Empire of the Bear: A History-Book After the End AAR

[GangsterSynod]

To understand the Celestial Empire, we have to first understand the Cetic religion, for the two were inseparable. Our knowledge of the pre-Event world is not perfect, but to our knowledge, pre-event America was divided up into several broad cultural and geographical regions: the Northeast, Southeast, Heartland, Southwest, and Northwest. The three coasts of America, the West, East, and Gulf, were all more cosmopolitan and urban, in contrast to the more sparsely populated, rural Heartland. The East was the political and financial center, the West a cultural and technological center, and the Gulf broadly a service and light-industrial center. The West Coast, comprising the states of California, Oregon, and Washington (confusingly, the capital of ancient America was also named Washington), was always more religiously syncretic than any other region in America, and this dynamic only strengthened and grew more prominent after the Event, as the religions prominent in the major cities of the region—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego—underwent significant changes. The idea of an approaching “New Age”, connected through means that we do not fully understand to the ancient zodiac symbol of Aquarius, was a common theme across the residents of California at the time, and the arrival of the Event only solidified that idea among the broader population. The Indian notions of reincarnation and its endless cycle, broken only by the most perfected soul, entered into this heterogenous mixture, as did remnants of Indigenous traditions, both genuine and imagined, particularly as regarded nature and environmentalism more broadly. Though the pre-Event West Coast did not always live up to its environmental ambitions, the broader populace had accepted the theory of “Spaceship Earth”, Earth as a closed system where all people had a role to play in maintenance, by the time of the Event (though the scholarship on this is dubious, resting more on the evidence of old soap containers than a historian might wish). Moderation of action and religious harmony were very much common themes in the region as well, unlike in the Heartland or the South more broadly. Religious strife post-Event, while present, more so than many acknowledge today, was not nearly at the level of much of the rest of the continent. The conditions, in short, were ripe for a grand synthesis of the faiths post-Event, which would likely have happened sooner or later even if Elton the Lawgiver had never lived. Others with talent could have found the moment and seized it, uniting the Pacific faiths through pen and sword, but Elton’s unique genius was that he bound the faith, state, and ruler inextricably together as had not existed since the days of Muhammad and the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs or Constantine’s endowment of lands to the Christian Church, perhaps outdoing even those. In doing so, however, he sowed the seeds for his line’s ultimate demise, his empire’s collapse, and his faith’s total destruction. In binding all parts together, he ensured that if one failed, all would fail.

The religion itself is instructive as well, and close study of its tenets and schools provides clues for consideration of the empire itself. Like any religion and/or philosophy, Ceticism was primarily concerned with living rightly and organizing society rightly. What did it mean for someone to be a “dude”? How was one supposed to remain “chill” when one was beset on all sides by injustice? How could one avoid falling to Mammon and becoming “The Man”? What, if anything, awaited after death? What wisdom could a person take from the Great Teachers (Muhammad, representing the bellicose Way of the Fist and the city of Sacramento; Jesus, representing the pacifistic Way of the Dove and the city of San Diego; the Buddha, representing the scholarly Way of the Book and the city of San Francisco, Henry David Thoreau, representing the Gaian-syncretic Way of the Branch and the city of Portland; Elron Hubbard, representing the pragmatic and manipulatory Way of the Cowl and the city of Los Angeles; and the First Emperor, supposed to embody all of those ways) and the Minor Teachers (an official tally in the 2880s ran to about eighty names, the most famous among them including Carl Sagan, Plato, Moses, Marcus Aurelius, and Joseph Smith) and what aspects of their teachings should be avoided?

On a more concrete level, how should one go about in the world? Given that greed was to be shunned at all costs, should one be profiting from one’s labor? If so, what percentage approximately would be extortionate, and in what profession would profit be most meritorious or least harmful? Should one patronize the business of someone you know to be inconsiderate towards others when fairly easy alternatives exist? What is one’s obligation to a family member who steals from you? Can you fraudulently sell or trade a product, even when you know it to be of better quality than what was asked for? How can one best care for a sickly child who lashes out at others? Is it problematic to eat meat and/or dairy products, and if not, would it be more meritorious to abstain? We know of these last few questions, and their answers, from Imperial Opinions, which were essentially crosses between a fatwa and a formal law. Citizens, from the most noble and wealthy to the poorest and humblest, could write in to the Imperial Court and the Emperor would evaluate their query, eventually distributing an answer to the entirety of California, an opinion that at once had the force of secular law and religious precedent. Since many of these queries were about purely personal, ethical matters, enforcement was rare, but it did occur.

A citizen, one Carlos F. of Redding, wrote in during the early reign of Terpen the Timekeeper (2743-2781) to ask whether officials who were claiming extra taxes in the name of the Emperor were telling the truth and sending it on, and in any case whether an unannounced double tax of that kind was justifiable, given the state of the peasantry there. Surprisingly, this scandal had not previously come to the attention of the Imperial Court, and its retribution was swift. The officials responsible were rounded up a day before the publication of the Opinion, made to read it and take responsibility for the lie in front of the Imperial person, then taken through every subprefectures of the Kingdom of Jefferson and do the same in front of the jeering crowds, visiting the subprefecture of Redding last. It was there that they were hanged, their corpses burned, and their families made to watch. It is somewhat unsurprising in this context to note that, for much of the reign of the Nine Good Emperors, graft and corruption in the Imperial Bureaucracy simply ceased to exist. The combination of a constant ear to the populist ground, strong scrutiny of the bureaucracy, and a willingness to be harsh to subordinates in order to maintain Imperial authority and order both physical and metaphysical would prove to be the toolkit that made the Emperors simultaneously awed, feared, loved, respected, and venerated for generations.
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Hey guys, thanks for following along! I'd appreciate any feedback if you have it. One big problem that's going to come up a little more in future that I didn't anticipate going in is that I have no idea how to write about Scientology while not getting sued, because the makers of the mod decided to put Hubbard up there with Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha in prominence for Ceticism. I guess that makes some sense considering Los Angeles, but still... Also, like I said in the first post, I'm trying to make this a little pompous and long-winded, but I'm worried it's a little too much so. Thoughts?
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Hmm, I'm not normally interesting in AtE, but that introduction has me hooked.

Subbed!

Excellent, glad to have you on board.

This looks good fun. I'll have to reacquaint myself with After the End – I'm sure I knew what it entailed once upon a time, but I've only a vague idea now.

Good luck!

It's apparently somewhat inspired by A Canticle for Liebowitz, if you've read that. In any event, the world experienced some unspecified cataclysm some time after the late 40s/early 50s, throwing the population back to essentially the medieval era by the 27th century. So there are literal Minnesota Vikings, the Amish, as the ones best prepared to survive a global shock, took over New York and Pennsylvania, Brazil has become an empire akin to China, things of that nature.

 

[GangsterSynod]

We have already talked somewhat about the religious development and syncretization of Ceticism, but that knowledge, while useful, does not prepare us for or explain to us Ceticism’s focus on the Imperial person, one of its defining features. We know from what scholars today call “meta-archaeological research” (an admittedly controversial term) that many cultures thousands of years before the Event regarded their leaders as more than or as something other than human, particularly notably in ancient Egypt and parts of pre-Columbian South America. This is an odd quirk of human nature, and even in societies where this leader-as-deity discourse was long dismissed, traces of it creep back up. There seems to have been a trend in the pre-Event United States to treat the Founders and Framers as a sort of civic pantheon, as flawless creatures with great foresight and unimpeachable judgment. While this discourse seems to have faded somewhat over time, it was resurrected in the years after the Event by the so-called “Americanists” on the East Coast, who sought to reinvigorate the America of the Founders and continue their legacy, thriving for hundreds of years before succumbing to slow Anabaptist and Evangelical conquest. California was, after all, a crucial part of the United States, so it is possible that the leader-as-deity discourse was an American inheritance that simmered quietly there under the surface before being exhumed by Elton I. Californians may have had need for a god-king long before Elton wrote his famous Invincible Letter.

The folklore in the Bay Area gives some credence to this view. We do not know much about Norton I, Emperor of the United States, and what we do know is very hard to square with the political realities that we do know existed at the time. Sifting through myth and legend for nuggets of truth is a hard, almost an impossible task, but several commonalities in the legend emerge. Norton, the folktales agree, was a Jewish immigrant from South Africa who lived in San Francisco in the 19th century. He became a merchant and for a time was wealthy, but was bankrupted by bad luck. Norton lived in poverty, but one day, he declared to the city (the various versions of the myth differ regarding the method; the most common version has him writing letters to the various newspapers in the area, and some versions have Norton sending his declaration to all the newspapers of America, which likely did not occur. Even with our scarce documentary record of pre-Event newspapers, such a seemingly important event would have had some perceptible coverage) that he was the first and only legitimate Emperor of the United States. The details of how he lived after this declaration are somewhat fuzzy. The legends agree that he clashed with the civic authorities at first, but later entered into a partnership with them; that he had a special relationship with the peoples of Chinese descent in San Francisco; that he lived in poverty but promulgated a currency that was widely accepted by many businesses in the city. They agree that he became a symbol of the city and of California, and that many important people traveled from all over the world to seek his advice.

In most versions of the legend, Norton is, after a series of marvelous events of one kind or another, eventually acclaimed by California and the West as the rightful ruler in 1876, in contrast to the corrupt, feckless, argumentative, and decadent Congress. He and his closest companions leave for the District of Columbia, where the people acclaim him in the streets as the rightful ruler. But the President and Congress are jealous of his popularity and seek to hold onto their power. President Hayes welcomes him “with sweet words” and promises to institute a peaceful transition to Imperial rule. The two become friendly and, despite Norton’s companions warning him not to trust Hayes, he accepts the President’s invitation to attend an outdoor Fourth of July celebration, in the heat of the Washington summer. The duplicitous Hayes, however, has poisoned that afternoon’s refreshments, and Norton dies after consuming a large quantity of cherries and iced milk, in what Hayes’ doctors call a “noxious flux”. Having no heirs, President Hayes declares the Empire to be dissolved and the Congress to be reinstated, and the people sadly disperse, but not before holding a gargantuan funeral in his honor. In some retellings, this is where it ends, but in most, his companions are said to come to his grave the next day and dig it up, seeking to transport him by rail to California, where they believe he should lie. They meet a surprise when they touch spade to soil, however: though his grave was undisturbed, the body is gone. Though they do not understand what has happened, they eventually come to believe that he has gone into what amounts to a state of occultation, and will return when he is needed, when California looks at risk of collapse.

This is a fine story, but there appears to be no evidence for any sort of journey to Washington. We know that at the time of Norton’s supposed “reign” that America operated in full governmental continuity from the days of the Founders and indeed fought the Civil War in part to preserve federal, congressional authority over the states. The election of 1876 does seem to have been extraordinarily contentious, for reasons we cannot today completely ascertain, but it seems clear that Norton could not have had any role in them or any sort of authority nationwide, nor does the evidence suggest that he was elected to high office of any kind. If he had political authority at all, it was on a very local level. Perhaps he was mayor of San Francisco and not a self-proclaimed Emperor at all, perhaps he was simply a popular half-mad street-corner figure that the city subsidized out of whimsy, perhaps he did not exist. We may never know. Most of the areas on which the legends are fully in agreement are, while somewhat unlikely, not out of the realm of possibility, however. We do know that a significant number of Chinese immigrants came to California in the 19th century to work on the railroads and that San Francisco was a mercantile hub in the 19th century, and nothing prevented an individual from mailing letters to newspapers declaring he was the rightful Emperor of the United States. The legend of Norton, First of His Name, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico is not remarkable for the details of the story or for Norton the man, but because of the legend's legacy. Something about this story was so persistent that it developed and spread beyond the Bay for centuries, eventually reaching all parts of California. Something about it tapped into the ruler-as-deity discourse that Elton I would draw on and derive imperial legitimacy from, in much the same way that the quasi-Presidents on the East Coast would sanctify the Founders and Framers.
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I promise we're getting to gameplay eventually! One more characterless entry, on the geography and production of California pre-Empire, will be coming soon enough, as well as some number of entries on Elton I and his descendants before gameplay starts. My goal is to get to gameplay by the end of August. Emperor Norton was a real guy, by the way, who led a fantastically interesting life and who I was very glad to see depicted as a legendary figure in California's title history. I tried to balance the real facts about him with the embellishments and confusions about 19th-century American history that would inevitably come after 600 years of continuous retelling, and I'm not sure how well I succeeded. Hope you guys enjoy.

 

[GangsterSynod]

I've been having a little difficulty writing this next update, but I should have it out soon. I've had to do some actual research on California's agricultural industry, and I've downloaded several PDFs from California's Department of Agriculture. As it turns out, they may not actually check the PDFs once they put them up? At least, that's the only way I can explain this, which I am presenting here as a little teaser, in a blatant attempt to maintain reader interest until I have the update ready.

