- Pronouns
- They/Them
C'mon people, Wendy! Give her a chance!
On the Road to Elspar [Book 1] (Dryad Mercenary Schoolgirl Quest)
- Thread starter Kei
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Threadmark this, sweetie.
I'm not against a strategic vote switch, but I've completely lost track of the vote... so, let's see if I can work a tally thing I guess?
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Inserted tally
- Location
- PA
Me: Sieglinde can use a bow!?
Sieglinde: Yes, I am an elf, after all.
Bemused Wendy is probably the person Neianne has the strongest personal dislike for in all the people she knows. She's probably going to end up in the infirmary if Neianne ever lands a solid hit on her when they duel, so she's going to probably get really good at spear-fighting really fast.
Vesna does not fear the Zabanya. Maybe Elizabeth won't be the pariah she initially seemed like she was going to be.
I seriously want to know if Neianne can lift Mia. I'm wagering yes, though maybe less so if Mia gets squirmy.
Azalea I think we should hang with more if we can swing it.
...I think that's about it on commentry.
Sieglinde: Yes, I am an elf, after all.
Bemused Wendy is probably the person Neianne has the strongest personal dislike for in all the people she knows. She's probably going to end up in the infirmary if Neianne ever lands a solid hit on her when they duel, so she's going to probably get really good at spear-fighting really fast.
Vesna does not fear the Zabanya. Maybe Elizabeth won't be the pariah she initially seemed like she was going to be.
I seriously want to know if Neianne can lift Mia. I'm wagering yes, though maybe less so if Mia gets squirmy.
Azalea I think we should hang with more if we can swing it.
...I think that's about it on commentry.
AnonymousRabbit
Rabbit Faced
Just your Ordinary High School Student tiny Shy Dryad.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, like, to quote the OP where Neianne's race was voted on:
So, this was always explicit -- elves are disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of society in this setting. Remember how Penelope went off on Lucille and accused her of not caring about whether Wendy, a human commoner, lived or died? There's probably a reason there that has less to do with Lucille as a person.
So far, Neianne's griped a bit about Wendy beating her in sparring matches, but there's not been a tremendous amount of active dislike, I thought.
Elves leverage lifespans. Way easier to rise in rank when you can plan for their lifespans.
Dryads just came out of the woods recently
- Location
- Austria
So, the most general ones:
1. Well, given that at least one person came here (assumedly not that short a travel) without boots, I would asssume malnutrition and irregular and unreliable access to food due to lack of modern preservation and lack of money to just buy food when in crunch.
(plus lack of modern market networks means lack of access to suppliers of food in villages in winter or whatnot)
2. Speaking of winters, exposure is likely a bigger problem for lower classes too - imagine somebody walking to the Academy without boots in winter! Oh wait you cannot imagine that as setting lacks zombies and they'd likely be dead if they tried.
Granted, in, say, Versailles IRL it was bloody drafty to the point in bad winters water could freeze inside too. Still, at least nobles could afford boots if they needed them.
3. Next, and tied very intimately to the previous two, lack of medicine. Nobility likely has reliable access to good medical specialists and good medicaments; lower stratas likely have unreliable access to at least one of those - probably a village priest as a doctor and whatever can be bought from travelling merchants or brought from forests as medicines.
4. Tied to that, I am not sure but I suspect that lower classes tend to have higher attrition of kids - a lot are going to die in first years of life (medicine, lack of vaccination, yadda yadda), so they compensate by pumping out more kids. Which interacts with lack of access to food and other stuff in non-fun ways. Which is likely stressful too.
So: most of children die within first several years, frequent malnutrition, unreliable medical care, winters are actually dangerous as opposed to romantic or whatever, those are all generic to any pre-industrial setting and I, so far, am not sure the factors in play do apply here but see nnnoooot much evidence to the contrary.
Now, more locality/setting specific problems (war-induces ones go here):
1. Locality-specifically, and explicitly pointed out by Kei's last post, there is no modern judicial system - I assume no concept of due procedure, no concept of "standard of evidence" and generally a lot of instances of "community judges things" aka "mob justice". With magic being a normal widespread thing, there probably are no witchhunts though.
