Revolt-Revolution, Yes-Yes! (CK2 Skaven Post-Revolution Quest)

Turn 18 Results--Too Small To Succeed?

The fundamental reality was that wealth could be measured, and the nations' well-being could be quite simply understood if one only grasped that it was the resources of the nation that were its wealth, and especially the gold and silver which made its coinage. Thus, the prescription was simple: you should attempt to have an autonomous policy, wherein all of your food and finished materials, so much as it is possible, come from within the country, and then for anything else you lack you should trade most of all for raw materials that you can turn into finished goods, and as little as possible give up the wealth of gold and silver. If you did give up your gold and silver, then you would be impoverished and more than that, without the means to dig yourself out of it. Moreover, the argument overwhelmingly, especially from those in the Empire, is that disaster was always around the corner and so it was only by having a powerful reserve of gold that you could maintain the prosperity of the people against disaster and outrage.

Yet, Chittertongue noted, something had broken in this assumption. Karl Franz had worked at trying to spend the coin of the Empire on food and resources to survive the famine, but when everywhere was starving there was just not the food to go around, and so the coin had wound up sitting there entirely useless as the world went from disaster to disaster. All the same at least a few merchants and a few farmers would profit, but believers in these policies would say more must be done. Indeed, that was a "hidden" second element of the very way of thinking this engendered-caused: that only through the complete exploitation of the land and the regular circulation of currency, but only within a single nation, could prosperity arise. Therefore, the slaughter of the tribes--as one Kislev writer put it--or the extermination of the beastfolk--in the words of a Imperial merchant--was not merely a moral necessity to protect against degradation and bloodshed, but a positive good whose result would be to produce everything a country requires in the land it is in.

Indeed, it was so believed that "the Godds would ne'er put us in such insuffiences as to nesessitate desperate thrift, and thus when these sundry lands were created in ancient times the Godds guided us with a will, that each land should have all of its nesessitaties and that therein lies the secret evil of those worshipers of Chaos or those Beastfolk, or the fungal menace, that by the effecting of their extermination wee shall obtain the full measure of the commonwealth."

This quote and others made it quite clear that in the traditional perspective, Under-Altdorf would be considered a threat and proof of the insufficiency of the policies if they cannot obtain food and must trade far more valuable things for it. Yet PLANT and others, instead of advocating for a conquest, had instead pushed almost for a merger, for something that brings them inside. Suddenly, all at once, it made sense. In the letters PLANT, despite its moderation, had in no way been the more conservative or skeptical of the revolutionary groups as to the possibility of working with the Skaven. The Artisan's Guild had worried that Skaven industry would surpass their efforts, though they knew that for now there was no way but forward, while PLANT had at every step been… ah.

Chittertongue, when he realized it, blinked. PLANT by the ideology of merchants and the definitions of good thrift would want, so much as possible, Under-Altdorf and above Altdorf to be as close as possible, such that it would not be dependence on a foreign power but dependence on some other part or portion of the whole, since none of the works went so far as to advocate for local autonomy. None of the people writing really thought that each of the provinces of the Empire should be independent of each other, which raised the question of what a "nation" is that made it both indivisible and unable to be combined into larger entities. Surely, Chittertongue thought to himself, there was at least the dream-possibility of some sort of Confederation of states, just as the Empire was the same, who could pursue their common interests and the interests of the world?

Well, this turned out to be a real question, perhaps even the real question. Why were they so sure that states could only be so small? They believed this because they saw the Border Princes and Tilea. While the Tilean city-states were debatedly large enough to pursue "self-suffiency" as it was called, nobody believed that any of the Border Princes could be a real government with a real fiscal policy. This might not be wrong, but the debate on the nature of these things became tangled up in all sorts of other disagreements. Those who believed that Tilea would never be a real nation until it united as seen from the Empire, which despite some civil war was united and would always reunite in case of any trouble, clashed with those who thought that each city-state was large enough to meet this self-sufficiency. Those within Tilea who wanted unification disagreed with both of them, but one thing that was clear is that there was no virtue in being a small nation, for all that philosophers had concluded that no Republic could survive that was larger than a city-state and its hinterland.

Unfortunately Chittertongue was quite aware that the Republic he'd helped founded would meet that definition as well, even if it perhaps reassured merchants that it was not anything like a threat, and was instead something they understood.