The rest of the PDF is normal, and I've learned quite a bit, but... yeah.

 

[GangsterSynod]

The regions of California. From top, left-to-right: Jefferson, Gran Francisco, Sacramento (Imperial Capital and its environs), The Valley, Death Valley (never an officially recognized region or Kingdom), Socal, and Baja (not pictured)​

California was one of the most developed parts of Old America, and, unlike the East Coast, had two major areas of production: agriculture and technology. The lands of Gran Francisco, the Valley, and of small parts of Southern California (the post-Event region of Socal) are some of the most fertile on Earth and remain so to this day, and many of the crops grown now were grown during the American period. Grapes, strawberries, oranges, almonds, and pistachios were grown through the American period and survived the Event quite well, though yields of all kinds of crops were much lower due to the sudden elimination of the harvesting machinery and the general post-Event drastic drop in population. Cattle, sheep, and goats, used for both meat and milk, grazed the grassy hills and fields of California throughout both the American and Imperial periods. California’s sunny, moderate climate and mild winters made for long growing seasons and consistently good harvests, and its easy access to water and fertile soil made it by far the most productive farmland acre for acre in at least North America and probably the entirety of the Americas, even after the Event. But California was not merely an extremely productive agricultural region, it was the only region in the Americas that could grow many highly desired agricultural goods. After the Event, California held an absolute monopoly on the production of garlic, olives, tomatoes, dates, and figs, and a near-monopoly in that most crucial of products, wine.

A grape-friendly climate broadly existed in only two places in the Americas: the Empires of California and Brazil (with some minor exceptions in Ohio and Western Hudsonia). Wine was desired for several reasons. First and foremost, it was a status symbol, a way of differentiating an American person of means from their inferiors, who largely drank beer or corn whiskey, and demonstrating the drinker’s refinement of taste. Like all alcoholic beverages, it was a drink free from potentially harmful microorganisms, reducing the drinker’s likelihood of getting sick. Its alcohol content also made it a useful preservative, and it was sometimes bought as such. Wine’s geographic scarcity of production (even in California, there were relatively few distinct wine-growing areas), upper-class consumer base, and fairly continuous demand made it a vital revenue stream for California, with Californian bottles being found as far away as the Maritimes and Haiti, and the figure of the Emperor was tied up almost as much with the symbols of wine and the Imperial wine monopoly as with the Californian bear.

The Winelands. Before the Celestial Empire's founding, both the Subprefectures of Yolo and Sacramento were considered to be part of the Winelands.​

The Emperors constantly strived to show themselves surrounded by the symbols of agricultural abundance, and this is a common focus of scholarship on this period, but what is less talked about is the Emperors’ deliberate linkage with the other major legacy of California’s past, its technological sector. Our knowledge of the exact date of the Event is fuzzy, and all chronologies are doomed to failure in some ways, but what is clear is that California was a center of technology at the time. The government and Stanford University cooperated to fund industry in the area, and soon silicon transistors and computer parts were pouring out of the Bay. The Event hit urban areas particularly hard, though, and the “Silicon Valley” was strangled almost in its crib. All that was left were the burnt-out shells of what was clear were particularly grand structures and many strange devices strewn across the area. These devices, largely calculation tools, became objects of prestige for the local rulers, eventually coming to the same status almost as a crown or scepter for demonstrating legitimacy. If a lord of the post-Event Bay wished to seriously rule, they must at least have owned an Old American calculator. Many rulers had pieces of Old American computers and supercomputers in their treasuries as well, and these were often exhibited at special occasions such as feasts to demonstrate the local lord’s veneration for the past prosperity of California and their dedication to bringing about similar prosperity in the future. When Elton I had finally conquered the Goldengate region, one of his first actions was to visit the ruins of Stanford University and be crowned as King of Gran Francisco with a calculator in his hand and atop a throne of computer parts. Subsequent kings would repeat the tradition.

The Emperors’ focus on the symbols of California’s prosperity contain in plain sight clues as to how Elton rose to power in the first place and shine a little light into the inevitability of a unified California. Agricultural yields, after plunging dramatically in the century or so after the Event, had started to scale upwards over time, and the land was starting to support more peasants. We know, for instance, that the number of taxable homesteads in what would become the Imperial Prefecture of Fresno quadrupled from 2507 to 10,086 over the 24th century, taxable homesteads refer only to those where peasants were living some ways above subsistence level, and a typical homestead would have an extended family group of ten to twelve people in it. This was especially remarkable considering the level of conflict and devastation that was a constant presence in California at the time. This type of growth was not evenly distributed across all of California, however. While the lands of Gran Francisco and the Valley were largely rich, Northern California and much of Socal and Baja was mountainous and poor, and the data we have reflect that. Taxable homesteads in what would become the Imperial Prefecture of North Jefferson stayed almost completely stagnant over the 24th century, rising from 550 to 574. The great disparities between the productivity and populations of Gran Francisco and the Valley and everywhere else meant that any Californian conquests would originate from there. Additionally, the market for wine so vastly outstripped in price and demand every other Californian product that the lands that produced it, the northerly parts of Gran Francisco and the North Valley, were far wealthier than even the other agriculturally productive, populous areas of central California. Once the Winelands were unified, as happened during the Warlord Period of the 2200s-2416, one could say it was almost inevitable that California would eventually follow, even if Elton the Lawgiver had never been born. As it was, however, Elton unified California under the symbol of the Bear, but won it with wine and legitimized it with technology.

A rough estimate of the wealth of California in the late 2600s. Green indicates the wealthiest areas and red indicates the poorest areas, with major trade routes in white and gold.​

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Hey folks, glad to see new people reading. This update was tougher than the others to produce and I'm not super satisfied with it. I was worried about making farming sound interesting, I didn't get to the history-from-below cultural aspects that i wanted to, and I felt like I could have done more to explain the role of pre-Event technology, but frankly it was getting to be a long enough post already and I've been keeping you guys waiting for far too long.

Can't believe I've let this one slip under the radar for so long; I usually try to keep an eye out for promising After the End AARs, but I guess I've been slipping lately. I for one thought the Emperor Norton background piece was excellent -- a fantastic blend of half-remembered history and exaggerated legends that encapsulates the spirit of the mod itself quite well.

Definitely going to keep an eye on this one, going forward

I'm very glad you like it and I hope you enjoy what you read going forward!

 

[GangsterSynod]

So I don't know that much about Islam. I think I know more about it than the average Anglosphere denizen, given that my main college study so far has been on the Middle Eastern portions of the Ottoman Empire and I've taken a class or two about it, but I am not a believer and I'm not super-knowledgeable. Basically I thought it could be cool to photoshop some actual Islamic art as a kind of example to show how religion has shifted after the Event in California (which will absolutely come into play next update), and I remembered I had a few cool slides from a class on Islamic afterlife narratives and eschatology I took a few months ago and changing them a bit.
I was thinking, in particular, of using these as a base:

These are selections from an illustrated mi'raj narrative (i.e. a version of Muhammad's Night Journey), the name of which I can't seem to find at the moment, made in Central Asia (from what I've been told, the figural depiction of the Prophet was largely not the biggest deal in many areas at the time, and the only place where figural depiction itself was completely prohibited was in the mosque space itself). The first picture depicts him speaking with an angel appearing as a giant heavenly rooster who is counting the time and praising Allah, the second of him and the buraq in the seventh heaven surrounded by divine light, the third is him talking to some sort of angel or archangel that I forget what the deal is, and the fourth is of him in union with the divine presence.
To tell you the truth, and I'm not proud of this, my first instinct was to consider Photoshopping James Dean's head onto the Prophet. I decided not to do that, because after thinking about it for slightly more than three seconds, it occurred to me that it would probably be incredibly blasphemous and offensive to every practicing Muslim in the world, as well as disrespectful to the art itself. I think I've made the right choice. But I still think that the art itself is very nice and something about its style still feels AtE Californian to me, and, since i think I want to retain you guys' attention through whenever I next have an update out (and it may be a while, because I'm taking the LSAT in a few days and may not have a lot of time), I'll present it here as a teaser (are these teasers the weirdest teasers in AARland or what?).
Hope you guys enjoy the next update when it comes out! If there are any Muslims reading this, I'm... really sorry about that, and I'd be interested in hearing your perspective.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Ok, so- I have 1000 words of an update, finally. It features war, skullduggery, dubious omens, and even more dubious scholarly theories. Unfortunately, this update will require more than 1000 words, perhaps much more. I've had you guys waiting too long already, so I think it's time for, yes, another teaser while I work on the update (which will hopefully be out Monday). In the meantime, I'd like to present one of several terrible MS Paint maps that will feature in the update:

I will leave you all to speculate as to what is going on here. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the meantime.

 

[GangsterSynod]

In retrospect, there were omens, at least according to later Imperial court chroniclers.* The winter of 2353 was much colder than usual, but despite that, multiple bears, the holy symbol of California since time immemorial, were seen walking down from the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada down into the Valley. At their head, it was said, was a golden bear**, a creature mentioned often in folktales and identified completely with the land, but virtually never seen before. The animals lumbered down through the warring states of Newton, Sinclair, and Rubinstein, and where they went, battles ceased. The chroniclers report that no soldier dared fight while the bears marched, for fear of getting struck down by the divine powers incarnate in ursine garb.

The bears then proceeded down to Sacramento, in the state of Waters, eventually lumbering towards the entrance of King Gustavo Waters’ palace. The bears walked surprisingly delicately into the King’s great hall, where they supposedly bowed (as much as a bear can bow, one assumes)—but not to the King, to his loyal squire and retainer Elton Yudkow. The bears, the chroniclers report, withdrew as suddenly and silently as they came, leaving a baffled king and an even more baffled squire behind.

California at this point was a mess of warring states and pathetic warlords, though extensive consolidation had occurred when compared to the first post-Event century. The map above is in many ways a simplification and shows more than anything the states’ spheres of influence more than directly administered territory (with the exception of Chu, with its poor, mountainous land that was nonetheless completely centrally-administered). Nevertheless, even from the map and the geography that we have already discussed, the status of the states can be gleaned. The Imamite state of Abbas controlled the entirety of Socal and was interested in maintaining the chaotic state of affairs to the north and subjugating the independent warlords in the lower Valley. Hernandez and Rubinstein had joined forces to partition wealthy, dying Newton, though they would almost certainly eye each other uneasily when the job was done. Sinclair aimed to control the strategic-though harsh- terrain of the Sierra Nevada and break the power of the non-aligned warlords while all other powers were distracted, with an eye to seizing their own piece of Newton. Flores and Chu were united and preparing to go on the warpath.

The kings of Waters, while powerful in their own domains, had faced competent, organized noble revolts throughout the last century, giving up more and more power in the process. A series of Kings unable to meaningfully exert their authority outside their crownlands led to an isolated court with no friendships and many de facto independent vassals. King Tyrus Chu and Queen Drusilla Flores, both rulers in their own right, saw an opportunity to partition the crownlands and in April 2354 (and according to the chroniclers a year to the day exactly since the bears’ visit) sealed their alliance with a lavish wedding in Tyrus’ palace at Humboldt. They also hired an assassin to do away with the heirless King Gustavo. The chaos of the interregnum, they hoped, would cause Waters’ autonomous vassals to defect to them as the strongest nearby powers of their own accord, leaving room for an easy seizure and partition of the crownlands among themselves. Unfortunately for them, when Waters was killed while out riding in Napa, his body peppered with so many arrows he reportedly looked like a chicken, there was no interregnum, and as it turned out, Elton Yudkow would be far more of a challenge than they bargained for.

We do not know much about Elton’s origins. Even his name is suspicious. “Yudkow” is not a classically Californian name, nor is it particularly traceable to any other place or people. There are two schools of thought about it, one perhaps more credible than the other. Elton was, as even his Imperial chroniclers and followers acknowledged, a willful, proud man with a capricious sense of humor. It is very possible that it simply popped into his head one day and caught his fancy. Some more fringe scholars think that he came from a family who converted to Judaism who originally bore the surname Jock. In Hebrew, “Jock” would be rendered “ יך” or “ ק‎י‎”, with the letters “Yud-Kuf” or “Yud-Kaf/Chaf”. This is an intriguing theory, and it makes a rough kind of sense on first glance. Unfortunately, there is no real evidence to support this. There were Jews, mostly of the Reform and Conservative schools, in the Valley, the warlord Rubinstein state being a particularly prominent example, but there is no evidence that there was any real conversion among the thin contemporary sources we have. Additionally, Elton’s philosophical writings feature no particularly exceptional knowledge about the tenets and observance of Judaism. ** It is a mystery, like almost all he touched. We know Elton lived, died, ruled, and wrote. What we do not truly have is Elton the man or Elton the child. There is a great ghost at the center of our portrait, and while we can shine light around the edges, we are ultimately left with a shadow.

