Like a lot of people, I've had thoughts on 'what if I created a video game.' Unlike most people, I put way too much thought into it. Worse yet, most of those thoughts are on paper, not word document.
Is is the first of a number of different aspects I hope to post on. This looks mostly at the factions, but with some basic context to get started with.
Empathy Project is what I imagine my own Bioware RPG would look like. It could be thought of as a more 'European' version of Jade Empire, but rather than a martial arts theme a focus on Empathy powers.
This writeup is an attempt at putting various documents together on type. It could stand a good editor, one with more will and ability than I. Be that as it may, enjoy.
Empathy Project currently belongs to no one but myself.
===
Setting
A semi-midieval/feudal society, along traditional european-fantasy lines. 'Early-Renaissance'. If I had to make an early comparison, the Dragon Age period... though maybe a little later. A mostly feudal world in which the greatest powers are monarchies and dictatorships, but with the rise of new and alternative forms of governments.
This setting has no magic, though semi magical creatures do exist. The supernatural is largely restricted to mental manipulations: hallucinations, induced or otherwise. A world in which fire-breathing monsters are scientific, in other words.
The plot hook and super power of the world is...
Empathy.
This is my Empathy Project.
===
Emotional reception, and emotional broadcasting, are the ties that bind the world. Some people, the sociopaths, are unable to perceive or accept the emotions of others. Some people place strong walls around their minds. And some people... Empaths are people who are born not only with exceptional sensitivity to the feelings of others, but the twin abilities to radiate their own emotions and feelings to others (to give unto others), but to take remove emotions from others (to take unto one's self).
Empathy is the closest thing to magic, and the world has evolved around this. Their are creatures who use empathy, materials that can hold an emotional charge. Even environments can be saturated and perpetuate the emotions brought there... hence why cemeteries are places of sorrow, arenas are places of vigor and ardor, and the truly sacred areas literally give off a sense of peace. 'Spirits' exist, but only as the residual emotions of particularly strong people: they''re more of a hallucination that the viewer's mind puts together. rather than an actual being.
Emotions are the one limitless commodity, the truly ex-nihilo that can spread and increase itself amongst others. One empath's determination can stiffen the resolve of a dozen men: one empath's despair can bring an entire theater to tears. One empath can take the feeling of sorrow off your shoulders to let you begin again... and one empath can steal your happiness from you for himself, or whoever else would wish to buy it.
===
Our story takes place on a continent like Thedas. It is not the only continent in the world, but it is sufficiently removed and sufficiently large that other continents are irrelevant. There are three powers, each with a different view on Empathy and empaths. The gaps and frictions between these views will soon lead to war.
---
To the rich, fertile west lies the Holy Kingdom. It is not, strictly, a theocracy: it follows a philosophy, the moral school of 'Light Empathy.'
Light empathy is the focus on positive emotions: to spread happiness, remove fear and anxiety, to quell discontent and replace it with satisfaction. The Light Empath path is the general 'do nice'... but not necessarily 'do right.' It is the path to make people happy, but strongly adverse to harming any for any reason.
The Holy Kingdom is an enlightened monarchy that propagates Light Empathy. It is a pleasant, if regressive place to live. The governance is fair, the people content because Light Empathy is used to keep it so: corruption and the desire for vices are removed from the populace and officials, and replaced with an abundance of feelings of honor, charity, and fairness.
These emotions and many other light-empathy are never rare because of the unique facet of the Holy Kingdom: the well of Infinite Goodness, a group of sages of the Order (the state philosophy of Light Empaths) who have reached enlightenment and can generate infinite amounts of good will and have reached a state of mind immune from darker emotions. This Well is used to improve and placate the populous, and enact a virtuous nobility, as empaths of the Order continually carry this Light Empathy across and beyond the kingdom.
---
To the East lies the vaste steppes... and Tyrannia. The Terminus on this continent, it is reknowned as a hard, brutal area in which evil reigned in the form of the antithetical school of empathy: Black Empathy. The devotion to the use of the darkest human emotions to achieve one's goals: anger, despair, terror, and worse, Black Empaths use these to achieve their goals, even as they spread them across the land.
Tyrannia, once a vast array of fighting tribes and minor kingdoms, has been unified by the greatest and most terrible Empath of them all: the Dark Empath, and the acknowledged power behind the Tyrant who has unified the Empire.
The Dark Empath is an incredibly strong empath, and the founder of the 'Middle Way': the philosophy of Dark Empathy. Dark Empathy sees itself as neither Light or Black, but uses both to pursue its goals. Dark Empaths are not against using Light Empathy to bolster the valor of their troops or to heal people with emotional fortitude... nor are they against breaking the wills of entire cities with the emotions of atrocities past. To them it is the nobility of the goals, and not the emotions used to reach them, that matter. Dark Empaths are the most varied, and the most precarious balance: few can stay the path without falling towards Dark or Light empathy in particular.
Tyrannia has unified the vast East under the Tyrant's banner, and now marches West. A showdown with the Holy Kingdom over the continent and its empaths is imminent...
---
The last power defies Empathy. 'It' is actually 'they': in the rugged North, in the Mountains and across the Archipelagos, lie the City States: a confederation of independent cities which are united in their historic opposition to the Holy Kingdom. Competitive, driven to evolve by strife, but progressive in ways none of the rest of the continent even dream of, the City States are a contrast of democracies, republics, alliances, and focused on their own personal liberties.
The City States, long rivals of the Holy Kingdom and with long-remembered wrongs by Empaths in the past, are notorious for their anti-Empath culture. In fact, in the course of the game the player can affect whether this goes from mere revulsion to those who would manipulate the emotions of others to outright persecution and imprisonment (a Circle of Magi solution).
The City States remain the pivotal power on the Continent, and while they could not take either Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom alone, many believe they may well yet decide the outcome of the war.
---
Morality System: Empathy Philosophy
"Judge others not by their actions, or even their intents: judge by the affects they have on the minds of many."
The Empath moral-choice system avoids 'good and evil' but focuses specifically on the emotional impacts of those directly affected. 'White' is nice emotions, while Black points are awarded for spreading negative emotions, such as sorrow or anger. It is the tone of the outcome for others, and not the outcome itself, that is remembered. Helping a murderer escape his death to reunite with his loving wife is White Empathy. Killing a villain who has his victims in stockholm syndrome is black empathy. It is important to remember that only immediate impressions matter, for the most part..
Tyrannia and the Holy Kingdom, the two major Empath powers, define the Empathy axis as such.
White Empathy - Dark Empathy - Black Empathy.
White Empathy is 'positive'/'nice' emotions: generally buffing, healing, and support emotions to improve ally ability. The moral focus is never doing direct harm: the most aggressive uses would be to paralyze or stun someone with good (blind someone with an expression of Bliss). The rarest White Empaths are healers: they can actually drain someone's sensation and emotions of pain, and take it into themselves (health point transfer).
Black Empathy is 'negative'/'bad' emotions: terrifying foes, driving people mad with fury, or inflicting remembered pain (a rare, rare art, the inverse of Healers). Black Empathy is aggressive, though it can be used to bolster: allies more afraid of you than the enemy will not fail, a berserker rage can overcome many a defense, etc. While many of these emotions are considered bad in excess, they can also be seen to serve a greater purpose for a greater good. It is typically associated with the evil tyrants of the East, and their sociopathic empaths who pre-dated Tyrannia.
Dark Empathy is the attempt to balance both White and Black in one person. Access to both, mastery of neither, and notoriously hard to keep stable as most people tilt one way or another. The Dark Empath of Tyrannia is the primary proponent of this as a philosophy, even as the Holy Kingdom maligns it as a corruptible philosophy that merely leads to Black Empathy.
Is is the first of a number of different aspects I hope to post on. This looks mostly at the factions, but with some basic context to get started with.
Empathy Project is what I imagine my own Bioware RPG would look like. It could be thought of as a more 'European' version of Jade Empire, but rather than a martial arts theme a focus on Empathy powers.
This writeup is an attempt at putting various documents together on type. It could stand a good editor, one with more will and ability than I. Be that as it may, enjoy.
Empathy Project currently belongs to no one but myself.
===
Setting
A semi-midieval/feudal society, along traditional european-fantasy lines. 'Early-Renaissance'. If I had to make an early comparison, the Dragon Age period... though maybe a little later. A mostly feudal world in which the greatest powers are monarchies and dictatorships, but with the rise of new and alternative forms of governments.
This setting has no magic, though semi magical creatures do exist. The supernatural is largely restricted to mental manipulations: hallucinations, induced or otherwise. A world in which fire-breathing monsters are scientific, in other words.
The plot hook and super power of the world is...
Empathy.
This is my Empathy Project.
===
Emotional reception, and emotional broadcasting, are the ties that bind the world. Some people, the sociopaths, are unable to perceive or accept the emotions of others. Some people place strong walls around their minds. And some people... Empaths are people who are born not only with exceptional sensitivity to the feelings of others, but the twin abilities to radiate their own emotions and feelings to others (to give unto others), but to take remove emotions from others (to take unto one's self).
Empathy is the closest thing to magic, and the world has evolved around this. Their are creatures who use empathy, materials that can hold an emotional charge. Even environments can be saturated and perpetuate the emotions brought there... hence why cemeteries are places of sorrow, arenas are places of vigor and ardor, and the truly sacred areas literally give off a sense of peace. 'Spirits' exist, but only as the residual emotions of particularly strong people: they''re more of a hallucination that the viewer's mind puts together. rather than an actual being.
Emotions are the one limitless commodity, the truly ex-nihilo that can spread and increase itself amongst others. One empath's determination can stiffen the resolve of a dozen men: one empath's despair can bring an entire theater to tears. One empath can take the feeling of sorrow off your shoulders to let you begin again... and one empath can steal your happiness from you for himself, or whoever else would wish to buy it.
===
Our story takes place on a continent like Thedas. It is not the only continent in the world, but it is sufficiently removed and sufficiently large that other continents are irrelevant. There are three powers, each with a different view on Empathy and empaths. The gaps and frictions between these views will soon lead to war.
---
To the rich, fertile west lies the Holy Kingdom. It is not, strictly, a theocracy: it follows a philosophy, the moral school of 'Light Empathy.'
Light empathy is the focus on positive emotions: to spread happiness, remove fear and anxiety, to quell discontent and replace it with satisfaction. The Light Empath path is the general 'do nice'... but not necessarily 'do right.' It is the path to make people happy, but strongly adverse to harming any for any reason.
