Remove ads

Kingdom of God: A Quest of Holy Revolution

Reader mode
Remove ads
Questions on Slavery, Debt, Burial & Railroads
  • Informational
    • Demonic Spoon said:
    What is the Kingdom of God's stances on slavery, usury and debt inheritance. Are there any doctrinal imperatives for handling of the dead or is it left to cultural discretion?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Slavery as defined as the purchase and sale of human beings as property is outlawed and a mortal sin. It has been totally eradicated within the territory controlled by the Patriarchate of Vaspukaran (also referred to as the Kingdom of God internally) except for isolated instances and local traditions in marginal areas, and even there it is exceedingly rare. This is something that the Kingdom is very proud of and it uses to distinguish itself. Slavery is seen as impure and disgusting and an example of the evil of Babarak, an ancient legendary state that serves as a kind of analogy of pure evil, and which was wiped out by a real flood which totally changed the whole history of the sub-continent that is now Vaspukaran and served as an early foundation for pre-Amalgastene faith in the region.

    However, coerced labour is obviously common, whether in the forms of obligated labour [unpaid labour as a form of tax, the historical corvee], serfdom, and penitence [a form of remedial indentured servitude]. Many penitents are those who have been forced to become so in order to pay their debt.

    There are laws regulating usury to more acceptable levels both to protect souls from penury and to establish more realistic forms of credit and debit financing. Jurors are the main lenders in the country, developing from a purely military role into bankers, financiers, merchants, investors and businessmen and women. Their monastic communities, once meant to be groups of sworn brothers and sisters on the old frontier, have turned into banking establishments that lend, borrow and invest their treasuries at will. Their palatines [areas of inviolable sacred Juror land that was granted to them in perpetuity] serve as untouchable sources of investment and development as well as rent.

    Also related to usury is that the Patriarch is expected to occasionally grant debt jubilees in order to alleviate it. There has been no such jubilee for over a hundred years and any Patriarch who dared without significantly increasing their power would be overthrown in a temple coup by the Jurors.

    As for handling the dead the general rule is that the dead must be buried. However, there are numerous outs, cultural allowances, and tricky loopholes which were put into the communion treaties that the Patriarchate signed with many states and peoples that it encountered and integrated. Patriarchical doctrine is deliberately and intentionally theologically flexible, being based in the first instance on a premise that God is a mystery unveiled by progressive investigation and interpretation (the spiral of truth), which allows to re-adapt and update theology to new premises and cultures.

    Sufganarot Rite (the core rite without any treaty allowances) cleaves strictly to simple, austere burials of the dead, usually in a cedar coffin. There are prayers and hymns to read and someone is assigned to watch the dead - sometimes they bury themselves halfway beside the dead as if to place themselves in a liminal space between this world and the next, and to aid them in passing on.

    Demonic Spoon said:
    @Cetashwayo What is the current state of weaponry within the Kingdom of God? Rifling, matchlocks, gatlings etc.? Presumably there are some nice big cannons for sieging and such.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Without putting a firm date on it, late 19th century, pre-electrification. I may give or take from this estimate based on whether I think something is cooler or less cool, but it is absolutely at least 1850. There are many many thousands of kilometers of railroad and the longest railroad (the Godspine from) is absolutely obscene. I am terrified to put actual kilometer numbers in because it will kill me to start then retroactively calculating whether one thing or another makes sense and if the country is too big or small, but it is definitely comparable in length to something like the American trans-continental lines or a shorter Trans-Siberian.

    Vaspukaran's railway infrastructure (the gold lines on the map) is its most impressive and most notable industrial accomplishment, but also its most expensive, and a major cause of a number of its current issues. Railways were seen as sacral lines comparable to Inca ceques, ritual pathways radiating from Cusco that tied the entire Empire into a singular cosmic geography. However, they also cost a fuckload of money. For Kutan Mission - too much. Building their very impressive round line made the most prosperous mission into a financial basketcase whose government was couped by the Dvarim High Jury meant to protect them so they could get a return on investment.
     
  • Informational
    • Cetashwayo said:
    I am terrified to put actual kilometer numbers in because it will kill me to start then retroactively calculating whether one thing or another makes sense and if the country is too big or small
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    fantasy writers and being terrified of scale, name a more iconic duo
    (for real tho why did people have to give real life numbers????)
     
    Remove ads
    Turn 0, 822 Alul: The Crack of Dawn
  • Threadmarks
    • Turn 0, 822 Alul: The Crack of Dawn
    ​
    [x] Boxer Rebellion
    -[x] Militant Pugilism.
    -[x] Discipline. All other things fail or pervert their aims. Discipline has kept us true and faithful.
    -[x] Guru Wendam
    -[x] The Black Elephant Standard

    Relevation's Fist

    So said Pasan Ghadi: "Revelation is a fist to the jaw of Evil."

