#it makes sense on a much bigger landmass than england to have a lot more ethnic and genetic variation in populations

[tetrachromate]

its kinda fire when asoiaf fanartists depict northerners as like, siberian-altaic looking. Gökstärks....

[jiskblr]

6/4: History

Worldbuilding prompts

History is different from Earth, but recognizable. Empires generally got bigger, and usually were ruled by an oligarchy of a particular magic school or a single archmage, but they have for the most part risen and fallen in ways we’d appreciate.

Magic always existed, but prior to writing was generally not well enough understood to accomplish impressive things. Undirected experimentation is dangerous and in technological conditions prevalent at the time frequently lethal; it was generally the domain of shamans. 

Globally, the first monastic traditions developed alongside writing, growing out of less formal mentor-student relationships that had arisen as humans settled into towns and cities. These generally were very locally influential, since while most of them were conservative with their approach to spellcasting, they still had impressive power that scaled enough to be important in city-state conflict. Pain-centered combat magic was not formalized into schools as easily, but individuals using it idiosyncratically gained more reliability from interacting with monastic traditions. One monastic tradition with outsize influence was what is now known as the Endless Wind school, originating in the Yellow River area of China around 1100 BCE. They developed a method of thought that allowed effective-anti-archery wind barriers and significantly increased barrage range for friendly archers. This allowed them to establish the first significant empire on the planet. (Probably. If any archmages showed up in this era they didn’t last or make an impact, so there are no primary sources.) It was historically analogous to our China’s Zhou dynasty but larger, closer in extent to the Han (the main roughly circular body). Its power rested on the dual requirements of Endless Wind magic and conscript archers using straight bows barely modified from hunting, which led to a somewhat more egalitarian society than otherwise.

The next major historical development was the gradual development of mathematical thinking by Pythagoras from around 600 BCE, through to the rigorization of geometry by basically-Euclid around 400 BCE. This was not immediately realized to be of immense magical significance, but the Pythagoreans developed a monastic tradition structured around their way of thinking, which was notable for being unusually good at self-sustaining, time-unbounded spells. Alongside the development of rigor, this was recognized to be much easier to teach than most monastic mindsets, and this created the universalist school of magic and the first deployment of magicians en masse, leading to the formation of the massive but short-lived Pythagorean Empire. It covered a large fraction of the landmass, surrounding the Mediterranean, Red, Black, and Caspian Seas, stretching along the Atlantic Coast from Gibraltar to Calais, the East African coast as far south as Dar es Salaam, and through India up against the Tamil regions and the Himalayan ridge, encompassing all of what we’d recognize as the empires of Alexander and Rome and then some (excluding England). Its expanse was limited mainly by climate, which is why it never reached west Africa, controlled the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, or went further than about 50º north. Long lines of communication also limited its spread, which is why it reached Lake Victoria from the east but not further, did not complete the conquest of India, and never seriously attempted the assault of England; its fracture after about three decades prevented these from being fixed with time.

The Pythagorean Empire forever changed the nature of warfare across the African-Eurasian landmass, and had a pervasive and enduring linguistic impact by creating the first major lingua franca. (Pythagorean Greek makes up the dominant ancestry of most major modern languages, through a chain of imperial linguae francae that covered successively more of the world, substantially influenced by Endless Wind Mandarin and less so in the Americas where native languages remained influential until much later.)

The Americas had parallel development of monastic traditions, though as writing developed later there, these traditions stayed simpler for longer. The Olmec civilization had some religious approaches to magic which formed common cults that continued in distorted form through most later civilizations, including a significantly earlier discovery of the uses of pain for anchoring, discovered by shamans undergoing ritual bloodletting common in religious practice in that society. This made their combat mages, even while shying away from likely-lethal experimentation, very mobile and deadly, and was common enough that continent-spanning empires could not develop as easily as in Eurasia. There was substantial cross-cultural contact and considerable mobility across the continent regardless. A swift-running spell anchored on pain and soreness became commonly known even to menial farmers from Mesoamerica north to the Great Plains and south to the Amazon basin early in their history, and has survived to the present day, now known as the “500-Miler” spell.

In the aftermath of the Pythagorean Empire and its disintegration into successor under internal pressure from philosophical schisms, knowledge of the basics of magical thinking became widespread, and personal-style magical experimentation became much more common. The first person to discover a powerfully-scaling archmage hack was a minor member of the Carthaginian merchant nobility with a lot of time on his hands, in 207 BCE. (Carthage, unlike Rome, had a culture resilient enough to have stayed basically unchanged by Pythagorean occupation and in fact was the administrative capital of one of the successor states, whose leader styled himself Supreme General and had absolute military authority outside the bounds of Carthage itself and partially-checked authority within it. It had not, however, maintained its most profitable trade monopolies.) This noble, Hanit, found himself able to to extend his attention massively and access the senses of others, eventually at extremely long distances. He was made Suffet (”Judge”, one of the civilian co-rulers of Cartage) by acclamation, then declared himself Suffet Alem, (roughly “Worldwide/Eternal Judge”) and used his newfound extremely versatile and extensive power to project a new Carthaginian Empire to the boundaries of the Pythagorean Empire over the next decade. Over the course of the proceeding forty years, it expanded to cover the entirety of the inhabited Eurasian and African landmasses, providing direct judicial governance through personal echoes in every city and many villages. Various representatives were also empowered, and knowing that it was possible, the First Archmage Wave began. This resulted in internal struggle but eventually was resolved into a mixture of places in a hierarchy and low-touch client states. Then after roughly two centuries he was killed, the hierarchy abruptly became a succession, and there was a shift to governance by the archmages in it and a collection of monasteries that had become much more formidable with better theory of how magic worked and peaceful experimentation and (careful, guarded) communication. This lasted another several centuries before factional infighting tore everything apart, with several large, self-sufficient pieces (particularly China and its environs) breaking loose somewhat sooner.

...this is getting too long, and I’m nowhere near the modern day. Well, there has been a cycle of splitting into smaller pieces dominated by local monasteries, new and unusually powerful archmages or coalitions of them expanding to cover more ground (ones in the 900s to 1300s finally encompassing the globe), then those breaking under the strain of size and infighting or unforeseen flaws in their magic. This started to change in a modern nation-state kind of way at some point but ??? I’ll figure that out later.