UncleChu/Lookshy
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UncleChu Solidifies Lookshy for his Neurotic Numberkeeping
Lookshy, the city-state, and the numbers I am using for my wee campaign. They are based on canon, but often I apply general fractions to whatever feels right.
Population:
- almost 300,000 persons claiming allegiance or under the rule of Lookshy
- 200,000 citizens and helots
- 80,000 citizens
- 120,000 helots
- 100,000 metics, slaves, and servants
- 30,500 metics
- 56,000 indentured servants
- 13,500 are slaves
- 200,000 citizens and helots
- 150,000-200,000 citizens, helots, and metics in Lookshy's city, depending on the season. (200,000 in winter, 187,500 during the Storms, 175,000 during the Farms, 150,000 during Summer, 162,500 during Descending Fire). Including the oppressed, the number is more like 185,000-246,000 people. The rest are on duty elsewhere in Creation. I need to pit this estimate against force numbers, if the Outcaste book gives info
- 4.5% of the population are slaves (6750-9000)
- 18.7% of the population are indentured servants (28,050-37,400)
- 17.4% of the population are metics (26,100-34,800)
- 23.8% of the population are citizens (35,700-47,600)
- 35.6% of the population are helots (65,900-87,600)
General Political orientation (based on the percentage of support from Italy's main 5 parties):
- Mercenary 39%
- Interventionist 21%
- Isolationist 19%
- Imperialist (still whimsical at this point, tend to side with other factions in a pinch) 15%
- Purist 06%
The Following is My Own, Non-Canon-based
Military:Lookshy possesses 21 Battle Carriers (WotLA p21). This is the primary method of transporting either a talon of troops or a pair of warstriders and their support teams, at 20mph (or 100mph in emergencies). The 7th Legion also has barely 200 Chariots of the Infinite Heavens, as opposed to the scattered handfuls found in the rest of the world. These carry the pilot and two passengers (and gear) at up to 80mph. Lookshy has a small fleet of 10 Whirligig-class Courier ships that it uses to transport marines and important cargoes along surrounding the coast and the nearby rivers. They have a dozen Glorious Dragonfly-Class Patrol Boats to patrol the nearby coast and the portions of the two local rivers going from Lookshy to Nexus and Sijan. They field more than 100 Manta-class transports, keeping two thirds in the sky on patrol and the rest in repair at all times. Also in the armada are two Shogunate-era Mobile Repair and Fabrication platforms. The core of the armada is of course five Kireeki-class Assault Skyremes.
Agriculture: 32,000 fixed workers working only 800 of the 1500 available square miles within the Great Wall. Main crop is Lookshy rice (wheat a distant second), a short sticky grain which thrives in the cool, moist conditions of the local Longfarm season. There is also no need for the "swamp" rice paddy method of cultivation, as it has excellent natural defenses against weeds, giving rice fields a much more "waves of grain" appearance. It grinds excellently into flour for noodles. Common vegetables are ginger, soybeans, spinach, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, beansprouts, eggplant, radish, burdock root, various beans, a few varieties of seaweed, and the all-important Chiaroscuran chile pepper. Pickling is common to transport food to all the forces. Fruit is much more limited to apples, persimmons, tangerines and pears. Beef is the primary livestock, though fish is more often consumed in everyday diet.
Flarings:
Lookshy freely distributes plans for building cheap, special Demesnes-taming towers that focus the potent Essence away from the area, allowing towns to grow in peace. Originally named Ventowers, they are commonly referred to as "Flarings." They require maintenance, so they cannot be erected in the wild and left alone, but the maintenance required is simple enough that even the smallest of communities can perform them.
Flarings stand from seven to ten feet tall, depending on the strength of the Demesnes they are capping. They have multiple "roofs" as are common with chinese or japanese architecture, but otherwise have no walls, only the bareset of structural support, and are hollow, allowing one to see the raging bonfire of Essence within. This Essence of course matches the aspect of the Demesne it caps, and provides the same amount of light as a bonfire. Anything thrown into the tower takes damage as though it were inside a bonfire. Thus, Flarings often serve as centers to festivals, as well as a means of waste disposal.