Elton was almost certainly not sent to the Court of Waters by virtue of his family’s political connections, as many children were in those days. His actions as wartime ruler of Waters and Celestial Emperor suggest the picture of a striver, someone born with great intelligence and a chip on his shoulder (rather curious for the founder of a religion that highly values stillness, peace, and harmony with one’s self). This, and the fact that no records of any “Yudkows” owning land anywhere in the area, seems to indicate that he was either lowborn or of exceedingly minor nobility fallen on hard times and considered effectively no better than a peasant. More than likely, some minor functionary near his birthplace noted his intelligence as a child and thought to ask the royal court if they needed a position filled. The records of the old Castle Waters in Solano indicate that he was brought on board as a cook’s assistant, a terrible job involving immense time pressure, intense heat (so much so that there were admittedly infrequent reports of kitchen boys dying from heatstroke), and frequent hauling of heavy loads. The chief cooks also tended to the martinet at this time, at least if Martin Woolpacker’s contemporary satire Thomas, or a Kitchen Tale provides an accurate picture. Its description of a “cook’s temper on blazing boil, for rewards so paltry, for endless toil” and a cycle of violence over the most trivial matters such as “heeding not the warning for salad dress’, nine strong punches ‘bout the chest” hint at the grim existence of a kitchen boy. We can well imagine that Elton would have sought any way out he could. Fortunately for him, at some point in 2251, he caught the attention of King Waters, for he was listed in that year’s records not as “Elton, kitchen boy”, but as “Elton, squire”.

According to Lucinda Bihari, the Early Imperial chronicler generally considered to be the most reliable, in the hour after the news of the King’s death reached the castle, Elton did five things. First, he went to speak to Waters’ wife, Queen Heather Tehama. Bihari does not report what he said or did in that meeting, but he emerged with the Queen half an hour later. In the hall, he gave an speech where he declared, in a voice that sounded “almost inhuman, impassioned, frenzied, unfamiliar as Elton to all who heard it”, that “Waters would be revivified, but under another’s name, and would rule all California”. Immediately after the speech, he and the Queen were married in front of the stunned courtiers, who were prevented from leaving the castle. He then went to the barracks to raise the castle guard and with their help rounded up a few of the King’s personal attendants who for a variety of reasons had not, as they normally did, go with the King on that fateful trip, executing them immediately. On the sixty-first minute after the news came to court, Elton formally declared war on the states of Chu and Flores.

The Northern War took six months. Two of those months were purely devoted to marshalling forces. There was a month of maneuvering and skirmish culminating in one battle, and then three months of siege warfare. Elton’s tactics were with a few exceptions fairly unremarkable (but competent), but his strategy was unparalleled.**** Mountainous terrain is not generally used for rapid aggressive warfare, but Elton’s strategy of pushing through the fortified mountain passes of Bragg and Mendocino no matter the cost gave him a crucial if costlu edge against Chu and Flores. Neither expected little Waters to go on the offensive and they could have never conceived it would happen so quickly. Additionally, because of Chu’s extreme centralization and its poor terrain, every one of the farms Elton’s soldiers burned hurt King Tyrus far more than it had any right to. By late June, Tyrus had to move or watch his kingdom be disintegrated in front of his eyes. They had been waiting for Queen Drusilla’s forces to make their way to Humboldt, but only a few had arrived. Tyrus decided to try and use Elton’s aggressive moves against him, chasing down small groups of soldiers and forage parties and striking larger forces at nightfall. But Elton had a trick up his sleeve. He had as many as 75% of his 3000 soldiers withdraw half a day’s ride away from the main force before the forces of Chu arrived and ordered the remaining soldiers to dirty their armor and act dispirited. The goal was to make King Tyrus reassess how badly their losses must have been when sacking those mountain castles. All the soldiers at the front needed to do was to last the assaults until they could be reinforced. It worked, and near the aptly-named castle of Fortuna, King Tyrus’ 5000-strong army was utterly wiped out at the cost of only 450 on Elton’s side and the King himself was killed leading from the front. In three months, the state of Chu had collapsed completely. Flores was now faced with a dilemma. There was a much stronger than anticipated enemy that had completely destroyed their ally and now faced their widely dispersed forces along a border they had not bothered to defend. Peaces were offered, even extravagant ones, including giving up half the state to Elton. None were accepted. Elton would accept nothing less than total surrender and absorption into his state. It only took three months, repeating many of the same aggressive raiding tactics as before, but this time, there was essentially no resistance. They swept through town after town, castle after castle, arriving after only a month at the Queen’s capital of Redding. It was the only significant pocket of resistance Elton would encounter, but after two months it too fell. Elton had consolidated the North at the cost of relatively few lives in just six months. His temporal power in the North was completely unquestioned now.

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*I’m diverging from the mod’s canon in this chapter to some extent, mostly because I thought a loose retread of the Warring States Period (incidentally, a period of which I know almost nothing, so I’m sure there are mistakes galore) was more interesting than what the title history says.

**In reality, the California Grizzly, the “golden bear”, has apparently been extinct since the 1920s, and is memorialized by California’s flag, sports teams, and military installations. Californian black bears are still around, though.

***The last name didn’t really make sense to me, so this was one of the actual possible explanations I came up with.

****When he died, he had 21 Martial, according to the history files, with no illness or anything that could have hurt those numbers. That pretty darn good but not-amazing stat, combined with the things he’s done, makes me think he wasn’t really a combat god but that he was very, very, good at one or two things. Also, probably because of CKII’s combat system, most AARs tend to feature tactical geniuses rather than strategic, so I thought it could be cool to change it up.
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Well, here it is. Hope you guys enjoy. I think it was kind of a problem that I have next to no familiarity with military history, so I hope I'm not totally off-base with how a war could have worked.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Two months after the North had been won, a letter was circulated to the various outposts of Elton’s new empire and to every vassal. Few of the soldiers and nobles (who at this point were basically just exceedingly wealthy soldiers) who received the letter could read it, and fewer still could understand it, but those who did told others. Elton was declaring himself a divine personage, but in whatever terms a reader’s religion would choose to understand it. To Buddhists, he would be a bodhisattva, to Christians a saint, to Jews a prophet, to the Imamite Muslims, the Mahdi. He had received this knowledge upon becoming “confused and forsaken after victory… unsure of what was to be gained and lost”. Elton claimed to have retreated into the great redwood forests and to have sealed himself off from the outside world for a month in order to meditate. He claimed to have seen, after ten days of hunger and thirst, Emperor Norton himself appear to him and give him his “path to walk”. Norton told him that all faiths in California had a reflection of the Truth and that that Truth was most strongly expressed by him at this time. Norton also declared him to be his descendant and successor, and ended his visitation with “Claim your title, great emperor, and abide”.

Elton declared a new religious order in his Invincible Letter (named because of the supposed logical invincibility of his arguments), but a new political order was also in the offing. Along with the letter came an exam, in five parts, to be administered in the presence of ten respected witnesses in the span of five hours. All existing vassals of the North who failed the exam would lose their posts and be replaced with those who did, and all rank-and-file soldiers who did well would gain immediate, significant promotion. This was such an assertion of top-down authority that it was tantamount to a declaration of war on the entrenched nobility. Somewhere around twenty percent of the vassals took it in good faith, as did eighty percent of the soldiers. The proportion of vassals taking it seems strikingly high and can probably be attributed to a general fear of Elton (and indeed when the vassal responses are arranged by location, there is a statistically significant correlation between them and relatively short distances from Elton’s fortresses). Around ten percent of both of those pools passed the exam. The rest of the vassals rose up, hoping to bring down Elton as the Kings of Waters had been brought down and humiliated in the past. The rebels failed in their ultimate goals, largely because they were completely unprepared for revolt and geographically spread out. Still, they outnumbered Elton’s forces by a significant margin. The conflict was immensely destructive to the North and the Winelands and it took seven years to resolve. If an outside power had launched an invasion, Elton’s hard-won state would likely have completely collapsed. The other powers, however, were busy. Sinclair was launching successive campaigns against the Sierra Nevada tribes and Death Valley warlords and was too poor to go on other offensives. Abbas had attacked Hernandez and Rubinstein had decided to align with Abbas and stab Hernandez in the back. But Hernandez ruled over the rich lands of the lower Valley and lower Gran Francisco and had narrow, easily defensible fronts on both borders, so long, grinding stalemate was looking to be the order of the day there. Raiders from Cascadia and the steppes could and would invade the North, but never in numbers enough to seriously attempt any conquest.

Once the war was won, there were more than eight hundred vacant slots ready to be filled by a class of educated, loyal, enthusiastic young men (and they were only men; women's rights were better than the norm in California, but they still weren't anything we would recognize today as good). Some of these young men went on to do nothing very much, managing a minor office out in the middle of nowhere and receiving no promotions. Others spawned great families. Two of the four Fractured Empire Period Kings three hundred years later were directly descended from those first batches of successful test-takers. Elton’s goal was nothing less than reshaping California in his own image, and the first seeds of the Empire’s sprawling bureaucracy were sown here. At this stage, Elton’s Empire was still mostly an army with a state attached, the populace felt little attachment to the new leadership (though this was still a step up from their general revulsion towards the old), and Elton himself was looked at as a crazy man trying to foist a religion that no one understood particularly well onto the populace. It is important at this stage to talk again about inevitabilities.

Given the absolute disparity economically between the Winelands and every other part of California, it was likely that their owner would be able to, once unified, project power to all other parts of the region (thanks also to its advantageous location). It was not inevitable that this person would be Elton Yudkow, or that it would happen in the early 24th century, or that the Celestial Empire would form as a result. Even if Waters had been killed in the exact same way and Elton had done the exact same things, it was not inevitable that he would crush Chu and Flores or do so as quickly and resoundingly as he did. It was not inevitable that he would break the back of the vassal rebels. For a few decades yet, in fact, we are not short of possibilities. We must always remember that history is at once a game of odds and an accretion of the small. Occasionally there will be fluke results. Often things get more likely with time, and occasionally some paths only have one necessary outcome. But that is not so all the time. If there is anything you take away from my work, it should be that. Elton was a genius, a brilliant leader. But there have been a hundred thousand other brilliant leaders and geniuses in the history of the world, and most of the rest had their heads rotting on pikes in the end.

But this is a history of this world and not of other worlds, and we must discuss what Elton did do. After the Exam Revolt, the North was not just unified on the map but unified in administration and intent, with efforts being made to unify it religiously. Yudkow was ready to push outward once again.

Hernandez had made quite a start to the war. King Kendrick Hernandez realized that a vigorous response was needed if his desperate situation was to be rectified. Instead of trying to protect all fronts, he struck at only one. Emulating to some degree Elton’s methods, Hernandez withdrew all his forces from the Socal front, knowing Abbas would take quite some time to gather his forces, and smashed Rubinstein enough for them to withdraw having gained nothing and lost time and men. Elton and Kendrick came to an understanding over Rubinstein. Elton was to seize all of it in exchange for state subsidies towards Hernandez in the ongoing war against Abbas (which was later amended to include Sinclair, who had been persuaded to join three months later). The war was swift, and Rubinstein was destroyed.

In discussing Elton’s rise, we neglect Kendrick’s. Historiographically, the difference is sharp (only six academic works have been published about Kendrick's life, as opposed to at least 1200 about Elton's). This is unfair. Kendrick was an extremely competent, important ruler, with comparable ambitions and interests to Elton (and was reputedly a kinder person) who happened to make one understandable mistake. Worried about overextension, he left Rubinstein to own all its lands and consented to a Yudkow takeover. Had he been bolder, had he reached more, there is a chance we would be speaking of the Celestial Empire of California headed by and linked inextricably with the Hernandez family. But Rubinstein fell, and, while the united armies of Sinclair and Hernandez were rampaging through Orange, Yudkow’s armies crossed the border into Hernandez-controlled Santa Cruz. By the time they frantically pulled back, it was essentially all over. One large battle was fought near Carmel, a crushing ambush in the hills. Abbas took the opportunity to push into Sinclair. By 2363, there were only two powers of note in California. Some Hernandez cadet branches remained independent in the southwest, but they were not to last long.