The Holy Kingdom is an enlightened monarchy that propagates Light Empathy. It is a pleasant, if regressive place to live. The governance is fair, the people content because Light Empathy is used to keep it so: corruption and the desire for vices are removed from the populace and officials, and replaced with an abundance of feelings of honor, charity, and fairness.
These emotions and many other light-empathy are never rare because of the unique facet of the Holy Kingdom: the well of Infinite Goodness, a group of sages of the Order (the state philosophy of Light Empaths) who have reached enlightenment and can generate infinite amounts of good will and have reached a state of mind immune from darker emotions. This Well is used to improve and placate the populous, and enact a virtuous nobility, as empaths of the Order continually carry this Light Empathy across and beyond the kingdom.
---
To the East lies the vaste steppes... and Tyrannia. The Terminus on this continent, it is reknowned as a hard, brutal area in which evil reigned in the form of the antithetical school of empathy: Black Empathy. The devotion to the use of the darkest human emotions to achieve one's goals: anger, despair, terror, and worse, Black Empaths use these to achieve their goals, even as they spread them across the land.
Tyrannia, once a vast array of fighting tribes and minor kingdoms, has been unified by the greatest and most terrible Empath of them all: the Dark Empath, and the acknowledged power behind the Tyrant who has unified the Empire.
The Dark Empath is an incredibly strong empath, and the founder of the 'Middle Way': the philosophy of Dark Empathy. Dark Empathy sees itself as neither Light or Black, but uses both to pursue its goals. Dark Empaths are not against using Light Empathy to bolster the valor of their troops or to heal people with emotional fortitude... nor are they against breaking the wills of entire cities with the emotions of atrocities past. To them it is the nobility of the goals, and not the emotions used to reach them, that matter. Dark Empaths are the most varied, and the most precarious balance: few can stay the path without falling towards Dark or Light empathy in particular.
Tyrannia has unified the vast East under the Tyrant's banner, and now marches West. A showdown with the Holy Kingdom over the continent and its empaths is imminent...
---
The last power defies Empathy. 'It' is actually 'they': in the rugged North, in the Mountains and across the Archipelagos, lie the City States: a confederation of independent cities which are united in their historic opposition to the Holy Kingdom. Competitive, driven to evolve by strife, but progressive in ways none of the rest of the continent even dream of, the City States are a contrast of democracies, republics, alliances, and focused on their own personal liberties.
The City States, long rivals of the Holy Kingdom and with long-remembered wrongs by Empaths in the past, are notorious for their anti-Empath culture. In fact, in the course of the game the player can affect whether this goes from mere revulsion to those who would manipulate the emotions of others to outright persecution and imprisonment (a Circle of Magi solution).
The City States remain the pivotal power on the Continent, and while they could not take either Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom alone, many believe they may well yet decide the outcome of the war.
---
Morality System: Empathy Philosophy
"Judge others not by their actions, or even their intents: judge by the affects they have on the minds of many."
The Empath moral-choice system avoids 'good and evil' but focuses specifically on the emotional impacts of those directly affected. 'White' is nice emotions, while Black points are awarded for spreading negative emotions, such as sorrow or anger. It is the tone of the outcome for others, and not the outcome itself, that is remembered. Helping a murderer escape his death to reunite with his loving wife is White Empathy. Killing a villain who has his victims in stockholm syndrome is black empathy. It is important to remember that only immediate impressions matter, for the most part..
Tyrannia and the Holy Kingdom, the two major Empath powers, define the Empathy axis as such.
White Empathy - Dark Empathy - Black Empathy.
White Empathy is 'positive'/'nice' emotions: generally buffing, healing, and support emotions to improve ally ability. The moral focus is never doing direct harm: the most aggressive uses would be to paralyze or stun someone with good (blind someone with an expression of Bliss). The rarest White Empaths are healers: they can actually drain someone's sensation and emotions of pain, and take it into themselves (health point transfer).
Black Empathy is 'negative'/'bad' emotions: terrifying foes, driving people mad with fury, or inflicting remembered pain (a rare, rare art, the inverse of Healers). Black Empathy is aggressive, though it can be used to bolster: allies more afraid of you than the enemy will not fail, a berserker rage can overcome many a defense, etc. While many of these emotions are considered bad in excess, they can also be seen to serve a greater purpose for a greater good. It is typically associated with the evil tyrants of the East, and their sociopathic empaths who pre-dated Tyrannia.
Dark Empathy is the attempt to balance both White and Black in one person. Access to both, mastery of neither, and notoriously hard to keep stable as most people tilt one way or another. The Dark Empath of Tyrannia is the primary proponent of this as a philosophy, even as the Holy Kingdom maligns it as a corruptible philosophy that merely leads to Black Empathy.
Posted at 09:09 PM on 2012-01-06
Faction 1 of 3
The Holy Kingdom
---
To start off, the Holy Kingdom is not a grim-dark subversion of a traditional idealistic fantasy kingdom in which all are content and happy with the established order of things.
The Holy Kingdom is a traditional idealistic fantasy kingdom in which nearly all are content and happy with the established order of things… because that is what a system dedicated to spreading White Empathy is capable of.
To understand the Holy Kingdom, you have to understand the transferable nature of Empathy. Empaths are not simply capable of perceiving others inner feelings that may not be obvious to others, nor are they limited to broadcasting their own current emotions: Empaths can actually ‘take’ the emotions and sentiments from someone, and ‘place’ other emotions in. A large part of emotions are a state of mind and the momentum of previous emotions. Sad people continue to feel sad, hopeful people can overcome what would drown a sad person: emotions are often like a bucket of water that is either re-filling itself (a positive/negative mindset that continues to reinforce itself) or leaking (returning to neutral).
Empathy is analogous to water, and Empaths can ‘carry' emotions from themselves to others and vice versa. A man who is sorrowful can have it removed by the Empath taking it upon him/herself, and a sense of peace instilled by the Empath taking the same emotion from him/herself and giving it to the man in question. This works so long as the Empath can maintain that state of mind and not be ‘corrupted’ by the other emotional baggage they take. The amount of emotions an Empath can bare, the specificity of the emotions and sentiments they can transfer, and their ability to not succumb to any particular emotional load all varies by the strength and nature of the individual Empath.
The Holy Kingdom is built around an expansive system of empaths dedicated to taking away the misery and sins of men and offering virtues and happiness in their place.
In a (utopian) traditional fantasy medieval setting, the government is fair and honest and the nobility, well, noble in spirit and intention. In history, this was bunk. In dark fantasy, the corruption and in-fighting is played up to the extreme. In the Holy Kingdom, however, this is played straight BECAUSE of Light Empathy.
The Enlightened Monarchy is recognized as such because Light Empathy is mandatory for the ruling classes and the Kingdom’s bureaucracy, from the lowest tax collector to the King himself. Based on the belief that one of the best ways to improve the general human condition and reduce strife is to have a ‘lightened’ (white-empathy desired) populace, and the best way to have that is to have an lightened, sympathetic governance free from sin (or as much as can be), the Order frequently, regularly, and sometimes randomly ‘cleanses’ the members of the state, removing the common and uncommon vices and instilling virtues in their place. And like most people, once in a virtuous mood the nobility isn’t in much of a mindset to trying and cheat the system… and by the time the virtue is waning and their own inherent flaws begin to rise again, it’s time for their next Cleansing. The higher the position, the more frequent the cleansings: the Enlightened Monarch is cleansed daily.
One of the defining sentiments within the Holy Kingdom, and one of the most precious produced by the Well, is ‘Sincerity.’ It is applied to nearly every member of the government.
Light Empathy is prevalent at every level of society. In courts, Empaths instill honesty, honor, and/or shame to encourage confessions from those involved, bringing most trials to a quick end. The Order conducts charity to alleviate the worst effected by disasters and poverty, and takes the sorrows of the mourning upon themselves and gives hope and resolve instead. Order Empaths make natural counselors and confidants, trained in both discretion and emotional health.
This is very impressive, because for most of history and in all other civilizations, such an effort has been nearly unworkable. While happiness can be limited by stopping its propagation, the empaths who take the root of it upon themselves have to take it somewhere else less they succumb to it as well. (An empathy succumbing to dark emotions is a major problem for everyone around, only heightening the loss). Likewise, positive emotions are notoriously fleeting and transitory when compared to the darker emotions: a single well-timed problem can ruin a good mood, we quickly forget the good in our lives to focus on the bad, and it’s always harder to slip into a good mood at will. Just as removing the darker emotions from one person can prevent them from spreading and multiplying, the same applies with lighter emotions, and in the end they both end up being passed off to other people anyway. Most empathy-trading schemes are zero-sum, never making any real ‘gains.’
The Order has a solution that has evaded all attempts to emulate it ever since. The Well of Infinite Goodness is the source of the Holy Kingdom’s virtues, and the dumping ground for evils. Not a literal well, but a group of monks who have reached enlightenment (as the Order perceives it), and have achieved a perpetual, unshakable, positive state of mind. Individually, they are titans amongst other Empaths, the strongest, most enduring. Individually, each could shoulder the emotional burdens of entire regions or major cities before being threatened and overcome by dark empathy. Together, reinforcing each other, their capacity for absorbing and dissipating evil in their hearts is effectively limitless, as is their ability to produce new emotions worthy of Light Empathy.
This is the heart of the Holy Kingdom’s massive prevalence of Light Empathy, far in excess of anyone else. The Well of Infinite Goodness produces limitless virtue, hindered only by the number and speed of Empaths to carry it elsewhere. Carrier-empaths, or those who specialize in traveling with emotional burdens, take good emotions to major cities or regions, and transfer them to capacitor-empaths. Capacitor-empaths, those especially good at holding massive amounts of empathy without losing it or their state of mind hold these emotions in store. And then distribution-empaths, those skilled in the precision and complexity of emotions they can handle, distribute these emotions to where they can do the most good. And in return, dark emotions are taken away, carried up the chain, and ultimately dumped safely into the Well of Infinite Goodness.
And this occurs day after day, year after year, and has been for centuries. Empaths work for the state, and the state works for the Light Empathy philosophy by collecting taxes, establishing law and order, and paying for this network, and everyone benefits. The evils of men are removed, the virtues spread, and the Holy Kingdom is certainly the ‘happiest’ place on the Continent, and possibly the world, to live. While not everyone in the Kingdom can be serviced frequently, as a reality of the Empathy network’s limit of Empaths, the Order and the Kingdom make every effort to help those who need it most.