Mercenary Companies
These sizes are extrapolated from the Hexagon and Big Three corners shown on the Lookshy map in Outcastes, using a Lookshy's wintry population density of around 14,000 people per square mile.
Hexagon: (Big 3 have about a Dragon, 1250 men, each)
--The Sun Lions – run by Tertael the Celestial Lion (male-ish)
--Ferocious Jade and Loving Blow – run by Blitz Ardurista, Water Aspect (f)
--Foralene Mercenaries –run by Foralene Bao-see, a horrificly Wyld-twisted commander. He has a strange autism, giving him occasional bouts of brilliance. He has a thick fur coat and only one strange centrally-located arm.
--twelve other companies (approx. 520 men each, about 4 talons)
District of Blades:
Small, disreputable companies (the biggest are a talon of 125 men each)
Lookshy Protectorate
194,000 square miles same as the historic Iowa Territory outside Lookshy that are superficially independent. 3.575 million people live in these Lookshy Protectorates outside the City-State.
There are 4 cities, 52 towns, and over eight-thousand villages covering the Protectorates. They are more densely clustered along the three big roads leading out of Lookshy, or along one of the 4 greater rivers as well as along the Yanaze and the Inner Sea. Almost every settlement has a river or creek running through it, as well as a Manse or Demesne-Tamers that is undoubtedly claimed by one of Lookshy's DBs. Almost 70% of the Demesnes in the area are capped in such ways.
Cities: 62,895 people
- Fusuro- 26,460 people. Lv4 Fire Manse
- Largess- 15,876 people. Lv 2 Wood Manse
- Parvenu- 11,113 people. Lv 1 Air Manse
- Kosasu- 9,446 people. Lv 1 Earth Manse
Towns: 178,000 people
- Expeditious- 6,612 people. Lv 1 Air Manse
- Marrow State- 1,962 people. Lv 3 Earth Manse on a Lv 5 Demesne. 10 nobles run the town in a small aristocracy, 15 law enforcement, 49 monks of the Lookshy Immaculate faith. 32 acres of town, 13 sq. miles of surrounding fields and orchards (2 miles from town to wilderness). Town is peppered with jutting spires of hard stone that have the nooks and crannies of bone marrow, thus giving the town its name. A hill to the northeast had the largest of these marrow-like formations, thrusting out 40 feet in the air in slightly curved claws around a spectacular mansion. Everyone could see powerful flows of essence dancing around these enormous spires and the manse in the middle, like swarms of flying rubies soaring through the air.
- 50 other towns with populations ranging 1000-6000.
Villages: 3,334,000 people
- Well over eight thousand villages. These tend to range 300-500 people, though they can range from 20-1000 at extremes. That’s a village for every 23 square miles (that's about five miles between settlements), though only 1 square mile of agriculture is required for every 200 people. Thus, only 9% of the land is cultivated.
Roads
Towns and cities have about 76 miles of roads between them. Plenty of villages between, though.
- Sea Road- This runs from the Sea Gate in the Great Wall, which pulls away from the actual Inner sea for over 500 miles, and once rejoining the coast heads down towards Celeren and all the way to Thorns.
- Center Road- This runs southeast, ultimately through the Marukan mountains and into Mishaka.
- River Road- runs east, parallel to the Yanaze though roughly 90 miles south of it, all the way to Ikari, which I assume is a riverport town to cross the Grey River to Nexus. Apostate in Tatters uses this road on occasion.
Rivers
Towns and cities on the river have around 175 miles between them. Again, plenny of villages.
- Yanaze River
- River of Dying Mercies
- Naru River
- Uyotamon River
- Ululating River
Only one town on the Inner Sea coast.
