Musings of a Canadian Nierite. . .

“Write faster! Or you all go out on the street!”

I have always thought that Tukufu’s letters went out on a model (somewhat) similar to Cicero/Atticus.

Much about what we know of the end of the Roman Republic comes from the private letters Cicero was always writting to his best friend Atticus… After Cicero’s death Atticus invited people to read (and copy) these letters and they spread widely enough to become part of the Western Canon.

I sort of assume there are no more than a dozen original copies of each Tukufu letter, but that they go out to acquaintances in “strategic” locations like major ports, seats of learning, or the Temples of Altheres. And the letters maybe get copied again or passed along by word of mouth from there to interested parties.

Of course in A Drink, A Dance, A Knife Henry revealed at least one powerful NPC in Ymandragore regularly read Tukufu’s letters. Zoinks! So I don’t really know who is on the reading list, or where the letters go. Because they are done IC, I have changed somewhat the “whats” I write as a result of that discovery. You never know. Tukufu is more careful to omit information that could get people hurt & tries never to poke powerful people in the eye with his writting. Could be other potentially hostile/undesirable readers out there. In particular the letters for Overdue would have been different but for A Drink, A Dance, A Knife.

Still. You can’t become the “voice for your age” if you are never heard, so it’s not like at Tukufu will stop….

Thanks to Rexplode for sparking this particular thought in my head up on the Community Forums . . .

Morality

What is morality? For all intents and purposes, it is the relative values of what is good and what is evil in a world. As in our world, these are nebulous concepts which have seen a great deal of shift in our own world and even in very closed societies. What was once considered evil in Christianity (such as violence for any means) became normalized (for example, the Crusades) where a value judgement was applied to make doing the thing which originally was abhorrent in all forms acceptable. As with many things and as in our world, the issue of morality is quite muddied in the world of Arcanis.

First of all, we should discuss how Arcanis relates to other gaming systems, and by other gaming systems, I mean Dungeons and Dragons (which, for better or worse, we all have at least some familiarity with). In D&D, there exists the “Alignment System” which chops people up into nine broad categories along a Good-Neutral-Evil and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic axis. As someone who brings gaming logic into not-necessarily gaming environments such as using game mechanics as examples of social, psychological, and cultural debates with my retired (and distinctly non-gaming) mother, I have been forced to analyze what this system basically means so I can best describe it to people who don’t use the system (as well as a LOT of people who do use it and steadfastly refuse to READ it).

In terms of morality, the Lawful-Neutral-Chaos axis represents one of the more straightforward angles to take. This axis basically measures how willing you are to give into the standard cultural norms of your society. At the extreme lawful end of the gradient (and please remember, it is a gradient not three uniform blocks) are people who are ultimate conformists, who follow all laws and norms regardless of how virtuous those laws and norms may be. On the other hand, the most extreme end of the Chaotic side are those who utterly reject societal norms and laws for a variety of reasons. To put it in a rather pithy form, it is the difference between ‘squares’ and ‘hippies’, but can be far more extreme.

The Good-Neutral-Evil scale, on the other hand, is a far more nebulous one. As D&D and all of its various iterations have been the product of North American (primarily) cultural values, which themselves derive from Christian Western Europe, this has come to mean that this axis is actually that of the “upright, white knight” versus the “self-centered psychopath.” This is where I have found a lot of people (many of whom should know better) err in their insistence that they themselves are of an evil alignment, typically out of (in my opinion) a rather juvenile sense of counter-cultural and anti-social views. What these people don’t understand is that these views that they are insisting on them being evil actually are more the Chaotic/Lawful angle. Good and Evil used here, again following Western culture, should actually be written as Altruistic and Selfish. In this case, the “Lawful Good” Paladin fights for Truth, Justice, and the. . . Coryani(?) way, helping the helpless and being respectful of authority. In here, the Good part comes from their willingness to self-sacrifice for others (altruism) and not their respect for authority.

It is this way that we can actually divorce “good” and “evil” from many cultural values of Arcanis. You can be a Good-aligned Coryani who believes in slavery, because slavery is not necessarily a good/evil thing, but a culturally normative thing. It falls onto the Lawful/Chaotic angle. Now, this doesn’t mean that slavery is ‘good’ as I just said that good can be rewritten as altruistic, and relying on the labour of others is inherently not altruistic. However, it also is not inherently selfish, as there were many reasons that a person could be enslaved in a given society which isn’t directly related to the ‘master’ of the relationship being self-serving. In this case, it can be argued that (within the laws of their nation) the master there is being altruisitc as they are taking on a monetary (and possibly legal) burden on themselves for limited direct benefit.

This all, of course, is like everything else in the world, a grey matter. Things like chattel slavery where the master rapes and otherwise abuses their slaves would be evil, but debt slavery where a person binds themselves to another while they pay off their debts is not in itself evil. This shows that while the two angles of Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic can be used to help define a person, they are not equivlancies. In the case of slavery, if you had a Chaotic/Good person in a slave society, they would be the ones who sacrifice their own comfort and resources to break down the institution of slavery within that society, while a Lawful Good person is one who would treat their slaves well, but believe that slavery was a useful institution (for example, a way of punishing people for crimes that was better than having them locked away in the ‘cesspool’ of a prison population). On the contrary angle of this, a Lawful/Evil person would believe that the accepted institution of slavery is perfectly fine, and would rape and abuse their slaves because ultimately this person is entirely selfish and only interested in their own benefits, while a Chaotic Evil person would probably not care at all about the structures about slavery (or any other lawful institution) and rape, pillage, murder, and steal however much they wanted to satisfy their selfish desires.

Now that we have established my opinion of this dynamic (using the above mentioned system as a common frame of reference), we can move into Arcanis generally.

Much of the world of Arcanis, as it was built by people who grew up in Western society, follows the morality that we mentioned above. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule, such as Canceri, who’s entire theology is based on doing terrible things to purge those urges during your mortal life so that your soul is clean when it goes to the afterlife. However, even in this case, the Cancerese acknowledge that this is ‘evil’, for they acknowledge that they are stains upon the person and their soul which need to be removed before they can gain entrance into the Paradise of the Gods. These evil urges are things to be removed, even if Becherek’s theological descendents do so with such vigour to make people question its ability to truly purify a soul.