The Holy Kingdom is not a grim-dark subversion. It is not an oppressive, undesirable place to live. It is not a dystopia. It, in governance and general nature, are quite pleasant and good intentioned.
---
Of course, it remains flawed.
The single greatest flaw of the Holy Kingdom is philosophical/ideological, not emotion. It is a very, very stagnant (and in many ways regressive) culture, and is largely stuck in the time of its creation. It’s a monarchy and ideology that sees little reason to change: democracy, self-representation, even equality of the sexes in public or service are ‘foreign’ ideas that only invite discord, and the Holy Kingdom’s solution to discord is to throw happiness at the loudest voices and take away their sentiment of misery.
This is good when the source of the discord is passing. This is very bad when it is systematic, or worse a breakdown of the system, because then it is only papering over what could potentially be a real problem. Taxes would be a good example of this: the Holy Kingdom has high taxes in order to pay for the Order, but like all nations only has a vague idea of when taxes are too high: it will chase 'cheaters' rather than consider itself wrong, even when it is the one at fault. While there is little malice in the Holy Kingdom’s ‘regressive’ policies, there’s such an entrenchment that any change is viewed with suspicion, skepticism, and usually a dose of Light Empathy to turn it off.
---
Ex:
A quest the player might come across is that in a port city with a merchant trader: a recent bump in naval taxes to pay for the war is actually driving the foreign-traders of the capital out of business and into bankruptcy: they have no desire to break the law and smuggle, but at the same time they have little choice if they’re going to provide for their families and bring in the foreign goods (including medicines) that people in the city need. The dilemma the player faces would be to help them smuggle, or to turn them in. Turning them in, however, doesn’t lower the taxes: the Merchants are ‘cleansed’ and given some happiness to make them optimistic, but the same situation that brought them into a criminal conspiracy remains. For the rest of the game, the player can hear their ambient about how they’re still losing money, and going back for cleansing more and more often.
---
Ironically (or not), the greatest force for social reform is also the greatest immediate obstacle: the Order. If those inside the Order can be persuaded that more emotional good can be done by adopting a new social policy, such as laws protecting women from their husbands and allowing them to own property on their own, then the Order becomes the greatest force for reform in the country. But it’s still incredibly cautious and conservative: it was considered incredibly controversial centuries ago when the Order allowed female empaths to proved services at all, and the recent achievement of equal rank and status within the order (even a female Enlightened at the Well) is still considered radical sixty years later. Proponents of incorporating women into combat roles in the King’s Army, however, are still regarded as radically liberal.
It was considered hugely controversial at the time three hundred years ago when the Order began including female Empaths in its ranks, and teaching women to read and becoming the leading
Another one of the flaws of the system is the Order’s monopoly on Empaths. All native empaths in the Kingdom are taken in by the state at a young age to serve within the Order, with Templars arriving to escort the children in safety and remind any hesitant parent that it isn’t optional. That’s about as close to the Circle of Mage from Dragon Age as it gets: Empaths are encouraged to remain in contact with their families, family visits are allowed, being a Light Empath is considered both an honor and very prestigious to the empath and family alike. For many, it’s a cause for celebration, as Light Empaths have good, respectable lives safe from many of the threats that endanger non-empaths (even criminals in the Holy Kingdom rarely harm an Empath, for respect and fear of certain retaliation). Just as importantly, the Order trains Empaths to master their gifts, not be consumed by them: untrained-empaths are as much a danger to themselves as others, as they are far more prone to being emotionally overwhelmed. Still, despite this, you’re always find the reluctant family.
---
Example Holy Kingdom Quest: family that’s continually trying to hide their dearly-loved child who would be risked in the war, and the Order representative sent to retrieve the child. The sorrow of the family if they lose their child makes siding with the Order the Black-empathy choice in this case, while convincing the Order representative that the child is dead/killing the Order person is the relatively ‘white’ empathy choice.
---
But that’s not the real problem derived from the system. What is is the relative lack of empathy trade. In most societies, empaths sell their services, trading emotions. They buy the happiness of some and sell it for higher to those who really want it. People pay them to remove their sorrows, and the empaths try and find someone else to take their sorrows. This is common everywhere except the Holy Kingdom, where the only empathy traders are foreigners under heavy regulation and watch. What inevitably begins to occur is that parts of the Kingdom which think they aren’t getting their fair-share of distributed happiness begin to grow, well, unhappy.
In the Holy Kingdom, ‘Empath Riots’ are the riots by people who WANT the empaths to service them, because being the squeaky wheel is about the only way to get the grease. Slums, far-removed counties and villages, wherever. Though things rarely get bad, there’s an inherent inability for a command-controlled economy (like the state empaths) to service everyone equally and fairly. A common, unofficial solution of this is the latent network of unregistered empaths who smuggle emotions, which leads to the final big problem.
---
Example Quest: Someone is interfering with the Order’s empathy-supply network, siphoning good emotions from the network and adding dark emotions to the loads of carrier-empaths.
---
People cheat the network. This isn’t surprising, but it is hard. The primary way to cheat an empathy-regulated network is to use Empaths, but with a state monopoly on Empaths the main means to do so are unregistered empaths. Besides the obvious lucrative advantage of empathy-smuggling, unregistered empaths are near synonymous with ‘corruption’ in the Holy Kingdom. For the regulators who cleans and keep an eye on the nobility, the primary means of detection of transgression is sentiments of ‘greed’, ‘illicit triumph’, and even ‘guilt.’ The presence of these spurs more intensive investigation. But with a private unregistered empath, however, the criminal in question can actually remove these tells before an exam, and thus escape detection. If a certain mindset that encourages such greed or whatever is desired, it can likewise be re-emplaced after a cleansing, when suspicion is lowest because most people are too noble and pure to want to continue with such crimes. So long as you wash your hands before a Cleansing, you won’t be caught red-handed (so to speak).
This has obvious applications for abuse by nobility who abuse their powers (a quest in and of itself), but the singularly most important example of this is during a story quest. The Enlightened Monarach of the Holy Kingdom itself is subverting his daily Cleansings in order to be a more effective, cunning, and ‘unfair’ King as necessary to do better in the war.
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The Divergence
///
Each of the three factions has two paths they can be pushed towards by the Mercenary (the player). Conceptually these are the ‘Moderate’ and ‘Extreme’ paths. These are determined by story quests every player will do. These choices affect the end-game, whether the power in question is willing to ally with City States (or another, if you join the City States), and even the treatment and ending of the player character.
The Holy Kingdom’s divergence comes in the form of the King’s Cabal. The Enlightened Monarch, nearly godly in reputation to the populace, is actively subverting the Order and his own Enlightened status. Upon discovering this, whether by accident or by seeking proof, the player is faced with the choice of becoming complicit in this cover-up or to expose the King’s sins to the Order.
1) 'Moderate': the King of the Holy Kingdom is traditionally 'purified' by Light Empathy to earn his title of the Enlightened Monarch. In actuality, the King is using a cabal of crown-loyal (not order-loyal) Empaths to allow him to 'harden' himself to make the hard decisions and unpleasant compromises with the morally infirm to lead his kingdom. While ‘hardened’, the King sponsors insurgency action within Tyrannia, secretly supports smuggling efforts in the capital to bring in war resources, and is even engaged in the most secret of diplomacy with representatives from the City States, the historic enemies of the Holy Kingdom, about an alliance against Tyrannia.
A Moderate Holy Kingdom, while still largely benevolent, sees more than a little well-hidden corruption and compromises of morality at the highest levels... and more than a little willingness to tolerate others who don't follow Light Empathy. It’s hardly any more ‘progressive’, but it is more ‘real-politic’:
2) ‘Extreme’: If the King's Cabal is exposed, the Order of Light Empathy asserts full control over the Kingdom. Corruption is rooted out by Light Empathy of constant exposure: misery-creating strife and dissent is stifled even more thoroughly. As the old system was clearly too flawed, the Order begins to add a new element of emotion into the Well, to keep people faithful: Zeal-bordering-Zealotry. The Pure Holy Kingdom is good in intent, but not nice: it will not tolerate anyone else who does not accept their peace by Light Empathy. It will shower you in empathy until you agree, or kill you if you still do not.
The Puritanical Holy Kingdom is a crusader state for the spreading of Light Empathy. A theocracy lacking a god, it is a place of Zealots and nearly uncompromising dedication against all evil, which is just about anyone south of Neutral, and anyone north of Neutral who opposes them. The flaws are exaggerated, especially the difficulty of internal reform, and it is an expansionist power. This isn’t necessarily ‘worse’ than what they’re replacing or conquering, but it isn’t kind either: it just papers over the not-nice with nice emotions.
The Holy Kingdom
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To start off, the Holy Kingdom is not a grim-dark subversion of a traditional idealistic fantasy kingdom in which all are content and happy with the established order of things.
The Holy Kingdom is a traditional idealistic fantasy kingdom in which nearly all are content and happy with the established order of things… because that is what a system dedicated to spreading White Empathy is capable of.
To understand the Holy Kingdom, you have to understand the transferable nature of Empathy. Empaths are not simply capable of perceiving others inner feelings that may not be obvious to others, nor are they limited to broadcasting their own current emotions: Empaths can actually ‘take’ the emotions and sentiments from someone, and ‘place’ other emotions in. A large part of emotions are a state of mind and the momentum of previous emotions. Sad people continue to feel sad, hopeful people can overcome what would drown a sad person: emotions are often like a bucket of water that is either re-filling itself (a positive/negative mindset that continues to reinforce itself) or leaking (returning to neutral).
Empathy is analogous to water, and Empaths can ‘carry' emotions from themselves to others and vice versa. A man who is sorrowful can have it removed by the Empath taking it upon him/herself, and a sense of peace instilled by the Empath taking the same emotion from him/herself and giving it to the man in question. This works so long as the Empath can maintain that state of mind and not be ‘corrupted’ by the other emotional baggage they take. The amount of emotions an Empath can bare, the specificity of the emotions and sentiments they can transfer, and their ability to not succumb to any particular emotional load all varies by the strength and nature of the individual Empath.
The Holy Kingdom is built around an expansive system of empaths dedicated to taking away the misery and sins of men and offering virtues and happiness in their place.
