[X] Gathering your band together and doing group exercises--spars, drills, and on the final day you will recruit an older Blooded man to act the part of a "monster." This will help further test each members abilities and give experience fighting a much stronger opponent. May benefit future cooperation.
[X][Cat] No, of course not, this could be dangerous!
[X] Gathering your band together and doing group exercises--spars, drills, and on the final day you will recruit an older Blooded man to act the part of a "monster." This will help further test each members abilities and give experience fighting a much stronger opponent. May benefit future cooperation.
[X][Cat] Of course. If anything, we need more Lappuras! More! We demand it!
[x] Gathering your band together and doing group exercises--spars, drills, and on the final day you will recruit an older Blooded man to act the part of a "monster." This will help further test each members abilities and give experience fighting a much stronger opponent. May benefit future cooperation.
[x][Cat] No, of course not, this could be dangerous!
[X] Find your friends and acquaintances and spend time with them. This would include figures like Etana and Akki, and perhaps even Jacob.
[X][Cat] Of course. If anything, we need more Lappuras! More! We demand it!
[X] Gathering your band together and doing group exercises--spars, drills, and on the final day you will recruit an older Blooded man to act the part of a "monster." This will help further test each members abilities and give experience fighting a much stronger opponent. May benefit future cooperation.
[X][Cat] Of course. If anything, we need more Lappuras! More! We demand it!
Well, I immediately thought of Ermor, and got chills.
For those not in the know:
Early Ermor is subtitled "New Faith", and centers around a recent religious revolution which drives the city-state to begin expanding into a proper empire. The nation's big showcase is the New Faith itself; the various clerics of the Sacred Shroud not only provide excellent priest units, they can also heal afflictions* in allied units (a rare and precious ability in Dom3).
The prior religious authorities, the Flamen and Pontifices, are very much pushed into the background by them; a Flamen can potentially be useful for the magic they know but has minimal priestly power, while a Pontifex is a passable cleric with a remedial knowledge of Fire magic.
However, they have something which very much connects them to the main spellcaster source for Ermor and to the downfall of the nation in later Eras. Augury. The Flamen and Pontifices are specifically noted for using fire as a means of divination (there's even a nation-specific spell for it) - but so are the Imperial Augurs, a secular organization.
And the Grand Augurs are noted as extremely accurate in their predictions, but also held in extremely ill repute by almost everyone outside of the generals and other elite who rely on their divinations - because they were the ones who prompted the military campaign against C'tis and stole the secrets of Death magic. There's an interesting web of connections between the practitioners of the Old and New Faiths & the Imperial Augurs, which seems to hint at details of the nation's past and eventual fate.
For example, the Augurs seem to be adherents of the New Faith. The Grand Augurs spurred Ermor to conquest because they had tried to divine the precise date on which the Shrouded Prophet's god would return, only to see visions of the Empire's fall - they sought out Death magic because they knew it was tied up in the doom they'd foreseen, and thought that by mastering it they would be able to preserve the Empire.
Given the augury connection with the Old Faith, the implication is that the Augurs formed out of other Old Faith sects that threw their lot in with the Prophet, setting themselves apart from worldly matters (and thus forfeiting their priestly power and authority) in order to plumb the divine mysteries of the New Faith.
The Bishopric of the Sacred Shroud is very much an active and worldly arm of the New Faith; its priests bear sanctified replicas of the Prophet's own shroud, which they drape over the afflicted in order to cure them. Their function is one which keeps them in direct contact with the soldiery and the common folk of Ermor. By comparison, the Augurs are occult, esoteric, seeking omens and portents in the movements of ritual flames.
However, once you move forward to the Middle Era (the Broken Empire) both the New Faith and the Old disappear. Ermor's religious fulcrum has become a mortuary cult led by the 'Grand Thaumaturges' - and the first big tell is how their unit description discusses the promise made by the Shrouded Prophet.
In the Early Era, the Shrouded Prophet was a universally revered figure, second only to the Reawakening God which they foretold. In the Middle Era, there's barely any mention of the Prophet at all, and the Grand Thaumaturges are stated to be driven not by fear of the Empire's destruction, but by the need to 'stallthe Reawakening'.
When a unit is injured in battle, there's a chance it will pick up an affliction as a result - anything from a limp to PTSD to a lost arm to a lost eye to profound brain damage. Part of what makes afflictions so devastating is that barring rare, nation-specific things like the Bishops of the Sacred Shroud, they're completely incurable.
