[CHAR] YOWL: a worldbuild collaboration

[Wardian]

The Pocket Principalities of the Three Rivers

At the South end of Cansma, where the famous rolling hills grow into precipitous peaks nestled between porcupine tree forests, one will find a most peculiar political arrangement. The region, once a small border province of the Null Empire, now houses no less than a thousand independent principalities. In the typical river town of Ochamire, every lane is under the domain of a separate prince. Even out in the mountainous backwoods, a single village often has more than one sovereign.

This situation came about when Timitubo the Just, the nineteenth son of the lecherous King Phrasgeri of the Three Rivers, raised an army of peasants and merchants fed up with the long, bloody war of succession between King Phrasgeri's first four sons. Timitubo's mob routed his brothers' forces across several consecutive decisive battles. Yet his brothers still held sway over the hill fortresses. Rather than suffer through years of prolonged sieges to reunify the kingdom, the wise Timitubo decreed that the kingdom should be divided up equally among all of King Phrasgeri's heirs, both male and female. A special court system, whose judges would be appointed jointly by the new principalities and the region's council of merchants, was established to handle disputes between the new principalities but had no power to govern any territory of their own. In addition, every eight years all of the judges would come together and hold an assembly where the entire region would be redistricted equally between all living and capable descendants of King Phrasgeri, thus avoiding any need at all for further wars of succession.

The system worked well enough for many decades, but eventually one of the judges managed to amass enough power to proclaim herself the High Judge of the Three Rivers. Her dictatorial Krytocracy saw the first expansion of the lands of the Three Rivers since the days of King Phrasgeri's grandfather, but it also saw widespread, punitive enforcement of every law on the books. Fifty-three persons were hanged for not properly trimming their hedges, one hundred and fifty-two had an ear cut off for exceeding the noise limits at night, and ninety persons were fined a year's wages for leaving unsightly wheelbarrows in front of their homes. Her reign of terror only ended when an all-star team of lawyers successfully sued for her to be impeached on some obscure legal technicality. After this unpleasant incident, changes were made to the system to further limit the power of the judges. But the concept of a high law that transcended the individual principalities remained, albeit in greatly limited ways.

Some time after the High Judge's downfall, the same all-star team of lawyers found a loophole in the high law that allowed–no, required–each of the principalities to be constantly at war with at least one other kingdom in order to assert their independence. A few ambitious pocket princes used this as an excuse to invade their neighbors across the street. The battles that followed were a thing of legend: Prince Arwin even managed to raise an army of seventy-eight men-at-arms! Houses were burned, taverns ransacked, and innocent civilians-turned-refugees forced to flee a dozen kingdoms away to the other side of town. However, these wars quickly fell out of favor when it was realized that the princes would always have to fight on the front lines and would lose any territorial gains once the assembly of judges met again. So the all-star team of lawyers was summoned to save the day yet again, this time by finding a ridiculously lax minimum set of actions that must be taken for a principality to be considered to be at war. Basically, challenging your rival prince to a daily drinking contest and reading a hurtful poem lambasting them for their perceived faults is enough to meet these requirements. But the occasional actual spat does still ensue.

Travelers to the Three Rivers are strongly advised to employ a lawyer-guide during their stay to avoid being immediately fined and/or imprisoned for some obscure violation of the law multiple times in one day across several dozen principalities.

[Wardian]

The Null Empire

The first and largest empire to have ever existed, the Null empire stretched from the shores of the Central Ocean to the craggy cliffs of the Great Rift. Yet for such a large empire, very little is known about it, including even its name. Scholars choose to call it the Null Empire to distinguish it from the First, Restored, Second, and Third Empires. For a long time the Null Empire was considered nothing more than a myth invented by the Restored Empire to lend legitimacy to its claims outside its de facto borders.

According to the histories of the Restored Empire, the Null empire was the direct descendant of Elohim, the First City founded by the creator god Del. The city made the transition to an empire when it was decided to spread the light of civilization across all the world. But civilization also changed the way people thought, and what they believed. The harsh realities of city life gave birth to legions of malevolent spirits, and nascent gods tore the empire asunder as they battled for divine hegemony. To save civilization, the last followers of Del gathered in the heart of the First City and invoked their god, who then translated them and the city into the realm of the gods where it could be preserved for all time.

Dreams of restoring the empire to its former glory have burned brightly ever since. And in none did it burn brighter than in Darian the Saviour, one of the acolytes of Del who was translated along with the city. He stole knowledge of the ways of the gods and ruse from Del, and returned with it to the world of the living where he shared it with the desperate survivors of the remaining cities. They used this knowledge to construct a network of towers that repelled the Ruse and saved civilization. The method for creating these towers was soon lost, and many were destroyed by the barkolupus swarms. But a select few still stand to this day, their workings baffling even the most learned scholars. The influence of the towers was nevertheless longlasting, with most of the successor states in the core regions of the Null Empire (the lands between the hills of Cansma and the Central Ocean) harboring a deep suspicion of gods and a fear of even the most benign ruse.