Some idea of the resulting Yudkow-Abbas conflict may be gleaned from this map. Abbas now had a long, awkward border, much of which they had newly acquired and were totally unfamiliar with. Elton had a much shorter front (albeit also in newly-conquered territory). Elton’s base of power was also much closer to much of the frontline. It is a testament to all of that that Abbas fought as well as they did. The war dragged on for eleven years, Elton consistently losing every battle of note that came his way (though often very narrowly) but still making slow, consistent gains. The resulting Peace of Los Angeles was in many respects a peace of exhaustion. Both sides were in utter disarray and operating at less than a tenth of the strength in which they both started. Still, if Elton came to a draw in the field, he achieved a modest victory at the negotiation table. Abbas would become part of the Celestial Empire but keep control over Socal as a King, retaining significant autonomy. The Sinclair lands were not to be included in that deal and would be administered by bureaucrats and vassals of Elton's choosing (a recognition of reality). Abbas was to retain full religious control "without molestation in any way" and Elton was to renounce his and his descendants' claims to the Imamate in perpetuity. It was a relatively poor peace for both sides, but it was peace, and it was badly needed. California was unified at last. Precariously unified, but unified all the same. Now a state had to be built, an infinitely more difficult task.
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Here we are, finally. an update. I can now get back to reading other AARs and responding to comments on this one without feeling incredibly guilty.
I do have a couple of questions, though. First of all, does this sound like a plausible peace, given the circumstances as presented? Second of all, I realize not all of my readers have written AARs before, and perhaps not any CK AARs, but if you have, do you have any tips on how to write battles? I realize this isn't a narrative AAR and my focus is never really going to be on wars, but I'm finding it really annoying to just go "side X won a bunch of battles" and leave it at that. Thanks to all for your lovely comments and to @DensleyBlair for his ACA vote. Not that I'm fishing for those or anything. Those things are cool, and even if you're not voting for this AAR (or you hate this AAR with a burning passion for some reason, in which case why are you reading it?), you should vote.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Building a state is difficult. Building a state in one generation is harder. Building a state in one generation that stands the test of time is harder still. Building a state in one generation that not only stands the test of time but commands longstanding cultural persistence is quite another thing altogether. How did Elton do it? How did he build out of the fragile Peace of Los Angeles a system that by the time of his death had not only preserved internal peace but had made a collection of disparate peoples begin to feel included in its project, as Californians, as subjects of the Celestial Empire, and (to some extent) as Cetics? It is embarrassing to admit, given the relative wealth of Imperial bureaucratic documents that have come down to us, that we may never fully know the answer, never explain completely the Empire’s formation. Going on at length about the ruler-as-deity discourse which Elton had tapped into is not an explanation, helpful though it perhaps might have been in the process. Neither is Elton’s effective control of state violence through his numerous Imperial Reorganizations. Elton’s material improvements in peasants’ lives through lower (though still high) taxes and public works projects of varying scale (generally constructed using an often-brutal corvee system, though functionally enslaved prison labor was also involved) also are helpful in explaining this (Bernard Choudhury’s recent work studying irrigation system construction in the lower Valley is particularly enlightening) but cannot account for everything. One factor, however, has been long-neglected when considering Imperial formation. More than anything else, Elton was a master of iconography. He understood symbols and, most importantly, he read what few books existed on the pre-Event world (we know him to have read Antoni’s 2202 History of the Catholic Popes, for example).

Elton issued a rather unimportant-seeming Imperial Decree a year after the Peace of San Francisco. The decree set up an Imperial Arts Endowment, “for the bounteous dispersal of beauty throughout the realm”, funded surprisingly well (in the years 2376-2381, it made up a shocking 13% of the Imperial Budget). Along with all that beauty, of course, came government and religious propaganda (though the terms of the Peace of San Francisco were kept, and all of the more overtly Cetic productions of the Endowment were kept out of Socal). While some artists of genius were recruited for the program (most notably Tristram, Gomez, and Nguyen), in the early years especially, the artworks and their messages were not particularly subtle. One particularly egregious example was Michael San Bernardino’s ink-on-parchment series of 2377, which was quite literally just a depiction of Elton and Jesus shaking hands against a celestial backdrop (in the more Mormon-influenced areas of California, Joseph Smith was also present, placing a crown on Elton’s head). Traveling players and bards funded by the Empire wandered the land with regularity, reaching areas that were too distant or poor for artworks, and Cetic Teachers (Elton’s new clerical class) followed them into the countryside to preach. But Elton felt that, to truly emulate the Pope and create a sociopolitical structure of longevity, Imperial glory beyond the Imperial person had to be displayed in a physical structure of longevity. In 2379, he started a search for an architect.

Like Imhotep, Sinan, or Olmsted, sometimes the man cometh along with the hour. Elton could not have picked a better time to seek an architect. Ideas of meritocracy were spreading fast and social mobility was increasing at an incredible rate, thanks in large part to the Exams, and Elton’s bureaucrats were proving proficient in locating talent in unusual areas. Three hundred ninety-seven applications were received by the central bureaucracy, with seventy-two being judged worthy enough to be shown to the Emperor. Of these, Elton was only interested in one. Bellis Dunne’s sketches echoed the pre-Event ruins he saw around him in Los Angeles, with their gentle curves of concrete (the buildings were made out of other materials, but only their concrete components had survived), which he married to the Imamite architectural traditions present in the area (Dunne himself was a believer). Dunne’s designs were particularly focused on marrying interior with exterior seamlessly, transitioning from courtyards and gardens into airy and open halls of state and back. Elton summoned him to the capital, and suddenly a merchant’s son from Socal in his twenty-fifth year was commissioned to build Elton a palace grander than anything before seen, and not only a palace. Dunne was given total authority over the planning of the city of Sacramento.

Sacramento pre-Dunne was a standard medieval city of no real note. It had been made the capital of Elton’s empire for the simple reason that it was the largest city nearest to his base of power in the Winelands, perfect as a home base for the movements of the war with the Imamate. Elton charged Dunne with making it a truly Imperial capital- and he paid lavishly for the privilege. 49% of state revenues went towards Dunne’s plans for Sacramento for the next thirty years. Military expenditure by this point was very much in the minority, a remarkable transition from the very recent past, and one that was not without its troubles. While Elton’s brood of “new men” owed their positions and prospects to the regime, many were troubled by the cuts to the military Elton had instituted in order to pay for statemaking efforts (credit was available at reasonably acceptable interest rates, but Elton was suspicious of bankers and preferred not to take a loan unless absolutely necessary). There were several small attempted coups and risings in the years to come, all ultimately traceable to the cuts and all quashed relatively quickly. But the money still flowed out of the Imperial treasury towards Dunne and his builders, more and more every day.

In order to put his plans into action, all residents of Sacramento bar the Emperor, Empress, and his closest retainers were driven from the city and put into extraordinarily basic but functional accommodations, huts really (plans to forcibly drive them away to other locales within the Empire were scuppered because of their practical usage as cheap labor). Dunne planned a comprehensive sewer system for the city, emptying out into the Sacramento River, as well as roads laid to a grid plan, wide enough for an army and two sets of walls, each sixteen feet thick and thirty feet high, and studded with towers. There was nothing of the small scale in Sacramento; all was meant to overwhelm and overawe the viewer. Year on year, the costs went up (mostly due to materials; California possessed local granite and limestone, but expensive marble and obsidian had to be imported from Arixo and Deseret respectively) but so did the buildings. By 2390, it was clear Imperial Sacramento was truly taking shape. These architectural achievements were reflected out in turn through the Imperial Arts Endowment, helped along with a change in how the Endowment operated. At this point, artists were no longer turning out unique works that they would copy or iterate in limited series. Rather, they would make one work and several hundred artists in San Francisco would copy and recopy that work, allowing for mass distribution. This primitive print system allowed for images of Sacramento and Imperial glory to be distributed beyond courts and fortresses and into the middle class of urban traders and wealthier peasants.

Herman Angeleno’s 2392 piece, a miniature depicting a portion of the Southeast Wing of the Imperial Palace, deliberately and imaginatively conflating the Palace with his impression of the idealized pre-Event city.​

The Imperial propaganda produced by the Endowment not only commemorated the buildings of Sacramento, but also its designer. In Socal especially, Dunne’s importance to the imperial project as an Imamite Socalian and loyal subject was commemorated in art (none of which survives) in Elton’s attempt to link North and South together. The glorification of Dunne marked, if any one event can be truly said to, the beginning of political Californianism, the attempt to turn a thousand disparate dialects and ten thousand disparate customs into a coherent identity bound up with the Yudkow regime. From Elton’s perspective, any price was worth paying and any scheme worth trying for its development, and the history of California cannot be understood without it.
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An update at long last, though a bit shorter than I'd wanted. I'm also never quite sure if I've hit the right ratio of longwinded pomposity to clarity in these things. Hope you guys enjoy!

 

[GangsterSynod]

I have sort of a busy weekend coming up, but hopefully I can get something out by Sunday. I also want to note that Elton has taken up quite a lot of space so far, though only because I've really found no way to avoid him. He set everything up and made very radical changes from what came before that the reader will need for context. This AAR will basically be all Elton, all the time, until he dies. After that happens, however, I'm likely to compress more, especially because once we get to gametime, I won't have any notes, just some screenshots I took after it was all over and some years of the Chronicle. So, vague memory and invention are going to be the order of the day at that point. Not that they weren't before. But there were two Emperors who were radical changemakers on an Eltonian scale, so we'll probably zoom in on them again.

I also want to note that I'm no fan of "great-man" history, and I've tried to make that come across in my writing and deemphasize them insofar as I could, but the thing is that strong Californian emperors = top-down, personality-driven radical change, so there will be a bit of a delicate balancing act between these big personalities and broader trends (I'm also not a Marxist historian, so don't expect everything to purely boil down to class either). Sound good? Also, are there any particular topics you'll want to see covered in future (bearing in mind forum rules, of course; I'd love to have a chapter about Cetic narcotic theology in here, for example, but I don't think I could get away with it)? I know there was interest for a sports update somewhere down the line...

 

[GangsterSynod]

Suggested musical accompaniment (or at least what I was listening to when writing)

The Imperial Qualification Exam is one of the most intriguing and genuinely intellectually novel ideas to have come from Elton’s pen (while he was a great writer, Ceticism is met with more than a hint of distaste in the historiography of California because of its perceived lack of theological coherence and innovation. Some of this criticism abates when the Matthewian Doctrines are discussed, however, and certainly the Doctrines represent a clarifying moment in the religion). While historians of the modern prefer to look at much later figures (Albertinus Des Moines, Sandra Tenyle, Zakariyya XXIX) in discussing the evolution of the foundational ideas of our age, there cannot be any doubt that Elton’s Invincible Letter, with its enclosed exam, marked the revivification of the idea of meritocracy, dormant since the Event (and indeed, while the Celestial Empire was brutal and arbitrary in many ways, its commitment to meritocracy (outside the imperial family) and social mobility remained constant through even its darkest periods, though the advantages of the traditionally bureaucratic families would accrue over time). The exam itself was split into five parts: History, Mathematics, Science, Language Arts, and the Bureaucratic Treatise, all intended to “measure the cultivation and attitudes of the most promising minds in order to approach a state of total collective chillness and serenity, so that we as a realm might all be on the same page as regards administration”. The questions on test 1:1 presupposed very little knowledge, though the trend over the centuries was eventually towards the complex and abstruse. Elton believed, however, that the realm was not learned enough for questions requiring some degree of background knowledge, and he designed a test that would “work as much for an intelligent peasant of thirteen years in Yolo as it would for the most garlanded scholar in Goldengate”. Once it had been tested on the military and on the remnants of the noble class successfully, Elton deemed it ready to be rolled out more broadly, though the Exam Revolt and the Abbas War would intervene and delay his plans. Once peace came to California, however, Elton jumped at the chance to expand the availability of the test.

As part of his implementation of Cetic doctrine into Imperial policy, Elton set up a school in Carmel where Cetic Teachers (missionaries, essentially) could be trained. Teachers were non-hierarchical and answerable to nobody save the Emperor in their capacity as Teachers, but they carried out a dual role when they were posted to the countryside. Teachers were also Imperial Proctors, responsible for basic children’s education and the administration of the Exam to all individuals of age in their area (in Abbas, they were theoretically just trained as Proctors, though there were constant tensions involving Proctors allegedly covertly indoctrinating Imamite children into Cetic thought). Next to art and architecture, the training of these Teachers and the copying of their books and teaching materials was the largest expense of the early days of Empire, and it would remain a substantial chunk of the budget until the Empire’s collapse.