In a (utopian) traditional fantasy medieval setting, the government is fair and honest and the nobility, well, noble in spirit and intention. In history, this was bunk. In dark fantasy, the corruption and in-fighting is played up to the extreme. In the Holy Kingdom, however, this is played straight BECAUSE of Light Empathy.
The Enlightened Monarchy is recognized as such because Light Empathy is mandatory for the ruling classes and the Kingdom’s bureaucracy, from the lowest tax collector to the King himself. Based on the belief that one of the best ways to improve the general human condition and reduce strife is to have a ‘lightened’ (white-empathy desired) populace, and the best way to have that is to have an lightened, sympathetic governance free from sin (or as much as can be), the Order frequently, regularly, and sometimes randomly ‘cleanses’ the members of the state, removing the common and uncommon vices and instilling virtues in their place. And like most people, once in a virtuous mood the nobility isn’t in much of a mindset to trying and cheat the system… and by the time the virtue is waning and their own inherent flaws begin to rise again, it’s time for their next Cleansing. The higher the position, the more frequent the cleansings: the Enlightened Monarch is cleansed daily.
One of the defining sentiments within the Holy Kingdom, and one of the most precious produced by the Well, is ‘Sincerity.’ It is applied to nearly every member of the government.
Light Empathy is prevalent at every level of society. In courts, Empaths instill honesty, honor, and/or shame to encourage confessions from those involved, bringing most trials to a quick end. The Order conducts charity to alleviate the worst effected by disasters and poverty, and takes the sorrows of the mourning upon themselves and gives hope and resolve instead. Order Empaths make natural counselors and confidants, trained in both discretion and emotional health.
This is very impressive, because for most of history and in all other civilizations, such an effort has been nearly unworkable. While happiness can be limited by stopping its propagation, the empaths who take the root of it upon themselves have to take it somewhere else less they succumb to it as well. (An empathy succumbing to dark emotions is a major problem for everyone around, only heightening the loss). Likewise, positive emotions are notoriously fleeting and transitory when compared to the darker emotions: a single well-timed problem can ruin a good mood, we quickly forget the good in our lives to focus on the bad, and it’s always harder to slip into a good mood at will. Just as removing the darker emotions from one person can prevent them from spreading and multiplying, the same applies with lighter emotions, and in the end they both end up being passed off to other people anyway. Most empathy-trading schemes are zero-sum, never making any real ‘gains.’
The Order has a solution that has evaded all attempts to emulate it ever since. The Well of Infinite Goodness is the source of the Holy Kingdom’s virtues, and the dumping ground for evils. Not a literal well, but a group of monks who have reached enlightenment (as the Order perceives it), and have achieved a perpetual, unshakable, positive state of mind. Individually, they are titans amongst other Empaths, the strongest, most enduring. Individually, each could shoulder the emotional burdens of entire regions or major cities before being threatened and overcome by dark empathy. Together, reinforcing each other, their capacity for absorbing and dissipating evil in their hearts is effectively limitless, as is their ability to produce new emotions worthy of Light Empathy.
This is the heart of the Holy Kingdom’s massive prevalence of Light Empathy, far in excess of anyone else. The Well of Infinite Goodness produces limitless virtue, hindered only by the number and speed of Empaths to carry it elsewhere. Carrier-empaths, or those who specialize in traveling with emotional burdens, take good emotions to major cities or regions, and transfer them to capacitor-empaths. Capacitor-empaths, those especially good at holding massive amounts of empathy without losing it or their state of mind hold these emotions in store. And then distribution-empaths, those skilled in the precision and complexity of emotions they can handle, distribute these emotions to where they can do the most good. And in return, dark emotions are taken away, carried up the chain, and ultimately dumped safely into the Well of Infinite Goodness.
And this occurs day after day, year after year, and has been for centuries. Empaths work for the state, and the state works for the Light Empathy philosophy by collecting taxes, establishing law and order, and paying for this network, and everyone benefits. The evils of men are removed, the virtues spread, and the Holy Kingdom is certainly the ‘happiest’ place on the Continent, and possibly the world, to live. While not everyone in the Kingdom can be serviced frequently, as a reality of the Empathy network’s limit of Empaths, the Order and the Kingdom make every effort to help those who need it most.
The Holy Kingdom is not a grim-dark subversion. It is not an oppressive, undesirable place to live. It is not a dystopia. It, in governance and general nature, are quite pleasant and good intentioned.
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Of course, it remains flawed.
The single greatest flaw of the Holy Kingdom is philosophical/ideological, not emotion. It is a very, very stagnant (and in many ways regressive) culture, and is largely stuck in the time of its creation. It’s a monarchy and ideology that sees little reason to change: democracy, self-representation, even equality of the sexes in public or service are ‘foreign’ ideas that only invite discord, and the Holy Kingdom’s solution to discord is to throw happiness at the loudest voices and take away their sentiment of misery.
This is good when the source of the discord is passing. This is very bad when it is systematic, or worse a breakdown of the system, because then it is only papering over what could potentially be a real problem. Taxes would be a good example of this: the Holy Kingdom has high taxes in order to pay for the Order, but like all nations only has a vague idea of when taxes are too high: it will chase 'cheaters' rather than consider itself wrong, even when it is the one at fault. While there is little malice in the Holy Kingdom’s ‘regressive’ policies, there’s such an entrenchment that any change is viewed with suspicion, skepticism, and usually a dose of Light Empathy to turn it off.
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Ex:
A quest the player might come across is that in a port city with a merchant trader: a recent bump in naval taxes to pay for the war is actually driving the foreign-traders of the capital out of business and into bankruptcy: they have no desire to break the law and smuggle, but at the same time they have little choice if they’re going to provide for their families and bring in the foreign goods (including medicines) that people in the city need. The dilemma the player faces would be to help them smuggle, or to turn them in. Turning them in, however, doesn’t lower the taxes: the Merchants are ‘cleansed’ and given some happiness to make them optimistic, but the same situation that brought them into a criminal conspiracy remains. For the rest of the game, the player can hear their ambient about how they’re still losing money, and going back for cleansing more and more often.
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Ironically (or not), the greatest force for social reform is also the greatest immediate obstacle: the Order. If those inside the Order can be persuaded that more emotional good can be done by adopting a new social policy, such as laws protecting women from their husbands and allowing them to own property on their own, then the Order becomes the greatest force for reform in the country. But it’s still incredibly cautious and conservative: it was considered incredibly controversial centuries ago when the Order allowed female empaths to proved services at all, and the recent achievement of equal rank and status within the order (even a female Enlightened at the Well) is still considered radical sixty years later. Proponents of incorporating women into combat roles in the King’s Army, however, are still regarded as radically liberal.
It was considered hugely controversial at the time three hundred years ago when the Order began including female Empaths in its ranks, and teaching women to read and becoming the leading
Another one of the flaws of the system is the Order’s monopoly on Empaths. All native empaths in the Kingdom are taken in by the state at a young age to serve within the Order, with Templars arriving to escort the children in safety and remind any hesitant parent that it isn’t optional. That’s about as close to the Circle of Mage from Dragon Age as it gets: Empaths are encouraged to remain in contact with their families, family visits are allowed, being a Light Empath is considered both an honor and very prestigious to the empath and family alike. For many, it’s a cause for celebration, as Light Empaths have good, respectable lives safe from many of the threats that endanger non-empaths (even criminals in the Holy Kingdom rarely harm an Empath, for respect and fear of certain retaliation). Just as importantly, the Order trains Empaths to master their gifts, not be consumed by them: untrained-empaths are as much a danger to themselves as others, as they are far more prone to being emotionally overwhelmed. Still, despite this, you’re always find the reluctant family.
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Example Holy Kingdom Quest: family that’s continually trying to hide their dearly-loved child who would be risked in the war, and the Order representative sent to retrieve the child. The sorrow of the family if they lose their child makes siding with the Order the Black-empathy choice in this case, while convincing the Order representative that the child is dead/killing the Order person is the relatively ‘white’ empathy choice.
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But that’s not the real problem derived from the system. What is is the relative lack of empathy trade. In most societies, empaths sell their services, trading emotions. They buy the happiness of some and sell it for higher to those who really want it. People pay them to remove their sorrows, and the empaths try and find someone else to take their sorrows. This is common everywhere except the Holy Kingdom, where the only empathy traders are foreigners under heavy regulation and watch. What inevitably begins to occur is that parts of the Kingdom which think they aren’t getting their fair-share of distributed happiness begin to grow, well, unhappy.
In the Holy Kingdom, ‘Empath Riots’ are the riots by people who WANT the empaths to service them, because being the squeaky wheel is about the only way to get the grease. Slums, far-removed counties and villages, wherever. Though things rarely get bad, there’s an inherent inability for a command-controlled economy (like the state empaths) to service everyone equally and fairly. A common, unofficial solution of this is the latent network of unregistered empaths who smuggle emotions, which leads to the final big problem.
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Example Quest: Someone is interfering with the Order’s empathy-supply network, siphoning good emotions from the network and adding dark emotions to the loads of carrier-empaths.
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People cheat the network. This isn’t surprising, but it is hard. The primary way to cheat an empathy-regulated network is to use Empaths, but with a state monopoly on Empaths the main means to do so are unregistered empaths. Besides the obvious lucrative advantage of empathy-smuggling, unregistered empaths are near synonymous with ‘corruption’ in the Holy Kingdom. For the regulators who cleans and keep an eye on the nobility, the primary means of detection of transgression is sentiments of ‘greed’, ‘illicit triumph’, and even ‘guilt.’ The presence of these spurs more intensive investigation. But with a private unregistered empath, however, the criminal in question can actually remove these tells before an exam, and thus escape detection. If a certain mindset that encourages such greed or whatever is desired, it can likewise be re-emplaced after a cleansing, when suspicion is lowest because most people are too noble and pure to want to continue with such crimes. So long as you wash your hands before a Cleansing, you won’t be caught red-handed (so to speak).
This has obvious applications for abuse by nobility who abuse their powers (a quest in and of itself), but the singularly most important example of this is during a story quest. The Enlightened Monarach of the Holy Kingdom itself is subverting his daily Cleansings in order to be a more effective, cunning, and ‘unfair’ King as necessary to do better in the war.
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The Divergence
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Each of the three factions has two paths they can be pushed towards by the Mercenary (the player). Conceptually these are the ‘Moderate’ and ‘Extreme’ paths. These are determined by story quests every player will do. These choices affect the end-game, whether the power in question is willing to ally with City States (or another, if you join the City States), and even the treatment and ending of the player character.
