#Dwendalian Empire

[devenrue]

The map of the Dwendalian Empire showing Matt Mercer’s original draft and the final color version I made for them.

[hinumay]

hmm just a concept sketch of the Soltryce Academy uniform

still tryna develop it, but it was inspired by theeeseee

[animatrobin]

Map of Blumenthal, Commissioned by the wonderful @samuraiko (pls check them out❤)

DO NOT REPOST WITHOUT CREDIT

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Credits: Art by me, Settlement info from the EGTW by @criticalrole and matthewmercer

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#criticalrolefanart #DnD #ttrpg #fantasymaps #calebwidogast

[saribrum]

A bit of old art, but I had to introduce my girl Vee too! She’s my Air Genasi Echo Knight Fighter from my groups main campaign, the Fabled Few. We have been playing for a few years now, and I have grown very attached.

I have so many stories from what we have done in this game, and it’s still going. So much cool stuff ahead, and I am excited to continue it!

[pyrot3ch-nick]

Hey guys remember the Knights of Requital plot line that M9 didn't follow.

The insurgents attacks and riots prison breaks that happened in the Dwendalian empire that Matt mentioned might have been because of that.

[aussie0608]

The entire early campaign of C2 there's like so much anti-dynasty propaganda and xenophobia and like the dynasty isn't perfect. Religious fanaticism isn't awesome and being reincarnated and the dens have made nepotism a major problem but like those feel like minor issues when two of the highest officials in the Empire are LUDANIS AND TRENT like good lord. And like not worshiping the Luxon is frowned upon BUT NOT A CRIME.

The Dwendallian empire is insane as a concept

Because I could say “The dwendalian empire is run by a cabal of evil wizards that outlaw religious freedom while making dark pacts with eldritch abominations for power, they take children from their homes, brainwashed them to be obedient soldiers and then make them murder their entire families

Sometimes they go down to quaint little towns and start exploding houses and vaporizing villagers, just to steal rocks they could’ve taken very easily

Their senile king is going mad and getting council by a demented cult leader set on killing god”

And you would think I’m like a Dynasty propagandist spreading the most unhinged conspiracy theories

But no, these are all true and objective facts about how their government is run

[utilitycaster]

I think I may have said this before but bears repeating, it will be so fucking funny to me if significant end results of Ludinus's world-wide temper tantrum include lasting peace between the Empire and Dynasty and the Empire permitting worship of the previously banned Prime Deities.

[omens-daughter]

just a lil reminder that Judicators and K'Nauth had a choice about defacing themselves and becoming vessels for their gods

the Ruidusborn Exaltants? who all felt fated to be in the Hellcatch? y'know, the ones like Imogen who are developing scars and physical disfigurement by just existing?

they didn't.

[ihassheepquake]

The Assembly abandoned the Empire??? Well shit. It makes sense but omg.

[wackachewbacca]

Keyleth mentioned that tensions are on the rise within the Dwendalian empire what with the king on his way out and the Cerberus Assembly running around unchecked especially with Ludinus as its head and while I would love for the Cerberus Assembly to be completely abolished or prevented from ever rising back to the height of its current political power after this whole Predathos incident I also hope the empire doesn’t tear itself apart from the inside.

The empire has just barely gotten out of war with the Kryn Dynasty and now it may just fall into civil war and I could give less than a shit about king Dwendal and all the bureaucracy and shit but the people still need to heal from the War of Ash and Light because that ended only seven years ago (836 PD) give or take and that’s hardly anytime at all to rebuild their lives because the ruling body of their nation have neglected their safety for arcane power and knowledge

[toeffelphi]

okay, time to nerd out about language for a moment in the context of tmn.

you all remember halas, right? local gem wizard (tm) and overall problematic practitioner of the arcane? you also remember how he is kinda out of his time when the mn meet him during the campaign? and how the dwendalian empire is sort of inspired by germany?

listen, as a kid who just started german studies (and is also german, blah blah) it would mean the world to me to see halas' old notes be in old or middle high german instead of just magic gibberish.

imagine. caleb going through the notes to make nott veth again and having problems with the translations, cause its sorta like his mother tongue but also not at all. and how nott could just take one glance at a sentence, see the connection between two words because she saw the whole instead of the parts and tell him "those two words could fit together" and suddenly the whole thing makes more sense!

we got percy attempting to translate celestial in tlovm, please give us caleb struggling with an old version of his own language with a different spelling system and weird pronunciation and inconsistent grammar!

just imagine halas writing his spells like the Merseburger Zaubersprüche or in the stanza of the Minnegesang. Imagine his planar illustration in the style of the old maps and images of the world (and its different planes! surprisingly, those are very similar to how dnd imagines the planes but I do not know nearly enough about either to give a more nuanced opinion) and imagine his writing with the elaborate first letters and decorations and everything!

please, just imagine the look of the codex manesse for halas' spell work. (that btw is a link to a digital browse of aforementioned codex manesse)

I just think that could be so neat. and such a wonderful way to make all us poor kids who study middle high german and watch critical role to go "ooohhhh I know that stuff!!"

it could be so dope

[c-kiddo]

[Image ID: A reply from days54g, reading: I think Taliesin explained he had said "thank you" bc to him 'educated' men like the King and the Wizards are actually really dumb to him, they know a lot but actually very little is how I think he explained it. End ID.]

ah that was more the vibe after he talked to Ikithon later on in th show, not the king.. him trying to explain tmn’s theory to king dwendal was like ,, he flubbed it for realsies 

heres what tal said on talks machina (this ep @ 19:48):

“That was what he thought was a genuine compliment, because he was having a panic attack. so that was him not really hearing what was happening and thinking that he was being .. complimented on his homespun wisdom, unburdened by modern society. i think he probably put it together later...”

so yea. basically cad was freaking the fuck out and also for sure not used to raising his voice so th whole thing was just. panic T_T </3 

[saribrum]

Vee and her backstory NPCs!