As for the Border Princes? Some agreed with the assessment and had as a goal ultimately to be an outpost of one power or another. Others stubbornly insisted that their little town of a thousand was large enough and tried to provide for everything.

One rather odd blacksmith a few years ago had written a tract that claimed that high toll barriers and governmental and mercantile restrictions against the traffic of trade amounted to a "conspiracy" against the common good, and that by removing barriers and trading freely, all would benefit from cheaper goods and a greater access to these resources. But as he was from the Border Princes, his views seem to have been dismissed as self-interested and of course primitive and provincial, not worth considering compared to the views of more august and learned merchants, to the point where he'd desperately started giving away the books, which is how it had ended here.

When Chittertongue asked local merchants, he was told that a few had started taking it seriously but that most were quite wedded to the way things were going, and that it was not as if the Republic in any wise could afford not to charge a hefty toll on anything passing through, whether or not it 'dis-privileged' everyone else.

The final revelation was if anything the oddest of all: a few of the books were older, and the Skaven in charge of the Clan had read some of them thoroughly and underlined parts-pieces of the whole, doing so with enough eagerness to get ink bleed. It seemed as if the necessity of hoarding resources--though some of the tracts argue that too much hoarding of resources leads to poverty--and the necessity of being the one with all of the things that other countries wanted so that they would be forced to trade valuable goods for it, had caught the attention of the Skaven. Perhaps, besides everything else, the attempt to create a vault and gather the many species of the world was an attempt to control resource-making so that the man-things would be enslaved and defeated by… what, some mountain rising from nothing? It was foolish-stupid, but ambition and survival-desperation were close allies in Skaven society even now.

But the Border Princes in all their majesty and all their pettiness were a subject of mockery and exclusion, treated always as if they were a strange beast that could not die and yet should not live. Each person who went there came with their biases and left with their biases, and to hear the tale every land and every ideology--at least every reasonable ideology, like different sorts of noble rule, kingships, rule by Wizards, necrocracies and more--had given it a try not just once but a dozen times and found that it amounted to nothing more than a way to keep a finger into a rotten pie.

Ultimately, and at the core of the problem, was that everyone was desperate and everyone was proud, and so while there were powers that became the center of gatherings of followers, none of these ever amounted to a lasting state, with the only exception being the Dwarfs, who provided a core, a heart that could not be easily dismissed, to the region around where they were. But besides this, what was it? Not endless sand, there, indeed it was at times and places a very rich region, though also filled with inexplicably haunted, hunted, or terrorized locales. There was no end to it, and the problem is that eventually things without end become without a beginning. Those who tried to explain why it was the way it was seemed eager-willing to say that there was some character of the Border Princes, perhaps even that the humans there were some other kind of human from all the rest, though most simply thought that only those who lacked any character that would do anything so gauche-foolish and rude-cruel as to be born in the Border Princes, let alone move there!

This is the world that Chittertongue must try to understand, and in trying to understand… try to change.

---

"So, allow me to run through the explanations I've put together," Tazio declared, looking at Chittertongue with his nose in a book. He was like Inkclaw at a moment like that, and it honestly did annoy him just a little bit. He was trying to do too many things at once, hunched over a book while also taking notes, Gralk pacing around bored around both of them. She looked as if she might wander off at any moment and get lost. He'd never met someone who could look so lost just standing there. "There are a few factions worth noting. First, the Northern Border Confederacy, if we get out of the Mountain Shadow lands--"

"Mountain shadow?"

"The three Princes we are closest to, and a dozen competing factions beyond it, have never been united because they're all fighting for tolls, but beyond it to the north if you keep on going you get the Confederacy, and of you keep on going east you get the kills and Barak Varr is among them. They're far from the only grouping, but there's about three or four general groupings and a bunch of large ones. If you go east enough, you have Zvorak and its competition, Trantino."

"Trantino?" Chittertongue asked, frowning, and finally, some interest.

"Little Trantio," Tazio said with a laugh at the twitch of Chittertongue's whiskers at that. "It was founded by angry exiles back when Trantio became a Republic, but despite opposing Trantio, they've become an outlet of it half the time. They're going to follow Trantio's lead, while Zvorak and their artists and masons are famous. If you go further south you have Argalis, Pugno, the Myrmidens, all trading powers that border Tilea on the other end, but you also have a half-dozen other little confederations in the region… closer to us, though, there's a strange realm that nobody talks much about, Gashnag, and if you want to make enemies with Barak Varr, there's apparently a necromancer who has lands on the border between the Dwarfs and the Badlands."