Weather
Based on Akita on Japan's western coast, which is located midway between the North Pole and the Equator, just as Lookshy is in the middle of Creation (plus Lookshy seems to have thematic similarities to Japan, so lets go with that!). It's also got a vast sea with a continent directly to its West, so weather patterns are likely to be more similar than basing it off Oregon or the Spanish coast. Finally, I added +5 to the Highs of Summer and -5 to the Lows of Winter to represent what I feel is the more extreme seasons presented in the 2E description. Regardless, my Lookshy has a cooler climate than most would originally envision.
| Season | Months | Avg Min | Avg | Avg Max | Chance of Rain | Chance of Snow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WINTER | D.Air-Asc.Wat | 21-25 | 26-31 | 32-42 | 01-35% | 36-78% |
| SPRINGSTORM | R.Wat-R.Ear | 31-34 | 38-41 | 45-49 | 01-39% | 40-49% |
| LONGFARM | D.Ear-A.Fir | 50-59 | 59-66 | 67-73 | 01-38% | - |
| SUMMER | R.Fir-A.Air.14 | 68-75 | 76-82 | 83-89 | 01-34% @ | - |
| LASTFARM | A.Air.15-R.Air.7 | 49-61 | 58-69 | 66-77 | 01-39% | - |
| FALLSTORM | rest of R.Air | 37-39 | 45-47 | 52-54 | 01-50% | 51-60% |
@ There is no rain at all during Descending Fire
-Precipitation percentages are cumulative for ease of ST utilization.
This chart works with the Valdrax-Chu Calendar
Updates
-April 19, 2006. JohnBiles pointed out my factor mistake, and so I had to redo everything again, jacking numbers up to over 3.5 million to my canon-based densities. The Scavlands be packed! Also came up with the Demesne-tamer idea (which needs a better name).
-April 19, 2006. After working out a population density based on the Blessed Isle, 1.4 million was crazy high. Dropped it down to 200,000ish, a near-canonical happy medium. I'm much more pleased.
-April 18, 2006. Boosted the population of the Protectorates from 50,000 to 1.4 million, and it feels much better. However, it means a half day's march can get you to the next town. Disappointingly settled, but probably accurate for the fertile Scavlands.
Comments
Oooh, weather! Very cool. That's the sort of thing I always have trouble figuring out in Creation. -- JohnBiles
Likewise, but weather is just such a critical aspect to setting a scene, I could never ignore it. I felt silly using Weather Generators, seemed too arbitrary. So I have to go in and create customized weather systems for locations based on real-world info. Glad you like it! --UncleChu
So why is Lookshy's protectorates so thinly settled? --JohnBiles
- The numbers were originally based on this Kingdom Generator cuz i love Medieval Demographics Made Easy, but it indeed created a far more sparse area than I had imagined as well. However, at the time, I had a lot of other planning to do for the series, and just wrote it off as saying "well, everywhere in Creation between the major cities there's sparse population." I want to emphasize the ruins of mankind struggling to survive outside larger powers in the Age of Sorrows. HOWEVER, your comment confirms my initial inkling that it is still too sparse, especially since i've scanned through HotBG. I will reinvestigate the numbers from MDME by hand instead of trusting the Qzil script. And maybe I need to warm up the weather a bit as well. --UncleChu
- I tend to see the area along the big river whose name is escaping me right now as the most settled region of the Scavenger lands, from its mouth up to Great Forks, with populations plunging as you move away from the river and its trade. --JohnBiles
Do the Flarings sound stupid? There's just so many Demesnes in the world (being 4-5 miles apart from the next), there must be some way for small communities to live without fear of being changed by the primordial energy.--UncleChu
- My gut feeling is that if it's within, oh, anywhere in Creation as we know it, it's already got a Manse, whether we realize it or not - the Realm defense grid. I hate to disagree with canon so strongly on this one, but the whole "Oh, and your children will have two heads" problem is a big one, easily fixed by level 1 and level 2 manses. If you're going to hear about this wonder-fabulous realm defense grid, I'd imagine that you've got manse-like 'taps' on these things, that divert power to the defense grid. Nothing too ornate, able to go without maintainance for thousands of years, these low rocky domes (perhaps 15 feet in radius) are an almost ignored part of the landscape, and make excellent landmarks for over-land navigation. Traditionally they're ignored in the common parlance, as they're so easy to destroy, and so common. If you want to put a 'proper' manse on top, it's trivially easy to do so, and doesn't require the kind of massive deconstruction (and owner-annoyance) as destroying a proper cap would. Just an alternative theory. -- GreenLantern
- That's not a bad idea at all, at all. A flaw with my Flarings idea is that structures of that sort really SHOULDN'T be cheaply made. It doesn't have to be a Manse and create a hearthstone, but it needs to direct the essence somewhere away. They're clearly artifacts, beyond the ken of Second Agers without significant governmental resources. The kind of thing Lookshy probably wouldn't care about outside its walls. However, if they were all made and set up in the First Age, even under the sea, there'd be enough to cover the millions of Demesnes in Creation. Sure, plenty get destroyed in the various cataclysms, as you suggest, and then maybe nations can install Flarings to keep things stable if they can't build a Manse right away. Now just to come up with a name for the Grid's Demesne-plugs.