With the talk of Becherek and Canceri’s. . . unique take on the evil/good dynamic, I fell I should bring up religion in general. For most societies, the values espoused by their respective gods go a long way into shaping what is viewed as culturally normative within that society. However, almost without fail, none of the Arcanis Gods (note the capital G) show that they espouse any particular “good” versus “Evil” dynamic, as per my statements comparing them to altruistic and selfish. These Gods are, for the most part, neutral on this matter, as they do not appear to be willing to sacrifice themselves for others, but are also not so selfish to make others suffer for their benefit. For example, when Illiir cursed the Celestial Giants, he did a ‘good’ thing in that he protected humanity (which he views as “his children”), but he did not punish himself for the fact that it was HE who chose the Giants to ward over humanity. As such, he was (officially) unwilling to sacrifice for his own actions, punishing others for them giving into their natures.

Where most people would look at evil and good, from a religious perspective, is on what constitutes heresy. However, heresy by definition is a cultural phenomenon, not a good/evil one. For example, the views of Islam espoused by the Turkic tribes between 900 and 1300 AD/CE would very much be considered heretical to the people of the Abbasid Caliphate centred in Bagdad of that era. While officially both Muslim, the Turkic people incorporated a lot of their own mysticism and traditions into the actual expression of Islam that the people of Bagdad would (and did) view as highly inappropriate and even outright heretical to their views of the word of Mohammad. However, neither of these cultures were the original Arabic tribes centred around Mecca in 610 AD/CE, and likely BOTH of these other groups would be viewed as heretical to Mohammad. In all three cases, they are Muslims, but all have a differing view of the religion.

The same is true for the Gods of Arcanis. All major human nations worship the Pantheon of Man, but none seem to be able to properly agree on what is the appropriate worship. Cancerese Sarishans see no problem summoning Infernals, for Sarish is the Lord of the Hells, and through their faith in Him they can use these vile beasts as tools to advance humanity (and them specifically). Coryani Sarishans, however, were raised to view Infernals as detestable and are more likely to hunt them down and bind them. They believe that Sarish gained dominion over the Hells to protect humanity, and to subjugate a threat to them.

One major cultural point here is how the two societies dealt with the Time of Terror. The Sarishans of Canceri were in contact with Infernals for centuries, and had made many arcane deals with them which allowed them to survive the Time of Terror relatively intact, while the people of the other nations which didn’t specifically venerate Sarish suffered the predations of the Infernals. The Coryani Empire was founded after a war to push the Infernals away, and because of this the Coryani Empire (generally) maintains a hateful view of that aspect of Sarish, and the Sarishans raised in that culture espouse a view on the Infernals which is culturally normative to that environment (Infernals are bad and a threat and the First Emperor died to protect us from them!). The Sarishans of Nishanpur, however, didn’t suffer as much, and as such their views at the dawn of the Empire were far more neutral. When the rest of the Empire recoiled away from summoning demons as tools, they shunned the Cancerese Sarishans, causing them to grow more insular and keep their more heinous practices private. When Canceri left the Empire, these strongly held traditions (kept alive in that most distant and hated of provinces) came back as something of a revival of ‘traditional values’ which had long been suppressed by Coryani imperialists.

In this case, the Cancerese worship is entirely lawful for them, so a Sarishan to summons demons as playthings would be considered a “Lawful” character in Cancerei, while one who actively bound those Infernals would be considered “Chaotic” since they are going against cultural norms where Infernals are acceptable tools. In Coryan (and Milandir and Altheria and other places) it is the literal opposite, where if a Sarishan walked around with a pet Infernal with a mark on his forhead, they would be shunned by society. In that case, that Sarishan is going against cultural trends, and would be labelled as Chaotic while the person who then attempts to kill the devil would be Lawful as they are upholding ancient Coryani laws, set down in the first of the first Crusade of Light.

This is why you can have both good and evil followers of all the various Gods of Arcanis. You can have Deathbringers of Neroth who are literal Paladins of good, while you can have vicious Altharians who vivisect people in the name of knowledge. How you can have a Nierite who burns down villages satisfying Niers aspect of the Lord of Destruction, while you can have another Nierite who goes around a city like Batman righting injustices in Nier’s aspect of the Lord of Justice. As far as these Gods are concerned, all of these things espouse their aspects equally well, for every god has a very complicated identity.

Now, different societies will view different (and sometimes contradictory) aspects of the Gods as being more ‘righteous’ than others. The Milandisians view Larissa’s aspect as the Farseer as being more inherently of value than her aspect as the Divine Harlot, because Milandisian society tends to be more staid and proper. The Khitani view the elemental aspects of Hurrian, Nier, Saluwe’, and Yarris as more inherently heretical because those came from the ‘tainted’ influence of ‘lesser beings’ when they absorbed the Elemental Lords (debateable with Yarris, as Beroe already seemed within Yarris’ ‘domain’), while the Mother Church actively supports Hurrian as the Storm Lord and the Erdukene delight in Nier’s role as the Fiery God.

This system becomes more complicated, however, with the non-human Gods of Belisarda and Kassagore. In almost every book we have, Belisarda is always viewed as being nurturing to Her children (the elorii) and others, though still not necessarily self-sacrificing. Meanwhile, Kassagore is always viewed as the Devourer, and has always been a harsh and jealous God. However, these views of objective good and evil in these two forces may have less to do with them as Gods, but the press they have received by the modern people of Arcanis. To the elorii, Belisarda almost HAS to be viewed as unbelievably good, for She is their sole remaining God. Without the Elemental Lords to add. . . nuance to her portrayal, the elorii inherently have to start believing she is the best because she is literally all they have. If they admit fault, they risk losing even her.

Kassagore is somewhat the opposite. All across Arcanis (except for a few scattered groups like the Emerald Scale ss’ressen), worship of Kassagore is proscribed. The Black Talons view Him as the quintessential aspect of evil, and the Varn-worshipping Ssethregore demonize him for his veneration takes away the souls their Varn lords need to form the Soul Bridge so that they can fully manifest on Arcanis. In both cases, the respective ssethric societies have reason to view him as the utter worst possible being, because it supports their own worship. For the Black Talons, they venerate the Fire Dragon as everything Kassagore is not, while the Varn will broach no competition.

