How do the Star Shaman and Horned Riders fit into this paradigm?
I mean for the Horned Riders, I doubt they arose from the same value system we currently possess, so I'm curious how they fit into this situation considering they will likely have to adapt to fit into our values.
As for the Star Shaman, I'm somewhat curious as to how they will interpret our values considering how different they are, especially as it looks like they don't really have another Holy Order to play off their duality.
The Star Shaman are: Introverted, Ascetic, and Patient. Their top two values are: Ordeals and Mastery of Nature.
Horned Riders are: Extroverted, Materialistic, and Patient. Their top two values are: Elitism and Familialism.
Fangs are: Extroverted, Ascetic, and Immediate. Their top values are: Vendetta and Familialism.
Ember-Eyes are: Introverted, Materialistic, and Patient. Their top values are: Elitism and Mastery of Nature.
Frost-Scarred are: Extroverted, Ascetic, and Immediate. Their top values are Ordeals and Might Makes Right.
There's essentially three main axies on which Holy Orders vary: Introversion/Extroversion (how open they are with their mysteries and seeking new recruits), Materialism/Asceticism (whether they focus on the material or spiritual world) and Patience/Immediacy (how willing the orders are to wait in order to see results in their mysteries).
A few questions. Can we still get said ice and meteoric iron from the north?
Is this northern horde of nomads simply a prediction or is there in actuality a horde of nomads lurking to the north that we aren't aware of?
I'm also now curious about as to what is west that could cause them to diverge and fracture so much that it ranks up there with invaders from the north or south.
Ice would be hard to secure without settling more northern settlements or looking for nomads who are willing to work as middlemen. It likely be more efficient in the long-term to build a fleet and then have that go around to the north to extract ice.
Meteoric iron is perfectly possible to trade for. It's likely going to have to compete with bog iron, but meteoric iron is generally better quality and it has unique attributes that make it visibly striking.
There's no secret nomad hordes waiting in the wings. Now, at least. North America, at the point in the timeline you're in, is still relatively under populated for its size. The initial group that settled across the Bearing Strait was very, very small IRL and that greatly slowed the growth of new populations. It's estimated that all of the Americas had a population of 100 million in 1941 while Europe at the same time had a population of 45 million. Needless to say, the Americas are many time bigger than Europe. It's going to really take time for all of the good land to fill up, but the outer reaches will eventually start filling with nomads. It's still not likely to get as crazy as Eurasian nomads, outside of perhaps the Canadian Prairies and Tundra (the American Midwest was mostly forested before white settlers arrived).
The thing that's there is something that isn't too far away (it's
just hidden in the unmarked parts of the map), but it's something that's obscure.
This sounds like you're describing the transition state for a molecule in chemistry, with us being the molecule currently undergoing a chemical reaction.
Anyways, does having heroes in this situation, especially a mystic hero, help in regards to the accessibility and possibility of which state we can end up in? As I gather with our previously high stability, we have a much bigger buffer than we would've had at a lower state.
Transition state! That's what I was thinking of. I could not recall the correct words in the moment.
Heroes are like catalysts. They provide alternative pathways that are less 'energetic'. They're less chaotic and as such are less likely to make everything fly apart. In short, yes they provide a buffer.
Would the Northlands have been the other examples of Beasts?
Yes.
Incidentally
@Redium can you use spoiler blocks or article blocks for the civ sheet lists of values? Large quotes are very hard to interact with on mobile and you can't even quote the text out for reference purposes anymore.
I'll change it back.
Ah, so cultural translation issue since multiple people around here have SOME kind of earthmoving construction megaproject of their own(Peace Builders, Island Makers and Pearl Divers), with the exceptions of the former Northlands(who probably would consider it significant), and the Mountain Clans(who sound like they have a different fork of the natural wonder value that we have?).
The Mountain Clans literally live in a mountain range. Your 'hill' is probably less than a hundred feet tall. They're used to have mountains towering thousands of feet over their heads.
If the Northlands survived they might call us the Mound Builders, since they understand the whole twin soul thing with their own lifebonded caribou.