- "Flaring" is the process modern oil-drillers use to burn excess pockets of natural gas so they can get to the oil, so that's what I called monuments that just basically focus excess essence away. But... hrmm, gonna stop here, create a new sub-page, and move it in there. This is a big topic, worth its own page. --UncleChu
- I'll let you make the new sub-page, but I do want to get some more talk in anyway. You're implying that it's somehow difficult to make even one of these essence plugs I speak of, and mention that "they're clearly artifacts". I disagree entirely. To me, the design of an essence plug (if not a defense-grid tap) is not only simple, it's an exercise for aspiring geomancers. Almost like a journeyman-level work, insomuch as it's like manse design, only about 20 times easier. No need to be so accurate, or ensure a hearthstone, or even make it truly stable - as long as your design has enough essence bleed-offs, you should be able to cap a demense with just basic geomantic principles, and just (as you mention) have a giant furnace of sorts. As long as your design doesn't have any essence build-up, it won't explode, and you'll be good. The first-age ones that power the grid are most likely more complicated, and encased in some sort of uber-solid substance, probably acting as some sort of actual manse, with the hearthstone long ago removed, and placed into an array at the Imperial Manse, which powers the weapons half of the grid. My guess is that most of Creation is covered in proper first-age defense-grid taps, but anywhere there's been a lot of action would have lost them. In particular, during the Baloran Crusade, the Fair Folk would've wanted to not only weaken the defense grid's power, but also 'untie' the wyld essence flows of the region. By uncapping those Demenses, they allow significantly more 'unfettered energy' to distort the places they've been, both essentially giving the places a bit of Wyld taint as it is, and pushing people out, letting the Wyld proper in as well. Other places, such as Lookshy, would want to maintain these structures, as they're obviously a part of Creation's defense (even if helping power your enemy, the Imperial Manse would still wipe out Lookshy even if all of the taps in the Threshold were removed). In addition, the first-age taps are propbably much more sturdy than the more modern "senior projects" of aspiring Dragon-Blooded geomancers. -- GreenLantern, expanding
Your map is not so hideous as you make you make out, though I do think there might be a few too many roads on the scale you posited heading to what is labeled 'Kamayua Secret Redoubt' - Kraken who wonders if perhaps the Kamayua Redoubt is Lookshy's Area 51...
- Ah, well, I placed the Redoubt first, distributing the towns later (evenly distributing 50 dots took up enough of my concentration that I wasn't paying attention), finally ending with the roads. Let's just say the Redoubt is a little ways farther up the River of Dying Mercies, where it intersects the 'u' in Kamayua. As for Area 51ness, the Secret Redoubts' primary purposes are to act as command centers should Lookshy be destroyed, and secondarily to house the Thousand-Forged Dragons. I imagine very little of the way of research goes on there. So if you consider super manse-eating clockwork monsters to be equivalent to UFOs, then Area 51 it is indeed. --UncleChu