2. More of speculation: with war in place, mob lynchings of ethnically Tenerian or those suspect of being such are probably....not ubiquitous, I guess, but do happen time to time. In countries with more modernized courts system, well, Spanish Inquisition was a big tool of the Spanish Crown in hunting down Jews, so it's likely not less of a thing? But it will be more systematized, for better or worse. Depending, naturally, on local culture.
It may or may not be applicable to nobility, but iirc nobility tends to be more international overall, so Tenerian nobles are probably mostly extradited from country, although I am very much not sure.
3. Elves being overrepresented among nobility probably means racial tension against non-noble elves.
4. War takes its toll on economy: best textual example I can recall so far is the blacksmith family having some (so far minor-ish?) troubles due to war. Humans being expended on war instead of being productive in economy is a problem too.
5. Sometimes, the only difference between mercenaries and rampaging hordes of invaders is fancy colours. Anybody who ever seen light cavalry doing
Less applicable to Caldrian due to highly disciplined and overwatched mercenaries - Tenerrian and other mercenaries are probably basically roving bands of thugs on a payroll, over here it's likely not a big deal...
Maybe.
I very much doubt villages on the frontlines can avoid being sacked by either side, our academy's graduates participating as well as anybody else. Until modern supply train, it's pretty much the big way armies feed themselves?
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6. A big maybe: so far, mercenaries, even non-mages, seem hypercompetent? So maybe there is a problem of "hyperpowered murderhobos"? So far I am not seeing much of it, but we are not adventuring yet, so.
Basically, a slew of normal pre-industrial problems, compounded by a slew of sorta feudal society, compounded by a decade of war - all hit harder on lower classes than on upper. Setting-specific problems I can think of, on top of that....so far only a combo of racial and class tensions making things worse for elven non-nobles I think?
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- Location
- Planet Earth
Thank you kei, really, THANK YOU! I was having trouble remembering the character and personality and even the names of so many of the interesting characters you've made to the point of defaulting on the squad and Lucille for interaction, this makes it much easier to figure out what to do. Thank you.
That said, a question on the war. What's Caldaran's approach to schorched earth warfare? with this world lacking the modern supply chain, couldn't they completely screw the invading army with a few good applications of fire? Sure they might be able to ship them enough food, but a lot of soldiers might starve and more importantly it could get really* fucking expensive for them really quickly, thus giving them a very good reason to stop eventually, and probably making everyone in the future think twice on whether or not it's worth invading caldaran(I keep wanting to type calderon from codex alera) if you're going to get nothing but the ashes of what used to be farms/cities.
- Location
- PA
Sorched Earth if I understand it correctly, requires enough territory that you can relocate your populace while you starve the army out. Caldren I think is too small/doesn't have the resources to make that work.
Also, Teneria probably has the logistics to power through a trick like that and Caldren lacks the manpower to reliably cut off supply lines-they can disrupt and wreck supplies but not quite close them entirely I think.
Also, Teneria probably has the logistics to power through a trick like that and Caldren lacks the manpower to reliably cut off supply lines-they can disrupt and wreck supplies but not quite close them entirely I think.
- Location
- Planet Earth
scorched earth only requires that you be willing and able to set your cities/farms/towns on fire when it looks like they're going to be captured, and with the shorter supply lines the caldarans would have a much lesser problem feeding their refugees than the tenies feeding their army that requires 4-1 odds to take on the caldaran mercenaries IIRC
oh it wouldn't stop them, I never thought it would and even said so in my post. What is would do is make it really fucking expensive for them, with no payout because that city you were trying to capture? yeah, you got a giant pit of ash in return for all the soldiers you spent taking it.
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I actually won't. Like, a lot of this information will probably be outdated in, like, two or three updates. And I don't really want to go back to this random post in the middle of the thread to update anything. I'll eventually have a codex on a Google Docs document that everyone can read.