The Holy Kingdom’s divergence comes in the form of the King’s Cabal. The Enlightened Monarch, nearly godly in reputation to the populace, is actively subverting the Order and his own Enlightened status. Upon discovering this, whether by accident or by seeking proof, the player is faced with the choice of becoming complicit in this cover-up or to expose the King’s sins to the Order.
1) 'Moderate': the King of the Holy Kingdom is traditionally 'purified' by Light Empathy to earn his title of the Enlightened Monarch. In actuality, the King is using a cabal of crown-loyal (not order-loyal) Empaths to allow him to 'harden' himself to make the hard decisions and unpleasant compromises with the morally infirm to lead his kingdom. While ‘hardened’, the King sponsors insurgency action within Tyrannia, secretly supports smuggling efforts in the capital to bring in war resources, and is even engaged in the most secret of diplomacy with representatives from the City States, the historic enemies of the Holy Kingdom, about an alliance against Tyrannia.
A Moderate Holy Kingdom, while still largely benevolent, sees more than a little well-hidden corruption and compromises of morality at the highest levels... and more than a little willingness to tolerate others who don't follow Light Empathy. It’s hardly any more ‘progressive’, but it is more ‘real-politic’:
2) ‘Extreme’: If the King's Cabal is exposed, the Order of Light Empathy asserts full control over the Kingdom. Corruption is rooted out by Light Empathy of constant exposure: misery-creating strife and dissent is stifled even more thoroughly. As the old system was clearly too flawed, the Order begins to add a new element of emotion into the Well, to keep people faithful: Zeal-bordering-Zealotry. The Pure Holy Kingdom is good in intent, but not nice: it will not tolerate anyone else who does not accept their peace by Light Empathy. It will shower you in empathy until you agree, or kill you if you still do not.
The Puritanical Holy Kingdom is a crusader state for the spreading of Light Empathy. A theocracy lacking a god, it is a place of Zealots and nearly uncompromising dedication against all evil, which is just about anyone south of Neutral, and anyone north of Neutral who opposes them. The flaws are exaggerated, especially the difficulty of internal reform, and it is an expansionist power. This isn’t necessarily ‘worse’ than what they’re replacing or conquering, but it isn’t kind either: it just papers over the not-nice with nice emotions.
Posted at 09:10 PM on 2012-01-06
Faction 2: Tyrannia
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If the Holy Kingdom is an old, centralized, organized bastion of civilization built on good will, integrity, and the mortar of happiness, Tyrannia is the new empire forged in blood, steel, and a self-strengthening cycle of the miseries of war, all directed in one direction: West.
Since the Holy Kingdom was established on the west coast of the continent, the East has always been the foreign barbarians. Petty kingdoms and despots, tribes and clans often ruled or terrorized by empaths, sometimes at the same time by the same individual. As the Kingdom grew and expanded across the Fertile Plains of the West, it absorbed many of these people and the rest were pushed back.
But the East is large, massively so. The whole of the City States and the Holy Kingdom combined could rattle around in the plains, swamps, steppes, and passes that mark the East. For as long as history has been written, the nomads and minor kingdoms have fought each. In this chaos of hard living and even harder wars, many of the empaths of the East were overwhelmed by the human suffering and went insane themselves, and in their insanity began inflicting their own suffering on others in a never-ending cycle continued simply for its own sake. These were the first of the Black Empaths, who used the cruelty, brutality, fear and suffering so freely available in the East to break men’s wills and serve their own purposes.
Traditionally divided and competing with each other, decades ago the Black Cabal formed: Black Empaths who worked together, rather than fight each other. Backing one tribe in particular, Tyrannia began, ruled by the Tyrant and the Black Cabal that advised and manipulated him. With acts of Black Empathy organized on an unprecedented scale, the armies of the Tyrant crushed the spirits and bodies of all resistance, and with each victory it has only grown more capable of continuing its march to the West. For too long the Holy Kingdom stood by, and now the last of the buffer states have fallen. With the Dark Empath at the head of his armies and driving him to even greater acts, the Tyrant looks west, to peace and prosperity of the Holy Kingdom. If civilization is to survive, any civilization, the City States and Holy Kingdom must put their differences aside and unite, and every man must do their duty and join the King’s Army in order to face this threat of pure evil…
Or so says the ministers and heralds of the Holy Kingdom.
Yes, Tyrannia started with the Black Cabal and the Tyrant. Yes, its history is of long, bloody expansion with massive use of Black Empathy to break its foes, and sometimes to keep them in submssion. Yes, it has spent decades marching West, and yes it is going to attack. Yes, it’s true the Dark Empath is the power behind the throne.
But it is not a force for pure evil like many believe. Not anymore at least. You see, Tyrannia was at its worst when the Tyrant was crazed and the Black Cabal supported him. No one knows an earlier time in which he was not mad, even himself. But he is not mad now, even if he is still quite capable of ruthlessness. The Black Cabal did not produce the Dark Empath, as many believe. And the Holy Kingdom did not simply stand by and do nothing for all the years that Tyrannia spread west.
The truth to all of these lies with the Dark Empath. Before he was the Dark Empath, he was a member of the Order of the Holy Kingdom. An empathy prodigy adopted by the order, not simply skilled but capable of holding onto massive amounts of emotions without himself being effected, he rapidly rose through the ranks of the Order: by the age of twenty-five he was suggested as a member of the Well, the youngest candidate in the Order’s long history. He was not selected, but his future was bright. Then came the first words of the rise of the Black Cabal and the Tyrant to the far east. Recognizing the dangers of an organized cabal of Black Empaths, the Order sent an expedition of agents and Empaths East, to end the Cabal before it could grow too large. Knowing the dangers of most empaths to the exposure to the Emotions of the East, and cognate of his own immense capacities to both store and endure emotions, the Dark Empath volunteered to accompany them. He would be the fragment of the Well that the expedition could dip into to stabilize themselves.
It was a long journey of several years. They passed through numerous territories, endured countless dangers, and endured the weather and distance. The Dark Empath endured as well, refusing to let his fragment of the Well run dry. It was he who kept the empaths of the party stable as they witnessed and passed the harshness of the wastes, and it was he who gave out their valor and hopes of success. And then they arrived at Tyrannia.
No one in the west understood just what Tyrannia had become. It was massive already, but more so it was depraved. The personal playground of Dark Empaths who cultivated emotions of terror and rage and loss to enforce their own preferences and expand their own claims. In the first week alone, two of the empaths that had accompanied them from the start were endarkened merely from exposure. But the Dark Empath himself remained pure, and with his sanity he was able to stabilize and fortify the rest of the expedition as they began to work.
Black Empaths died of mysterious causes. Sedition stirred in the ranks of the military. The populace, long cowed by fear and Black Empathy tactics, began to strengthen and resist the Black Empaths, even as the Tyrant’s retributions for insurgency grew more and more harsh. And then they were caught, and brought before the Tyrant himself.
The Tyrant was a cruel man, as cruel as any of the Black Cabal that kept him so. After torturing the non-empaths before their Empath companions, he forced each empathy in turn to touch his mind. Each who did so was driven insane, blackened merely by contact with the Tyrant. One by one they fell, surrounded by the Black Cabal’s laughter and welcoming them to their order, until it was the Dark Empath’s turn. Desperate, he took a gambit the Black Cabal surrounding them did not expect.
He struck an empathy-bond with the Tyrant, the same gesture that the Empath would make with the Mercenary decades later. In an instant they were one, their wills shared and emotions mixed. The depths of evil in the Tyrant’s heart fought with the portion of the Well of Infinite Goodness that remained within the Dark Empath. And so the Dark Empath, once the Lightest Empath of them all, earned his title: he was endarkened, the dark conversion only an Empath can appreciate that closes off the idealism of Light Empathy forever more.
But the Tyrant… the Tyrant was made sane, and an unbreakable bond between him and the Dark Empath was formed. The new Tyrant’s first order was the arrest and execution of the Black Empaths who held his partner and his partner’s friends. The Dark Empath’s first appeal was that the Black Cabal be granted clemency, for they could still serve a use. As the Dark Empath tended to the physical and emotional wounds that had endarkened his companions, the Tyrant reasserted himself, free from the claws of the Black Cabal, and began bringing order to the depravity that was Tyrannia. And so the reformation of Tyrannia began…
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The Tyrannia of old and the Tyrannia of present are two different places. The Tyrannia of old was a mad house, closer to a post-apocalypse anarchy than a civilization. Torture gangs and violence against the weak were everywhere, and only the Tyrant was beyond question. This existed because, in Black Empathy, the suffering of others is power. If you break a man’s arm, the pain he associates with it could make another man flinch at a critical moment. If you torture a man to death, his agony can make soldiers tremble at the knees. In the constant fighting amongst the Black Empaths, they had an incentive to perform newer, ever more horrible acts against others (and sometimes themselves): the Blackest Empath wins at tearing down the others’ defenses and making the enemy’s soldiers flee.
The old Tyrannia was Black Empathy run amock, chaotic-evil at its worse. The Tyrant was the blackest of them all, and the Black Cabal enjoyed it for its own sake, being both the strongest themselves and believing this was the ‘true’ Human nature and purest form of Empathy. Suffering wasn’t simply a byproduct, but a goal in and of itself.
The Tyrannia of new is the border of lawful-neutral and lawful-evil. Though the Dark Empath was endarkened, he was not stripped of all idealism. As the Tyrant restored pure order on Tyrania, forcing the Black Empaths into restraint and killing those who refused, the tone and emotional wellbeing of Tyrannia improved immensely. The Tyrant was no longer a malevolent individual and the Black Empaths no long allowed to practice their arts without direct sanction, and so long as the people obeyed the laws they were largely left alone and protected from the bandits and other threats of the East. This state of safety and a literal freedom from fear was such an improvement compared to the rest of the East that the Dark Empath was enthralled with how the suffering of so many could be diminished even without the Well of Infinite Goodness. In the absence of infinite hope and virtue, total law (with the regulation/enforcement of Empaths to keep it honest) was the next best thing for the wellbeing of so many.