Of course, this discussion also should include Umor/The Other and Yig/Anshar. Both of these deities are often viewed as either very good or utterly depraved by different people. For example, the elorii view of Umor/The Other is that of a lost and mad God, but not necessarily an evil god. In fact, Belisarda seemed to take sympathy on Him. Meanwhile, the Pantheon of Man view of Him is that His existence is antithetical to order, life, and everything else good in the world. Mention of His name is so proscribed that he literally has been stripped of identity.

Likewise, Anshar is viewed (by the Mother Church, at least) as being an utterly self-sacrificing God devoted to charity, while the ssethric view of Her as Yig is that of the Goddess of Lies. While 99.999% of the population do not know that these two Gods are one and the same, we know metanarratively that they are. To have the same divine creature have such massively opposed aspects represents a major shift even in the complicated nature of Gods, to the point of making those wonder if Yig is entirely something else than a normal God as we know it. That said, there are many examples which show Anshar as being far less benign, such as the crazy cult which was seen in the A2 adventure “Hide and Seek.”

Anyway, I’ll leave these thoughts here. I could go into much more detail about the world, but that would be belabouring the point and diluting my arguments (which I probably have already done).

Well, speaking for myself, Eric is fairly close to my intentions.

I’ll be fairly real here by saying that a lot of these topics that come up are usually seeded by books I’ve read or conversations that I’ve had. The religion one came up from me listening to an audiobook about comparative religions in the modern world, and seeing similarities between our world and Arcanis. The essay on good and evil comes up from a debate I saw on facebook about the bible and its injunctions on slavery (specifically, the difference between Biblical Civil Law and Biblical Moral Law).

In both cases, I found this to be a good method of expressing my thoughts on the matter. In the same way that Science Fiction allows writers to talk about present problems by replacing real-world equivalents with aliens to allow us to examine things one-step removed, I find Arcanis is able to do that for me.

That said, I also have STRONG opinions when it comes to what is and is not realistic when it comes to player/NPC/human motivations in the world of Arcanis. I know that for many people, RPG games are a form of escapism. They want to be the immortal badasses so they can feel like Gods in a world where they feel increasingly like insignificant cogs in the machine. It is this reason that zombie fiction has become so prominent in the last few decades: a force of unfeeling, uniform masses pushing down upon you and destroying your individuality in favor of conformity by literally consuming you. Similarly, I understand why people play completely over-the-top characters, such as cartoonishly evil characters or rampant sex-fiends that would not be allowed in any civilized society. It is a way of channeling those urges/thoughts/etc in a ‘safe’ manner so that they do not come out in a context where they may illicit punishment or social scorn. This is why in Japan hyper-violent Manga and pornography is so accepted, as people need a way to vent their human urges in a society which demands discipline, conformity, and lawfulness.

For me, I view RPG’s as a way of exploring people. I use roleplay to place myself in the mindset of a person who I am not to see if it expands my own views. For example, I am about as against the concept of organized religion as you can be (I stress: I don’t necessarily disagree with having Faith in divine beings and such, but the human-built organizations which exploit this faith for their own real-world power I find offensive), but almost in every context in Arcanis I play some flavour of priest. Not only that, I play Nierites, which are the literal inquisitional and behaviour-police of the Pantheon of Man. I use these characters to (try) to explore in my mind what would cause someone to be a person of such blind faith and zealotry that they would ignore evidence and rational argument. I also strive to use this as a vessel for me to see what of these thoughts exist in me.

Diglossia and Culture among humanity:

Hey look, Cody’s talking about languages again (ducks from the thrown produce).

A slightly different angle for this one, but I recently listened to a lecture on the concept of diglossia and as usual I figured I’d put it into perspective by writing an essay on the subject. Like in our world, I can see Arcanis-equivalents of much of what was discussed in the lecture applying to the human nations of Arcanis (probably also the non-human ones, but those are more difficult to apply human notions to) and figured it would be a good vessel of discussion.

For those not familiar with the term diglossia, it is the sociolinguistic term of people effectively speaking two different languages in their everyday lives. These are often termed the “high” language, which is the formal language of the society, and the “low” language, which is common everyday speech. As an example, in the United States of America right now pretty much every school child is taught ‘standard’ English, which is a fairly highly structured version of the language based off the Americanization of the London dialect of English, which became the official ‘high’ dialect of English in England as that was where the King/Queen resided. Proficiency in this official version of English is demanded to various levels for people in professions, and being able to communicate well using it is essential in most jobs. This language is generally fairly standard throughout the United States, and even to an extent in other nations such as Canada.

Conversely, the ‘low’ dialect is the ‘street’ languages or dialects. These are your ‘urbanics’ or ‘Black English’ or what people would consider to be an accent. These are the tongues that you speak at home with your family that you learned on your parent’s knee. This is the language you speak at the bar with friends while watching the game. This is the version of the language which often gets you hit by a ruler in school for being ‘wrong’, and you almost never see literature written in this language. People tend to be shamed publicly for speaking in the ‘low’ dialect of their society, or often viewed as being uncultured, so most people do what they can to hide their proficiency in the ‘low’ dialect when they can.

As an example: I watch a web series made by a gentleman from Boston. Most of the time, he speaks with a lovely, flat accent and uses ‘normal’ speech. However, he has on occasion (often when he is sick, tired, or trying to make a point) switched back to his accented voice, with all the changes associated with that accent (further example: “going to” vs. “gunna”) coming through. Now, this youtuber has said he does this for various reasons: it is easier to edit sound with the ‘flat’ accent he puts on, it tends to be easier to understand, etc. However, it should be pointed out that he has said (and I have heard it elsewhere) that this is a skill he picked up early in life. There was a reference in the film “the Departed” as I recall where they called out one of the characters about saying he had two faces and two languages that he spoke in, and this is that.

