#veraphiums

[st-just]

I've seen you post a few times some interesting world building snippets, is there a setting your working on at the moment, or are they unrelated? (Feel free to use this an invitation to talk about the world, I'd love to hear about it)

Well, since you did ask for it!

They’re mostly theoretically written to be in the same setting, with a sort of acceptance that when put together it’ll probably be a bit incoherent around the edges. Given that it started as the setting for a D&D game that ended like a year ago and has just stewed and metastasized since then, that’s kind of a given, really.

But honestly, the initial impetus was reading...I think it was Strangers Drowning?, anyway, there was a discussion of how rather than just ‘selfish versus selfless’, a more useful distinction is how people distribute moral weight between themselves, their friends/family/close circle, and the general public/world at large. And, being an utter nerd, my second or third thought was “huh, that’s a pretty decent chassis for an alignment system that’s meaningfully distinct from good vs. Evil”.

So then I ended up working out three Great Powers for a world as sort of ideal types/expressions of each extreme, and then coming up with cultures and aesthetics that seemed kind of fitting after the fact, which I’m fairly sure is not how you’re supposed to do it, but anyway.

So on the one extreme you’ve got the Sublime Commonwealth, called the Esheri by everyone without a government job. A universalist, bureaucratic state, governed by Janissary-technocrats plucked from orphanages and schools, without family or property or the right to any sort of legacy beyond what they can contribute to the Common Good. Mandatory public education, but it’s solely in the equivalent of Esperanto. Religious freedom, as long as the temples accept state funding and choose their preachers and officials from government-approved seminaries and madrassas, with the more or less explicit goal that after a few generations of modernist theology and Higher Criticism the whole thing will be unnecessary. Family ties considered broken at the age of majority, or when the parents are deemed negligent, with newly formed households encouraged to take their name from some civic virtue or geographic feature rather than anything related to their cultures or ancestries. Public sanitation and healthcare and food relief, but also if the Committee on Strategy determines that they really need a new naval port you might find out you’re moving in a month, all your sacred rites and trade secrets will be carefully recorded for inclusion in the next edition of The Encyclopedia, and so forth. Titles like “Empiricist.” “Special Adviser to the Secretariat,” “Alternate Member of the Committee on Industry and Progress”.

The second power would be the Holy Ilyrin Empire, or possibly Ilyrin-Belthaya, depending on who you ask and where you’re standing. Not so much a unified ‘state’ as a vast and sprawling collection of crown in personal union, sworn vassals, various sorts of tributaries and protectorates, and a thousand other sorts of distinctions fit to make any central administrator cry. The Empire’s exceptionally big on tradition, you see and while the Queen-Empress is clearly the Heavens’ chosen Vicegerent, she and her court have no special authority to meddle in the natural and organic constitutions of her various subjects, save to defend them from unnatural innovation or outside influence. Family, lineage, and inheritance  are all exceptionally important, with infertility being treated like a malignant tumour that’s too humiliating to discuss in public, and disinheriting a child or repudiating ones family being more or less unthinkable, though the particulars of just who counts as your ‘family’ or ‘children’ can vary quite a bit, depending on location and circumstance. Regardless, nepotism and patronage are so widely accepted there’s barely words for them, and certainly no stigma attached-really, not going out of your way to help out distant relatives or family friends with any jobs or trading tips you happen to be able to hand out is what would get you ostracized and looked down upon. Religion is everywhere, and all-encompassing, but despite what the Hierarch in Imir might desire, most minority faiths have sort of official compact with their lords and ladies mandating toleration as long as they keep to themselves and know their limits. Education is handled through guilds and churches, without any sort of central organization or certification scheme, and the vast majority of really useful or impressive knowledge is hoarded by particular sacred orders or guilds or family lines. Absolutely all relief against misfortune relies upon your local churches and notables and whether your family or social circle can support you, but on the other hand if you’ve got a good thing going there’s essentially zero chance someone is going to come in from on high and destroy it, and if some system works then it’s going to be allowed to keep working. Titles like “Earl Marshal,” “Lady Protector.” “Witchfinder-General”

