire-worshippers was originally a minor annoyance to neighbours, since they tended to raid them for sacrifices, but did not pose any global problem. Until one of the priests announced himself to be the god's spokesman, the Burning Prophet, and began to convert other tribes. With the increase in sacrifices, his power grew exponentially.

The growth of the empire was incredibly quick. The armies of Fire burned their way through the world, devouring everything in their way and converting and conscripting survivors. The empire stopped growing only when their armies went so far from the capitol that the Prophet was afraid he will lose control over them.

They were finally defeated by the undead armies of Aua-lu, who were not afraid of fire, and could not be converted. But if the empire of fire was terrible in attack, they were even worse in defense. They mobilized everyone. Those who could not fight, were sacrificed to the fire-god, together with their crops, animals etc. They used literally "scorched earth" tactics. When they cities were captured, they set them afire. At the end, when their capitol was besieged by the undead legions, the Prophet led the great rite of self-immolation, in order to summon their god and go directly to the paradise.

It is not known whether he succeeded, because not one witness of that rite survived. When the emissaries from Aua-lu tried to learn what happened to their great army, they found only the Mosynic Desert, with nothing living or dead left there.

The losses from that war fatally weakened the Aua-lu, and the horror caused by their destruction of the Fire-Empire made all other empires to band against them. The coalition was led, of course, by Atalaya.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=38395

BTW - the fire-worshipping tribe was human, and was totally destroyed. The Hive Mosyna was forced into the desert much later, and have nothing in common with the Empire of Fire.

[IGTN]

IIRC, Hive Mosyna is a human "mole-rat" hive, not Ormigan (although they mimic them, socially).