Another example of this is “Yankee” English vs. “Southern” English in the United States. As a non-American, I can tell you that their is a massive difference in accent and lexicon between Minnesota (the state closest to where I was born and raised) and Texas where my cousins live, and even between Texas and Alabama (where one of my uncles is from). Among my home area, and from what I understand most of America north of the old Mason-Dixon Line, the Southern accent/dialect is viewed as uncouth, even “hillbilly-like”. Even the cultured, Scarlet O’Hara “I do declare!” accent has various negative connotations. Because of this, many people I know from the American south also try to ‘hide’ their accents, especially if they came from a more rural upbringing.

Now, this relationship doesn’t just have to be between ‘common’ and ‘official’ versions of the same language. In ancient Rome, Latin was the ‘high’ language according to the culture, with all the languages of the subject peoples being the ‘low’ language. If you were in North Africa, you would expect Roman citizens to speak Latin (it would be drilled into your head if you were in the legions), but the ‘low’ language would be Berber (or the version of that tongue that existed 2000 years ago) or Ancient Egyptian. In India, typically Hindi or English are viewed as the ‘high’ languages that people are taught in school, but languages like Punjabi or Malayalam or Tamil are spoken conversationally to kin, so those would be the ‘low’ languages. Alternatively, there are nations like the islands in the Caribean like Jamaica or Haiti that officially speak one language (English and French, per those examples), but when speaking among themselves would speak a Creole language (such as Jamaican Patois) which incorporates aspects of the official language with African slave languages, Spanish, etc. These languages are often barely mutually intelligable to the listener, which I have found personally with both Jamaicans as well as with Haitians speaking to me in French (which I admit I’m only partially proficient in).

Now, how does this relate to Arcanis?

Well, we know in Arcanis that there are two languages that exist in a literal (named) high vs. low relationship, these being Khitani and Coryani. In the case of Coryani, High Coryani represents the language spoken in Coryan-the-City when the Empire was founded, and became the official tongue of the Empire, court, records, and the Church by grace of the fact that it was the language of the city that became the capital of the Empire. We do not know how hard Coryan tried to impose this language on the rest of the Empire in the following 1075 years, but if they did they met with almost total failure from what we’ve seen in universe as literally every mod has Heroes speaking to the common folk (and even the nobility) in Low Coryani.

Low Coryani has often been stated as being a trade language of the Empire, and is something of an amalgum language of the various languages that became subject to the Alabaster Throne. We do not know how many of these other languages exist(ed), but following the 2nd Coryani-Khitani War we know that distinct Milandisian, Cancerese, and Altharin languages were still in use by the nations which secceded from the Empire, and Myrantian remained in use to the modern day. Presumably there was also an “Annonican” and a “Valentian” and a “Cafelan” tongue as well (or many such tongues), but these have not been widely espounded upon in fiction.

The exact nature of Low Coryani has not been widely discussed within the universe, beyond it being the ‘low’ tongue of the Empire. Most likely it started out as a pidgin language between the various desperate provinces of the Empire following the formation (remember: Milandisia, Canceri, Cafela, Illonia, and probably Balantica all entered the Empire willingly as part of the First Emperor’s First Crusade of Light). While people officially had to learn High Coryani (derived from Tridueaian, the tongue of Coryan-the-City), learning new languages is hard for adults so they would instead learn a mixed version of their own tongue (say, Ancient Milandisian) and this new one. What is known, however, is that over the intervening centuries that whatever this langauge started as, by now it has become a full language in its own right. Pidgins tend to take words and grammar from one component language, add words from another one, and cut as much out to get the rough message across. However, we know that Low Coryani isn’t an awkward but functional pidgin language, but a full, living tongue that has incorporated grammar and vocabulary from many different language.

In the case of the (modern) Coryani Empire, most likely High Coryani is the ‘high’ language for most of the population (being the language of official documents, the bureaucracy, and the Church), while Low Coryani is the ‘low’ version which people use to buy cabbages on the street and talk to their children and (likely) slaves. It is highly unlikely to me that one would see High Coryani spoken outside of Illonia (and likely, even not there casually), and would be viewed as a marker of social distinction. When patricians speak in front of their slaves and don’t want to be heard (or, very possibly, want the slave to know that they are no longer considered to exist in the same room), they would likely switch to High Coryani, and would use Low Coryani when directly addressing their ‘lessers.’ [As an aside, this happens to me literally every day at work. I work with a lot of Germans, and when they are speaking publicly about work stuff they speak English. However, if they are gossiping, they switch to German, at which time they pointedly are excluding non-German’s from the conversation.] Similarly, the scribes in the Bureaucracy would do all their documents in High Coryani, even if between themselves they spoke Low Coryani. When the Emperor releases decrees, they would officially be written in High Coryani, though it likely would be co-released in Low Coryani. This last example is seen on the Rosetta stone in our world, with the same decree written in Greek (the official language of the Ptolemaic dynasty), and in two forms of Egyptian (the “High” Egyptian in hieroglyphics, and the “Low” Egyptian known as Demotic).

Of these two languages, Low Coryani would probably be easier (subjective) to learn for newcomers to the Empire as it bears at least some resemblance to their own tongue (in the Known Lands), so they can pick up bits of grammar more easily. Because of this, it would be the ‘common’ tongue of slaves within the Empire that slave-owners would force their slaves to speak if they did not already know a Coryani language. For example, as an English speaker, I can pick up French easier than I can Russian because there is so much loaned French words/grammar in English, while there is almost no loaning of words and grammar from Russian. It is also possible that High Coryani and Low Coryani are mutually intelligible in the same way that “Black English” and “Standard English” are mutually intelligible in our world, as likely (but not stated outright because why go into that much detail) Low Coryani uses the framework of High Coryani with a bunch of the vocabulary changed to reflect foreign influence. Similarly, slaves would often be the ones doing business, buying food, etc. for the household, so they would have to know how to talk to the traders and merchants.