By all accounts, the program was effective. The geographic origins of occupants of entry-level bureaucratic positions roughly matched the geographic population dispersal of the rest of California up until (roughly) the reigns of the Stephens. Literacy rates of normal people in the provinces were at somewhere around 20% by the time of Elton’s death, reaching 40% by the time of Elton IV, and 70% by the reign of Karen and the Collapse (though it’s important to note that literacy, as the Empire defined it, was somewhat flexible. Being able to write and read one’s name counted for qualification as literate, and most probably only 10-15% of standard peasants had the writing and reading skills to take the written Exam with any hope of passing by this time). The Exam was also delivered orally, but the acceptance rates were much lower, largely because the Imperial bureaucracy tended to, unsurprisingly, prefer candidates who did not need to be taught to read. Nevertheless, some of the most gifted bureaucrats to ever serve came to Sacramento ignorant of the written word. Talent-sometimes-did out.

The curriculum itself was also largely effective, both as propaganda and as pedagogy. Teachers would “ride circuit” all around their assigned area, on horseback from farm to farm and town to town. The average pupil would get instruction for about two weeks three times a year from the age of four until the age of sixteen (and if a homestead paid for it, increased rates of visits in the year before a boy’s Exam date). A visit from a Teacher, once scheduled, was mandatory, and an extra tax of twenty percent of goods produced would be charged to a homestead if a teacher was met with hostility or a child was deemed truant. Unsurprisingly, there were very few cases of open parental refusal of education, though when religious minorities or dissatisfied peasants took up arms, Teachers were second only to tax collectors in their ratios of murder. One reason for that was likely the mandatory nature of the Exam itself, and of its consequences. A candidate with a passing grade on the exam would, if offered a place in the bureaucracy, be required to accept and to be posted wherever it was deemed necessary for them to be. With sufficiently good grades (a rank of Great Egret or above, or 60%+), a candidate would be required to travel to Sacramento, even if there were no immediate spots open, and await assignment indefinitely. While advantageous for the candidate, this meant one less pair of hands back at the family farm, and if crop yields were poor one year for one reason or another, or if there were few other surviving siblings, starvation could and did often result.

In addition to their pedagogical roles, Teachers acted as vital links between homesteads and the regime. They could-and did-often report community sentiment and individual issues up the chain of command, and were generally regarded as one of the Yudkows’ finest sources of information about the mood of the provinces, acting as a sort of informal espionage system (see particularly C. Lise Krishna’s Spies and Secrets: Espionage in the Celestial Empire). They were also often the communicators of new laws coming down from the top, and the regime’s fastest-moving deliverers of news (at least that news that it wanted people to hear).

Teachers also had a more personal role. As spiritual advisors, they engaged in Therapy with those who had questions. Therapy functioned broadly like Catholic Confession, but with more of a focus on practicalities. Teachers were encouraged to “heighten your questioner’s potential to revolve not only their headspace, but their methods and results”. Sadly, very few Teachers lived to write much down, and fewer still described how their practice of Therapy functioned, but one Teacher, Franklin of Shasta, lived to the age of ninety-two and spent his last twelve years living in Imperial favor under Terpen the Timekeeper. Franklin was interviewed by several senior bureaucrats on behalf of the interested Emperor, and his recollection that “…of Therapy I can say very little. It has a tendency to work, though not drastically, and only if the participant truly wills it. The participant must hear all and accept all, not only all they wish to hear. Oftentimes as I opened my copy of the Letters [the collected works of Elton, with commentaries from assorted emperors] and invited searchers to study their wisdom with me, though, I found opened hearts and ready eyes”, seems to imply that some elements of theological study proper were interspersed with practical life advice and a discussion between participant and Teacher over the course of a Therapy session.

Teachers were vital in translating the often bizarre, insular, and self-consuming world of Sacramento into a context that rural peasants could understand and of encouraging the development of political Californianism. They acted as conduits, funneling local talent and information to the Imperial center and bringing education to the periphery in return. Teachers, in conjunction with the Exam, could be said, not inaccurately, to have made Imperial California what it would become at its height.

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Maybe instead we can get a nice update about the mythical White Rabbit of California, with its reputed psychedelic powers.

I do keep meaning to talk about centuries-long misinterpreted song lyrics, and every time I realize that means I need to decide roughly when the Event happened and decide to stop worrying about it and write about something else. But I'm sure I'll get to it soon. It's got potential.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Hey all. Our election happened recently/is still ongoing. You may have heard about it. I've been totally unable to get non-AAR things done while votes are being counted and states decided, annoyingly. So, depending on how much longer this all takes, an update might also be delayed. Sorry.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Suggested accompaniment

Elton only had one child in his lifetime, despite years of trying with both Empress Heather and, judging by constant notations in Imperial records of this period of payments for gifts for “the Emperor’s consort-companions”, a fairly large assortment of noble and somewhat less-than-noble ladies (though of course Elton’s chroniclers insisted he was always faithful to his wife). Presley was born in 2400, when Elton was, astonishingly, 62. Elton’s succession plans were not finalized prior to Presley’s birth, but most likely would have involved some sort of adoption process, some bright young prospect, competent but ultimately controllable by the emergent bureaucracy, elevated to the throne and the House Yudkow. But Presley was born (there were obviously questions as to his legitimacy, promptly deemed treasonous and quashed, but it is certainly possible that Elton simply had low spermatozoic motility for one reason or another, making children unlikely but not impossible) and Elton’s empire would become hereditary, with a national month of celebration declared across the whole of California.

Presley’s birth and its attendant celebrations coincided with a change in courtly customs. Elton, for all his patronage of arts and culture, was never by inclination given to entertainments or splendor. Art, to him, was only a means to his end of retaining power. Prior to 2400, Elton’s court was remarkably compact, consisting of only his most loyal retainers, some of the more prominent bureaucrats that found themselves in imperial favor at any given time, their immediate relations, and maybe at most a musician or two. The court itself was peripatetic for most of Elton’s heirless period. While its nominal base was in the partially-built Sacramento and Elton did indeed stay there for approximately a month out of the year, the court ranged as far north as the Shasta Cascade and as far south as Los Angeles, with San Francisco being a particularly popular choice. But with a son and heir, Elton realized that a hereditary empire and grandiose future plans required in turn a court environment of sophistication. At this time, too, Sacramento had started to take shape and appear as both a finished capital and as a place where people who were not part of Elton’s regime could actually live. The Imperial Palace was essentially complete and many of the main roads of the city boasted small, organically developing markets sprouting up in between the grand, newly-built houses of Elton’s new elite class. The time was ripe, in short, for a permanent court, not least because it gave the ever-pragmatic Elton yet more control over the aspirants to power and position. The potential benefits of keeping all the intriguers of California in close proximity to the Emperor’s best-trained and most loyal soldiers (mostly Idahoans and steppe peoples, in the dimly-remembered model of the Roman emperors) in the geographical area where the Emperor had the most direct control could not have gone unnoticed by the imperial person.

The move of the court to the Imperial Palace on a permanent basis was accompanied by an exponential rise in leisure activities. Playwrights and their companies regularly performed in Sacramento’s amphitheater, poets from far-away Iowa recited at Elton’s feasts (which, along with hunting, was the rare activity Elton did seem to enjoy), and the post of Imperial Entertainer, responsible for designing masques and dances of all kinds, was created. Some of this development was of course top-down, instituted in much the same way as Elton’s other works, but just as much developed naturally from the concentration of people of means in a small area. If the poets, actors, playwrights, musicians, and painters originally came to Sacramento because Elton paid them to, they stayed because Elton’s upper class kept paying them. This, if anything could, marked the beginning of a distinctive court and capital culture, the moment Sacramento became not just an expensive building project built on the remnants of a minor city but a proper capital of Empire.

Presley, named for a famous mythological figure who symbolized action, energy, and male sexuality, grew up in this dynamic capital, surrounded by tutors and servants. A typical day’s schedule for the then-eight-year-old (as seen in some of the richest portions of the imperial records that we possess) began with meditation at eight in the morning, followed by a large breakfast. After breakfast came the morning’s lessons: an hour of English study (the mother tongue of all Old American dialects and the language of the educated upper class), an hour of mathematics, and an hour of rulership lessons, the specifics of which varied, but could be anything from philosophy to ancient history to practical lessons on etiquette. In the afternoons, Presley’s time was his own. Typically, he spent that time at the palace’s barracks watching the guards train or riding in the woods with his friends (and, one may assume, several guards to make sure of his safety). The picture we get of Presley’s childhood is by and large an idyllic one, though there is reason to complicate that picture somewhat. Elton showed great interest in Presley’s progress and education, going so far as to at one point imprison a tutor who he felt had failed to properly explain division to the child, but little in Presley himself. The two rarely interacted, and when they did, Elton was, in the words of Lucinda Bihari, the rare Imperial chronicler to acknowledge any faults in Elton the man, “distant, sealed off, and most assuredly unchill”. It is perhaps too much of a leap to see in this lack of paternal love a hint of the future reign of Presley, but certainly Presley grew up to be, in the words of the historian Celia Zilen, somewhat of a “cold man, prone to rages, obsessed by the military and driven by a desire to make everything he touched optimal and efficient”. Perhaps, however, that was needed. Along with the cultural growth of the court and the city came the first cases of a disease that would become endemic in the capital.

The murder of Michael Garlick occurred in broad daylight. Garlick, newly appointed head of the Imperial Commission on Rivers and Fisheries, was walking from his home on the Grand Way, in the heart of the city, to his new office near the Palace on February 12th, 2407, when three men with crossbows fired at him from a granary rooftop. The bolts struck him in the shoulder, the stomach, and the top of the head, and Garlick fell to the ground. By the time passers-by dared to approach, he was dead and the assassins gone. An irate Elton ordered an investigation, which discovered that Arnold of Chesterville, a rival for the post, had ordered the murder. Arnold was put to death (the assassins were never found), but he was not by any means the last to die in this way, and many of his successors would remain unpunished for their crimes. The politics of Sacramento were brutal and cutthroat from the beginning, and successful emperors in many ways had to reflect that in order to survive.
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Sorry about the wait. I had a major case of writer's block on this one and I feel like it's one of the weaker updates I've written so far. But we're finally beginning to see a post-Elton future. Another year or so at this rate and I might actually get to gameplay!

Well, Elton is certainly influential.

I do wonder if he ever actually existed, though. Perhaps, many people actually did deeds attributed to Elton?

Interesting thought. Elton as folk hero would be a fun spin on things.

I definitely considered it, but I decided against writing it that way because the situation seemed complicated enough already. That said, certainly the author is at the very least emphasizing Elton's role in affairs.

 

[GangsterSynod]

The summer of 2430 was the hottest the Westcoast had seen in living memory. Crops died on the vine. Horses collapsed from heatstroke. Lakes became ponds, great rivers dried to become barely creeks. Drought, famine, and disease, itself unusually prevalent that summer, stalked the land with a fury none could before recall, killing off thousands of Californians. The Imperial family was by no means immune to the disasters of that "devil's summer" (as it is known to history, thanks to the memoir of Leonard of Wichita, a Sedevacantist monk who traveled to California in those years). In the heart of the Grand Palace of Sacramento, in the secluded private chambers of the Celestial Emperor of all the Californias, Revealer of the Totally Ineffable Bodhisattvic Path, a nonagenarian was submerged upside-down and naked in a tub of ice water.

This was not only a function of the heat. Elton had had recurring headaches and visual difficulties for the past several months. Suddenly, he "could not judge the state of objects, whether they were twenty feet or two feet away from him, they were the same... his eyes also underwent temporary periods where he could see nothing, whereupon he would shout 'I am blind! I am blind!' until sight was restored or until he ran out of breath". His "frame of mind was also not quite in a place of utmost serenity. The pain in his head caused him to wake up screaming through the night and rush to the basin in the corner of his room to expel from his mouth. The headache would get worse with daybreak and throughout the day he would see things that we could not, to his great chagrin". The bath, according to the writer of those words, Lindus of Sonoma, was the only thing that soothed his head and kept his body cool. Only there could he think, could he issue the orders that needed to be issued and sign the documents that needed to be signed. Lindus was Elton's physician, and it was him that put to paper, in a letter to a military camp outside Los Angeles, the words that no one at court could say even to their closest companions. "You must come to court at once, Presley. Your father does not have long. The mass in his head is killing him." For the rest of that vile summer, as the letter raced to Presley and Presley promptly raced back to court, an empire of millions of souls was ruled by a dying man in an iron tub of ice water.

Presley arrived back in Sacramento with an escort. The prodigal son had returned from his Baja campaign, having conquered Ensenada and cut down on the pirates that lay in wait off of Los Angeles (a problem that would not fully die out until the reign of another Presley entirely), cowing the Imam of Abbas in the process, who had attempted to assert himself more independently than Sacramento could allow. He arrived in Sacramento with four hundred of his Cavalry Guard, the elite of his forces. Only moderately armored, the Presleyan-era Guard more than made up for that deficit with speed, technique, and discipline. These horsemen put fear in the hearts of even Elton's personal Imperial Guard, who had frantically readied themselves for a fight if necessary, worried that Presley had come to claim his birthright early. But Presley was patient, was meticulous. He made clear as he entered the city on September 16th that there would be no fight. The man who had waited fifteen years for his chance could wait a few months more, though he did see fit to replace the guards attached to his wing of the palace with the men he arrived with.

