Paths of Civilization II: Paths of Industrialization

1818 EY

[X][Campaign] 0 PW - Don't stop until you arrive at friendly territory
[X][Guilds] 2 PW - Yes (-1 Temp Happiness, +1 Temp Militancy, +1 Temp Consciousness, begins Guild Crisis)

"FUCK!" Poetyr screamed, slamming his fist down on the field table in front of him at the news of the latest missive.

Watching impassively, his son Hyrnyr asked, "More bad news father?"

"The worst, because it is wrapped in what should be good news! That bloody, committed, zealous, honourable son of a whore! Fuck!" Poetyr steamed, tossing the bundle of papers across to the future Haddyth.

Picking them up, his first son quirked an eyebrow and said, "This looks like a peace offer from vyn Hohozyn, and quite the generous one."

"It is. It gives everyone but one person what they want, and that list fundamentally does not include Hohozyn, even though a surface reading says that it does," Poetyr fumed as he paced through his tent. "He's been reading on King Alyxunmyn, I can tell it. He's been reading on Tarbyn II too no doubt. Fuck, he's gonna fold so that he gets another draw of the cards rather than going bankrupt."

"Exile... dissolution... restoration of the nobility? Father, this looks like bankruptcy to me," Hyrnyr said as he skimmed through the missive.

"Two hundred years ago Tarbyn II bent knee in vassalge to the Patriarch of Nevien. Now Nevien is a relative backwater and Gylruv is more Ymaryn than even the old myths might have suggested. He's making a deal that keeps his people intact and their core territories from being on fire and gives them all the tools they need to reunite in a generation when they will be unstoppable instead of drained from a generation of revolution and war. Read it more carefully, because while this is obviously just a proposal to get people to come to the negotiating table, there are enough clauses in the discussion that the Sketch and Kielmyr will pounce on it and could potentially leave everyone else flapping in the wind. Fuck, given the way they seem to have made it a habit of annoying continental powers the Sketch will probably sell the Tortun supplies to screw with the Ochruhr... which is really the point to all of this," Poetyr complained, while Hyrnyr went through the papers more carefully and let a frown come over his face.

A few months ago First Citizen Faron vyn Hohozyn had offered the surrender of territory taken in the previous war back to the Kielmyr and the People, along with maybe some bits that hadn't been with them before but they had a weak claim to. The offer had been rebuffed by a unified front, although by all accounts the Kielmyr would have taken the deal had they been on their own. The Sketch had made it quite obvious that they considered a unified revolutionary republic in Tortun an unacceptable risk, and more than that everyone was more than a little afraid of Faron in charge of a nation and multiple parties wanted him gone as part of any peace deal. While no one was quite sure what exactly the end game would look like, the Ochruhr had made their intentions to restore the empire increasingly clear, much to the consternation of the Behryvar and Styrmyr and the annoyance of the Sketch and People.

In this missive Faron had decided to offer to fall on his own sword if it would spare his people. Quite possibly literally, although from the language it more implied that his exile was on the table if it would end the fighting before it ravaged all of the Tortun People. He knew this war was lost and if he let it drag on much longer it would just be pointless bloodshed for his own pride, but if he was going to lose he would lose on his own terms. He would break the republic into a half dozen Constitutional Grand Duchies, the ruling families drawn from former nobles who had chosen to bend the knee and renounce their titles rather than let war sweep over their people: none of them were more than distantly related and had family members they could marry off into the ruling families of the various coalition members. It basically gave every coalition member what they wanted, while laying the groundwork for a resurgence, because it was obvious that the various parliaments would have teeth and while reunification would not be possible this generation...

And of course there was the fact that this deal would involve giving the Ochruhr nothing. It would humiliate them and at the end of the day they would have essentially nothing to show for their efforts. The Tortun Republic would be gone, but its component parts would not be vulnerable to being devoured, the Behryvar, Hespranxer, and Halvyni would be strengthened despite not really doing anything, and they would have shed rivers of blood for it all. They would probably refuse, but the other coalition members would take the deal, and Faron was clever enough to have left the suggestion that while he would be willing to make individual peaces for the surrender of land, the possibility of dissolution and his exile was contingent on all hostiles agreeing to such a peace. He would either be able to close off hostile fronts and remain unified while thrashing the Ochruhr one on one, he would ensure his people would be in good condition to recover and reunify in a generation, or he would be able to go to his people and say that he tried literally everything to protect them from the Ochruhr and those who hated them so. Poetyr was not quite sure how these new republicans and nationalists thought, but that a man such as Faron would propose such lengths... ha! Good luck trying to hold the Tortun lands as an outsider.