By this point he'd pulled out a map and begun displaying the specifics, drawing lines to indicate areas of influence. "The Kypris Empire is in the center, and yet it's opposed by the Badmen."

"The… Bad-men?"

"No, the Badmen," Tazio corrected. "A new mercenary band that's started to unite bits and pieces of the region… what you really need to care about is this. If you want trade with the world, there's a few ways to get it. You can go north and get the Confederacy on your side, you can play nice with Barak Varr, you can travel a long way's away to the Myrmidens and then by sea from there, and that's a choice plenty of Elves do, or you could go on to either Trantio in the East or cross the border to Tilea by going far east and then south," Tazio said. "Those are all the possibilities, and then there's a few other places to think about. Aesertheim, the Last Homely House, is a land ruled by an Elf who essentially conquered the region and rules it as a King in order to create a safe haven for Elvish parties. That's pretty significant, but there's also the Ciztellian Anarchy, which is pretty significant because some of its famous mercenaries are often the ones who fight off the Badlands."

"The what?" Chittertongue asked.

"It's a state without a state, founded on the principles of trade and purchase of goods," Tazio explained. "Anything can be bought and sold there, and so many crazy or dangerous people take shelter there in exchange for paying to the merchant-lords or the like for the privilege. But they do a lot of work for it, and there's strange beliefs they hold that you have to tolerate, and of course with Barak Varr going insane…"

"Insane? How?"

"They have a new King who says that they've let too many short-beards be in charge and traded too much with their surroundings and that they should withdraw-reduce their sea trade to focus on building up a fortress. There's debates even now, but if Barak Varr does do that, tens of thousands will die and…"

"The Necromancer will take over the region," Chittertongue added, having a working brain-mind that could pick up clues. "But probably wouldn't be able to hurt-damage Barak Varr, if it's really so large."

"It is one of the two or three largest cities in the Border Princes, and probably the biggest," Tazhio said, adding, "There's no chance it falls to anything except every Greenskin tribe combined, and maybe not even then. If Barak Varr does become a hostile-state that lives like a crab in its shell, then either the Necromancer will take over or someone else will come to guarantee-security against the goblins, Necromancer, and more. This could be us."

"It could be… or we could see what Barak Varr is doing, yes-yes," Chittertongue said. "And what about the Mountain Shadow?"

"If you could unite it under a friendly government, or most like a confederation, it would be an achievement and a half. There'd probably be enough Border Princes willing to let you through from there if you could convince Myrmidens to open their ports, or if you had a way not to start a fight with Trantio. The Northern Confederacy favors the Empire, but they also do their own-thing and any unrest…"

"Any unrest would mean they'd be desperate-hungry and need the help," Chittertongue said.

"But also… it'd mean immigrants."

"Good."

"Good… depending."

He could hear Chittertongue ask it: depending on what?

Now there was a tale, and the tale was simple: depending on who came and what happened?

Twist of the Tail Time! The Announcement goes well, but Chittertongue wants it to go amazingly… so it does! What's the complication?

[] [Complication] The news does get out to Aelin, but it interrupts some sort of ceremony or ritual, and while this doesn't lead to a conflict it does mean that apparently someone has to show up to make amends, which might become something larger and certainly will be something annoying.
[] [Complication] The news gets out and includes the idea that the Piebald Republic is a good place to immigrate… to find suckers that you can grift for money! Increase the portion of people heading here as treasure-hunters or fortune-seekers merely claiming to want to live there and actually just trying to find something to steal… but telling them apart from the merely desperate and figuring out what to do about that will be a long-term issue, and one that is likely to exacerbate tensions and skepticism in the meantime.
[] [Complication] The Piebald Republic comes off as rich and foolish in another way: a much higher level of grifter shows up, that being representations of local small Border Princes who absolutely will make the Republic part-owners in their plot of land, such that they could declare themselves the Lord of it, for only a small payment… or otherwise engaging in the same grifting that the Border Princes do to Tilea, the Empire, the Dwarfs and the Elves.
[] [Complication] The announcement interferes with the road to Altdorf by causing more attention and focus in the region, which will create some difficulties for the next year as things get settled down!



A/N: The Blacksmith's name? Adam.