Galatea

[pedromvilar]

Political Organisation
Each of the three kingdoms is organised differently. Although all settlements or other population centres are ultimately subjects of their respective kingdoms, they are different degrees of independent.

Laokab has a few large city-states, much in the ancient Greek way. They're mostly independent, and each has its own system of government, culture, and micro-society. You have variants of the main religion with minor deities that are aspects of the four gods, local saints, and other cultural peculiarities. Relationships between the cities are mostly cordially distant and commercial.

Teinnab has the least amount of useful land, between the swamps and the hilly grasslands. The floating university-cities are where most of the rich, powerful, learnt, and magical live. University deans are the political power there, and they're democratically elected - but only those who are or have at some point been students in a university can vote. Elections get pretty heated, with mobs holding protests, rallies, debates, politically charged art, slander upon candidates' characters, etc. Meanwhile, "downside," people raise cattle where they can and farm crabs from the swamps, and the small towns and villages formed for that are largely apolitical. The beautiful, hard-to-access beaches are mostly full of deadly sealife, but there are some small and rich villages by the shore that make a living out of closely guarded secrets on how to catch and prepare rare delicacies.

Bezanab is your typical game of thrones medievalish kingdom, with various fiefs and castles controlled by clans and inherited using less strictly magical laws of succession. Some have patriarchal laws, some matriarchal, some merely primogenitous. Bezanab as a whole has the strongest military, though Teinn be goddess of war, but its fragmentariness means it never really poses a threat to the two other kingdoms (and some Teinnab nationalists point to that as evidence that this is because of the patron goddess of their kingdom). Farms, villages, and small towns are all abundant (belonging to one fief or another), exploiting the kingdom's abundant natural resources.

[RoboticLIN]

[13:14:12] <RoboticLIN> I'd make some comment on the expression of magic VS how the states are in regards to individuality but hey I can't name the goddesses yet to connect them
[13:14:27] <RoboticLIN> (Not saying to put it in, just what I'm thinking about after reading)
[13:17:12] <pedro> what do you mean?
[13:17:41] <RoboticLIN> Okay give me a second. (Laoku-Enchanter. Teinn-Arcanist. Bezana-Elementalist.)
[13:18:18] <RoboticLIN> Bezana, having the most inward-focused magic, is pretty much the most selfish of ruling styles [Elementalist]
[13:19:03] <RoboticLIN> Teinn, having generally outward magic, expresses themselves heavily in politics (and has messed up groundland) [Arcanist]
[13:19:16] <RoboticLIN> The Enchanters kinda hang together and kinda can be used for themselves or others.
[13:20:57] <RoboticLIN> So there is my commentary, Pedro. Would you like me to put that on the thread?
[13:21:06] <pedro|work> sure

[pedromvilar]

Things that are true, as shown in or decided for the threads with CuriousDiscoverer and RoboticLIN:

• "Metamancer" is considered a rude word outside of scholarly contexts and even there is somewhat taboo;
• There are artefacts that generate solid forcefields which can be passed through in various ways depending on construction (access list, password, possession of specific artefact, etc);
• People on the Explorers' Guild leave ads in sync'd boards for other people to find and help them;
• Plant-artefacts exist;
• Most Galatean languages have a distinction between "static to be" and "temporary to be."

[DanielH]

Why is the last one the case? It’s a useful distinction but I don’t quite see why it is more useful there.

Also, are there euphemisms for discussing the evil people who affect others’ magic? That is sometimes necessary in scholarly contexts, history lessons for children who shouldn’t be exposed to such language, unfortunate news reports, and the unfortunately less-rare, less-newsworthy cases where somebody finds they have this ability and quietly decide to never use it.

[pedromvilar]

It's just a matter of language evolution, really, the most widely spoken languages there have a common ancestor that had that distinction and it stuck (like most Latin languages, with French being the glaring exception).

There are indeed such euphemisms. In scholarly texts, one usually uses the real name "metamancer" once and tries to reference it using pronouns throughout and minimise the number of times it actually appears in texts. History lessons about metamancers usually don't happen until the children are old enough to understand it (sorta like how we wait to teach children about the Holocaust), and then in class they do the same thing as in scholarly texts. In casual discussion or news synonyms of the word "corrupted" or "tainted" are sometimes used (the subject is suspected of corruption, a tainted individual did such-and-such).

Also LIN reminds me that blessings have in-built "safeties." For instance, firebenders get fire-resistance, jumpers don't break their legs when falling down, walking through solid objects lets people breathe even though there's no air there, that kinda stuff. These safeties are not universal or complete, though; someone with flight can just drop to their death, and if someone runs out of mana while inside a wall they will be unfortunately bisected or buried.

[pedromvilar]

As mentioned in the Elcenia and Threefold Miles threads, only about half the people with magic manage to Express it, between giving up after they're old enough and just never managing it even after.

[pedromvilar]

Other mentioned thing: world population at the time of those threads is somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a few million people, where the uncertainty is both Doylistic (idk) and Watsonian (no one has ever run a census).

[pedromvilar]

Thing I have decided metamancers can do: transport effects from one kind of magic to another wholesale. For instance, get an invisibility spell from an arcanist and attach it to an artefact which can then be recharged and become a ring of invisibility or whatever.

There are probably some way cool combinations of this sort I'm too tired to think of right now.

[DanielH]

What would the social repercussions be if, after Ruava healed everybody, they were to say “By the way, one of this pair of people was a metamancer”? Presumably whatever the fallout was would be mostly confined to the one town, but what would it be?

[pedromvilar]

Generally, panic. Some individuals would react differently (like the brother of the one with tuberculosis who pretends to be pious but is really an atheist), but in general people would freak the fuck out and think all the healed people were doomed to do some Simurgh-like plan somewhere down the line, the more panicky ones might just kill their loved ones to prevent that, some people will flee the town and try to change identities so they don't have to do that...