He was honestly wondering if he shouldn't bother with holding the Wyrmyn lands either. Their loss had been inevitable, but as the noose tightened and the Wyrmyn realized that Faron was getting squeezed and couldn't send more than token aid, they stopped selling land for time and dug in. The costs were significant, but by then the People were able to turn locally superior numbers into locally overwhelming numbers at all points of contact and the ferocity of the Wyrmyn only bought them the salutes of the People as they passed over their corpses. Holding this place was going to be... not fun, but the pride of the People would not allow the continued existence of the Wyrmyn in their current form. Of course, by fighting so damn hard they had bought Faron enough time to make the sort of peace he was proposing possible rather than already having the People laying siege to his capital.

This peace proposal was also going to cause trouble in another way. If he wanted something else, something different, he would have to spend a lot of energy getting everyone focused on convincing the rest of the Coalition to reject the offers being held out by Faron, energy that he doubted he had, because the efforts to get the guilds to back off had exploded in an almost comical way.

The guilds were now fighting with each other! While grand for the objective of getting short sighted twits out of the way, it also meant that they were pushing the issue towards a constitutional crisis, and there was rioting and general civil unrest within the core industrial areas of the People, which was a distinctly bad thing from the perspective of trying to wage a war. Ultimately some of the motivation of the guilds had come out in that their practices were driving some of their junior members to run off to Kyberi, which the new constitution enabled, and they were not just threatened by the possibility of new machines replacing the work of apprentices and journeymen but by those self-same apprentices and journeymen running off to work outside the auspices of the guilds anyway. However, on the other hand the 'precision' guilds had come to the conclusion that they were doomed if they did not adopt they new machines. It stemmed first from the glassmakers, who had found that if they wanted to make some of the new optics they were working on in any significant number they needed the precision of machine tools. The gunsmiths and the clock-makers, who with the new prototype optics were able to inspect their work better than ever, had agreed. The precision machines the Sketch and Kielmyr were coming up with would allow journeymen to do master work and masters to surpass them, and if they did not adopt these measures they would be obsolete within a generation. Of course the expertise to build a precision powered lathe or polisher could just as easily make a mechanical loom or the like, and many other guilds opposed the development of such technologies at every turn.

Using the ruckus Poetyr had generated as cover, a number of ambitious junior masters had overthrown the leadership of those three guilds through judicious use of turning over evidence of malfeasance to the king, slander, blackmail, and probably at least one straight up assassination. These Young Masters had then approached as one with a proposal: their current charters were limiting them in what they could and could not do, so they were requesting the dissolution of their charters and the right to reform as a series of crown corporations. While perhaps not the easiest move, with the current constitution it was the only way these guilds could operate in both their traditional territories with their current infrastructure and in the Kyberi territories where they could build up the machine tools they needed without the other guilds falling upon them like a murder of crows.

This proposal was of course causing rather massive issues.

Poetyr wasn't sure whether he regretted pressing the Wyrmyn at the same time as the guilds or not.

You have 4 PW to spend
You've won the war! Now to win the peace...
[] [Peace] 0 PW - Take the Wyrmyn territories you have conquered and let everyone else figure things out (-2 Temp Trust, gain Wyrmyn lands, may not count as avenging Humiliating Loss)
[] [Peace] 2 PW - Negotiate with the rest of the Coalition for the Dissolution of Tortun (Gain Wyrmyn lands, remove Humiliating Loss, Tortun Republic broken up into six Constitutional Grand Duchies, various powers gain small amounts of Tortun land, Ochruhr utterly humiliated by all powers)
[] [Peace] 4 PW - No peace, keep pressing! (-4 Temp Trust, war does not end, Tortun nationalism set to 12/10)

Guilds
[] [Guilds] 0 PW - Block the dissolution of the precision guilds (-1 Temp Happiness, guild position strengthened)
[] [Guilds] 1 PW - Allow the dissolution but do not address the larger issue of the guilds (-1 Temp Happiness, +1 Temp Consciousness, remove Recent Constitutional Changes status)
[] [Guilds] 4 PW Invested - Begin a new constitutional convention to address these issues (1819 is a constitutional turn)


New Research Option for the Most Ancient University of Redshore
[] [Research]Academic Freedom (0/???) [Social]
[] [Research] Modern Nationalism (0/???) [Social]
[] [Research] Early Modern Logic (0/20-25?) [Science]