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?
To answer, I’ll need you to pop over to the new blogging mothership, where the like feature of the Disqus comment system will allow us to collapse pitching and voting into one week instead of two, and grant wider latitude to contributors who want to build collaboratively on others’ proposals.