Khitani is somewhat different. The little bit we know of the language is that High Khitani is the language of “Educated/Scholarly people of the Khitani Empire” (ARPG pg. 155) while Low Khitani is the language of the “Common people of the Khitani Empire.” Now, we don’t have enough information to state outright whether or not the two Khitani languages have the same relationship as the Coryani languages, but I feel I can make a few assumptions. For one: as far as we are aware the Khitani Empire was a much more culturally unified nation than the Coryani Empire was. The Khitani Empire was (officially) founded by a Valinor of Larissa who led its “pure” people (the Uls) off to the far northern provinces of the Imperium to escape the Sword of the Heavens. Since then, aside from the two wars with Coryan over the Blessed Lands, we don’t have any information about the Khitani getting involved in the politics of other nations except defensively, and in one case trying to absorb the ‘lost’ province of Haina.

Because of this, we don’t have any real evidence that the Khitani ever sought to bring other cultures into their own, and that when their language developed it was insular. If this supposition is correct, then the difference between High and Low Khitani would probably be that they are two separate languages (possibly related, but separate) which are not mutually intelligible, but one is spoken by the ruling caste (the Uls, the bureaucrats, eunichs, etc) while the Low Khitani language is that of the original population of the region which never died out. The titles “High” and “Low” could be an artificial naming scheme meant to suggest a unity of the two languages, even if they are actually not the same language.

To give a real-world example of this, look at “Chinese.” I have worked with many, many different Chinese people (both native born Chinese and Canadian-Chinese people), and talking to them about their language(s), I have learned something interesting: China, the nation, lies about the existence of the Chinese language. Almost every native-born Chinese person I have spoken to will say that there is only a single Chinese language, and then there are various different dialects like Cantonese and Xiang. However, every NON-native of China that I have talked to will say that this is a flat-out lie meant to perpetuate that China is a unified whole rather than a nation made up of distinct cultural groups (no matter how similar they may be).

Having myself heard people speaking Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, I definitely side with the second view because these sound LESS similar to my ear than Spanish and French do (which are related, if distinct, languages). In this case, Mandarin is the slightly dumbed-down version (it is a simpler language in terms of grammar, tones, and such compared to other Chinese languages) of Chinese which has become the official language of the nation, acting as the “High” tongue for people to learn in school, while learning Cantonese, Hakka, and Ping at home. What allows the Chinese government to claim that there is only one Chinese language is that all versions of Chinese use the same writing system. Because Chinese writing is not (or, not fully) phonic but more symbolic, as long as the languages using it structure their sentences in the same way, it doesn’t matter if one symbol is said as “Ping” in one language and “Big” in the other, as long as that word means the same thing, the written sentence still makes sense.

Now, if Khitan (which is heavily modeled on China) follows the same logic, then in this case High Khitani could be the language spoken by the Uls and other nobles, and Low Khitani could be nothing more than a variation of Altharin which the commoners in that province spoke. Because of the story associated with the Uls and them leaving, and how the Uls look down upon the Vals and those in the rest of the former Imperium territories, I would not be suprised if they started speaking their own ‘special’ language to separate themselves from others, in the same way that a cult will start to alter their language to differentiate themselves from those not in that cult.

Alas, in terms of Khitan I can only make suppositions, but it is an intriguing idea to me.

Moving to other nations, and you can see the same high/low relationships between languages in those nations. When it was part of the Empire, Milandisian would have been relegated to the position of a ‘low’ language to the ‘high’ language of High Coryani. After independence, the relation between these two languages appears to have shifted somewhat, as Milandisian has seen something of a resurgence. Many times after a nation is ‘liberated,’ the people of that nation will push their local vernacular as the dominant language regardless of if it is spoken by the common person. For example, after the foundation of the Republic of Ireland, Irish (Gaelic) became the official language of Ireland. However, having met several Irish people, not a single one of them can utter more than a few scattered phrases in Irish. Another example in our world is Hebrew in Isreal. Here the people who now populate that nation came from many desperate locations, and have decided to revive the then-dead language of Hebrew as their common language. Unlike (to a great degree) Irish, however, Hebrew seems to have had much more success in becoming a commonly spoken language in Isreal, likely due to the fact that most Jews had a passing understanding of the tongue as a liturgical language, while Irish was almost extinct when it was legislated into being the official language of that nation.

Unfortunately, I cannot 100% say if Milandisian is the ‘high’ or ‘low’ language of Milandir. In almost every mod the common folk of Milandir all speak Low Coryani, and as the former ‘high’ tongue of the land there are surely lots of people (especially the “Noble Vals”) of the nation who would speak High Coryani as their High Tongue. It is possible that Milandir is a nation that is triglossic, meaning that there are three different languages, each used in different social contexts. When speaking among each other, they speak Milandisian. When speaking to a superior in an official sense, they speak High Coryani. When speaking to foreigners or those that they are not close to, they speak Low Coryani. While we have reams of material on Milandir in Arcanis, this is a topic that has never been fully explored.

Canceri, on the other hand, is a nation where we can see the vernacular-becomes-high-language. From what I have read on the subject, the people of Canceri enthusiastically re-embraced Cancerese as the official ‘high’ language of the nation after their indepence. In fact, in the Canceri Sourcebook in the 3.5 days there was a discussion of the three primary dialects of Cancerese and the social pressures at work there. In Nier’s Spine, the insular Nierites reject the ‘impure’ loanwords from Coryani, while the more open Nishanpur’s dialect has more loans, for example. However, from my reading Cancerese is simply used from the top down as the official language of the nation, and only some people would speak Low Coryani. As an oppressive slave-owning population, they would do their best to have their slaves and commoners speak as little foreign tongues as possible as a means of population control, and because much of the nation is xenophobic there would be little opportunity for these people to learn anything but what their master commands them to learn.

I would be remiss to not mention Altheria in this regard, but like Milandir I’m not 100% certain of how things work. Like everywhere else, it seems everyone in Altheria speaks Low Coryani fluently, and never has Altharin been shown as spoken casually in spite of it being the language of that nation. However, Henry has stated that the Altherians have kept the otherwise-dead Altharin language in use as a form of worship of Althares (who gifted it to Mankind). My theory (and with only some evidence), is that the Republic of Altheria operates much the same as Ireland in our world, with Altharin taught in schools and is officially the proper language, but in casual conversation everyone (even the ‘nobles’) speak Low Coryani. It is possible that High Coryani lingers there as well, but due to the less-stratified nature of Altheria, I personally find it more likely that the vernacular Low Coryani would be far more prominent, and that the role of High Coryani would be replaced fully by Altharin. Because of the influx of foreigners into the nation as part of the Shining Patrol, I cannot see how Altharin could be (in real life) anything but an enforced language on people, kept alive only as a cultural memory than anything that would normally come up.