They actually care very much, although I guess in different ways. They are absolutely contributing to the war effort, they have no illusions about their chances against Tenereia (which is only taking them this long to conquer Caldrein because Tenereia is literally fighting multiple wars right now, and the generals are jockeying for manpower and resources), and they know that they're next if Elspar falls. Countess Celestia has already sent an army to fight in Elspar - the one with Melanie's eldest sister as a quartermaster - and the other countesses have done the same. This being said, there have been different solutions being bandied about. Does Caldrein want to ally with another power - most likely Ornthalia - by sacrificing its longstanding policy of neutrality? Do they want a fight to the death? Do they want to engage in diplomacy with Tenereia, which almost certainly means granting concessions?
I mean, we do eventually know what happens afterwards: The Caldran Countesses (at least the majority of them) sign the Treaty of Arnheim, where the war ends but Tenereia controls Elspar (with, of course, neither side recognizing their opponent's claim to the region). But treaties tend to be easier to negotiate when you're really putting up a good fight. So the other regions are putting up a good fight.
Ultimately, the problem with Caldrein's national defense is organizational, and I'll get into a bit of why as I address several points in @ctulhuslp 's post.
Food is actually a fairly accessible resource, even if there's not a lot of it. Farmlands are generally pretty common, and as a peasant, Ashlyn and her family would've worked on one of the farms owned by a noble house (in this case, House Celestia, Lucille's family). And in general, nobles do want to make sure their lands are productive. Food will become a much more major problem as the war goes on for another two years, but "starving peasants" has historically not been a major problem in Caldrein. They don't eat super-well, but they eat.
This ties into some of the questions @Nervos Belli asked. It's not that Caldrein doesn't have judges. It does. They have a judicial system, in fact, with a level of due procedure. They even have traveling judges to arbitrate disputes in far off villages too far from an actual courthouse. The problem is that there exists a lack of institutionalism, not only in the legal sphere, but also other spheres. The relatively feudal setup of Caldrein's individual sovereign region means that judges exist and they're an extension of their countess' laws, but there's no dedicated ministry for judges, no broader organization beyond "judges act with the countess' authority". There's no centralized organization semi-independent of the countess' direct oversight (not in the sense that they're not entirely accountable to the countess, but that they can make big decisions without the countess). There's no bureaucracy to handle all the wrinkles outside a countess that may be too busy with other things, even if we're assuming that the countess is always well-meaning one hundred percent of the time, and even if we assume the countess is very competent at law (as opposed to, say, trade).
Fundamentally, the quality of personnel starts suffering under this setup. The military is a good example of this: The lack of a dedicated military leadership occupation (such as generals) means you're basically stuck with nobles having to lead. And sometimes they're indeed very good at war, but sometimes they're actually scholars, and sometimes they have to lead anyways regardless of whether or not they want to because there may not be anyone else. (Caldran mercenaries are the exception in that they're basically dedicated fighters, but not necessarily in a "lead the army" context.) There may not be specific institutes there to train non-Caldran-mercenaries how to lead and fight a war, and there are no formal networks that can help alleviate these shortcomings beyond "a bunch of nobles gather around the table and start talking about war experiences". You don't have formal, unified systems of command and control, leading to different operational procedures for every army, different organizational frameworks, etc. They're five armies fighting together, not five armies fighting as one, because they don't have the basis by which to fight as one.
In a way, Caldrein has sort of sidestepped the worst consequences of these problems because they're kind of a small confederacy the size of Austria (and governed separately in five independent parts rather than altogether). And, in a way, that smallness means they've always been reluctant to adopt bureaucracy where community would do; the PTSD'd-veteran-turned-village-drunk, regardless of her misdemeanors, is seen as their responsibility rather than something to be foisted off to a judge. But whereas this approached used to work relatively alright-ish for small-ish countries, as larger countries develop more organized bureaucracies akin to modern states, Caldrein is being left behind in terms of governance. And the worst part, as Sieglinde would note, is that they don't even realize this. (Or, at the very least, they don't understand how dire the situation really is.)
