The Promethean region is a fiction region basically replacing .. let's say Thessaly. Wikipedia has this to say about Thessaly during this time period:
"In the summer of 480 BC, the Persians invaded Thessaly. The Greek army that guarded the Vale of Tempe evacuated the road before the enemy arrived. Not much later, Thessaly surrendered to the Persians.[4] The Thessalian family of Aleuadae joined the Persians subsequently.
In the 4th century BC, after the Greco-Persian Wars had long ended, Jason of Pherae transformed the region into a significant military power, recalling the glory of Early Archaic times. Shortly after, Philip II of Macedon was appointed Archon of Thessaly, and Thessaly was thereafter associated with the Macedonian Kingdom for the next centuries. "
It appears to have done little of note during the Classical era, and is likely to be conquered soon. It's perfect!
You are Pliny the Elder, ruler of Promothe, a skilled space mage, and head of the Promoth Mage's Association.
Promethe is the foremost city-state in the Promethean region, as the oldest and largest. Promethe sits in the east. It sits along the coast, and does minor trading with exports of food and metalcrafts.
In the south is the port town of Aileen. About half of the Promethean trade goes through their ports. While you have your own shipwrights, most of your ships are bought from them, being slightly superior.
In the west is Garrett, which oversees the majority of the region's mining efforts.
Near the center, upriver of Aileen, is Taner. Taner serves as a market town for the many scattered farms and farming villages nearby, and provides an abundance of food. It also supplies horses to the region.
Promethe holds strong influence over the region, but not true control. In the event of war, you can count on them to supply troops, but they will be upset if you take the brunt of the spoils while they take the brunt of the casualties, or if they disagree with the war. Similarly, if you build a permanent portal to one city and usurp its leadership to form a giant city, the others may see the writing on the wall and seek aid from outside city-states.
The Promethean region has no colonies, and is relatively unremarkable to the rest of Greece.
All of the Promethean region seems to have a similar spread of potential mages, but only Promethe has an organized Mage's Association. Your Mage's Association has a small branch in Aileen. Occasionally, curious hopefuls from across the region spend time in Promethe learning magic.
Promethe directly controls a population of around 150,000, while the Promethean region has another estimated 250,000. You have 60 full mages, of varying skill, and 200 part-time students, all with low skill.
The military consists of citizen-soldiers who supply their own gear. The standard levy is currently 4%, or 6000, which will have minimal economic impact if only raised for one season. Standard composition is 2000 hoplites, 3750 light infantry, and 250 light cavalry. No mage support is used. Note that heavy casualties, especially amongst the noble cavalrymen, may cripple your economy. Expected casualties from fighting a similar-strength Greek opponent without mage support is 10%-15%.
The navy is 70 galleys strong, enough to carry your entire levy and light loot.
Promethe is walled, has trading docks, and a shipyard. The Mage's Association has a prototype trading portal with its Aileen branch. The portal opens once for a few hours every few days, enough for compact and high-value trade goods, or fairly wealthy people traveling quickly between the two. Naturally, Mage's Association members have easy use of it, keeping the main Association membership centralized and slightly increasing part-time students.
(D&D stat range, 3d6. 10.5 is average. Rolls have been modified as befits someone of your background.)
Diplomacy: 7 - You were born of mages, and rarely associated with non-mages. You can usually avoid a major faux pas, but simply have trouble understanding anyone who hasn't dedicated their life to studying magic.
Stewardship: 6 - You don't understand the economy or why it works, and you're afraid you'll break it if you try to touch it.
Intrigue: 11 - You're decent at subtlety of action, and security.
Martial: 10 - War is easy. Send the wave of hoplite militia to crash into the other hoplite militia, and hope you have more hoplite militia.
Learning: 13 - You've spent your life studying, and even know many mundane yet esoteric concepts.
Magic: 16 - You're not quite the best in the association, but you're close. You have a deep understanding of space magic and why it works. You might even become a tier 3 mage in a few years, even with the job of running Promethe.
Advisor Petryr stats:
Diplomacy: 15
Stewardship: 11
Intrigue: 7
Martial: 7
Learning: 8
Magic: _ - No magical talent.
Petryr is a nobleman fascinated by magic. He was instrumental in you winning the election.
Your ruler has four dice to assign however you want, these may be given to different projects or stacked and added together.
Your advisor has one dice, or may instead use his stats to help with all your non-personal actions for the turn.
Diplomacy
Happiness at home - Make a new festival. People should appreciate this, and you can show off your magic. Someone might even figure out a new trick.
Maintaining influence - Petryr says it's a good idea to keep the rest of the Promethean region happy with you, and this might help take the edge off if they feel threatened by your trade portals.
Friends within Greece - Be friendly with your neighbors! It might help your merchants get better deals, or get access to their unique magic services, or move you towards an alliance. (Expected options are Athens, Sparta, Macedonia, colonies, or all/general spread.)