As I have said in so many previous essays, I think languages are both facinating and very informative about culture. Though it is not well-explored in Arcanis fiction, Henry and PCI have laid a lot of groundwork in the universe which allows rather deep analysis into the culture at work here. Unlike most fantasy universes which just have “Common” or “Undercommon”, the inclusion of many different tongues is essential to the universe of Arcanis, even if by default for a living campaign we have to have everyone speaking Low Coryani so the mods can actually be played.

My one critique of your analysis, Eric, is equating Khitani and Chinese saying “Chinese has nothing to do with Latin.” (simplified for brevity) I am the first to admit that it was a poor choice on the part of the PCI team to equate Khitani (the language) with Chinese. Take massive trappings of their culture and society, yes, but chose a language like Sanskrit or Persian if it is a related language. However, Arcanis uses our real world languages as stand-ins for these ones, and while they have been very good to keep the majority of the languages as things which could concieavably coexist, there are other blips. For example: Why are Valentians Finnish and Eastmarchers Hungarian, when both are Uralic languages and completely unrelated to Indo-European tongues? Why do the Yhing Hir alterantively speak Turkic or Mongolian while still being labelled as a “Khitani Language” when Altaic languages are similarly unrelated to Sino-Tibetan Languages? How was Hainese show to be effectively Japanese when Japananese is often considered a language isolate and generally unrelated to ALL of these languages (they MIGHT be a very far removed Altaic, but the connection is distant)?

Now, you can chalk a lot of this up to ignorance on the subject. As mixed English/Spanish/Dutch/French speakers in PCI (I don’t think they speak any others in the core PCI. . . ) they by nature have a very Euro-centric view of languages, and as such have the greatest ability to distinguish between European tongues, and by extension the Indo-European family generally. Why were Uralic languages included? Possibly because in 2001 it was difficult to google the difference between Finnish and Swedish if you are not a speaker, so you assume they are related and plop it down on the map. Why equate Yhing Hir with Khitani? Maybe you see “Mongolian and the Chinese languages are close on the map, so they are probably related” even though they are almost literal opposites in linguistic terms. Why add Japanese? Well, that one was more an IK thing and probably because a lot of the culture of Haina seemed equated to Japan, so it was an obvious fit despite how unrelated Japanese and Mandarin are.

I write these essays and attempt to use the real world to explain things, but the system ultimately breaks down. It is entirely possible that Henry has a plan with the Finnish-speaking Valentians (they don’t actually speak Finnish, but their names are listed as being Finland-derived) that has yet to come up and I am (as always) overthinking this, but it could also be chalked up to the difficulty in researching relatively obscure topics back 16 years ago. After all, Google only started in 1998 and Wikipedia in 2001, so it was right at the start of the information age.

::Sound of a door cracking open. A cloud of dust puffs up. Coughing is heard::

(man, I need to clean up in here more often. . . )

I felt the need to write something here that was neither editing, scientific, or political to our world. As such, something I am sure is fascinating to everyone!

International Trade in Arcanis

I was recently reviewing old mods for reasons, and I came to the adventure known as “Judgement”, an A1: Crusade! mod set in Censure. In this mod, the ethnically Khitani House Zhuan makes an appearance and it got me thinking: why would there be such a large body of foreigners so far from their homeland? Now, there have been many discussions of this over the ages, ranging from a northern sea route that skirts the Unsealed Lands, as the most recent map shows it stretches to what must be the arctic of Onara, to captured Khitani in an early war that just set up shop there. In this little essay I intend to discuss how trade worked in the ancient days, and what is for me an entirely reasonable theory on how such a large number of Khitani ended up on the other side of the world.

First, a primer on how trade worked in the ancient world.

Based on what archeological records we have, there has been evidence of long distance (hundreds of miles at least) trade in our world that long predates written language and records. In fact, it is from the few records that we have on this trade that we believe modern writing as we know it evolved. In the ancient days (before about 3300 BCE) trade goods were often accompanied by little tags or tokens which had pictograms and scratches to indicate what was in it. These were done as many of these trade goods were in jars sealed with clay or similar material to prevent theft. As such, you had the tags to tell the recipient what was in it, and how many, and if there wasn’t that much they know they would have been cheated. For example, if you had a jar with 10 pears in it, you’d have a clay or wooden tag with crudely drawn lemon and 10 slashes. Eventually that symbol of a lemon begins to be used as that sound ‘pear/pair/etc’ and the symbols become more abstract and BOOM, writing as we know it is born.

To go back to international trade, we begin to see how trade started in the day. Even before writing, people were ordering material and getting others to bring it to them. A person in Town A sends agents or hires nomads to travel to Town B and pick up an order of obsidian or tin or wood. That group of agents then goes, picks up the order (possibly bringing trade goods in exchange if they are not already paid for), and then brings them back to Town A. The tags show what the order was when picked up in Town B to prove that the agents (or anyone else) didn’t try to cheat person in Town A, and there you go you have international trade.

There is, however, an upper limit to how far trade can realistically go. The average person can walk no more than about 20 miles per day on an average day. To travel even 100 miles takes 5 days of these kind of days, which puts an upper limit on a ‘on foot’ or ‘with a donkey or camel’ to maybe trips of 200 miles (10 days travel) for specific goods. This of course changes over time with the advent of better roads, sea travel, river networks, the domestication of horses vs. other pack animals, and so on, but ultimately it still makes individual trips relatively short distance by our standards. To remedy this, you build trade networks.

In this context, a trade network is a series of short hops for trade goods to travel, with agents/nomads/etc only travelling relatively short distances to bring trade to these hub cities, and from there they hop from one city or trading post to the next until they reach their final destination. You see great examples of this in our history in the form of the Silk Road cities like Samarkand, Kashgar, Turfan, and so on. In this network, products from thousands of miles away can make it to market, brought between cities by dedicated caravans, tribes, and nomads, then bought by merchants in that city, and then reexported to the next city along the line by another group. At each point, the price of the product goes up as merchants buy and sell at a profit, so the further away the item comes from, the more expensive it is, but it allows for long distance trade. Examples of this is silk from China becoming popular in the Mediterranean world, despite there being so much territory between China and the Levant.