On a Doylist level, the obvious implication is that the Bishops are able to heal all manner of sickness and injury, which helps explain how the New Faith managed to rapidly overtake the Old.
In other words, the Reawakening's meaning in the minds of the Ermorians has pulled a 180 - and I have a decent guess as to why.
While the Grand Augurs never publicly announced what they had foreseen, it was an open secret that they'd seen something bad in the Empire's future and were now quietly scrambling for a solution.
Now, I don't think that the common people of Ermor turned against the New Faith because of the rumors about the Augurs. My impression is that the Augurs being only crypto-clergymen of the New Faith, with distinct ties to the mystics of the nation's recent past and minimal interaction with the day-to-day activities of the Empire, insulated them from both larger reprisal and from their PR issues rubbing off on the New Faith itself.
To the overwhelming majority of Ermor's citizens (and vassals!), the New Faith was synonymous with the Bishopric of the Sacred Shroud, and the Bishops had impeccable PR, because they literally spent their time going around healing the sick and making whole the crippled.
It wasn't until the Empire actually started meeting with major setbacks that things began taking a turn.
The worse things get, the more the rumors of the Augurs come to the forefront of everyone's minds, and the more volatile things become within the Bishopric. They're the ones who literally bear the divine mantle of their savior, so what the hell is going on now? How are they losing when they have God's favor evident on every man jack of the New Faith's clergy?
Eventually, the internal contradictions within the New Faith become too much and a massive schism occurs, breaking the previous religious order and cracking the Empire into pieces.
There are two Middle Era nations that don't have a direct Early Era predecessor, but have clear ties to one or more Early Era nations - and which seem to have some amount of connective tissue with Ermor in particular.
And while they don't worship a Sacred Shroud, the theocracy of Marignon continues the semi-Christian symbolism of the New Faith in other ways - and they have a pronounced hatred for the Death magic which the Augurs had begun practicing in the Early Era. Likewise, they're heavily associated with Fire magic, which is tied to both the Old and New Faiths of old Ermor.
(They even have an order of cavalrymen as their capital-specific sacred unit, echoing Ermor's Equites of the Sacred Shroud.)
So, a decent portion of the Bishopric breaks off from the Mother Church of Ermor and creates its own sovereign state - one which sets itself explicitly against the Augurs and enjoys a significant degree of popular support among its peasantry. They seem to represent the closest thing to a direct successor of Ermor's New Faith.
Meanwhile, the swampy border provinces (which were once known as Sauromatia) develop into Ermor's other successor, syncretizing the pagan faiths of the region with Ermor's Old Faith and shucking off the Shrouded Prophet entirely to become a more overtly Grecian version of Byzantium - and, I imagine, taking shape due to a breakdown in the larger Empire that birthed it, as with the Byzantines.
This new nation, Pythium, becomes the successor to Ermor in terms of broader culture, retaining the Romanesque legionary structures and use of occult diviners to guide the decisions of the state.
The Bishopric of the Sacred Shroud itself collapses in the tumult, with much of the New Faith gravitating toward Marignon while the Old Faith bleeds away into Pythium - leaving the Augurs as the sole power within what's left of Ermor. Even the Holy Sepulcher in which the Prophet was laid to rest slips from relevance. The two magic sites for Middle Ermor are 'the Temple of the Dead' and 'the Temple of the Spheres'.
At this point, the Grand Augurs' predictions must be looking downright apocalyptic, because the most likely path for the Empire to 'survive' has now become the Ashen Empire.
Now, remember that in the religion of the Shrouded Prophet, the Reawakening is absolute. It will happen. So, because the closest thing to a grand, world-shaking miracle that the Augurs can foresee is a vision of Ermor as a profaned city of death...
There are only two conclusions that could be drawn. Either they've been worshiping a fraud, or they've been worshiping something that intends to bring that future about.
Which is correct is rather irrelevant at that point - either way, any "Reawakening" is something that needs to be prevented at all costs.
I can't help but think that this is part of what keeps Ermor from immediately imploding. For the clergy of the once-great city, they're fighting to save the entire world from the future they've seen.
For them, the world is already ending.
Where the commentary comes in is the difference between how Middle Ermor plays and how Late Ermor plays. In my games as Middle Ermor, the "Broken Empire", the dead levies always felt like a cumbersome, troublesome, but unfortunately indispensable asset for my survival.