If the Northlanders have survived, you'd more likely get a derogatory nickname. Dirt Digger most likely.
That sounds a lot like they would not have liked our temple on a natural wonder at all. Their religious autocracy government would lose legitimacy simply from it existing independent of their approach.
There's a reason that the first reason they could've fallen was getting knocked over from someone from the south.
3) Check the maps? Whats to the western side of Canada?
Note: you're not looking that far to the west.
The Canadian Prairie and the Great Plains as a whole are pretty large, so considering how divergent history can be I don't think we can discount another nomad horse arising from it now that there are potentially rideable animals aside from horses that can be used in the wide open plains of North America, something they didn't really have historically.
Note: The Prairies are about 1,000 miles west of Hill Guard. They're very unlikely to have anything to do with you until way, way latter on.
How did he, as someone who grew up outside of our society, manage to obtain such mystery knowledge? Is he prestigious and respected enough that the other Holy Orders just showed him stuff when he was interested, or were more subtle means involved?
He's a genius and most of the Holy Orders' mysteries aren't that obscure. The Ember-Eyes and Frost-Scarred practice theirs publicly as a matter of prestige. The Fangs are fairly close to the Horned Riders, just focusing on different aspects of rearing animals. The Star Shaman were the only ones he'd really have struggled to grasp and he was an apprentice with them for years.
I was asking more about what the internal relations between those three tribes look like.
Cousins. They're distant and becoming more so every day, but they still recognize each other as closer kin than any other civilizations.
Huh. Interesting. It will give us a very weird incentive in the future where expensive slaves will be much more valuable than cheap ones, not just due to whatever skills and qualities they have that make them so expensive but because it will be more socially acceptable to keep them for long if they cost more. It also means that a slave in the know would try to keep their own price down by seeking unattractive, as long as they are still worth being bought by us, since it could be the fastest way to freedom. And that slaver tribes will be able to negotiate above average prices since the price itself is a positive quality to some extent.
It's still possible for you to drop debt slavery in the future. With the correct decisions, it can evolve into corvee labour and just become a form of taxation instead of servitude.
Since a lot of our formal breeding has been traditionally done by Holy Orders (but not all, like orkers for instance) does it look like this practice will start in an existing Holy Order or outside of it?
Potentially. Domesticated ravens are most likely to be adopted into either the Fangs (since they interact with the Hunt) or the Star Shaman (because of their status as tricksters or omens of death).
The Holy Orders are responsible for feeding their own members? Do they function like a massive clan each then?
In general I'm a bit confused on how the daily social life of a member of a Holy Order works exactly. You already said that they are allowed to marry freely and keep their previous familial ties. But they also get recruited at a young age from various settlements and (presumably) relocate to the settlement where their Holy Order is based at after recruitment. And while traditional warriors join a warrior clan by getting adopted or by marrying in to it and joining their wife's family (I think), most martial Holy Orders are male dominated. So what exactly happens when Holy Order members get married? Do they belong to their spouse's clan while still fully participating in the Order as their 'profession'? Or do they live with their Order brothers, with spouses and future children essentially becoming periferal Order members?
Norminally, every member of the Holy Orders support themselves and their families independently by pursuing a regular 'career'. Ember-Eyes are jewelry, charcoal, and soap makers; the Frost-Scarred tend to be traders or warriors; the Fangs are hunters; the Horned Riders are herders; and the Star Shaman are shaman. As they age, these individuals tend to do more and more services on behalf of their holy order, collecting a ration for that work. There's a period of transition from normal work to working for the Holy Order itself.
Speaking of marriage, is Male Exogamy still something that mostly applies to warriors or have non-warrior professions also have adopted it by now?
It's percolating throughout society now. It's been adopted quickly by most professions that require apprenticeships, but it's slower in professions that are geographically tied (farmers, herders, lumberjacks).
Lastly, what do the Fangs do professionally in peace times other than breeding and training dogs and giving mystic aid to their parishioners? Do they still go hunting enough to be considered food producers as well? Do they actually participate in and/or lead large scale herding activities full time? Or do they more like gift/sell/lease their dogs to hunters and herders to use?