But Bergie, you say, wouldn’t this raise the price to the point it would become prohibitive? Yes. However, our ancestors were just as smart as we are now, so they came up with many ways of dealing with this. There were many instances of ‘trade houses’ or even whole ethnic groups which pop up around all of these trading networks throughout our world, throughout history. These groups send representatives of their group (family, culture, religion) to these trading cities, and act as the intermediates. In this case, Merchant A sells an item to a caravan run by his own group. This caravan goes from Town A to Town B, and ‘resells’ the item to Merchant B of the same group essentially at cost (or only with a slight mark-up). This means that these trading groups are able to undercut the price of items that aren’t carried by their own group, decreasing price, and allowing them to gain immence profits as they essentially undercut the competition. It is from here that groups like Jews and Arameans along the Silk Road, and Assyrians before them in the Near Eastern Trade networks, grew to prominence.

For reference, this was also the beginning of banking houses and other similar groups. If you have a group you trust (maybe a son or uncle) in a far away city, you do not need to bring money with you when you go on a trade mission. You go carrying just as much money as you need to get to the far-off place, then when in that place you borrow from those of the same group as you already there. You all are part of the same ‘corporation’, after all. Eventually, people even not from the same group tap into this, bringing receipts from Town A to Town B, saying they cashed in 100 gold in Town A, so they can get 100 gold in Town B, allowing them to travel more lightly.

Okay, real world history done with (I’m probably going to perjure myself later, but oh well), how does this affect Arcanis?

The average merchant on Onara does not have access to the many magical means of transportation such as portals or spells that the rich and powerful do, and even those magical means do not allow for bulk transport of items as they are cost-prohibitive to use. As such, goods and services move as they do in our world: through muscle, wind, or river current.

We know from the Blessed Lands Book that there exist two major Trade Routes in the Blessed Lands which bring goods between the Khitani Lands and the Known Lands (former Coryani imperial territories). The northern route represents a much more direct trade route from the Khitani Lands, starting at the Ququil Lumer Mill (and likely the surrounding towns and villages), skirting the Vastwood forest, and ending at the Pilgrim’s Pass in modern Almeric. The southern route seems to travel primarily to the lands beyond the First City, beginning at the Harbour of the First City and travelling to the same Pilgrim’s Pass along the Corlathian Mountains.

Using what we have learned earlier in this essay, we know that these ‘depots’ like the Habour, First City, and even the Qoquil Lumber Mill must be like our Samarkands and Turfan’s. Goods are brought there over land (the Fervidus Hills for the north, the Sea of Lanterns for the south), bought by local merchant factors, and then shipped further down the line using caravans run by those same factors. Unlike in our world, however, great cities have not sprung up in the Blessed Lands, but these still pass by major landmarks such as the Citadels of Hurrian and Larissa, which themselves must have also built up ‘castle towns’ around them to support those fortifications (think Winterfell in A Song of Ice and Fire series). Additionally, we know there are Andyar villages all throughout the Blessed Lands, as well as semi-nomadic groups like the Maghir who continue to exist in the land between settlements who can also act as waystations and agents to carry goods. This lack of cities, though, can be somewhat countered betcause the trade routes in question are only between 300 and 450 miles long within the Blessed Lands, meaning that they can be travelled in roughly a month. Even in our world, most of these major trading cities were somewhere between 150 to 200 miles apart, and Central Asia is more lush and fertile than much of the Blessed Lands.

So what about the Zhuan and Censure?

Well, there are two major theories on my part on where THEY came from, as Khitani about as far away from Khitan as you can be, and these two options depend on if they arrived prior to the foundation of the Coryani Empire, or after it.

If the Zhuan have existed in the Hinterlands before the foundation of the Coryani Empire, they most likely arrived as merchant factors, similar to the Jews and Arameans in our world, from the lands that are now the Unsealed Lands/Fiendish Expanse. Before the Time of Terror, the entire northern part of Onara was steppeland similar to our own Central Asian Steppes. These lands were inhabited by the people who would now be known as the Axunites, Yhing Hir, and the Riders of Himmetah, and was a direct route between Khitan and what are now the Known Lands. Here, these nomadic horse tribes (taking the same role as the Turkic, Mongolian, Indo-Iranian tribes of our world) would likely act as go-betweens in the trade between Khitan and the areas that are now Canceri, the Hinterlands, and Milandir, but almost certainly the Khitani would send their own representatives along with these routes as described above. When the Godswall Mountains were raised at the end of the Time of Terror, there must have been Khitani left trapped in the Hinterlands, and it is possible that from THIS group, the Zhuan are descended.

The second major theory I have is what if they arrived AFTER the foundation of the Empire and the raising of the Godswall Mountains? In this case, there are two situations that would cause this: the above mentioned sending merchant factors along trade routes method, or another more. . . invasive method: forced relocation. In this second method, it was common in our world for defeated enemy groups to be forcefully relocated deep into your territory, often onto land that was not at that time being worked to bring it under cultivation. Examples of this in our world is the exiling of the Judean ruling class to Babylon following the Babylonian conquest of Judea, or the many Greek communities founded by the Persians in what is now the Middle East following the Greco-Persian War (some as far away as modern Uzbekistan!).

Assuming the second method, we know that the Coryani Empire fought two wars with the Khitani Empire. The First Coryani-Khitani War of 398 I.C., and the Second War which was fought for over 40 years between 764 and 806 I.C. It is possible that the ancestors of the Zhuan were captured in one of these two wars (timeline wise, probably the second one) and resettled in Coryani territory as either POW’s or in a population transfer as outlined above. The fact that they ended up in Censure, which even in the 700’s I.C. was a penal colony of the Empire, suggests to me that they were more POW’s than simply resettled populations, but it could go either way. When Censure became independent in the chaotic years at the end of the Second Coryani-Khitani War as the Empire broke up, the Zhuan were already a powerful and populous group in that city/region, becoming a major trading power.