By the time the Expedition had recovered, the Dark Empath no longer wanted to leave even though the Tyrant was willing to abandon it all and leave with the Dark Empath. Instead, the Dark Empath argued that they could expand what they had, and improve the entire East, bringing order to chaos. The Dark Empath and the willing of the expedition would take in many of the numerous empaths of the East and rehabilitate them, organize them into a new Order, both to enforce the Tyrant’s law as was done in the Kingdom and facilitate Tyrannia’s expansion. Tyrannia could use the Black Cabal to facilitate its expansion: though the Black Cabal would be under close watch of the Dark Empath and his fellow dark-empaths, their talents could be used to win wars in short order with minimal loss of life, and to subdue restive populations as the Tyrant’s Order took hold. A cycle of conquest, reorganization, and enforced stability could then take begin. As Tyrannia expanded, it would bring order to the constant wars of the East until it was the East. Though the war of expansion itself would be long and miserable, the potential for a peaceful future justified it.
And when Tyrannia reached the West, the borders of the Kingdom… it could capitulate, and link to the Well of Infinite Goodness. The Dark Empath’s own empathy order could join forces with the Order, distributing the virtues of the Well from West to East. The Black Empaths could then be done away with, the dark empaths fazed out in favor of Light Empaths raised by the Order, and the continent stabilized. Or such was the plan. The Tyrant agreed merely because the Dark Empath desired it, caring less for his position than for his companion’s vision. So did most of the survivors of the expedition: all endarkened themselves, they had little future if they returned to the Holy Kingdom, whereas they still believed they could help those out East. Only three out of the original thirty dissented, and they were allowed to leave freely, bearing a message of the Dark Empath’s offer to take to the Order. They left, and Tyrannia began a new wave of expansion and conquests of the tribes of the endless steppes.
But the Order had a different perspective. They saw the Dark Empath, so changed from what he once was, as having succumbed to Black Empathy. That Tyrannia was better than the worst of the East did not mean it was good: it remained a major source and cause of much misery and oppression even improved, and even more the pre-existence of suffering Light Empathy abhors the creation of new misery. The Dark Empath’s message only barely beat the arrival of news of new atrocities in new conquests, showing that the Dark Empath didn’t even care if the Holy Kingdom gave permission before he started his new project. Tyrannia was the cause of too much misery to be compatible with the Kingdom, the empaths in the east too endarkened to carry and distribute from the Well so far out east. The scope of such a project was surely impossible: the Kingdom remained unable to service its own subjects fully, and the Dark Empath wanted to add nearly the entire continent at once? To do so would require pulling most empathy distribution out of the Kingdom itself, simply to carry the amounts further east: the Kingdom would be starved of its light, simply to whet the unending appetite of the East.
A logistical impossibility, an abrogation of responsibility, to feed the miserable conquests of a fallen, corrupted, son who did not even wait to hear the answer to his proposal.
The Order said no. It bid the Dark Empath, if he was truly sincere about decreasing the misery in the world, to end his wars and return to the Holy Kingdom for cleansing and judgment. With its message it sent a new expedition, to bring the Dark Empath back by force if he would not come along willingly, lest he do more harm to others.
The day the expedition arrived and delivered its message, it is said the Dark Empath and Tyrant wept together. The day after, they resolved to continue regardless: if the Kingdom would not share its Order with the East in favor for the fewer numbers of the West, then the East would take that peace for itself… and if the Holy Kingdom would oppose it, then that would be one last war to be fought.
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*The concept of endarkening is a ‘once you understand this, your views are forever changed’ sort of thing. It’s the emotional scars that convince us that pain is a part of life and should be accepted, and even done to others when necessary: ‘life hurts, and sometimes we hurt the people we love’ rather than ‘do no harm.’ Like a scar, once you’ve endured/experienced it, you forever after know what it is, and even when you think you’ve forgotten you can still rub and it will still be there. Light Empaths of the Order are kept ‘enlightened’, optimistic, and vehemently anti-harm with their empath abilities: endarkened Empaths who believe that inflicting emotional harm can be justified are viewed with extreme distrust and suspicion, because an empathy who broadcasts suffering is a snowball effect waiting to happen to creating massive amounts of misery. ‘Endarkening’ happens as a result of sever trauma, or from over-exposure to negative emotions, whether emotions broadcast by others or emotions transferred and carried by an Empath. Far past endarkening is ‘enblackening’: those empaths who become utterly knumb and de-sensitized to the suffering of others, or even relish in it.
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Society-wise, Tyrannia is the expanding empire. It’s a military state that is geared towards fighting the next war and incorporating the conquests as quickly as possible. Tyrannia is the Mongols, the Huns: cities and kingdoms are shown what remains of those who refused, and offered a chance to submit. Those cities that submit remain intact, their people left alone so long as their leaders meet the demands of the Tyrant. Their identities are bowed, but not broken, so long as they serve. These are the lucky and smart ones.
Those that refuse are destroyed in every sense of the word. Those that fight to the last, pushed or bolstered by empaths who do not want to give up their prerogatives, are fought to the last person resisting. Defeated foes are broken, permanently, the tattoos scraped away and the clans burned and divided, breaking the old loyalties forever. Tribes are split up, immediate families moved across the empire to regroup with new, unfamiliar peoples. Old feuds are buried, sometimes literally, when the former inhabitants are replaced. Cities are emptied and re-filled: nomadic caravans of people moving across the plains to their new location, escorted by soldiers of the Tyrant and his empaths, are common. It is population reorganization on a massive scale, with the defeated driven not simply by whips of leather but the whips of the mind from the dark empaths who oversee such things.
Tyrannia is massive, and it’s hard to conceptualize it. It is the Mongul Empire of an alternate Eurasia, only with more cities as well as tribes scattered along its map: a bloody, brutal, horrific expansion followed by a relative order not known before. Raiding along the primary routes is minimal, even by the standards of the West. Fear, force, and the fear of force, as channeled by dark and black empaths, is used to quickly pacify those regions that do being to become restive, but these regions are surprisingly few: many alive still remember what life was like before Tyrannia brought order, while those who have grown up afterwards have never known anything else. Tyrannia has brought a bad landscape to sometimes bad, often neutral, a bargain to the desperate.
The key to this all, as always, remains empathy. Specifically the dark empaths, organized under the leadership of the Dark Empath himself. Part secret police, part personal agents of the Tyrant and Dark Empath, part military support, and part bureaucracy of the state, the Dark Empath set up his own version of the Order to hold Tyrannia together. Raised and indoctrinated in the Dark Empathy philosophy of necessary-evils for greater goods, the Dark Empath Order uses both White and Black empathy in far more proactive ways than the Order does. Using not only virtues but also vices and fears, the Dark Empaths are both carrot-and-stick to improve the lives of the Many.
Unlike the White Empathy exclusivity of the Order, the Dark Order gives a member a task and leaves it to them as to how they will accomplish it: dark empaths may intimidate, charm, and otherwise pacify as they see fit. Yes, that means they’re more or less the Spectres of Tyrannia, besides the unlimited legal privilages. No, it doesn’t work out perfectly, and the flaws of such a system are a bit more obvious: our first impression with the Dark Empaths is a bad one because the one we meet does dabble in Black Empathy and is antagonistic to us. But one aspect of dark empathy is that it’s very hard to stay truly in the middle: the ‘purer’ one’s mindset (Black/White), the more effective their empathy skills are, and so most individuals shift towards Light or Black empathy practices because it works better for them.
The Dark Order has many different specialties that focus on different missions: internal pacification (dealing with conquered areas and peoples), law and order (crime and jury interrogations), war support (obvious), and internal investigation (those who investigate not only the bureaucracy for corruption, but scour the empathy ranks as well). Unlike the Order out west, the Dark Empath doesn’t forbid Black Empaths in general: though they are restricted in what they are allowed to do and closely watched, Black Empaths and even members of the Black Cabal (legal, but forbidden from unauthorized activities on pain of losing a head) serve an indisputably necessary part of the Dark Order, especially in the war front.
To the surprise of the Order and the Holy Kingdom, the Dark Order has its own empathy-transfer network as well. Though Tyrannia lacks access to the Well of Infinite Goodness, it makes a partial substitution by commercializing the empathy trade throughout its large empire. Empath-merchants buy and sell the emotions of people, buying happiness from those with more to spare and selling it to those who can afford it. Misery itself is also a commodity: depending on the market and circumstance, people may pay the empathy-merchants to take their misery away, or be paid in return: the Black Cabal and the war effort in general can always use more misery to fuel their emotional weapons. Non-empaths can literally profit from their own misery, which can help them stop being miserable.
Though the Dark Order doesn’t forbid the use of Black Empathy, or even Black Empaths themselves, it also still seeks to prevent all its Empaths from tipping over into blackness. Negative-overload concerns, while at a blacker point on the spectrum than the Order, is still a concern: to enblacken is the concern instead of those who endarken. But without the Well, there is no safe dumping ground: even selling one’s troubled state of mind to an empathy-merchant is just moving around the traditional zero-sum game.
Tyrannia’s solution is simple, direct, and unpleasant. The death of a criminal of good mind is a waste of a good mind: negative empathy that cannot be used elsewhere is taken to the executioner’s docket and dumped on the individual about to be killed for crimes committed. Life-destroying amounts of negative emotions and sentiments are dumped in full force onto someone whose life is about to end, in amounts that drive many people insane and suicidal: by the time one of these Black Empathy dumps is completed, death is a mercy, not the punishment… and this process is arguably an effective deterrent. It is one thing to risk death for a crime, but the emotional suffering as well… As the body dies so too do the emotions that the mind held and sustained, thus taking out of the system that many negative emotions*. This is a duty that only the emotionally-calloused Black-Empaths can perform without losing what’s left of their sanity.
*Well, besides the residual post-death empathy that makes execution sites and the graveyards of Tyrannia miniature curse zones. More on that later.
===
Tyrannia’s branching point comes in a story quest in which the player is inside Tyrannia and meets the Dark Empath personally. After the Dark Empath tries to reason with you and convince you to join with him and Tyrania, the player is approached by the Black Cabal: the Black Cabal wants to help you assassinate the Dark Empath. Though they don’t expect you to join them, they propose it as a win-win: most of the other factions see the Dark Empath as the lynchpin of Tyraniaand will send you to Tyrannia looking to kill him and weaken Tyrannia*. The Black Cabal will play this up, and claim that they want to return Tyrannia to its true nature even if it weakens it. With a good speech/empathetic-perception check, the player can realize that they think Tyrannia will also be even stronger if it returns to the Blackest Days. Whether you do it for them them or simply help yourself to their advantage, the player is given the dilemma of carrying out the assassination or warning the Dark Empath and Tyrant of the coup.