Third and the Free Cities, or the Federal Republic, or the Unconnected Collection of City-States Who Share Many Prominent Citizens And Trading Interests. Words are wind, and honour is an affectation, duty and loyalty are chains the cunning try to fasten around the necks of the strong. Notably, the only democracies-in a somewhat Athenian sense, with crimes against the City being tried before an assembly of citizens and determined by popular vote, without reference to written law, and open campaigning for command of armies and bidding for the right to exact tribute from the various hinterland tribes. As a matter of principle, there is no obligation that is not freely accepted, whether to family or faith or sovereign. The great and good of the Cities enrapture the masses with their feuds and romances, and a vital part of any political career is providing grand spectacles and public feasts to entertain and sustain the masses living on the street, the vast majority of whom can rely upon no other source of charity. Religion is commonplace, though objectively a large fraction of them are probably better called ‘cults’, sustained by direct sponsorship or force of personality, feuding with all the other street gangs and syndicates in bloody, shadowy affairs, each sect rising and burning out like a seasonal fashion, though each City has something like an official patron and a few festivals widely observed enough to have the mob firmly behind them. As the City Assemblies assign duties or assignments and not occupations, there’s officially speaking no title higher than the elected captain of a ship or mercenary company. Not allowing this to humble them, it’s an accepted practice for the famous and important to take various grand sobriquets and epithets-”The ingenious,” “the magnificent,” “Maestro of Falling Stars,” “Weaver in Blood and Bone,” and so on.

....I can keep going on pretty much indefinitely, but I’ll stop writing their in the interest of actually posting this relatively soon after receiving it.

[secretlystephaniebrown]

veraphiums replied to your post: If you were offered a chance to write a single...

Thanks for writing such a detailed response, that honestly sounds really cool

every now and then my inner Gotham Central fan comes out, and I feel like this is one of those times. 

[screechfoxes]

veraphiums replied to your post “help i’ve fallen into incredibly niche skulduggery pleasant + magnus...”

What. What are they?

i warn you, i don’t have any strong justifications for any of them

mary keay (in her younger years) sharing a vicious back-and-forth relationship with china sorrows; two morally dubious collectors of occult books...

which for some reason led me to gertrude/china, which i have no backstory for

i have weird urges to ship valkyrie with someone and all my brain is giving me is either melanie or mike crew (?? - because she likes flying? idk)

please tell my brain to stop, i have no idea why it’s doing this

[zizygy]

Have you read the "This is not a place of honour" text that was written as part of the same project as the spikes?

Not yet, I have it saved in my likes for some time when I have the time/energy

I didn’t realize that they were part of the same project, but that doesn’t surprise me. In a writing class I once read a story about a woman who was trying to solve what I assume is this same problem: How to alert people to nuclear waste presence centuries after our language becomes forgottenI think it came up again in a different writing class, which is about when I realized that was a talked about question rather than one particularly brilliant writer

[fipindustries]

veraphiums

were there ever any details on what the whole golden calf cult entailed?

well, for starters, you have to worship a giant golden statue of a calf, so that is one thing

[pumpkinskull]

Some of the post about zuckerburg wasn't really accurate (He's definitely a shitty person with way too much money). He didn't set up the fund, and he's also not allowed to spend more then $2000 of his own money on his own campaign. The fund was set up by someone to persuade him to run

didnt get notified about this ask whenever it arrived, but, that’s good to know, i guess

[afloweroutofstone]

Is it me or is Sanders a little more subdued tonight? Not in the sense that he's veering away from his stance, just the presentation seems a lot less bombastic

Yeah, he’s aware that doing the sort of cutthroat back-and-forth that this debate would otherwise feature right now would come across looking really badly to most people given the circumstances. Which sucks, because that’s exactly the kind of debate we need now that we’re down to two candidates

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your post “Imperial Religion”

What kind of impact would a terrestrial god be able to have, in regards to resisting occupation, if it did choose outright resistance?

Well, that does depend a bit on the exact stature of the god in question, really. Broadly speaking their very Fisher King in powers, metaphysically holding dominion over the natural cycles of their domains and (depending on their status and power) things increasingly abstractly connected to that. 

