Talk:Flannary

All our nations need a section about their history and relation with the church. I don't know how we missed that. Dur. -Msallen 18:32, 4 November 2009 (EST)

Because it would be hard and it would be boring? -gm

Man, this article shows some blatant bias! Who wrote this trash ;) --Msallen

GM text vomit from Petra page

I could see that, yeah. In fact, since this is Proto-France, it's pretty easy to imagine one mega important city and thousands of square miles of fuck all. I imagine that area of southern flannary probably has like 40% of the total population in the one big city (capital) and it's satellites, and all that shit in the interior is mostly villages It also explains why the contested provinces with Fresia are a contest at all instead of a strong, wealthy, and unified Flannary steamrolling a decentralized and infighting Fresia: it's basically the Flannari frontier. Additionally, we can imagine that southern area - southwest of the FuckityDick River (needs a new name, obvs)is a lot more worldly and cosmopolitan than the basically ignorant peasantry of the interior. Good catch. I would expect that the Odessan navy doesn't really fuck with the Petarans on the Heretic Sea (which is shoal infested, island heavy, and very treacherous, putting the Odessan's relatively large fleet at a comparative disadvantage. The Odessan navy IS, however, powerful enough to prevent the Petarans from even bothering to create anything beyond a small raider and trader flotilla. So, you're not entirely wrong - there isn't outright war, per se, so much that the Petarans have conceded control of the Seas to the Odessans.

A little bit of cross-ref shows us that the Odessans have been big shit, one way or the other, pretty much always. We also notice that the ill fated Barbannan family - as in Barbannan's Crusade - are Odessan. That was almost 1,000 years ago, but I can't see any reason that any prior animosity would have abated over-much. So, yeah, we can safely say that Odessans and Petarans probably despise one another. Celstians and Petarans get along quite well, not only because of their mutual hatred of the Odessans, but because the Petaran and Celstian people have a relatively close relationship, hinted at by the Ebony Reaver's backstory. The Petaran royals gave a lot of indirect support to the Celstian Revolution, which might actually be where the animosity between Odessa and Petara finds it's ultimate genesis. Also, the Celstians are barely Alexandrian anyway by the reckoning of some. Flannary probably has some, but lesser, trade contact with Petara on account of the whole "Flannary is huge and centrally located and pretty much self supporting" thing they have going on.

As to that mountain range and cultural divide, I go back to the whole Center of Culture thing. It seems that if that interior is mostly agrarian fiefs, then they're producing a mess of grain that then travels towards that central river, which seems like it would be huge and rather tranquil, which would act as a sort of central highway (see also "The Nile & Ancient Egypt"). I imagine the grain all goes down (or up? only you know the flow direction) the river to that central lake, where there is probably decent sized trading town - I imagine run directly by the crown - where ALL the grain is bought up. Since I expect the river is basically unpassable going through those mountains, we can assume that the Flannary probably have carved out a huge road going over that mountain, probably well traveled and well fortified and also owned by the crown. Non crown people probably even have to pay a fucking toll. It can then go on a leisurely barge ride down the second river and to the capital, where the crown then can directly sell it the rest of the world. Since Flannary pretty much produces food, and since the food is all bought up by the crown one the cheap side of the mountains, we can see why the Flannary have only one big city and why the King reigns as an almost absolute monarch. The nobles basically depend on the crown for all of their income. Which is, come to think of it, why they also live in the Capital almost exclusively rather than on their estates.

In the new map, I think the area between the lake in southern flannery and the southern river-facing border is more of a set of rolling hills. One could imagine building a reasonable trade road across them with the proper motivation. I would imagine this area gets a bunch of grain shiped down to it to trade for luxury exotic goods from Petra (which can't have great grain supplies, can it?) and probably some Celstian goods as well. --Msallen