August 18, 2011

Korad: An Empire in Crisis

Last week’s poll in our Korad world-building exercise told us about the province of Palth. The following entry now goes into the Korad bible:

Nomadic pastoralist yak-herders, the Palthians make winter camp at Bridlepost. Something destroys all other communities that get "too big". They just disappear. Palthians are an ornery bunch who just plain don't like being crowded. Palthians believe weather at one's birth mystically affects one's personality and character. Youth go on vision quests/rites of passage in the mountains. In Palth, orphaned children disappear within a fortnight, without exception.


That completes our survey of Korad’s regions. Now it’s time to activate its core conflicts, as it becomes a place of contending ideologies.

In order for new ideologies to arise, the old one has to show strains severe enough to grant them purchase. As you'll recall, the prevailing culture is austere, militaristic, reverent of knowledge, and covertly matriarchal. The supreme Koradi deity is the Black Goat of the Fens (whom is symbolized by the sacred goat of the marriage ceremony), a million-teated, ever-pregnant creator who spews out fragments of the cosmos, which given enactment and form by her soldier-demiurges. Her great holiday is the Festival of Ideas.

The crucial social unit is the guild, which connects family and empire. An honorable Koradi remains ever willing to spy and steal.

For more detail, review the above-linked setting Bible.


What now threatens the empire? Answer (and vote on the answers in real time) using the comment system below.

Okay, there are new rules coming up. You’re gamers; you can figure out and follow rules.

This system will speed the last stages of the now-overlong worldbuilding exercise, by folding the pitching and polling steps into one post.

To add a new answer to the question, start a new main comment thread.

To add a modifying riff or detail to someone else’s answer, append a reply comment.

Show your approval for an idea by liking the comment in question. Like as many comments as you want.

The original author of any main idea can count a riff on his or her idea as part of the main idea by saying so in a reply to the modification. If the original author does not make this approval, it is incorporated anyway, when the number of likes on a modification equals half or more of the number of likes on the main idea.

The three ideas with the greatest number of likes will be chosen as the primary causes of instability in the empire, to which the new ideologies must respond.

And… go!

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