Saving the Dark Empath is the ‘moderate’ Tyrannia, called ‘Dark’ Tyrannia. Killing him leads to ‘Black’ Tyrannia.
1) 'Dark Tyrannia': Tyrannia exists under the control and influence of the Dark Empath. A Napoleonic-figure together with the Tyrant, the Dark Empath's vision for the future is one of enduring peace through conquest and post-conquest reform: once a Light Empath sent to the East to stop the Tyrant, his exposure to the constant violence there made him see that the Holy Kingdom cared little about ending the endless wars elsewhere so long as the Kingdom itself was happy and safe. Endarkened by his connection to the Tyrant (once the Blackest man in the continent, the Dark Empath sees the unification of Tyrannia as the only feasible, quick path to peace. Though he initially intended to stop at the borders of the Kingdom, the Order fears him and has mobilized the entire kingdom. War is inevitable, but conquering the Holy Kingdom would allow him to take the Order’s system and the empathy-dense West and integrate them into Tyrannia.
Once the coup is brought to light, the Tyrant takes down the Black Cabal once and for all. Dark Tyrannia remains aiming for at least a somewhat noble goal, and the Dark Empath remains focused on the Holy Kingdom, but with an open mind regarding the future of the City States. The Dark Empath remains on a cynical, but not illogical or without optimism, path to Human progress at the cost of significant immediate suffering.
2) 'Black Tyrannia': In the Dark Empath's forces, however, is a cabal of Black Empaths. The most wicked of the wicked, this cabal approaches the player with an offer to kill the Dark Empath. To any player opposed to Tyrannia, this is a means to greatly weaken its strongest champion: to the Black Empaths, it is a means to retake control and return Tyrannia, and the Tyrant, to its original Black Empathy roots, which they believe will only make it stronger. Black Tyrannia is the ultimate dystopia, as the creation and spreading of feelings of misery and suffering is a goal in and of itself for the Black Empaths. Nihilist and cruel, Black Tyrannia is the ultimate 'evil' option.
*This is actually a generalization. The Enlightened King of the Moderate Holy Kingdom, being a bit more clever and with a better spy network, sends you to protect the Dark Empath in case there is a coup because a sane Tyrannia is a better foe to face, and a better foe to lose to, than Black Tyrannia. The moderate city states want the Dark Empath alive because he’ll focus on the Holy Kingdom first and foremost. The extreme Holy Kingdom and City States want to kill him, but will accept his survival.
Posted at 09:13 PM on 2012-01-06
===
Faction 3: The City States
===
The lands were Empaths are the fewest and least welcomed, but at the same time strongest and most diverse… and the least empowered. While the lands of Tyrannia have always been the limitless, lawless east into which the Holy Kingdom has expanded, the rugged North East has been where the antithesis civilizations have formed: pockets of civilizations which do not answer to Empaths.
The City States are not a strongly united entity. A multitude of independent cities, minor kingdoms, and fortress-towns, the North has never been truly united and likely never can be, thanks to the extreme terrains that separate help defend each bastion of civilization. Rugged mountain valleys, desert oasis, or the archipelagos in the North Sea, the City States fill the habitable land and endure the divisions.
Culturally diverse with a number of distinct identities, the City States as a whole are notorious for their in-fighting, regular (but often futile) wars against themselves… and for their near-universal antipathy for the Holy Kingdom, which for much of its history had played the City States against each other. The Holy Kingdom has a long history of expansionism in the North, and self-justifying it all the while.
One of the few shared sentiments that helps unite the City States is the general antipathy to Empaths and the Holy Kingdom. As long as Empaths have existed, they have dominated over the non-Empaths. Whether through ‘benevolent’ oligarchy of the Order to the West, or the terror-based horrors of the East, Empaths have never lived as equals. Before the rise of the City States, the North itself was a distant territory of the Holy Kingdom. The Holy Kingdom for a long time supported and propped up rulers of empathy-barons to maintain a grip on the lands. Being further away from the Well of Infinite Goodness, the Empath-Barons were permitted great discretion at how to manage dissent… and to use non-Order empaths to do so.
The first City State to not only rebel and replace the Empath-rulers with non-empaths, but resist all further Holy Kingdom attempts to restores its rule, was the City-State of Logos, an island-state in the North Sea. Logos became the bastion of non-empath empowerment, and supported the revolution of many of the City States that would eventually break free of the Holy Kingdom. The more successful the rebellions were, the more desperate the Empath-Barons became. The more desperate the Empath-Barons were, the greater empathy acts of suppression they resorted to. The greater the empathy acts, the stronger the anti-empath sentiments grew.
A few hundred years later, the City States still hate and fear the Holy Kingdom, opposing the Holy Kingdom’s expansions and unifying in the face of every attempt to divide and conquer. Though the Kingdom has long since given up its attempts to reclaim the North, suspicion lingers, and many in the City States would be just as happy if Tyrannia did destroy the Holy Kingdom, so long as they themselves were left alone.
The City States anti-empath culture rears itself not only in history, but its treatment of empaths in its own boundaries. While no universal sentiment or laws exist across all the city-states, treatment of empaths varies from hostile toleration to outright oppression. Empaths travelers are often suspected of either being there to steal positive emotions from people, or to spread misery: when such changes of moods do happen, an empathy only needs to be in proximity to be blamed. Empaths who aren’t affected by the hostile environment can expect serious restrictions thanks to their ‘gifts’: using any empathy without explicit prior consent by the other party tends to carry very heavy punishments, from fines to death. Empaths are often forbidden to own land, citizenship rights, and many other limitations.
Despite this anti-Empath sentiment, the City States produce some of the most potent, powerful, and varied empaths on the continent. Rich in empathy-absorbing materials and other influences, the types and manners of empathy can be as varied as the city-states themselves. Tactile-empaths (empaths who can share sensations, such as heat and cold), actually telepathy-bonded empaths (empaths who can share mental words with a bond-mate), and many more. One island on the Northern Archipelago, for example, has a unique empathy split: a sub-race of empaths of exceptional emotion who are ruled by passions (Ego-ians), and another race with remarkably dampened emotions ruled by their logic (Id-ians).
The hate-love relationship with empathy also carries over to resources and trade with the Holy Kingdom and even Tyrannia. The lands of the City States are rich in materials that can hold and store empathy: mined, grown, and gathered, these materials (metals, plants, and even animals) are sold to become the base-components for empathy artifacts. Pendants that literally radiate courage, potions that rejuvenate, swords that can spread terror in their enemies, or armors that shield their wearers from emotional assaults: the materials of the North can make these things.
Passing up on Empathy to placate themselves, however, the City States are also a center for cultural and technological advancement. While empathy-traders exist, selling and buying emotions, non-empath solutions are favored within the City States for raising social wellbeing. Technologies to make life easier, medicines (and drugs) to help make life more fulfilling, or political theories like democracy, are experimented on in a highly-competitive environment to encourage the best ideas to win. While there are many losers in these competitions, people of the City States generally accept this base level of suffering the be a reasonable cost, and one that can be made up by coming up with the next good idea.
===
Conceptual Outline
Hard to get across in the summary, but the City States are a mix between the Greek City States (duh), the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance, but also the inequality and ugliness of a Europe during the industrial revolution
Politically, the City States of Greece. In-fighting is regular, but so is unifying in the face of the great external threat (in this case, the Holy Kingdom and Tyrannia). You’d have Sparta and Athens analogs (militarist and democratic city states) working together under a common congress/alliance.
Socially, more of the Italian peninsula of the Renaissance. A new acceleration of social and technological advancement. While the Holy Kingdom is a nice enough place to live, it also is pretty much Dark Ages in terms of society and technology. A better comparison than the Renaissance might be the Ottoman Empire’s golden age of science and philosophy, only without the unity and religion. Rather than a revival of old ways of thought, a new start of progress.
Economically, I’m thinking in terms of industrial revolution, only without the industrialization: windmills and water mills, not precision machines. Extreme inequality: some very rich groups, and lots of really, really poor people who struggle to make it big. The main thing that keeps a class-war from breaking out is the anti-Empath sentiment giving a more convenient target. We’re looking at the technological difference between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. Holy Kingdom uses Long Bows, while City States are starting to use Crossbows. The City States have the best, most expensive equipment around.
The Empaths, of course, are the… gypsies. Seen as semi-magical, bringers of bad things, stealers of good things, but also mysteriously powerful and interesting in their own right. No one really wants them, even if they do provide their own uses. Not rich enough, or organized enough, to warrant the ‘Jewesh-capitalist conspiracy’ aura: Empaths aren’t allowed to be rich, and try to travel with their own kind even as they make a living. Empaths are caravan-traders (again, gypsy themes), traveling around in clans and carrying emotions for sale. They aren’t allowed to become bankers or elites. Most city states will tolerate an Empath caravan for a short while, but few tolerate them for long.
A very, very few City States are known to forcibly conscript Empaths and put them to work as servants of the city: these Empath Agents are raised to be fanatically loyal to their city-states, regardless of the public’s treatment.
While most Empaths in the rest of the continent are uniform in their nature, the varied terrain of the City State, and the plentiful emotional forces and terrain allow ‘special’ brands Empathy to develop. Think of it as ‘ethnicity’ of empathy: the continent is covered by one ‘ethnicity’, but in distinct areas or islands unique ‘ethnicities’ can rise. These are the empaths with non-standard abilities that most empaths don’t. They can generally be slotted with ‘anything that would be cool, but not what we want everyone else to have.’ The only absolute limitation of all Empaths is that they can only have a mental affect on others: no psychic precognition, telekinesis, or anything else supernatural. (Example: a rare ‘breed’ of Empath would be one which can transmit not emotions, but senses of pain and pleasure. Imagine going into battle, and then having the vivid experience of childbirth.)
===
Game Role
The City States remain the pivotal power on the Continent. While smaller than Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom, they are more than large enough to play king-maker. The City States, however, are highly divided on what they are to do: they believe war is inevitable, but aren’t decided on who the enemy is.
Some would make peace with the Holy Kingdom and face the greater enemy, Tyrannia. Others would try and cut a deal with Tyrannia, and work against the Holy Kingdom. These are the anti-Tyrania and pro-Tyrania factions. These are the ‘moderate’ groups, not least because they’re also open to using native empaths for the war effort. The third, and largest, faction would say ‘to hell with all empaths,’ and try and use the war to cripple both Empath-powers and putting all empaths in their place. This is the anti-Empath faction, and the extreme group.