Either method, the Zhuan ended up being one of the Six (now Five) Great Houses of Censure, and maintain a large and well-populated Khitani population in that city. Also, regardless of when their population came to the region, they seem to have established themselves in the role discussed above as the local representatives of their group (Khitani) in the region, so traders representing Khitani interests almost have to deal with them. They would run the overland exotic trade from the Empire at least as far as the edge of the Hinterlands (if not all the way to the Pilgrim’s Pass), allowing them to undercut non-Khitani, making a profit.

Moving away from the Zhuan, I figured I’d have a few side discussions about trade around Onara in other areas, notably sea trade. Onara generally, and the Known Lands specifically, seem to have a robust but largely coastal sea-based trade not dissimilar to the kind that existed in Europe between the Roman conquest of Gaul and Britain and the Viking Conquests. Because the Coryani do not (as far as we know) trade with far-off nations beyond the sea, and mostly only trade by sea between other Onaran ports like Savona, Censure, Midake, and Plexus, you see sea trade routes very similar to the land-based trade routes described above. For example, since you rarely need to travel out of sight of land when going from Savona to, say, Censure, you would develop ships that sacrifice durability and endurance (like a Galleon) for increased cargo capacity. These ships are designed for short hops between ports through mostly calm seas, carrying the maximum amount of cargo their (relatively) fragile hulls can carry. You wouldn’t see ships travelling directly from Plexus or Metra all the way to Pearlspar in the Hinterlands, instead each ship would travel a relatively short route to a nearby port, offload their cargo, load up with local cargo, and go back to where they came.

Because of this, you are almost never going to see large ocean-going vessels like Tall Ships in our world because there is no need to travel long distance. As far as we know in canon, there are no trade routes which go further south from the Known Lands than the elorii lands of Entaris, and certainly none that round the Southern Continent like an Arcanis Cape of Good Hope. In fact, in a mod from a few years ago, we got a glimpse of a world beyond what we knew while travelling into those Southern Waters that suggest that, while trade with the Known Lands is occurring, it is not very common and few ever make that trip.

On the subject of ocean-going travel, I should also bring upriver routes into the discussion. In our world, rivers like the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, Mississippi, Rhine, Yellow (Huang He), and Amazon have been major arteries of trade for as long as they have been known to exist. The same is true in the Known Lands and beyond. We know that Khitan is a land of many major rivers, and even the Coryani Empire links much of its civilization on the Corvus River, linking such major centres as Plexus, Panari, Coryan-the-Cities, and even Solanos Mor together. We know that many of these cities—especially Plexus and Old Coryan—have major river ports, with Plexus operating as the major trading hub to move goods from within the Empire to lands like the League of Princes. These river routes tend to be very fast, and because they are reasonably predictable, can move massive amounts of goods (even very perishable ones) very quickly over long distances on large, shallow-bottom barges and boats. As such, you can in theory get fresh fruit from the tropical Western Lands to Grand Coryan rapidly, and possibly even faster than you could get similar fruit from a city like Savona which lacks these river routes!

As a final thought before I log off (as I am already around 3000 words), I should bring up a point that was brought up some years ago in a discussion with val Holryn/Eric about how people could become rich on trade, especially in context of the Shadow Towns of the Western Lands. As stated above, trade routes tend to promote outpost/waypoint hubs where caravans meet after a few hundred miles of travel. In these hubs, goods are bought, sold, and move back and forth. These hubs tend to attract many merchants who aim to buy low and sell high. However, when multiple people are doing this, your profit margins can be very low relatively speaking. After all, if you have multiple trading houses trying to break into the silk market, if they sell too high, their competition will undersell them, taking the business.

One way that merchants get around this is to invest in. . . alternate means of gaining funds in these cities (both land hubs and ports), many of these we would generally consider borderline criminal. For example, most ports even today charge ‘port fees’ to use their facilities. Boats coming in have to pay to dock, merchants have to pay labourers to load and unload, there are warehouse fees, etc. The same is true with a lot of land cities, where to enter the city you have to pay to get in. This means that these local merchants/lords/etc are earning money from people for the RIGHT to trade, and not only on trade goods themselves.

Additionally, many of these people will resort to straight up strong-arm, protection racket tactics, saying that if you don’t pay their ‘fee’, then there is a risk that your caravan/ship will be attacked by raiders of some sort. There were many instances of merchants along the Silk Road in our world who had. . . understandings with local horse tribes to help remove some of their competition or undesirable people who didn’t pay the proper fees. With this, you can squeeze a lot of money without even selling or trading anything, simply being the most convenient stop on a trade route. Of course, if you do this too much, you risk being undercut by competition or by other powers who wreck your little monopoly. A good example of this was the economic destruction of Rhodes by Rome when the Roman Senate decided to make the nearby port of Delos their preferred port of call because the Rhodians were not bowing enough to Roman domination.

Anyway, I could go way more into this, but I should probably get to other more economically for me productive topics. Still, it was nice to have a little foray into a random topic.

Always nice to get a post from Nierite…

…Oh. Trade. ::sigh::

Still, nice Nierite wrote something.

It really wasn’t until the ARP edition (and then 5E) that I thought much about trade in Arcanis. I don’t play D&D because I want to think about imports and exports. (I play for complex NPCs who you repeatedly interact with over coherent story arc. And a world with secrets worth exploring.) Unfortunately I can’t look away when i see something that doesn’t make sense to me. And though I love the setting, I think what Arcanis has printed on trade networks often lacks verisimilitude. Such as House Zhuan in Censure. Or the supposed wealth of the Shadow Towns. Or grain shipments to the First City. Meh.

Cody’s latest has two pieces. An analysis of (ancient) trade practices. And an application of that analysis to areas in Arcanis that seem troubling. I’ll write two posts. One on each point.

Alas, I am sorry about the trade discussion vs. something more fluffy. I also apologize for not doing sea travel justice. As I was already at some 3300 words, I figured I’d wrap it up. Also, to sea trade water has never been a major part of the Arcanis story, so I did have less to go on than land-based trade.

I will see what inspires me next.