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I'm a High Fantasy Tax Collector, So What? A CKII Tax Collector Quest

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huhYeahGoodPoint said:
His formal business is delivering a message to the local Compact, and thus a message to the Countess directly: Due to present circumstances, the adoption of the proscribed potato is temporarily permitted, but the Divine Gathering at large fully expects no further proliferation, and greatly encourages a steady draw down in its usage. Should the Countess attempt or support further proliferation, she will be held to account for violating the divine order of the Compact. Thus is the decree of the Divine Gathering, enforced through the available Orderlies.
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Okay. Yeah, the compact is evil.
 
Oshha said:
@huhYeahGoodPoint Is is possible to get any more options for Intrigue and Learning? I don't particularly like any of them. For Intrigue, I would like something to go towards making nobody undermines up attempts to ensure nobody messes with the trials. Also does the Gnarled Rod count towards Broad Justice?
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Hm. Fair. Intrigue action added:

[] [Intrigue] Conduit Protection
Hostile actors might decide to act against the trial, or possibly attack witnesses and suspects, and you really can't have that. DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.

The Gnarled Rod counts for all Trial actions right now.

Not really thinking of any other good Learning Actions at the moment, tbh - this isn't exactly a province renowned for its magical presence, and most of the merchants that would be carrying stuff Tekla could work with are gone. I could throw in another action to Study Potatoes again, especially studying whether the fallow land really healed - but I get the feeling that that wouldn't be super appealing either.
 
Chronic said:
Man really, the Compact is in no way better than this Kingdom. Corrupt to the core, more concerned with the status quo than protecting the people. Also very inconsistent.
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I mean.

There are clearly parts of the Compact that want to protect the people. And there are other parts that are deeply reactionary as only an immortal being who has a deep-seated need to keep mortals performing the same rituals over and over for eternity can be.

The spirit(s) of Justice don't worry about maintaining Order, as we saw in the capital. The spirit(s) of Order don't worry about maintaining Justice. In this case, Order seems to have scored a point in whatever internal politicking takes place among the 'gods' (that is, the greater and more powerful spirits) of the setting.
 
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The Divine Gathering (Isn't)
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    • Oshha said:
    @huhYeahGoodPoint Could we get an info post on how the Divine Compact operates or functions?
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    I'm going to answer your question with a mangling of a famous Voltaire quote.

    The Divine Gathering isn't a gathering, isn't divine, and it's not even "the".

    Gathering implies that the spirits that constitute the Divine Gathering are in session all the time - and depending on which school of theology you follow, not that it really matters so long as the rituals still work, it's either an unfathomably huge pantheon (to numerate the spirits here would be to numerate more than the snowflakes on the peak of Mt. Anak) of different spirits, who mostly gather in smaller gatherings to hand out decisions as blocs named after their role (e.g. the spirits of Justice have decided this, the spirits of Orders have decided that, the spirits of Oskaria have decided that) or it is a gathering of a few large spirits and their underlings, who can all take on faces as their need requires. Some even hold that it's really just One Being, whose infinite facets determine the shape of the entire world, although this view is decidedly...heterodox, to say the least.

    However, this is not to say that the Gathering part is true. Frequently, you have situations where one set of spirits enforces a completely different set of regulations and decisions than another, sometimes even contradictory in multiple ways - to call them a unified body would be patently ridiculous, considering how many decisions are made without consulting the other spirits, or groups of spirits, depending on your theology. Instead, the Gathering seems to have been one of those things that just happened in the theology, where everyone assumed that the spirits on high were getting together and deciding everything together, when in practice that doesn't really happen.

    Just about the only thing the Divine Gathering has, slowly but surely, tried to enforce was the founding mission statement: restrict the growth of technology to prevent another Calamity from ever happening again. Even then, it's not all that successful - spirits constantly carve out little exceptions to the rule, surely this innovation can't cause that much upheaval and change, right? - and so regardless of the Gathering's occasional abortive attempts to completely shut down technologies that dip too far into prohibited territory, through means large (like Crusades) and small (a sensation of revulsion whenever someone uses or touches an item created by said innovation), civilization slowly innovates. That said, many of the local spirits under the Divine Gathering have gotten the message from on-high, so to speak, and discourage innovation in many of the same ways - save for Crusades, because that's an amount of power that the local spirits simply cannot call down.

    So that's one of the three.

    What do I mean by not "divine"?

    Because again, you have to go back into the theology. Are the spirits that constitute this so-called "Divine Gathering" many of one concept, or are they one of many concepts? If we accept the commonly accepted definition of "god" being a "being or spirit who has power over nature and destiny", well, there's a lot of powerful things out there that have power over nature and destiny, and a lot more people out there with a plow and a need to eat or they'll die inside of the month - to say that these particular spirits are gods on this definition would be to definitionally assume that everyone is a god. To adopt a looser frame of it, then, where you stipulate Gods have power over many people's lives and the destiny of many people, you still run into the problem of "so what's a God to a Dragon? To a King?" All of those groups still have control over many people's lives, and yet somehow they're not (usually) included in the Divine Gathering as "gods". Thus to call them a Gathering of Divine spirits makes some amount of sense - until you start poking at what exactly divinity is and the whole enterprise falls apart.

    Most importantly, however... it's not even "the".

    I hinted at this in Interlude: With Nothing But A Gesture, but the Divine Gathering you're familiar with, and the Compact of the Precursors that you're familiar with, isn't the only one. In fact, the Dragons out on the steppes view it as the Accords of the Western Spirits - that is to say, there are other spirits out there with their own agreements and their own treaties with mortal rulers.

    So it's not the definitive Divine Gathering - it's a Divine Gathering...which really isn't divine so much as "consists of spirits"...and isn't a singular Gathering because spirits don't appear to consult with each other and it's made up of successively smaller gatherings and agreements...and it's only real purpose that it can't even quite pull off is to try and impose the Compact of the Precursors to try and prevent another Calamity.
     
  • Informational
    • By the way, @huhYeahGoodPoint, you done a good job of turning random event rolls into terrifying forces of nature. Every time I craft a good plan, I am always left hoping that the random event doesn't ruin it.
     
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