By October, Elton could barely speak coherently, his words mixing into a slurred mumble that heightened in pitch at odd intervals. The intent and the intelligence was still there, but it was struggling to be expressed. Movement also came with difficulty at this point. It was decided that when Elton was not in his tub, he would be carried in a litter. Even the slightest lurch of the litter would cause him to scream "as if he had been stabbed with a thousand knives and curse the family lines of his litter-bearers". But still Elton did not die, and still Presley's silent, sullen death watch, conducted from the opposite end of the palace, continued. By November, Elton could not move on his own or muster up the strength to speak above a whisper, and his breathing had grown weak. The slight motions of his chest and his eyes were all that made clear that there was a person still living and thinking inside that "decrepit husk". But Elton clung to life and the death watch stretched on into another month.

Finally, on the first of December, Elton slipped away. After a largely motionless morning, he collapsed into a seizure, and from there into another and another. At around seven p.m., Elton roused himself for one last time and found one last moment of lucidity. He begged for water, and was gently given it. He asked if he was dying, and the answer came back in the affirmative. He said nothing more, and drifted off to sleep around eight p.m. He would not regain consciousness. At seven in the morning on December 2nd, Presley, First of that Name, was acclaimed Celestial Emperor of all the Californias in the Grand Square of Sacramento.

Ignore the chronologies of the Emperors here. I screwed up the dates from the very first update, so I'm reordering things to fit. Elton was 93 when he died in this AAR's canon.​

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Well, there he goes. Quite an interesting character, I thought. What did you think of him?

 

[GangsterSynod]

If Elton’s reign was essentially the story of how a marauding military with an embryonic state attached transformed into an empire with a distinct identity and religio-cultural worldview that it wished to convey, Presley’s reign represented a sort of reversion (or, as some historians prefer, regression) towards militarism and a more flexible state. The cultural and building projects that Elton spearheaded found their funding cut and the money redirected into the Imperial military, which underwent a threefold expansion. After his coronation and the official announcement that he had passed his Imperial Test, Presley did not return to Sacramento for the first thirty years of his reign, preferring the life of a campaign. He wrote little, promulgated his writings less, and kept up only that portion of actual rulership that was necessary to maintain a strong grip on the bureaucracy. War was his chief pursuit, which he embraced with an almost religious zeal. Fortunately for him, Presley would not be short of war, one of the two words that would permeate and define his life. The other was Baja.


The Baja peninsula was never part of Old America, belonging instead to Mexico. We know that it was a land of glamor and excitement for its many beach resorts, popular especially among Old American fraternities and sororities, organizations of college students that (ostensibly, at least) promoted fellowship and leadership. It also served as a sort of cultural borderland between Mexico and Old America, along with Socal, Arixo (the Old American region of Arizona), New Mexico (confusingly owned by Old America, after a 19th-century war), southern Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo Leon. Southern America and Northern Mexico was a vibrant place of cultural exchange, one which did not lessen after the Event. The region, particularly the western coast, was also fairly wealthy, though not quite to the same scale as central California, bolstered by the trade route with the Empire of Brazil that we know as the Coffee Current. Quite simply, it was a more tempting target than any other available, and it was intended to be a springboard to yet greater conquests. If a mainland-California-based power possessed the Gulf of California in its entirety, they could monopolize the entire mercantile economy of the Westcoast while not coming close enough to threaten the interests of Brazil. Presley’s wars in Baja marked the beginning of a dangerous obsession on the part of the Californian administration and particularly the Californian Emperors with the dream of a “California Resplendent”, an empire spanning the old American West Coast, Sonora, Arixo, Baja, and Sinaloa, an idea that would ultimately lead to the Empire’s demise.

While the exact borders of the ideal shape of Empire varied from advocate to advocate, most would have settled on something like this​

Baja was essentially divided into three parts. Upper Baja, the most populated part of the peninsula, a crucial stopping point for the Coffee Current and an area that was controlled at various points by the Imams of Socal; Baja Sur, at the tip of the peninsula, which saw ships of all kinds call into the port of La Paz every day; and the desolate deserts and mountain ranges that separated them and which made up the rest of the peninsula. The terrain prevented any power of note forming across the peninsula, leaving the land divided between petty warlords ruling city-states and nomadic tribes. Traditionally, they had paid lip service to the Imam’s authority while remaining practically independent and occasionally even hostile to the government in Los Angeles, but during the Eleven Years’ War, they slipped away from Socal’s grasp completely.

Presley’s initial Baja campaign was very successful. The city-state of Tijuana-Diego was culturally rich (indeed, a shockingly high proportion of Imperial court entertainers would come from the region in years to come) and in the first century after the Event looked poised to unify Southern California, but a bout of some kind of very severe disease devastated the area. Its population still had not rebounded by the time Presley’s army arrived at its walls, and its defenders surrendered the city without a fight. The summer was too hot to march through, though, and the campaign had to halt there for the year. Elton had refused to allow Presley to bring more than eight hundred soldiers from the Imperial standing army with him on campaign, and the bulk of his forces were made up of conscripted homesteaders who needed to return home for the harvest. Presley was not confident of success with just the eight hundred, so he stayed sweltering and enraged in Tijuana-Diego. In December, he reconstituted his army and marched through Mexicali, not stopping until he reached the Gulf, but then the heat of the Devil’s Summer told and his army returned to their homes while he returned to Sacramento for his death watch.

Upper Baja was conquered and Presley was Emperor, with all the resources of the Empire at his disposal, and Presley thought the conquest of the entire peninsula looked likely inside of two campaigning seasons. But he was born and raised in the pleasant land of the Valley and, though he had campaigned briefly in the desert in the last two years, he did not understand the trials that his army would face. He also did not account for the Bajan Accord.

The Lord of La Paz, the richest city in Baja Sur, had been watching the developments in Upper Baja with great concern. He sent word to all the tribal chiefs and petty rulers left in Baja to gather in La Paz and draw up a defensive agreement, ending each time with a quotation attributed to one of the Founders. “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” The conclave met in January 2431 and adjourned in February. In that time, they had agreed not only to an accord, but also to a command structure, a shared war fund, and to joint naval action, coordinated with the pirate fleets that menaced the Californian coast, if it became necessary. Such was the perceived threat of the young empire and its martial heir coming down from the north.

The Empire would find the Accord nearly impossible to deal with. Twenty-three years stretched by without a land battle or siege. Every campaign, lethally well-trained and equipped troops would try to invest the small settlements and oases of the desert and they would meet with some initial success. Once they penetrated deeper into the peninsula, the guerilla raids that were so infrequent as they set off became daily affairs, sometimes occurring multiple times a day. Small bands of warriors with bows, slings, and noisemakers disrupted sleep, wreaked havoc, and destroyed supplies before disappearing back into the desert. Imperial scouting parties, once so confident, ventured out cautiously, often not returning at all. Under hunger and thirst and pressure, the armies would retreat back to Tijuana-Diego again. Every time Presley tried to sail to La Paz, small crafts barely better than fishing boats sailed up quietly in the dead of night and carved holes in the bottom of Presley’s ships while larger vessels distracted the sailors on deck with projectiles and insults. Shallower waters held other threats. Sharpened logs and rocks were rammed below the waterline and spelled doom for the unwary captain, and traders that offered to barter supplies gave Imperial forces defective and poisoned goods.

Finally, Presley decided on a novel strategy. Five years went by without Imperial forces marching into Middle Baja, and, while the Accord was naturally wary of Presley’s intentions, they also naturally let down their guard to some extent, hoping that he had given up. Then, in June 2460, twelve massive warships sailed past Cabo San Lucas loaded with thousands of Imperial soldiers. The ships had been custom-built in San Francisco at enormous expense (70% of the military budget and 50% of the general budget for the years 2455-60) and had managed to sail several hundred miles out into the Pacific, according to legend even going halfway to Hawaii, before turning back eastward to Baja. Presley led the ensuing siege of La Paz personally, sustained by his anger, the sense that his destiny as a great conqueror was denied to him by the Accord’s guerilla tactics. The city refused to surrender for two years, bolstered as they were by the defenses built and the supplies loaded into it for the last two decades. When it finally fell, Presley showed no mercy. Other settlements in Middle Baja and Baja Sur were also mercilessly sacked, though Presley offered clemency to settlements that opened their gates immediately.

My personal hypothesis of their route
​

Presley’s decision at La Paz had many ripple effects. Barely-exaggerated reports of the conquest of Baja and the siege’s horrors spread as far east as Texas and as far south as Gran Nicoya, and the scale of the brutality outraged even those that tended to support the Yudkows. Presley became known as the Demon-King even among his own people, Cetic Teachers found it impossible to proselytize given the example of the figure sitting the Totally Serene Throne, small revolts erupted across the whole of California, and the Empire was in danger of splintering completely. Presley, fearing for his life in the face of essentially universal popular anger, made plans to abdicate in favor of his son Elton but suffered a fatal heart attack in June 2459. In deference to the popular will, he was not mourned in any way, instead buried quietly in one of the gardens of the Imperial Palace.

Once Elton had been crowned, he took a very different line to Baja than his predecessor. One of his first actions was to order the execution of the officers who had carried out Presley’s orders, and he visited La Paz in the first year of his reign to apologize as best he could to the Bajans. We may speculate as to how much of this was pragmatism, an attempt to burnish the Empire’s tarnished image and his own legitimacy, and how much was his own moral sense, but by all accounts Elton had been as outraged by Baja as the rest of the population was. Nevertheless, Presley’s deeds would leave a long shadow and Baja would never have much love for the regime in Sacramento. The ships would molder in dock until they were eventually unusable and destroyed.
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The Gulf of California​

He certainly has a different nickname here​

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Well, it didn't end up being a week after all. I had some good ideas and in the end I didn't have to revise that much. Not exactly a holly, jolly update either (it was challenging to figure out what awful deeds Presley could order in retaliation that would still fall within forum rules, and I failed the first time. Hope I'm good this time), but honestly it's definitely time to take a break from the Imperial family and take a peek at homesteader culture, so there may end up being a surprise belated holiday update coming in the next couple days. Happy holidays all!

Wonder where we go from here?

Great update.

Elton in his bathtub gives off big Marat vibes. Although in some ways he did not suffer so terrible a death.

Obviously a very significant figure. Will Presley be able to break out from under Elton’s shadow? Will he even dare try?

Elton will be a hard figure to follow in achievements.

What a pitiful death for him, though.

...Well, that's where Presley went from there. His monomaniacal focus on conquest, and on Baja as the target of that conquest, certainly stems from his desire to equal-or perhaps even outdo- his father. Elton's death was certainly something. I'm not quite sure why I decided to make it quite that elaborate, but it certainly seemed fitting while I was writing it.

I just googled California Christmas on the off chance, and… well, I can’t say I ever expected to strike gold but this seems pretty appropriate.

That does seem rather appropriate.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Suggested accompaniment
A farmer's life was an exhausting one. Early mornings, late nights, and the risk of starvation if conflict came to the area or the weather was bad (though in central California, this was rare in the extreme), along with the constant risk of death from childbirth and illness, made for tough, unsentimental people. This is not to say that homesteaders had no empathy or capacity for love; humans are humans across time and space. Parents loved their children and grieved when they died and mourned the deaths of their parents when they died. But these losses were private, rarely expressed in text, even by those who were in a position to do so. This privacy was a hallmark of homesteaders more broadly. With relatively few (though noteworthy) exceptions, for much of the Imperial period, homesteaders never had much of a voice in Imperial affairs, nor did they try to develop one. One reason for this was the relative success of Imperial development projects, which generally preempted and coopted embryonic peasant concerns (though occasionally created some astonishingly long-lasting tensions in the process; see Horkheimer's exploration of the "thousand-year rage" among homesteaders in a small part of the subprefecture of Stanislaus over a dam first built under Stephen I). It also bears mentioning that the trend over time was for more homesteader agitation and simultaneously greater identification with the Imperial Californian project, but nevertheless, the type of "peasant proto-class-consciousness" that we know to have existed in many parts of medieval Europe and among other parts of Old America during the post-Event era was largely and strikingly absent in California during the Imperial period. We do not know why this was the case, nor why peasants who stayed peasants tended not to write about themselves, even if they were able to. As such, most of what we know about how most of California lived at the time comes down to us from surviving Imperial records, the poetry of Californian elites (which generally glorified and idealized homesteader life), and a few precious memoirs that bureaucrats who grew up as homesteaders wrote. It is remarkable, in fact, that we know- or can hypothesize with a reasonable degree of certainty- as much as we do.