While the cities were saved, the empire was not. Without the First City no contender could claim sovereignty over the others. What followed were several centuries of independent city-states and ever-shifting small kingdoms, until the establishment of the First Empire. But no empire since can lay claim to as vast a territory as that of the original Null empire.

[Wardian]

The Three Rivers Telo Trials

When Prince Vakhul XII died, the question of who should inherit his third floor factory kingdom captivated all the principalities of the Three Rivers. According to long standing custom, it belonged to his closest living relative until the next conclave of judges redistricted the region. As the late prince had no descendants and no living ancestors, his only sibling, Princess Peraula, took possession of his domain. Normally this would not be the least bit controversial, but in this case, a complaint against this transfer of sovereignty was filed in the High Court by none other than the deceased Prince Vakhul himself.

In life, the prince had a sliver of brightstone implanted in his brain. After his original body died, the shard was transplanted into an artificial humanoid construct, called a telo. The shard imparted the late prince's personality and memories into the telo, which it argued made it Prince Vakhul. Princess Peraula disagreed, arguing the telo did not meet the legal definition of being the same person as Prince Vakhul and so the late prince's domains still rightfully belonged to her.

The case sharply divided the Three Rivers. Old codgers pining for immortality expressed outrage that there was a question about whether a telo was the same person as the one its shard had been implanted in, while young yipper snappers worried about yet more cuts to their already dismally small inheritances argued voraciously against granting telos inheritance rights. There were also a few crazy people who argued something about fundamental rights of personhood for artificial constructs and whatnot, but most people were wise enough to only care about the decision's impact on their immediate future.

The hit reality show The High Court immediately picked up the case for its prime time slot. In the law obsessed land of the Three Rivers, there was no higher honour. After lengthy preambles intermixed with touching flashbacks of childhood memories of the main participants, the actual case began as the judges entered the arena amidst a fantastic pyrotechnical display as the show's guitar-heavy theme song roared in the background. The announcers play-by-play commentary flooded the soundscapes of every home, with cheers erupting as each cunning legal maneuver came into play. During the bonus round, the defense shocked the court by bringing in a necromancer who summoned the prince's spirit, proving that the telo was not the same person as the late prince. At least, it would have proved it if respectable people still believed in such foolishness as necromancy. At the end of the first day, the judges remained undecided, although the defense's lawyers lead the style scoreboard by 7 points.

The next morning, as the defense's expert witness Eliana Reyes was on her way to the Timitubo Legal Arena, the prince of the intersection of 12th and Rosewood Street detained her for violating Article CXCVII, Section 17. This was, of course, a dirty move because everyone knew that the third paragraph of Section 2 provided exemption for noncitizens from violations of sections which conflicted with Article XLII's basic rights of pedestrian access, provided proper etiquette was followed. And the only reason she could be detained was because of that section's ambiguous language which allowed for one to argue for either one of two mutually exclusive definitions of proper etiquette. Three Rivers residents were fans of crafty legal arguments, but only when they did not rest on ambiguity.

Rioters overwhelmed the one-man army of the intersection, and barged into the despicable prince's adhoc bathroom prison. But, due to a prolonged dispute over the sharing of maintenance costs between the princes of the third and fourth floors of the apartment complex, the floorboards could not support the extra weight of the rioters. Eliana cracked her head on the bathtub below and died. Back at the arena, both sides agreed to expedite the case in the interest of public safety. In practice, this meant no new witnesses could be called upon to testify. However, later during that day's bonus round the defense unleashed their next surprise: a telo containing the personality and memories of Eliana Reyes. Despite her vociferous opposition to the technology, she had secretly undergone the operation. As the telo maintained Miss Reyes' personality and memories, it was still vehemently against the technology and was fully prepared to demonstrate the ways in which she was most certainly not the same as the real Miss Reyes. This left Prince Vakhul's lawyers in an unpleasant situation: They could either bar Miss Reyes' telo from testifying on the ground that the telo should count as a new witness, and thereby undermine their case by admitting that telos were not the same as the person their brightstone came from, or they could allow Miss Reyes' telo to unleash her crafty arguments against her own kind without being able to call upon a new witness of their own to balance the score.

A mix of boos and applause filled the arena as the judges chimed in: Should telos be legally recognized as the same person whose memories and personalities they hold? Judge Sarkov, no. Judge Nanuri, no. Judge Pulo, no. Judge Khaminda, no. And of course, Judge Simon went against the crowd and voted yes. "The defense's tactics were complete rubbish", he explained.

However, this victory for anti-thought activists was short lived. In the Second Telo Trial it was decided that telos, while not meeting the legal definition of a person, were still legally eligible to be the closest living adult relatives of their previous bodies. And thus a new class of princes, lacking the rights of personhood but also not burdened with its obligations, came into being.