    When the Grand Mouflon began his uprising, he did so for the sake of all humanity. After he had been touched by the angel Simurgh and told to go forth and free the people, he emerged from his tent and looked down on those gathered around him, a few hundred peasants and their wagonloads of grain and palty gunpowder, and said: "when God came to Amalgast he said to him, look upon the people all around who are trodden on the ground, bowed and weak, and look up to see the beasts who harm them. Smite them those that rule and protect them those that bow. The sword of heaven is your level, and the wrath of God your ruler." And Pasan Ghadi asked among those gathered if they felt that the Prophet's work was done, and they cried nay, and so he ordered each and every one to draw their level.

    But if the philosophy of Pasan Ghadi was merely to bathe in blood it would not have survived the spilling of his own. You are alive and fierce today because the Mouflon and his greatest follower the witch-woman Opernani Myriam wrote down his beliefs and his proclamations and added to them the following great facts: 1) that this world is imperfect and flawed, and will be replaced by the perfect world in the world to come, 2) that the world to come will come only by the acts of man, 3) that this action is taken by destroying the five evils.

    The five evils are the sins which must be destroyed by righteous action. In sum they demand all followers of the Pasan Ghadi to 1) self-discipline and elevate the mind and body, 2) align themselves with the sacred, 3) bring up the weak and level the strong , 4) elevate and unite the communes of the people, and 5) bring forth the world to come. The world to come is a state in which souls are freed from material and spiritual want and united in a congregation of congregations that comprises all the world, and it demands the strongest will and the application of the greatest revelations of God's mysteries of creation to accomplish. The Pugilists do not disdain the new tools of this age but their use, for it was said by the Pasan Ghadi that "Do not hate the lash, but seize it for yourself and turn it on the wicked." It is only by the action of all communities that this world is gained - for the soul who is an island will be lost in a sea of suffering.

    In 536 AA, it was the Pasan Ghadi who made these commitments and vows and so began his war against injustice. Today, it is your turn to take a step towards the messianic age.

    It begins with an anointing.

    Be not Afraid

    Guru Wendam is a stout energetic man at the cusp of middling age with a bristling moustache, short-cropped black hair and a trickster's grin. When he talks to you he smiles and his eyes shine as if you are his love and joy, and tonight you have put your fate in his weathered hands. As the day starts to turn there is a great meeting of the sect, ostensibly to observe the end-of-sabbath ceremony. This night has been chosen because on every other day you work, and so tonight all will be ready for the day of liberation.

    First, Guru Wendam performs the angelforms, the sacred and mystic moves practiced and perfected by the members of the sect. The forms were all devised by the Pasan Ghadi in reference to dreams and visions granted to him by the angels, and so have embedded in them a mystic and powerful quality. Wendam dances and cheers, and all join in a perfect hora, spinning 'round and 'round, tears falling because all know some of you will not meet again for morning prayer.

    Then Baba Tanda comes and cradles something close, and many more begin to burst into tears as they see it is the last of their sect's old anointing oil, sealed with the sacred Pei and concocted from plants that could never be fetched here. It is the last little jar, and tonight she will expend it to anoint a troop of holy warriors. All know, then, that this last piece of home is gone. You have no choice but to reclaim enough oil for you all to bathe in (not that you would do as to do so would be outrageously sacrilegious and impure, it is a metaphor, oh God).

    Rector Qanam gives a stirring and long speech outlining the reasons for injustice and the ways to rectify it. He outlines the ways in which you sought to stop it before, that each option was expended, that you were subject to abuse, that the villagers of Xococo are being choked to death, the other prisoners worked to death, that here there is no future and a profound slavery. He sentences those who fight against you to death, and that their deaths are just if they cannot be avoided. And then he commands you to look forward, and not merely bask in revenge, but remember your oath, the oath you took for this sect: that the world to come is built by love and not by blood.

    And then there is an incident as Guru Wendam starts to draw up the battle plan, as the women of the sect make ruckus, and some of the men grumble, eight years of exile dulling them into domesticity. The women rebuke them rightly and say: tonight, we wish tonight for guns, and not for sons. There is stillness in the air, and Guru Wendam steps forward and inspects the women each and every one, and looks back to the men, and grips a bolt-action in his hand and shoves it into the youngest woman's arms. And he says: My brother, does she not have hands to grip and eyes to aim and ears to hear and mouth to shout and teeth to bite? So why then, should she be left behind when she can fight?

    And Baba Tanda walks up, and takes another rifle, and places into another woman's hand, and says to her: here is your son. And the woman replies, and may I take good care of him.