The life of a homesteader was inextricably tied to the land and the harvest season. Every hour of work done, every task performed, was in some way meant to ensure the harvest could be brought in as efficiently as possible. Despite- or perhaps because of- the great pressure and pure physical effort required every day, homesteader life was not dour. Families made jokes, sang songs, played games of chance, and (thanks in part to Cetic doctrine, which encouraged presence and mindfulness) found a few precious hours to relax most days, making space to be not just farmers but humans. For all the drudgery and occasional danger of farm life, there was joy and tranquility too, and the idealized peace of the homestead would inspire elite poetry and Cetic theology for centuries.

Homesteads generally stayed fairly isolated, but homesteads near each other would often come together to celebrate festival days. While homesteaders, who had surprising religious diversity through most of the period, observed their own religious holidays (Inner Self-Perfection Day and Mutualism Day for Cetics; Easter and Christmas for Christians; Ramadan and the Eids for Muslims; Pesach, Sukkot, Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur for Jews; etc.), secular holidays that all homesteads held in common were celebrated with similar degrees of devotion and preparation. Blooming Day (celebrated within two weeks of the first appearance of fruit on a plant), Flourishing Week (celebrated at the height of summer), Fool's Day (celebrated the first day of April), and Harvest Day (celebrated after the last harvests had been reaped), as well as funerals and weddings, habitually saw homesteads coming together socially to celebrate. Wagons from miles around would congregate at a predetermined spot, generally the closest mutual homestead. Each household would bring gifts for the others, typically in the form of food or drink to share (though after one more than usually harsh winter, one Blooming Day gathering near the Sierra Nevadas reportedly saw every household bring a gift of ice, causing much initial embarrassment*). During these holidays, stories were told, music was played, drinks were imbibed, feuds, jealousies, and gossips were stoked, deals were done, and friends and lovers were made. A grand old time was generally had by all. Despite homesteaders' general isolation, celebratory gatherings ensured community ties remained strong.

It bears remembering too that homesteads were communities of their own, and not unsubstantial ones. A homestead would ordinarily house three (sometimes four or even five) generations of the same family and hold up to twenty people. The challenges, advantages, and priorities of that lifestyle can perhaps best be seen through homestead cooking, for whatever reason a particular fixation of urban Californian elites, whose elaborate poetic fantasies of retiring to the countryside generally included a rhapsodic section on food. On a typical day, the women of the household would get up at about the same time as the men and spend the early morning hours doing a combination of foraging for ingredients, digging up herbs and produce from the family garden, and bringing ingredients out from the family storehouse before setting down to cook for the rest of the day (in Northern California, perhaps because of Cascadian influence, gender roles were much less defined and restrictive than in central California or Socal, and tasks in general were generally done by the people best able and most willing to do them). The homestead as a whole would sit down to eat twice a day, a first light meal in the early afternoon and a second, heavier meal in the evening. Because of this structure, there was little to no accounting for individual tastes, especially compared to the way in which we plan our meals today. When twenty people needed to be fed well and quickly, practicality and collective desire were paramount. In a homestead, the individual was unimportant when compared to the family. Cooking also demonstrated the traces of older ethnic roots. While the food of urban California, the coast, and the court bore more notable influences from Old American immigrants, California's inland cuisine was not monolithically "American" (a problematic descriptor that in itself contains many dishes adopted and adapted from immigrant traditions) in nature. A homesteader soup known to us as "fuwa" appears to be a spiritual descendant of Vietnamese pho, while the popular egg dish of "wevranchers" was virtually identical to the Old Mexican breakfast huevos rancheros.

Homesteads were more socially complex than Californian elites ever knew or than historians understood until very recently. In many ways, they are still mysterious. These vast populations, communes of family units that rejected the individualistic ideals developed in the Renaissance and maintained by the dynamic meritocracy of Sacramento and the other urban centers of California and the sense of collective peasant identity and grievance that would characterize most feudal societies of the period, deserve more historical study than they currently boast. Their wish was ultimately to be left alone to prosper, but public works projects ordered by Sacramento left them reasonably well-disposed to the regime and its tax collectors (in good agricultural times, at least). As Imperial and Californian identity took root, homesteaders would find themselves more deeply entwined with the regime, learned to want and to demand the satisfaction of those wants in return for continued allegiance, but for the first few centuries of Empire at least, much of the population of California would be unconcerned with events transpiring more than a few miles away.

*The story is reported in a Personal Digest Report made for Presley II. Presley, a man who never liked to be short of an anecdote or joke, required bureaucrats stationed in the provinces to report any interesting or humorous goings-on for his reading pleasure. As far as we know, the vast majority of the stories in these reports were true.
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We'll get back to the Emperors soon enough, but I felt we needed to shift focus a bit first. A combination of illness, family drama, and writer's block prevented me getting this out until now, and I still feel very unsatisfied with parts of it, but I hope you all enjoy.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Suggested accompaniment
The chief diplomat of the Empire of Mexico to California's court sent back a confidential report to his master's court the day Elton II was officially crowned. Most of the document does not survive, and we have only fragments, but historians may have for once had the luck of the draw, because the fragments that we do have are enlightening in the extreme and most likely represented the interesting parts of the document to begin with. "How like and yet unlike his father this man is!", the envoy wrote. "Similarly austere, to be sure, cold like the rest of them, and this one is respected by the army, but he has the breadth of vision that his father did not. He wishes to be Emperor, not the world's foremost general, and his gaze is not fixed upon the Baja Peninsula. Were we not so great and powerful and far, I would be concerned. As it is, it may benefit our great and glorious Emperor to reinforce the northwestern border forts."

Fundamentally, imperial policy under Elton II was driven by the fact that Elton was a ruler as preoccupied with institutional and Imperial strength as his predecessors, but possessing a very different expression of and vision for that strength. He wrote works on theology, unlike his predecessor, and on military tactics, like his predecessor, but the bulk of his writing was on what today we call political theory, all of it deriving from a few maxims:

Strength without grace and subtlety is no strength at all. It is in fact weakness of the highest order.
One does not need to be fearsome to impose one's will. Attempts to appear fearsome frequently reveal fragility of the highest order.
Strength comes from security in one's self and due, tranquil consideration of one's possible courses of action and their potential consequences. Acting without considering the facts as they are is foolishness of the highest order.
It is better to listen than to talk.

His domestic policy tended toward the conciliatory and reactive, his gestures towards the Bajans being a prime example, and in general he took pains to ensure that changes made came with advance warning, an explanation, and a smooth transition for those affected, a marked change from the arbitrary impulses of his father and grandfather. For much of his reign, Elton was not especially loved or feared (at least not by the standards of the office, which generally inspired quite a bit of love/fear, depending on the situation), but his competence was generally acknowledged and respected. It is merely speculation on my part, but my pet theory is that it was this that preserved and secured his position given his relative pacifism. Elton was not a pacifist by principle, but the realm demanded consolidation and rationalization. For much of the Lawgiver's reign, and all of Presley's, the state existed merely to serve the military and its campaigns. Institutions had been built, abandoned, and reshaped haphazardly and arbitrarily, and the state's efficiency had suffered. Rationalizing the Imperial bureaucracy was a mammoth task, one that drained Imperial time and the Imperial treasury in equal measure, and a military campaign to the wild Cascadian north or the scorching Mexican south would be a horrendously expensive task with the possibility for disaster hovering around at all times which could provide nothing other than more distant frontiers and the assuaging of military egos that grew restive in peacetime. But there were no military risings during Elton's reign, nor even significant murmurings of discontent. Elton did have support in the ranks of the military, did have a faction of loyalists behind him, and a fifteen percent military pay increase introduced in the twelfth year of his reign certainly smoothed matters along, but the lack of military discontent is still remarkable.

The realm was not completely tension-free, however. The Peace of Los Angeles, made after the Eleven Years' War, had unified California and created a surprisingly enduring compromise, with the Imams of Abbas given full religious autonomy and a significant degree of general autonomy, much more like a vassal king than a bureaucratic appointee, though that was their official classification. The Imamate was in many ways an ill-fitting component of the Imperial system. The Imamate's hierarchy and the Empire's hierarchy often issued competing orders, which were generally only resolved after extensive dialogue and compromise, and much delay. Elton's rationalization drive ran up against the brick wall of the Imamate, and faltered. Either the South could keep its status quo, with an powerful Imam under-king always dreaming of more and remembering the days when holy warriors drove up into the Central Valley, or the Peace could be broken, the frozen war restarted, and California torn apart. Elton deliberated, then he stalled, and just when it looked like the Emperor was paralyzed by indecision, Elton acted, choosing neither option. Would the Imam like a palace in Sacramento and to have the newly-created title of Governatus, at the Emperor's decision-making right hand, he inquired. The Governatus, of course, would be so important that they had to be easily--instantly--contacted by the Emperor, and no delay of any sort could be brooked. Of course, the Imamate's historical capital of Los Angeles would be respected and it would remain the official city of the Imam, but the official and unofficial residence of the Imam in their capacity as Governatus would be Sacramento or, if the Emperor was not in the Imperial capital, wherever the Emperor was. The office of the Governatus would naturally also have to be integrated more fully with the new Imperial system for more agile decision-making. Would the Imam be amenable to that? The Imam was. The creation of the Governatus post, while an effective solution to the power of the Imamate, would prove to be, unexpectedly, Elton's most lasting legacy and would leave a shadow as big as his father left in Baja.

Elton's home life was less turbulent than the affairs of Empire, but painful nonetheless. His marriage was arranged, his wife a princess from the distant southerly realm of Gran Nicoya, but chroniclers made note of the genuine affection and mutual respect that seemed to exist between the pair. Their home life would have been idyllic were it not for the long string of miscarriages the royal couple endured through their first decade of marriage. Finally, Empress Luz gave birth to two healthy boys: Perry and Reuben, and the royals were even more ecstatic than the realm. Tragedy struck just a week later, however. When the proud parents entered the babies' room one morning, they found only one baby moving. Crib death had struck Perry during the night. Yet again, the Empire would only have one heir. Superstitious Californians muttered of a curse, and Elton worked, throwing himself more than ever into the duties of state.

The next three decades passed fairly uneventfully, as they tended to whenever imperial rule was strong. Trade revenues went up, thanks mostly to punitive expeditions against pirates off of the coast of Baja, and the lack of massive building projects in the capital or other large, anomalous expenditures instigated by Imperial peccadilloes meant that the treasury was healthier than ever. While peace was never truly total in an empire the size of California (the main threats were bandits, pirates, and raiders) or skullduggery entirely absent in a city like Sacramento, peace and stability reigned. In many ways, Elton's reign marked the height of the First Empire. When Elton passed in 2511, the victim of a nasty winter flu, Sacramentan peasants did not have to be forced to attend his funeral, as they sometimes were for funerals of those close to the imperial family. At a certain point, the boundary between respect and love blurs.

Still adjusting to get the dates right after my miscalculation early on. Canon is him dying at 72, not 62.​

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bureaucrats doing humour? I feel like Presley III may have an antecedent in our own world…

Presley... We'll get to him, but if anything, he's some sort of strange Amy/Gina/Hitchcock combo.

Interesting to see normal people's lives covered.

Also, April Fools survived the Apocalypse?

I think too many AARs, especially but not exclusively in CK, kind of fail to look under the hood and remember that, while we see what the nobility are doing much more clearly than what the peasants are doing, the peasants are there and their story is as important--or more, really-- as the nobility's. I'm actually not sure that I've done enough writing about normal Californians thus far, frankly.
As to April Fool's, I figure that it's not something that would change very much conceptually after a global calamity and it's present enough in our culture that it might stick around and even do a little better.

Thanks for the rest of the compliments, guys, especially @Idhrendur and @Midnite Duke. Verisimilitude is something I always try to get when I can and I was really worried I wasn't familiar enough with farm life to capture what it might be like here.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Suggested listening
Reuben's ascension to the throne marked a return to the tradition of an emperor having a policy priority (or, less charitably, an obsession) that they cultivated during their reign. Unlike Elton's state and culture-building efforts or Presley I's Bajan campaigns, however, Reuben's drive for "peasant enlightenment" and welfare programs came from a place of religion. While it was commonly known that Reuben was more pious than the average noble Californian, few realized just how devout he would prove to be when he first sat the Totally Serene Throne. One of his first acts after coming to power was adjusting the Imperial Daily Schedule, a seemingly minor act. His revisions, however, ensured that three and a half hours daily would be reserved for meditation and meditation only, as opposed to an hour or less under the previous Emperors, and that the time reserved for hearing petitioners would be extended from two hours to four. Here, too, we see the first drop of what would eventually become a flood: the delegation of mundane Imperial duties to the Imam/Governatus. The time saved from simplifying and austeritizing* mealtimes (reportedly, Governatuses were typically pleased by the fact that their job required them to take charge of feasts), reducing the number of public events that boasted a personal appearance from the Emperor, the welcoming of minor delegations from even more minor powers, and removing the need for formal Imperial signoff on minor provincial decisions meant that the Emperor could spend hours every day forensically dissecting reports about peasant welfare and the studies he commissioned on the mitigation of peasant problems.