The Fangs are hunters. They're actually the ones that maintain the Hunt as an institution. They also tend to be explorers and traders, but hunters are the most comon.
Are you sure? How long does a caribou live? Traditionally cavalry warriors tried to get more than one warhorse under their name. Also, the story has already told us that the rodeo of breaking in a new caribou is considered a national sport among the Horned Riders, so it can't be happening only once per new initiate.
Caribou tend to live 13 years for males and 17 years for females. They can be safely ridden from the age of 3 until 10-12 typically.
@Redium, can you give a source for this?
Not off the top of my head, unfortunately. This was something that we studied briefly in a course of Evolution during university. Artificial selection was used as a means to compare and contrast natural selection. If you wanted to do some research on it, you're going to want to look up the Second Agriculture Revolution, British Agriculture Revolution, or Charles Townshend, the man who pioneered it, or Charles Bakewell, the man who scientifically codified selective breeding.
To make a long story short: the Second Agricultural Revolution was prompted by the adoption of four-field crop rotation (also called the Norfolk System). By rotating between wheat, turnips, barley, and clover, it was possible to extract much greater yield from agricultural fields. The reason for this is because of turnips and clover. Turnips have exceptionally deep roots and can survive cold temperatures, and often extract resources during the winter that other plants simply can't. Clover is nitrogen fixing in soil and as such greatly reduces the need for any particular field to lay fallow.
This agricultural increase, ended up creating an increase animal products. Turnips can be eaten by humans, but tends to be unpalatable. Clover is inedible. Instead of allowing these new crops to rot, farmers started to feed them to cattle and other animals. Before this, cattle were bred as farm aids; something to pull the plow, primarily. It simply wasn't calorically effective to feed the cattle to grow to be meat. Anything that you could feed the cow would be better consumed directly by the farmer since the cow doesn't translate 100% of the energy in the food it eats into meat. It's more efficient to eat the plants directly. Farmers would still eat their cows, but only as a last resort.
In the Agricultural Revolution, however, farmers suddenly had a lot of crops that they weren't going to be eating themselves. They had enough food from the wheat and barley they grew that it made sense to feed the turnips and clover to the cattle. Cattle then started to be bred for increased size in order to offer more beef. Tax reports from butchers during the period indicated that cattle roughly doubled in size over the course of a century because there was more food available and selective breeding made animals bigger. Scientifically directed breeding was credited with making this enormous difference in cattle size possible.
Now, the counterpoint to this would be that scientifically selected breeding doesn't matter; simply having access to more food would make cattle grow bigger. This is true to a limited extent, but it masks how
enormous the difference selective breeding makes in a relatively short time. There was a
study on three different breeds of chicken; one from 1957, 1978 and 2005. Each of these breeds was kept isolated and were allowed to mate randomly while later breeds had experienced normal artificial selection from the chicken industry, selecting for bigger and bigger birds.
Over the course of the experiment, all of these chickens were given the same diet and living conditions. At the end, the 1957 chicken weighed 905 grams; the 1978 ones weighed 1,808 grams; and the 2005 chicken weighed 4,202 grams. Purely by selective breeding, chickens more than tripled in weight in a fifty year period. Of course, the 1957 birds were noted to be much, much healthier than the later birds.
It's likely that the difference in cattle wouldn't be this immense in the same time period (since cattle have much longer generation times), but it illustrates how strongly scientifically formulated artificial selection can affect a species of animal.
Before Charles Bakewell, the notion of artificial selection did exist, arising among the Romans and the Muslims. The difference between this artificial selection and more modern artificial selection is in its immediacy. Early artificial selection would involve cutting down the most diseased or unhealthy trees, culling the smallest and weakest animals, etc. It only removes a few of the weakest members of a breeding population; this works on the scale of centuries and millennia. Late artificial selection involved specifically breeding the best specimens and introducing a very unhealthy degree of inbreeding. This works on the scale of decades.
When the People are selectively breeding something, they're using the first method, and it's not a fast one.
Additionally, I added an extra voting option on the bottom of the previous update. You may want to check it again.