Distant Friends - They're pretty far away, but apparently more exotic goods will help your economy. But the relations boost isn't very important. It's not like the Persians are going to go to war with Greece soon or anything, right? (Expected options are Persia or Egypt.)
Stewardship
You have no idea. You could spend some time looking for ways to improve the economy.
Raise the taxes!
Lower the taxes!
Abolish the taxes entirely!
Get drunk, get a random idea, and try to implement it.
Intrigue
Tracking the students - Nearly anyone in Promethe is allowed to learn space magic. You can set up a network of people to track them, so you'll know where they are, and that they're not doing anything insidious or being kidnapped by rivals.
Spying on rivals - Your rivals have different magics and expertise than you. Send out some spies to find out more information than mere rumor will get, and give a trickle of information over time. A good first step if you want to encourage mages of other types into Promethe.
Counterespionage - There [/s]might be[/s] most definitely are rival spies in your city, because of human nature. Build your own counterespionage efforts and hunt them out.
Martial
Expanding the hoplites - Hoplites buy their own equipment, which is expensive. This makes it quite easy for Promethe, but not so easy for them. Reward the more skilled light infantry with help buying their armor, and you'll have more hoplites to use in war.
Increased training - If you feel war is on the horizon, for whatever reason, encourage your militia to put extra effort into training themselves. This will temporarily improve their quality.
Raise the levy!! - You can go on a raid, gaining valuable loot and plunder. If you succeed. Your army is a bit weak, but you have some ideas for relatively easy targets.
Raise all Promethean levies - Bring your allies in on a bigger raid.
Learning
Better Farming and herding - Over time, farmers develop better techniques, and they tend not to be too secretive about them. Try to find higher performing farms, and figure out why.
Smithing: Hiring from abroad - Your smiths are good at what they do, but can't seem to compare with some of the works of foreign smiths you've seen. Have your merchants look for any smiths who might be willing to move, and entice them with money.
Naval engineering - The Aileen are better shipwrights than you. They might be willing to send a team to train your own workers.
Magic
Use city resources to help with the Mage Association's action, if applicable.
Create a new, dedicated Mage's Association for Pyromancers. Specializing might help if, say, you wanted the pyromancers to have a martial culture and be dedicated to being militarized.
Try to integrate mages into the army.
Personal:
Magical Study - You're close to being classified as a tier 3 space mage, and would like to dedicate some time to reaching it.
A second advisor - Managing a city-state is hard. You could search for a second advisor (of what type?), and have another die for actions or general support for tasks you're bad at. You could really use a general, steward, or spymaster, but could also use this to increase your strengths.
You are unlikely to have the opportunity for a third advisor, unless you want to divide some of your own authority.
Stat study - Try to improve one of your stats. Lower stats are easier to raise.
Note that you will slowly make incremental progress on all of these, although a high-intensity project will slow progress further and might entirely stall more theoretical work.
1, More Trade Portals - Every few days, we open a trade portal between Promethe and Aileen. If we expand and create another branch in Garrett or Taner, we can add to the network and earn even more money.
In addition to the profits and defensive benefits, this would get us useful practical experience with strategic portals. On the downside, even with novices helping maintain the portals, it stretches our experienced mages thin. Teaching new mages will take a slight hit (more than made up for by training from another town), and we won't be doing much else until we've increased our numbers.
Note that this will start to disrupt mundane trade. If we start this, we can't cancel it without major consequences.This is a high-intensity project, and requires most of the association's focus.
2, Study Trade Portals - Our long-distance portal is still a prototype. It's very magepower-expensive to keep running, although even the most novice space mage is able to help keep it up, and takes most of an hour to start up. We can focus on studying it, trying to make it easier and more efficient.
We can't say whether this choice or #1 is more effective for improving it, but this is certainly easier.
3, Branching Out - Imagine mages being trained from every city and town, and having mages selling their services in every agora. With the income our trade portal, the Mage Guild can afford another branch. If we set this up before we commit to another pair of trade portals, we can begin preparing to have enough mages to easily maintain it.
Note that without the trade portals for constantly keeping our mages in contact, more distant branches will be forced to be more independent from us.
4, Branching out x2 - The mage guild can afford to build and maintain two more branches. This will give us a foothold in every major population center in Prometh. It does stretch our experienced teachers and resources thin, but makes up for it by teaching as many mages as possible.
This is a high-intensity project, and requires most of the guild's focus.
This project will benefit from state financing.
Note that without the trade portals for constantly keeping our mages in contact, more distant branches will be forced to be more independent from us.
5, Teaching - Focus our efforts on convincing new space magic talants to study under us, and on teaching them. This will also help us build up initiates into experienced mages, but not as much as with choice #6.
6, Studying - Focus the efforts of our experienced mages on improving their own magical skills. They carry the bulk of the work of teaching new mages, studying new spells, and dealing with the trade portals, so more can only help us.