    And so it was that the plan was set, and then at last, Wendam made the order, and a group of men went with shovels to a far-marked spot on a nearby moor. From there, they retrieved and unburied from a hidden place, a piece of cloth smuggled on the inside of an infant's swaddling clothes all those years ago. On the inside:


    ​
    SIX-SHIN-ALUF, the square sacred banner of the calligraphic expression of the six wings of the seraph angel interposed around the first letter of the name of Amalgast. Seven is a holy number to all in Vaspukaran, and it is by seven that all change is made. Here is a banner so feared that in the immediate aftermath of rebellion its unfurling was punishable by death, and it was buried rather than burned for fear its vapors would be inhaled and curse the burner. To wave the Six-Shin-Aluf is to declare a challenge to the established order and an appeal to divine liberation. By the Six-Shin are a million made one, before the angel's gold. All make a prayer and run a finger in a circle on their chests, and then the warriors, man and women are anointed, a dab of oil on the heart and one above the brow.

    And all make a vow to fight injustice, and all make a vow to fight the calf of gold that rules in Nachivan, and all make a vow to fight for freedom, and the world to come.

    For there is nothing else worth fighting for.

    Midnight

    It comes to pass at midnight. Wendam meets with the Jurors who had come and they tell him of the secret routes into the old castle, which in olden times had been a frontier fort to control the boundary of Kutan when the country was still independent but now was too vast for its depleted garrison. They show him a place where there was a gap of collapsed wall and the jurors were too lazy to repair it, near enough to the arsenal. And when Wendam interrogates these men who could be untrustworthy why they would betray their brothers, they say only they had been betrayed first, placed to rot here as humiliating to an order that left them behind. They are all detritus, waiting only to die: why not live, instead?

    So Wendam accepts it, and gains a good rapport off trading barracks stories and mocking the pointless brutality of all frontier komandirs. Varan is particularly unpleasant: many of the jurors hate especially that he and his officers mocked and had beaten the 'tremblers', those jurors who had never properly returned from the War with the Mare. It was not right and not to the Jurors' code to behave such a way, but on the frontier this was barely observed, and these days they were all seen as surplus souls and not righteous soldiers. The village and the sect already knew his behavior to them: neglectful in upholding law and exacting in retrieving tribute, he had become meaner with his Kuti wife Tekala's death. For it is said that jurors are ruled by their wives, and she was a much better ruler than he.

    It was decided that they would act by pale moonlight, for many great things happen under the protective light of the full moon, and so a number of souls steal into the arsenal in the darkness. A distraction is made by way of a fire burning in an abandoned hut, and then the jurors are all running with buckets while others gawk and peek, and this provides cover for the men. They rob the arsenal of a vast portion of its armaments (d100=86+10 [Wendam]=96) without delay and then Wendam forges another distraction by having a particularly crafty traitor juror rush off and tell the other triers (as jurors often call themselves) to alert the Komandir that the village is in revolt.

    In a surprise to all including Wendam, there was indeed something odd with the village, for so soon as the distraction fire was lit the villagers fled towards the abandoned ancient ruin on the hill, and none can explain why. One of the traitor jurors mentions that the villagers have been storing crates of smuggled potatoes for bad winters where the Komandir cannot see it, but a sudden lust for spuds, Wendam points out, does not explain the movement. Noting it, Wendam sees the distraction work even better than hoped for, and the fortress is soon even further depleted. Only a few men need be killed or disabled before they can alert the rest, and then all the arsenal is taken away to be distributed to the warriors waiting behind a nearby hill as they prepare for an attack with dawn's early light.

    It is all extraordinary and well-executed, but an errant sneeze in the cold of early dawn and then a failed shout to quiet it alerts a patrolling mounted juror riding nearby (d100+20 [sect discipline]=32). A shot is fired and then the fortress is alerted too early. The warriors of the sect, though do not break or panic. Baba Tanda kills the patroling juror with the single shot of a revolver, and then Qanam steals his horse and makes a bloodcurdling battlecry he learned from Gushans he was captured by, and as the first rays peek on the edge of the horizon the armed warriors of the sect march in a terrible near-silence as the jurors watch them approach nearly mute with fading spirits that God has abandoned them for the demon-fists below. Nevertheless, lives are lost and a few drop dead from shots fired down. Thankfully, most of the weapons of this place are outdated or in poor condition, and much of the garrison left behind are the worst of shots.

    The nearest battlements, not meant for defending with this few, are immediately scattered, and those who stand and fight are shot to death (d100+20 [sect discipline]=100] (A/N: holy fuck lol). Many of the sect's warriors, however, are less disciplined in the breach as they are no soldiers, and it quickly devolves into a mob melee and errant chaos while Qanam, Wendam and the jurors push through. The Komandir, observing all this in increasing panic from his tower dons a ceremonial sword and adjusts his four-cornered hat, ready to die, but about halfway down the rickety steps he trips and hits his head and is dragged out unconscious while most of the remaining jurors lay down their arms and either surrender or outright flee.