And, since I’ve unconscionably had this in my drafts for like a week now, some examples 

-The Dryad Siflaed, who harbored outlaws against the Emperor’s Justice and claimed the right to grant sanctuary to any who bled beneath her sacred ash, was too powerful to trouble lightly but not so powerful as to easily attract the notice of Church or Court. When she accepted the local Duke’s patricide of a daughter without understanding the situation and, having done so, refused to reverse herself things quickly escalated.

The King-Emperor, Lord Binder and Chamberlain together decreed her Damned, and hunting parties were sent into her forest to retrieve her. They were set upon, as might be expected, both by the bandits and runaways who made up her court, and all the wild beasts to who she was the soul. As they neared her grove, more than a dozen men-at-arms were seized by suddenly animate trees, crushed or hanged before their comrades could free them with hatchets of silver and iron. And facing her in person, at the heart of her sanctuary, many more found themselves petrified and rooted to the ground, or dragged down into the suffocating loam and muck, or simply torn apart with divine strength.

But in the end, it was a matter of dozens dead, and a fortnight passed, before she and hers were simply overwhelmed. As the infernal yoke was forced around her neck, her curse echoed through the forest, and none within it were again able to nurture or grow any fruit or flower. Banished to the sixth hell and named the Baroness of Red Orchards, she has rarely been called upon since. But as her forest quickly withered and died, it is by now only diabolists who remember her.

-The Serpent Zesar is surely a god, and yet his existence is a blasphemy. When the priests of what is now the Southern Marches became corrupt and embraced death, the greater number of the Terrestrial Gods they had until then worshiped as lesser aspects of the Celestial were set upon and broken apart for the secrets of their divine souls, or else forced into hiding to avoid such a fate. Some though, and Zesar is among their number, were not victims of this corruption but instead its cause. Calling himself Psychopomp and Judge, when the Heaven's true judgment was made known, he and his entire temple-city was drowned beneath the swamp and forced into quiescence.

Until, of course, some generations later particularly foolish grave-robbers had the bad luck to violate his temple, their deaths providing all the sacrifice required to awaken him. A scaled, rotting, fungus-encrusted monstrosity, he for some years acted quietly. Overawing the small companies of heretics and outlaws who call the deep swamp home, demanding that they drown their criminals and captives so he might bind their soul to corpse and claim them as courtiers, destroying the Icons and consuming the Saints which had provided the land a soul in his stead. The land turned sickly, only those in his favour able to hunt or forage surrounded by poison and rot.

When he regained the fullness of his power and spite, he struck at the Ducal seat itself, desiring to slaughter her court and drown her cathedral, so his own sunken temple might once again become Abhari’s rotting heart. He brought with him flood, and plague, and a legion of the dead. Wherever he passed rivers flooded their banks and crops were struck with blight. The blessed who stood against him were consumed with rot, and only those who accepted his mark could grow anything but poison. A shameful number did.

But he had more pride than strength, and Abhari’s fortresses were built to stand against grander foes than he. His flood broke against the walls of Lusselo, his flesh further burnt and scarred by the scorn of its holy men, his rotting slaves liberated by the silver blades of its paladins. The Grand Duke defeated his followers twice more in open battle, but the ruin left in his wake was such that he was able to retreat back to his sanctuary and once again regain his strength. It has been three years since any have admitted seeing signs of  his passing, but he surely still hides like a festering abscess.

Caille Desoi called himself the King of Rivers, and claimed it was by his benevolence that that the oceans filled and the rain fell. Whole peoples paid tribute to him, and grew rich farming on his banks or trading along his currents, paying heed to no higher power. Through a simple glamour he took on a comely and kingly bearing, but in truth he was a leviathan fit for the darkest depths, and on being raised to see the sun had the hubris to believe that there none who might rightly claim to be yet above him.

When the Queen-Empress sent emissaries to make known her claim, he caused the foremost among the to drown with a gesture and demanded the rest pay homage and apologize, should they wish to live. As he blasphemed, so to did all those who paid him homage, for their kings and priests were his sons and daughters. The Desoi Crusade would see a full third of the Imperial Navy dragged beneath the placid sea as they neared his domain, and whole regiments drown a mile from the Desoi’s banks as they prepared to give battle. He was declared Damned, and laughed in the face of the knights who attempted to make good the sanction.