From left to right we have Vee (originally known to the group as Victor), Charlie, Foxtrot, Glyph, and Juliet. They were in a group called Project Primordius, and were a mesh of elemental genasi (plus one hellfire Tiefling) and were a branch off of the Cerberus Assembly, under the Volstrucker. This is them all now, but back when they were children, none of these kids were treated like anything other than soldiers and experiments. It was a rough existence for them all, with a lot of bloodshed and anger. Most of them were forcefully taken from their families when they were younger, all of them were taught that society would only ever see them as monsters, and that’s partly why they stayed. That and it was all they ever knew.

Now in our game, Vee is doing everything she can to help them. She was rescued from the facility, but she will always feel guilty for getting out when they couldn’t. Fox and Charlie have proven to be good allies to the Fabled Few so far, Juliet seems a bit on the fence on whether she is friend or foe, and Glyph is just a straight up bbeg to us right now. Only time will tell what happens with these maniacs. I’m excited to see it all come to a head.

[astrid-beck]

Okay I have two thoughts about Caleb giving luc the magic book. One is that caleb's unshakable patriotism is heartbreaking and the fact that he tells that kid that "your mother and father are a credit to the empire" is so indicative of the way he still thinks about the empire and the nobility of serving his homeland (along the lines of "my parents died for our country") even though he is obviously contrasting the Ikithon "when talent rises from nothing then nothing is truly lost" school of thought. And my second thought is the irreversible damage book cover but it's a picture of luc that says "the transmutation craze seducing our sons"

[utilitycaster]

A lot of people who try to analyze religion in Exandria need to watch the Adventuring Academy episode where Brennan and Matt talked about worldbuilding, specifically when Matt said “In a game like dungeons and dragons, or a lot of role playing games where ultimately part of the game is to overcome villains and rise up and become a hero, there has to be some level of universal antagonism… there is a pure and defined entity or force that is evil, it may not be realistic to some stories out there, but that’s [how it works in DND].”

This is true, and it's really interesting to watch this happen because Matt will make a huge, unambiguous evil like Lucien or the Vanguard, or Brennan will do so with Asmodeus and people will do everything they can to try to come up with reasons to woobify them or argue why they're justified...but I haven't seen this happen in most of the D20 seasons, and I think it's because the villains in most D20 seasons have been things that reinforce people's beliefs, namely, capitalism and abuse of religious power. And to be clear, capitalism and abuse of religious power fucking suck, but it's telling that people assume the villain is capitalism in places where that doesn't apply on a wide scale, or in some cases, exist (EXU Calamity, Neverafter); or that the Ruby Vanguard or Tomb Takers, both of which have pretty much every single hallmark of a cult but just aren't affiliated with the main pantheon, are actually the good guys.

Incidentally: this is like, quite literally how people get sucked into cults. One of the leading cult researchers in the world, Janja Lalich, is a survivor of a now dissolved explicitly leftist/anti-capitalist cult. Abuses of power, which is, ultimately, what both Brennan and Matt lean on as their Universal Antagonist traits, rely on confirming people's existing biases and exploiting them - even if those biases are broadly good! This is in fact why I can get so fucking adamant about what is mostly silly fandom shit, because I do, on some level, look at some takes that completely lack critical thinking and am like oh you'd 100% buy into all kinds of dangerous patterns of thought if someone packaged it nicely; even something as stupid as the Caleb Werewolf Theory relied on circumstantial evidence and false information that you could easily verify was false. And it's annoying but mostly harmless in the context of fandom, but it always makes me wonder - does this person do this with political posts on social media?

Anyway getting back to the main point, I think watching/listening to Brennan commentary on Adventuring Academy is generally a really good idea because he is a very smart guy with a philosophy degree and has a strong grasp of the genres in which he works as well as TTRPGs as a storytelling medium, and talks to other people who also have a good understanding of the morality of fantasy stories. And if you listen to this, you will in fact get that the basis of evil in these stories is not something as specific as "capitalism" or "religion"; it's quite literally as basic as "exploiting other people simply because that is an option available to you and you don't care about them." And obviously that's the whole basis of capitalism, and it's a serious problem that exists within organized religion, but like...not to repeat myself from this weekend but I keep thinking about the "Suvi without the imperialism" and it's like...she is a 20 year old woman whose parents died for a cause and we have had ONE episode with her as an adult. We know nothing about the Empire except that it's an empire and it is at war. Like, can you look at imperialism and understand why it's bad? Can you separate the concept of imperalism - which, to be clear, is based on power structures - from say, your 21st century understanding of empires in the real world? Or do you see the word Empire and go "Bad Thing" without any capacity to analyze because that's how you end up looking at two flawed things in a story (well, if we're lucky; see the middle paragraph) and deciding one is perfect and correct for no reason other than because it opposes the thing you think is worse. And Brennan is REALLY good at skewering that, and Matt is REALLY good at portraying multiple complicated and flawed perspectives, but you do have to like, use your brain slightly.