When the player gets around to the City States, the collective-assembly is deliberating on whether City-State Empaths should be used or not. The Moderates wish to use the few empaths in the City States as weapons, to give them a role in this society. The Extremists would arrest all Empaths and put them in detainment camps, to prevent any traitors or empathy-spies from running amuck… and to make up for the lack of Empaths, are proposing radical reforms such as freeing slaves and letting women serve as soldiers as well.
Securing the 'Moderate' ascension to power is one that, while racist and suppressive, at least tolerates Empaths in the otherwise most democratic and progressive society on the Continent. The moderates are then broken up over whether to side with Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom, or to go it alone… but they’re at least open to an alliance.
Should the Extremists raise to power, the tennor in the City States becomes outright suppression, and sometimes worse. Though life sucks for Empaths should the extremist City States win, the City States are otherwise the most progressive society in this setting (woman's suffrage, welfare, an abolition of racism, personal liberties, and more). The Extremists are not interested with an alliance with either Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom.
The first City States story arc has to do with deciding whether the Moderates or Extremists shape the conduct of the war. The second City States story arc has to do with shaping any alliance between the City States and one of the other powers.
Faction 3: The City States
===
The lands were Empaths are the fewest and least welcomed, but at the same time strongest and most diverse… and the least empowered. While the lands of Tyrannia have always been the limitless, lawless east into which the Holy Kingdom has expanded, the rugged North East has been where the antithesis civilizations have formed: pockets of civilizations which do not answer to Empaths.
The City States are not a strongly united entity. A multitude of independent cities, minor kingdoms, and fortress-towns, the North has never been truly united and likely never can be, thanks to the extreme terrains that separate help defend each bastion of civilization. Rugged mountain valleys, desert oasis, or the archipelagos in the North Sea, the City States fill the habitable land and endure the divisions.
Culturally diverse with a number of distinct identities, the City States as a whole are notorious for their in-fighting, regular (but often futile) wars against themselves… and for their near-universal antipathy for the Holy Kingdom, which for much of its history had played the City States against each other. The Holy Kingdom has a long history of expansionism in the North, and self-justifying it all the while.
One of the few shared sentiments that helps unite the City States is the general antipathy to Empaths and the Holy Kingdom. As long as Empaths have existed, they have dominated over the non-Empaths. Whether through ‘benevolent’ oligarchy of the Order to the West, or the terror-based horrors of the East, Empaths have never lived as equals. Before the rise of the City States, the North itself was a distant territory of the Holy Kingdom. The Holy Kingdom for a long time supported and propped up rulers of empathy-barons to maintain a grip on the lands. Being further away from the Well of Infinite Goodness, the Empath-Barons were permitted great discretion at how to manage dissent… and to use non-Order empaths to do so.
The first City State to not only rebel and replace the Empath-rulers with non-empaths, but resist all further Holy Kingdom attempts to restores its rule, was the City-State of Logos, an island-state in the North Sea. Logos became the bastion of non-empath empowerment, and supported the revolution of many of the City States that would eventually break free of the Holy Kingdom. The more successful the rebellions were, the more desperate the Empath-Barons became. The more desperate the Empath-Barons were, the greater empathy acts of suppression they resorted to. The greater the empathy acts, the stronger the anti-empath sentiments grew.
A few hundred years later, the City States still hate and fear the Holy Kingdom, opposing the Holy Kingdom’s expansions and unifying in the face of every attempt to divide and conquer. Though the Kingdom has long since given up its attempts to reclaim the North, suspicion lingers, and many in the City States would be just as happy if Tyrannia did destroy the Holy Kingdom, so long as they themselves were left alone.
The City States anti-empath culture rears itself not only in history, but its treatment of empaths in its own boundaries. While no universal sentiment or laws exist across all the city-states, treatment of empaths varies from hostile toleration to outright oppression. Empaths travelers are often suspected of either being there to steal positive emotions from people, or to spread misery: when such changes of moods do happen, an empathy only needs to be in proximity to be blamed. Empaths who aren’t affected by the hostile environment can expect serious restrictions thanks to their ‘gifts’: using any empathy without explicit prior consent by the other party tends to carry very heavy punishments, from fines to death. Empaths are often forbidden to own land, citizenship rights, and many other limitations.
Despite this anti-Empath sentiment, the City States produce some of the most potent, powerful, and varied empaths on the continent. Rich in empathy-absorbing materials and other influences, the types and manners of empathy can be as varied as the city-states themselves. Tactile-empaths (empaths who can share sensations, such as heat and cold), actually telepathy-bonded empaths (empaths who can share mental words with a bond-mate), and many more. One island on the Northern Archipelago, for example, has a unique empathy split: a sub-race of empaths of exceptional emotion who are ruled by passions (Ego-ians), and another race with remarkably dampened emotions ruled by their logic (Id-ians).
The hate-love relationship with empathy also carries over to resources and trade with the Holy Kingdom and even Tyrannia. The lands of the City States are rich in materials that can hold and store empathy: mined, grown, and gathered, these materials (metals, plants, and even animals) are sold to become the base-components for empathy artifacts. Pendants that literally radiate courage, potions that rejuvenate, swords that can spread terror in their enemies, or armors that shield their wearers from emotional assaults: the materials of the North can make these things.
Passing up on Empathy to placate themselves, however, the City States are also a center for cultural and technological advancement. While empathy-traders exist, selling and buying emotions, non-empath solutions are favored within the City States for raising social wellbeing. Technologies to make life easier, medicines (and drugs) to help make life more fulfilling, or political theories like democracy, are experimented on in a highly-competitive environment to encourage the best ideas to win. While there are many losers in these competitions, people of the City States generally accept this base level of suffering the be a reasonable cost, and one that can be made up by coming up with the next good idea.
===
Conceptual Outline
Hard to get across in the summary, but the City States are a mix between the Greek City States (duh), the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance, but also the inequality and ugliness of a Europe during the industrial revolution
Politically, the City States of Greece. In-fighting is regular, but so is unifying in the face of the great external threat (in this case, the Holy Kingdom and Tyrannia). You’d have Sparta and Athens analogs (militarist and democratic city states) working together under a common congress/alliance.
Socially, more of the Italian peninsula of the Renaissance. A new acceleration of social and technological advancement. While the Holy Kingdom is a nice enough place to live, it also is pretty much Dark Ages in terms of society and technology. A better comparison than the Renaissance might be the Ottoman Empire’s golden age of science and philosophy, only without the unity and religion. Rather than a revival of old ways of thought, a new start of progress.
Economically, I’m thinking in terms of industrial revolution, only without the industrialization: windmills and water mills, not precision machines. Extreme inequality: some very rich groups, and lots of really, really poor people who struggle to make it big. The main thing that keeps a class-war from breaking out is the anti-Empath sentiment giving a more convenient target. We’re looking at the technological difference between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. Holy Kingdom uses Long Bows, while City States are starting to use Crossbows. The City States have the best, most expensive equipment around.
The Empaths, of course, are the… gypsies. Seen as semi-magical, bringers of bad things, stealers of good things, but also mysteriously powerful and interesting in their own right. No one really wants them, even if they do provide their own uses. Not rich enough, or organized enough, to warrant the ‘Jewesh-capitalist conspiracy’ aura: Empaths aren’t allowed to be rich, and try to travel with their own kind even as they make a living. Empaths are caravan-traders (again, gypsy themes), traveling around in clans and carrying emotions for sale. They aren’t allowed to become bankers or elites. Most city states will tolerate an Empath caravan for a short while, but few tolerate them for long.
A very, very few City States are known to forcibly conscript Empaths and put them to work as servants of the city: these Empath Agents are raised to be fanatically loyal to their city-states, regardless of the public’s treatment.
While most Empaths in the rest of the continent are uniform in their nature, the varied terrain of the City State, and the plentiful emotional forces and terrain allow ‘special’ brands Empathy to develop. Think of it as ‘ethnicity’ of empathy: the continent is covered by one ‘ethnicity’, but in distinct areas or islands unique ‘ethnicities’ can rise. These are the empaths with non-standard abilities that most empaths don’t. They can generally be slotted with ‘anything that would be cool, but not what we want everyone else to have.’ The only absolute limitation of all Empaths is that they can only have a mental affect on others: no psychic precognition, telekinesis, or anything else supernatural. (Example: a rare ‘breed’ of Empath would be one which can transmit not emotions, but senses of pain and pleasure. Imagine going into battle, and then having the vivid experience of childbirth.)
===
Game Role
The City States remain the pivotal power on the Continent. While smaller than Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom, they are more than large enough to play king-maker. The City States, however, are highly divided on what they are to do: they believe war is inevitable, but aren’t decided on who the enemy is.
Some would make peace with the Holy Kingdom and face the greater enemy, Tyrannia. Others would try and cut a deal with Tyrannia, and work against the Holy Kingdom. These are the anti-Tyrania and pro-Tyrania factions. These are the ‘moderate’ groups, not least because they’re also open to using native empaths for the war effort. The third, and largest, faction would say ‘to hell with all empaths,’ and try and use the war to cripple both Empath-powers and putting all empaths in their place. This is the anti-Empath faction, and the extreme group.
When the player gets around to the City States, the collective-assembly is deliberating on whether City-State Empaths should be used or not. The Moderates wish to use the few empaths in the City States as weapons, to give them a role in this society. The Extremists would arrest all Empaths and put them in detainment camps, to prevent any traitors or empathy-spies from running amuck… and to make up for the lack of Empaths, are proposing radical reforms such as freeing slaves and letting women serve as soldiers as well.
Securing the 'Moderate' ascension to power is one that, while racist and suppressive, at least tolerates Empaths in the otherwise most democratic and progressive society on the Continent. The moderates are then broken up over whether to side with Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom, or to go it alone… but they’re at least open to an alliance.
Should the Extremists raise to power, the tennor in the City States becomes outright suppression, and sometimes worse. Though life sucks for Empaths should the extremist City States win, the City States are otherwise the most progressive society in this setting (woman's suffrage, welfare, an abolition of racism, personal liberties, and more). The Extremists are not interested with an alliance with either Tyrannia or the Holy Kingdom.
The first City States story arc has to do with deciding whether the Moderates or Extremists shape the conduct of the war. The second City States story arc has to do with shaping any alliance between the City States and one of the other powers.
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