    The fortress, such as it is, is yours.

    Standoff

    As dawn cracks across the horizon, the six-shin-aluf flies atop Hasadaya, and the Black Elephant Standard has been crossed with black paint, signifying the capture of the Komandir and the standard's surrender, put forward by Hyanaki Akov, the most enthusiastic of the turncoats.

    But now, there is a problem. The remaining jurors are outside Hasadaya, a good portion of their force drawn by the distractions or else reforming after flight. Despite proclamations by Qanam riding proudly on his newfound horse that this is the beginning of everlasting universal freedom, all stands on a knife's edge. On the one hand, if you charge now, you will surely rout the force, save time, and keep the Komandir as a critical hostage.

    Akov, however, proposes an alternative: if you hold a trial in the Juror tradition, and legitimate the downfall of the Komandir, the remainder will surrender and refuse to fight you until a new Komandir is elected, which could take weeks for a quorum to assemble and therefore could disable the whole force if Akov's deception holds. There is also a deep urge among a number of the sect to see him put on trial for his crimes, and have justice be done the proper way and not to walk in the path of the skulldugger. It would also avoid the risk now of confrontation with the Jurors, and perhaps some might even join you if they see you holding to their customs. Wendam is supportive as he fears that a fight with the remnants of the loyal Standard will risk more lives.

    It is the concern of Qanam and Tanda, though, that delay is death, and that even if the Black Elephant does not fight, other Jurors might. Juror trials in the field are not long, but it will still be hours lost. Varan will almost certainly be executed for he was short to being killed already and that will not be taken kindly, no matter the tradition, and you will lose the chance for ransom. To do so will burn valuable time and risk some of the Jurors trying to break tradition and reorganize against you even after or more likely stealing away and warning the rail station. It is also unknown what is happening with the village, as it is now almost fully deserted and there is smoke rising from the fortress ruin in the distance. And the criminals, it may be said, should be now waking up, and may soon gather as well, with their scythes and pitchforks.

    There is little time for a debate, and yet the sect is having one regardless, because this is the way. A hurried shouting match, to be sure, but still a debate. Someone says that maybe young Yoni shouldn't have sneezed, and Yoni turns red and says that Chana shouldn't have shushed him, and Wendam laughs because if he does not laugh he will weep that God has entrusted him with the lives of all his good brothers and sweet sisters and they may well all die by day's end if they do not make right decisions. A few have died already, and there are none more he can bear to spare. A prayer is whispered facing Nachivan, and now is the hour.

    Haltingly, he demands a tally. Who is for the trial of the Komandir, to be held upon the walls, and who is now against? Let all those who wish to thrust up their hands to vote one way or another do so, for it is by the hand that the world is remade.

    Should the Sect hold a trial for the Komandir?

    [] Hold a Trial in the Juror Tradition.
    [] Take the Komandir hostage and drag him with you to the train.
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • It is a detestable one who says "I will walk towards Truth tomorrow", for indolence is the ghastliest image of death! Our duty is in the Holy City and we must attend. Righteousness shall never accept delay, my friends!

    [X] Take the Komandir hostage and drag him with you to the train.
     
    [X] Take the Komandir hostage and drag him with you to the train.

    We are riding the tiger now - there must be no hesitation in our righteous quest.
     
    Hear me, brothers and sisters! Justice echoes hollow in the taking of hostage and ransom, and we fight for what is sacred. Let him stand trial, for he shall thus be judged by the divine as well as by mere mortal men such as we.

    [X] Hold a Trial in the Juror Tradition.
     
    dash931 said:
    Hear me, brothers and sisters! Justice echoes hollow in the taking of hostage and ransom, and we fight for what is sacred. Let him stand trial, for he shall thus be judged by the divine as well as by mere mortal men such as we.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    We carry behind us the banner of the six-shin-aluf - we already bear with us the most righteous of declarations, that the old order has fallen and that true change is at hand! It will be by our hands that divine judgement is wrought, not in idle, indolent prattling!
     
    Also, if you're curious, this was what the Confessor banner was going to be (an unfurled woodcut print of the Lie-Eradicating Hamsa, stamped out of the printing press):



    Don't worry if you picked any of the other factions, as if you do manage to get out of here you will have plenty of opportunity to interact with, cooperate with, integrate the thought of and feud with other sects of other theological movements. I was just antsy to get both banners out there in either case because you bastards made me make two in anticipation of either option winning :p
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top