The Crusade-named such in the third year of the war-too a full seven. At last, the Queen-Empress grew impatient and sent the most fearsome of his household to reduce the land. Duke Paimon of Chains, Imperial Chamberlain and Regent of Hell, was granted leave to depart from the palace, and took a full nine legions as his retinue. The Desoi ran red and black as Caille was chained with silver and iron amongst his burning city and slaughtered children, his arms cut away and his eyes put out until, resisting justice to the end, he sank beneath the waves.

The Desoi has grown slow in the years since, every shipment it carries seeming to bear pestilence and disaster. The town that was his sanctum, still known as Caille, is now called the City of Dead Gods, and the sects of divers who call it home surface strange and with stranger stories. It is yet unknown if the creatures living in the river’s bed are nascent demons, his surviving children, or something else entirely.

-A Incomplete Bestiary of the Enemies of Heaven.

[st-just]

That post about the bill in Missouri is kind of reaching a little bit, not in that it's not an awful piece of repressive legislation, but last I checked it has no co sponsors, and isn't scheduled for any hearings. The guy who proposed it has written a whole bunch of other blatantly unconstitutional bills, and none of them have any support either.

On a moment’s reflection the fact that the article doesn’t mention who supports it or whether anyone expects it to pass is a bit of a red flag, yeah. 

My own fault for posting while half-asleep on the bus. Thanks for pointing out. 

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your post:

A Demon

Glad I could help! Always happy to ask you about things if this is the kind of output it brings. Really love the design on the witches. I’m guessing this is the form the perspective of the middle kingdom, the ‘family’ focused one?

Oh, thanks, glad you like them! 

And yes, specifically from the perspective of the head of the Empire’s Third Section/Star Chamber/Anti-palace coup secret police, writing for public dissemination to her men. There may be a trace of official ideology detectable. 

(a key part of Imperial ideology is the belief that the world is fragile, and decadence, impiety, or innovation is very nearly as dangerous to world as it is to the social, as there’s almost not difference between the two. Thus everything from “STIs are the result of carnal indulgence weakening the soul, allowing the flesh to warp and rot” to “extreme gluttony leads to cannibalism leads to becoming literally an ogre”.)

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your photo: Never let it be said that this is not a...

How did you vote?

as per my longstanding love of terrible people with good banter, basically have to go for Lisa, really. 

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your post:

So since I’m finding myself in need of listening...

Have you listened to any of the Fall of civilisations podcast? Not many episodes, but they’re long and seem pretty well researched and thought out, and certainly high on lecture low on banter.

Haven’t heard of it, but a glance seems very promising. Will take a look, thanks!

[st-just]

How are you finding thinking fast and slow?

Truthfully finding it a bit of a slog so far, though that’s at most 50% down to writing style and 50% down to me already knowing most of what their going over from pop cultural osmosis, and thus requiring active effort to keep focusing for anything new/interesting. 

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your post “But okay now I actually need book recommendations again. Please help. ”

I feel like last time this came up, you hadn't read the earthsea books

I mean, it’s been long enough that I could probably do to re-read them, but I did read (most of?) them way back in elementary school.  

[st-just]

veraphiums replied to your post:

Okay, so I think I’ve got at least a few...

My understanding of it was always in the context of it being opposite to consensus theories of society, so less of an individual theory, and more of a classification of theories that see society and the world as existing as the result of a conflict between two groups, ie marxism or feminism

The two options being “Society as it exists is the result of a good-faith consensus where all stakeholders are more or less represented” and “Society as it exists is the result of homeostasis in an endless Manichean struggle” seems like a hell of an excluded middle, (and not necessarily accurate for the groups mentioned*). But granting all that-if those are the two options, why is the idea of choosing the latter over the former treated with such vitriol?

*If nothing else, Marxists have been talking about competition between factions of capitalists, between the bourgeois and the aristocracy, etc, etc since...Marx?

[zizygy]

21 and 3 for the spotify playlist thing?

21. Punches - Bryce Fox

3. II b: Unrest in the House of Light - The Protomen