Reuben's quixotic interest in the plight of the poor, with whom he likely never interacted on an informal level (he often invited them into the palace to focus-group his plans for reform, but despite his best efforts, an awkward distance seems to have persisted), stemmed from his apparently sincere belief in the "mutuality of existence", a core Cetic tenet, according to most scholars (because of the great diversity and malleability of Cetic thought, virtually no idea could be held to be completely unanimous). All life was connected and equally valuable, ran this line of thinking, and the primary purpose of existence was to lead a good and virtuous life, and to do so by reducing the suffering of others wherever possible. Much of Reuben's surviving religious writing (mostly mediocre poetry) concerns--obsesses over--this notion, and whether his decisions and his life are advancing or hindering this cause.

And so, the plans. From the mid-afternoon straight through to the late evening, nearly daily, Reuben developed plans, ancillaries to plans, revisions to years-old plans, timelines for introduction of his plans, surveys for assessing the popularity and effectiveness of existing plans, etc. Reuben's efforts were, as may be guessed, ambitious and expensive in equal measure. His Central and Regional Grain Distribution Offices, his Urban Begging Elimination Income, his Merchants' Emergency Subsidy Fund, and his Urban Free Schooling Initiative for the Promotion of Useful and Creative Endeavors were designed to collectively develop, from nothing, what we might today call a welfare state, and an extremely generous one at that, in a historical environment that had no experience, no conception of such a thing. Massive amounts of money were being drained from the treasury yearly to pay for it all, more than Presley's wars, and about as much as the most frenzied phases of Sacramento's development, though unlike Elton's grand building projects, these expenditures had no end date in sight. Reuben's expenditures were therefore polarizing to a degree not seen since the deepest nadir of Presley I's time. Cost-conscious bureaucrats and Imperial hangers-on found it hard to justify, even understand, Reuben's spending in a way that they could do to a degree even in Presley's martial madness, and the development of the first proper anti-Imperial faction that California had ever seen sprung up at about this time, centered around the Governatus' assistant, Subprefect Third Class Desmond Suarez. For the first decade and a half of their existence, they functioned fairly amicably as His Serenity's Loyal Opposition, attempting to conciliate and moderate what they saw as his compulsive spending while maintaining imperial prestige. Eventually, however, relations worsened.

The conflict stemmed from Reuben's dialogue with the Queendom of Cascadia, up in the forests and hills of Old Washington and Old Oregon. Cascadia, a unique society by and large nearly as matriarchal and misandrist as California and much of the rest of the New World was patriarchal and misogynist (I use the word nearly here because Cascadians were normally dismissive towards men rather than actively oppressive and controlling; for a far more nuanced, graceful, and informative view of Cascadian society than I can possibly provide here, see Tran's masterpiece Cascadia: A History), nevertheless shared many religious customs and attitudes with California, especially the more egalitarian Jefferson region. Reuben's generals, who generally were identified more with the anti-Imperial court faction and were thirsty for a major war after decades of nothing but bandit and pirate subjugation, felt it would make for a natural conquest. Reuben, however, was a pacifist and, unlike his father, was pacifist out of principle. He urged the Cascadian Queen to accept his offer of a "Grand Sitdown Sesh" (in other words, a synod) near Mount Shasta to discuss whether the perceived religious difference between California and Cascadia might be unified, and whether the worship of Mother Gaia might be considered a Way of Ceticism like any of the other five major Ways.

The negotiations were long and protracted. Months passed without any visible sign of progress at times, but just enough headway was being made that the talks continued for nine long years until, finally, there seemed to be a clear path towards mutual doctrinal acceptability. In February 2526, Elton began the long trek up to Mount Shasta to officially preside over the ceremony that would seal Westcoast religious unity. As he neared the site of the summit, however, his private wagon was stormed one night by shadowy assassins. Reuben and most of his guards were killed, and the assassins slipped away before most of Elton's guards could identify them, but a guard swore he saw one of the assassins. The killer wore the traditional green of Cascadian holy warriors, but appeared to be male and thus prohibited from engaging in violent acts and from wearing the color.
The Imperial party turned back towards Sacramento, and speculation raged and rumors spread of the Man in Green who killed Reuben. Was he a Cascadian hardliner acting alone? An agent acting at the behest of the Queen, who secretly wanted war with California? A member of a false flag operation orchestrated by the anti-Imperial faction and its military allies? As the wagons hastened south, the stories became wilder and wilder and chaos began to take hold in Sacramento. For the first time, an Emperor had been assassinated. It would not be the last.

Dates still wrong, but this should be the second-to-last time that's true.​

*Is there a word for "making more spartan"? i can't think of any at the moment, but it seems like a good word to know if it exists.

Perhaps not the most exciting of reigns, but Elton II was an effective rule nevertheless, and one who fully lived up to his own philosophy that the most potent forces in government (as in many things) are often the least visible.

There is a small touch of irony in the fact that the post of Governatus, created as a means for the Emperor to subtly neutralize the strength of an over-powerful vassal by giving him something to be "kicked upstairs" to, would eventually turn around and do the same to future Emperors as well -- though, of course, that situation can also be viewed as self-inflicted to some degree, too. But I'm perhaps getting ahead of the story just a bit.

Not very exciting at all (and I really struggled with how to write him, because as conceived, he just wasn't going to do anything interesting, because any interesting action would be fairly illogical in that situation), but certainly effective. And there's more than a little irony in the Governatus origin...

Sometimes we all need an Elton in our games. A few decades of relative peace is never a bad thing.

Certainly no one was complaining very much. Except the military, of course.

Elton II seems like a good ruler...

I'd say he'd be one of those dark-horse picks that no one can really find too much fault in retrospectively. Other emperors will grab all the headlines for being good at their jobs in more dramatic fashion, and in any sort of retrospective historical ranking, he wouldn't make top three, but he might end up as a sort of Harry Truman equivalent (though Truman was too controversial in some respects to really make a good comparison).

 

[GangsterSynod]

Sacramento's main roads and thoroughfares were built of excellent-quality stone. Fine limestone from Old Indiana lined the areas of the city where normal people lived and where everyday business was done, while the centers of Imperial power and prestige were laid out in the finest marble. On March 26th, 2526, however, the charming grays and dignified white stones of Sacramento were stained red with streams of fresh blood. Anarchy gripped the capital city. Reuben was dead, struck down by a mysterious assailant, who, depending on one's political position, was either a Cascadian seeking war or an assassin ordered by the anti-Imperial faction, led by Desmond Suarez, secretary to the Governatus. Desmond came from a long, distinguished line of nobles from Ventura who had historically been close to the Abbas rulers, but his branch of the family Suarez grew up in relative poverty, thanks to a freespending ancestor. It can be easy for a historian to assume that Desmond's impoverished background led to a resentment of more established and wealthy Sacramentan figures and thus spurred him on to the acts that he would undertake, but this is a lazy piece of pop psychology that a wise historian should not fall into. Fundamentally, Desmond led the anti-Reuben court faction, but Desmond's boss, Imam Mahmoud VII, unquestionably approved of and protected Desmond and his faction from his enemies at court, especially as Reuben delegated much of his authority to him, and when Desmond acted, he certainly acted on behalf of the Governatus.

The chaos on the streets of Sacramento was due to several factors. Firstly, the Imperial Guards, responsible for guarding the Imperial person and the most important palaces, had been largely Idahoans and Steppe Peoples. They came from places within the Cascadian cultural sphere (and occasionally the Gaian religious sphere), making them politically suspect. Secondly, the Guards did not coalesce around an agreed successor for Reuben, who had three adult male children. Errol, Elton, and Nathan all had their partisans among the Guards. Thirdly, the anti-Reubenist faction acted quickly and had the perfect successor in mind. Elton was pro-welfare, though not on anywhere close to the scale of Reuben; pro-war, though not too pro-war; competent, though not too competent; and willing to let the Governatus continue to play a stronger part in the Imperial regime, though not too willing. Elton was the most broadly acceptable successor to Reuben, and had been for some time.

Whether the Man in Green was a direct agent of Desmond and the Governatus or whether the anti-Reubenists saw their opportunity and siezed it has been a subject of constant scholarly debate for centuries, and many salient points have been made by both sides over the years. Regardless, the outcome was the same. The coup was short but bloody. Imperial Guards and pro-Reubenist bureaucrats were locked in buildings that were then burned and cut down in brutal street fighting. Errol and Nathan were made to take poison, as Elton emerged from the Imperial Palace at the head of an honor guard of Imamate soldiers and, attended by the Governatus, was acclaimed Celestial Emperor in streets still slicked with blood. War with Cascadia followed immediately afterwards.

The Cascadian Campaign unfolded much like the coup itself. By May, the columns of soldiers had arrived near Portland, and by October it was all over, with much destruction wreaked upon Cascadia, and a land that could have existed in harmony with the Celestial Empire was brutalized, all for little gain but the symbolic. Along the increased tax base for the treasury and the satiation of the generals came an extremely anti-Imperial populace, one that refused to be reconciled to their new leadership. Scattered bands of guerilla warriors menaced the Californian presence in the reason for decades to come, and the horrors of the campaign would linger on in Cascadia as they did in Baja.
After the war, it was time for Elton to rule, and it is in this that we see both his intentions and his failures. While he arguably hoped to rule as independently as the rulers before him but was willing to let the Imam/Governatus take on more power in the short term, Elton found his authority more curtailed than he could ever have imagined. He almost certainly did not intend to name Desmond to the newly-created title of Protector of the North, responsible for the administration of Cascadia and on par in terms of prominence with the Imamate, for instance, but the appointment went ahead only six weeks after the war was won. He was, however, able to prevent plans to have portions of the Imperial Treasury effectively siphoned off to Socal every year under the guise of local mercantile development. Overall, Elton's rule marked a bridge between the absolute power of the Founder Emperors and the effective puppethood of his successors, and existed in a state of uneasy balance with the Governatus and his faction.

Elton's rule was largely uneventful apart from the Cascadian War. Most of his political capital was spent in ensuring that the Governatus and his allies did not become even stronger, and a large part of his fiscal capital was spent on the more popular welfare programs that Reuben had instituted, which went some way towards preserving his authority but which limited his options yet more. Elton died knowing that, for the foreseeable future at least, the decisions that mattered would not be made by the men on the Totally Serene Throne. His supposed last words, uttered while on his deathbed in late 2559, (though this story is likely apocryphal) were said to have been "after me, the flood". And a flood would come.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Well, here we are, closing in on the end of the First Empire. Hope you guys are enjoying the ride so far. Apologies if this update is not up to the usual standards. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to start writing this when I actually felt awake...

Uh oh. I wonder if Reuben’s death will give his radical ideas a cult-like boost later on, or whether this is in fact a false flag operation by the hardliners. Either way, it looks like rocky times ahead.


Maybe ‘straitening’, as in ‘straitened’? Probably the closest I could think of off the top of my head.

Rocky times might be a bit of an understatement, really. And things are about to get much worse.

Reuben seemed to have had many plans. Shame most of those went unfulfilled.

Cascadia sounds interesting. I assume a Cascadia-California War is on the cards?

Reuben definitely had many plans. Many of them were unwise, perhaps, but certainly none were badly-intentioned, and many had positive effects.

 

[GangsterSynod]

Just wanted to stop by and say that I now see a way through my thesis and, shockingly, may even finish a day or two before deadline! I still have some more stuff to do after that, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that I might get an update out on the 7th or 8th. If not, it'll be a little bit of a wait, probably until around the 18th or 19th. If I still don't have an update for you by then, watch for a few closely packed together from the 25th through the end of the month to make up for it.

Also, I ran this game on an old computer. Said computer is now almost in two pieces and the screen is connected to the rest of the computer by one shaky-looking bolt. The computer still works--barely, and very slowly-- but I was able to email the savegame to myself. I have no idea how to actually put the savegame in the relevant CKII/After the End folder to have it be loaded up on this computer. I've tried and failed a few times, but hopefully I can figure it out soonish. Even if I can't, I can still put out updates all the way up to gameplay, so you will at least have a few updates at some point in the next month or so.