Soulless (zombies) are slow and often half-crippled from the wounds which killed them, while longdead (skeletons) are just fragile enough to make their usually superior armament and availability feel like just barely enough to make them preferable to soulless rather than the clearly better option.
There are other sorts of undead you can potentially field, but the majority of them require a fairly skilled Death mage to create - and the only Death mages you have that can meet those qualifications right off the bat are the High Thaumaturges, who are at best 'old' and more often 'barely-mobile dotards'**.
In short, Middle Ermor's ability to field undead that aren't either glass arrows (calling them glass cannons would be excessive) or glorified arrow fodder rests largely on the shoulders of cripplingly wizened old men with one foot in the grave, to the point you'll often have to spend your capital's commander slot in the recruitment tab on producing a new High Thaumaturge because one of the ones you already had started dying last round and developed something like Mute or Feebleminded this round, thus rendering them useless as a caster.
Ermor's fortress units (normally, these are the bread and butter of your nation's armies) are the tattered, sad wreckage of a Roman-style military; each unit type's description makes sure to lay out what their role is supposed to be in a legion, which adds to the sense of desperation and humiliation because actually following that structure is nigh-impossible.
The units with anything approaching proper military training have resource costs too high for you to produce more than a handful per fortress per round, and the centurions, the triarii, the praetorii - the hardened, elite spearpoint which the rest of the army is meant to ram home - they also have a starting age weighted to put them in their dotage.
It's an absolutely crushing (although likely unintentional) depiction of why everything is falling apart. Ermor's strength as an empire was dependent upon its military infrastructure, upon having massive programs churning away so that in any given month, a decent number of elite soldiers would be stepping off the metaphorical assembly line.
Now, all that infrastructure is gone. The chain of military production has been broken to the point where the only source of experienced, well-trained legionaries is a mixture of old men coming out of retirement and men who never had the chance to retire at all, and grew old while fighting to slow the rate at which Ermor's borders crept in toward its capital.
Many nations have capital-only units (IE, units that can only be produced at their capital), but Middle Ermor is basically capital-reliant if you want to progress beyond motheaten alleged legions bracketed by shambling mobs of soulless and longdead. High Thaumaturges are capital-only, and so are the only sacred unit (sacred units being another important potential game-changer, since they can gain various buffs depending on what your Pretender's magical loadout is), the Shadow Vestals - which are a horrifying kettle of fish all to themselves***.
In any case, Middle Ermor does get closer to RL logistical issues than some other nations, because you're both forced to truck out High Thaumaturges and shadow vestals from your capital to wherever the front line currently is (quite slowly, in the former case) and - at least in my games - you end up relying increasingly on provincial units, IE non-Ermorian units.
It adds a real sense of incompleteness to Ermor as a military engine, and makes the normal cycle of expansion and conquest as a Pretender take on a slight sense of grasping desperation, of Ermor feverishly scrabbling through the newly conquered territories for something, anything that could form the foundation of a new order, a way to escape their current cycle of decline.
But then...
Then there's Late Ermor. The Ashen Empire.
Mechanically, every unit type has a "starting age" (a range of values - say, 25-35, or 40-100) and a "maximum age" (a hard limit - 80, 120, 45), both measured in years. When you produce a unit, the game randomly generates their starting age using that numeric range (which seems to be weighted/curved, so you're not very likely to end up with a unit who's much younger or much older than the median).
The unit then ages (each turn representing an in-game month), and when they reach their 'maximum age' they gain the "Old" condition, which imposes over a half-dozen maluses to many of their stats - maluses which geometrically increase the farther the unit goes past the 'maximum' - and makes the game start rolling each turn to see if the unit enters terminal decline.
Terminal decline is represented by them gaining the "Diseased" condition, which is one of the single nastiest things your units can have happen to them. Diseased units can't be healed, lose 1 hp each turn, and gain a decent chance of developing other afflictions as turns pass.
High Thaumaturges have a starting age range which all but guarantees they'll be not just Old, but far enough past the maximum that they'll have something like a -4 age penalty - which affects both Precision (which they need to aim their spells in combat) and Encumbrance (which is positively crippling for a mage, since that means they'll gain more fatigue per spell, and when a unit hits 100 fatigue they're knocked unconscious).