You're culturally Tenereian, not ethnically. Excluding immigrants, both Caldrans and Tenereians are of the Treiden people (different from Ornthalia, which was literally formed by a union of different ethnic groups), sharing much of the same cultural heritage. Kind of like how Germans and Austrians are ethnically Germanic, even if they're culturally different.
Caldrein will adopt limited scorched earth tactics. Enough to slow the enemy and deny it the most valuable of resources where possible, while also remembering that not everyone will evacuate from Elspar in time and that these people also need to survive somehow. The two Caldran mercenary academies in Elspar - Alvimere and Silleton - will be dismantled on the way out, though.
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- They/Them
Of course, this raises more questions than it answers. But I suppose we'll see when we get there.
- Location
- Planet Earth
huh, I was actually hoping for "there is nothing to conquer but the blood soaked ashes of what you'd hoped to claim" but I suppose I can't complain. thanks for answering.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's only viable if the countess of Elspar is willing to completely ruin her lands for a generation or more and starve everyone who couldn't or wouldn't leave, which like... They do theoretically want that territory back some day even if it's not likely to happen, and most nobles in this setting don't seem to have enough distance from the commoners they're ruling to be entirely callous about that.
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- Planet Earth
on the other hand, not only is the example a wonderful deterrent to future invasions, but it would seriously screw with the tenarians in this war. Besides, calddaran's odds of getting it aren't all that high, they don't have much that the tenies want aside from the land itself.
It really wouldn't. It'd screw over the general who's leading this invasion - if she isn't already kind of screwed for taking eleven years to fight a war against a tiny upstart province now - but while conquering Caldrein would have some economic benefits, the war has always been fought for strategic and nationalist dick-waving reasons. Like, again, Tenereia is large enough, powerful enough, and rich enough that they are fighting multiple other wars aside from the Huntress' War.
- Location
- Austria
First of all, thanks for taking time to reply to my post, @Kei , I appreciate it.
Ah. My bad, I misinterpreted the previous post of yours regarding the judicial system.
So basically normal feudal system problems otherwise? Granted, first military academies were established in 18th century, so "lack of institutional system of sharing and teaching experience to everyone" is probably not addressed by neighbours either?
This actually makes mercenaries, assuming those have a unified and clear-cut command structure, a valuable thing for army due to always knowing who does what and reports to whom.
True, I meant culturally.
Btw, @Kei , regarding points you did not address: does it mean that those are broadly correct or that those are not worth addressing or just that you lacked time to?
Ah. My bad, I misinterpreted the previous post of yours regarding the judicial system.
So basically normal feudal system problems otherwise? Granted, first military academies were established in 18th century, so "lack of institutional system of sharing and teaching experience to everyone" is probably not addressed by neighbours either?
This actually makes mercenaries, assuming those have a unified and clear-cut command structure, a valuable thing for army due to always knowing who does what and reports to whom.
True, I meant culturally.
Btw, @Kei , regarding points you did not address: does it mean that those are broadly correct or that those are not worth addressing or just that you lacked time to?
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Caldrein isn't taking that land back from Tenereia without a serious crash modernization program and jumping them when they're still fighting another peer power or two. More likely, it seems that Tenereia will have a lot more success gobbling them up in the next go around so long as they haven't exhausted themselves fighting other powers as I would suspect they have better recovery.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
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- She/Her
Sure, but Caldrein admitting that or acting like that is the case is not politically tenable, is it? They can't just say "well, that land's gone now and we're never getting it back" and treat it like it's enemy territory by burning it to the ground.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
No, they shouldn't be admitting that because that's also tantamount to admitting they probably need to become a lesser partner/client state/vassal of some other nation before Tenereia comes around for another go. What it does mean is that if they -do- want it back, they need to seriously internally reorg hard during the armistice years because what they've been doing hasn't worked and they're not going to be any stronger in that paradigm in the next go around.