The Shadow Vestals are part of why I describe the Grand Thaumaturges' religious model as a mortuary cult. Arguably, that's only viewing one half of a diad - the Temple of the Spheres indicates how the Thaumaturges also try to look forward into the future, sorting through the threads of Fate in their efforts to forestall the Reawakening.
However, the Temple of the Dead still exists, and the Shadow Vestals seem like an intentional symbol of the Broken Empire's decay. Young girls are secluded in the Temple of the Dead and trained to become ideal vessels for the souls of the departed; once they come of age, this training is put into practice by summoning the soul of an ancient Ermorian vestal virgin (a direct reference to Rome, although the term isn't seen in Early Ermor, leaving the meaning of choosing those souls in particular unclear) and merging it with them. The result is a thing caught between life and death, shadow and substance, as illusive as the former and as deadly as the latter.
In gameplay, the shadow vestals are useful, but almost tragically disposable, serving more as illustration of how Middle Ermor is reduced to throwing its children into the fires just to ward off immediate collapse - and how the Grand Thaumaturges will justify ever-greater sacrifices in the name of fighting the Reawakening. To them, the vestals aren't sacrifices for the good of Ermor, they're sacrifices for the good of all life.
The Late Era incarnation of Ermor is the Thaumaturges' nightmares made manifest. The last of their number (possibly having launched a successful coup against the Order) attempt a final Hail Mary pass by opening a rift into the Land of the Dead - a sort of shared afterlife for the beings of the setting, which would hypothetically give Ermor an unbeatable advantage by abolishing death for their citizens.
Even if an entire legion was killed to the last, its members could march out from Ermor again within a week or two none the worse for it - and the current custodians of Ermor could form a new ruling council of every Ermorian leader ever to live.
Unsurprisingly, their rift 'missed' and ended up bridging the Ermorian capital and Tartarus (Dominions' version is pretty much the mythological version, just with the Titans replaced by "all of the previous Pretenders to the Throne who failed and were exiled there by whoever became Pantokrator in that cycle") - not completely, but in a way that let the various baleful entities and energies within Tartarus begin leaking into the Ermorian heartlands.
Completely crushed by this horrific failure, Ermor's remaining aristocrats collapsed into despair and nihilistic debauchery rather than attempting to close the rift again, for which they were cursed by their ancestors to become wretched ghoul-like creatures, that they would have no choice but to witness the consequences of their actions.
The Ashen Empire does not use gold or promises of glory to muster its legions. They simply crawl out from the soil, from under collapsed buildings, from the ashes where fields of grain once were.
Where Ermor is, life dissolves and Death takes form. Even their fortresses are more totem than military outpost - skeletons simply emerge from the darkness of halls and the empty caverns of storerooms, bearing dusty legionary lorica and Ermorian steel, forced into existence by the unholy powers which Ermor has surrendered itself to.
As to what directs this power...
The demiurgic hordes of Tartarus are utterly, irretrievably mad, robbed of sensibility and memory by their torment, and seem to have seized upon the shapes and forms and oaths of old Ermor as a substitute for the nations and causes which once motivated them. This gives the expressions of their will a veneer, at the very least, of Ermor-ism, dragging ancient senators and Theurges and other luminaries of the empire from their graves in a sickly imitation of what the High Thaumaturges had intended to achieve through their ritual.
These shades, while distorted and corrupted by the powers which retrieved them from the Land of the Dead, at least were once men and women of Ermor, cives of the old empire, and they all have at least something of their old selves about them. Likewise, the accursed Censors and Thaumaturges who abandoned their oaths in the Empire's final fall remain, pressed into service as officers in the Dead legions and adjutants to the reanimated Ermorian citizenry.
It's very questionable whether even the Pretender you choose for Late Ermor is really who you're playing as/who's in control of this. At best, your Pretender might be one of the demiurges sentenced to Tartarus, who happened to escape through the rift and then take control over it before any of the others could. At worst, your Pretender is some poor fool unwittingly enslaved to the collective will of the Tartarian damned.
Scheduled vote count started by paebel on Sep 29, 2024 at 12:36 AM, finished with 11 posts and 11 votes.
[X] Gathering your band together and doing group exercises--spars, drills, and on the final day you will recruit an older Blooded man to act the part of a "monster." This will help further test each members abilities and give experience fighting a much stronger opponent. May benefit future cooperation.
How many people do we have BTW? Would probably greatly determine the sort of drills we need.
A group of less than 10 will work quite differently to a company of 20-30