7, Spatial Senses? - Every few days, we re-cast the trade portal. It starts with a beacon ritual at the Aileen branch, which mages at Promethe branch work off of. The spell to pick up on that, if cast in isolation, allows one to sense a towards the direction of both branches. We should study this, maybe we'll eventually be able to open portals to anywhere the mage guild has a presence, without a beacon spell.
8, Combat Spatial Manipulation Study - Alone, a space mage may twist space, pushing a few arrows off-course. A group can have more of an effect than one might expect, by specializing. Unfortunately this group spell is delicate work, and useless for battle. Can we make it useful?
9, Games With a Twist - Our most basic spell is to twist space, making two points closer together or further apart. We should create a ball game based on this. The spectacle will help to popularize Space magic to attract more casual mages, and it will train combat reflexes so our mages are better at defense.
10, Power Grading - Some mages are more powerful and talented than others of the same tier. If we develop a system to grade individual mages and track these grades, we'll be better informed, and better able to decide what to do with our more powerful mages. Do they change over time? Can we influence how powerful we are?
11, Pyromancers - We worship Prometheus, the fire giver, yet neglect our pyromancers. Now that we have the resources, we should begin encouraging those with the pyromancy talent to figure out their gift, and trying to help them with our experience in space magic.
This project will benefit from state financing.
CAMPAIGN PROMISE! - This gets a higher emphasis on automatic increases, if an intensive action isn't chosen. It receives a bonus if its the action chosen.
12, Redefine Tiers (Trivial, can be taking alongside any other Association action) - In addition to another action, you may modify the mage rankings. Some examples of this are if you want to lower the standards (and education time) for a war, ensuring that all tier 2 pyromancers can use a low level space magic defensive spell, or making a side-upgrade of Tier 1 pyromancers that are trained as blacksmiths.Note that this will temporarily destabilize training, based on the extent - Simply renaming a tier is much easier than expecting all tier 2s to know a second type of magic.
Education - We have a fair degree of experience and reliability with teaching tier 1s (But don't expect much from tier 1s training other tier 1s).
We still have some difficulty training mages to reach tier 2, and some mages simply never reach it. We can do it, but it takes time. We expect it to be easier once we have more tier 3s training them, or over time as we get more experience with this and expand our numbers.
We might consider creating specialist sub-tiers. Training a mage to the point that they can cast a single Short Portal would be faster, but might slow their training to full Tier 2 mages for generations while we slowly improve the training program.
We can't properly train tier 3s, and are lucky to get one in a generation. Magic is difficult, and we're learning more every day - Perhaps one day we will understand it well enough to have an education program for tier 3s. If we want more, the best way is likely expanding our numbers and and doubling-down on studying.
50 years ago, what we now consider to be a tier 2 was as rare and prestigious as a tier 3 is now. Even a tier 1 would have been lauded as a genius in our early days. As such, we expect that our current tier classification would eventually scale to 4, 5, or even 6. (Your predecessor, who instituted this system, was an optimist, and hoping to inspire more progress.)
Tier 1 space mage - 50 full time mages, 200 part-time mages. Tier 1 mages have learned the basics of space magic. Mages of this rank are expected to be able to cast 3 low level spells without rest, and support more experienced mages casting strenuous spells. It takes 5 years of dedicated effort for someone with the gift for space magic to reach this level.
Tier 2 space mage - 9. They have fully learned our current understanding of space magic. To reach tier 2, a mage is expected to be able to hold two space warps stable while distracted with holding a conversation, and be able to cast 10 low level spells or 2 medium level spells before tiring. They are expected to be able to cast a Strategic Portal in a group of 3 (their half of it at least), with tier 1 support. It takes another 5-15 years of dedicated effort for a fresh tier 1 to reach tier 2.
Tier 3 space mage - 1. A rare display of skill and talent, understanding space magic at an intuitive level. Someone at this level is expected to be able to triple the capacity of a standard oil vase, and have it last for two weeks. They are expected to be able to create a Strategic Portal almost alone, and cast 10 medium level spells before tiring.
[spoiler=Spells known]
Space MagicWarp Space (Cantrip-Low) [1.5] - Increases or decreases the distance between two points in space. It can also add a curve or a twist. User must maintain concentration, space slowly untwists afterwards.
As a cantrip, it's enough to help grasp something just out of reach, and takes several seconds to cast.
As a low level spell, it can be cast very fast. It can be cast within standard line-of-sight. It can be cast through obstructions, but becomes far more expensive.
Higher power increases area, magnitude of effect, and allows maintaining multiple effects.
As a high level spell, it can reliably be cast semi-permenantly, creating a room or container that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It needs to be stabilized occasionally.
Short Portal (Medium) [1.05] - Creates a pair of portals within line of sight. Can be cast through obstructions. Casting time is a few minutes. Portals cannot be moved after creation, but may be disrupted by any space mage. Duration affected by mana cost, usually lasts from 2-30 minutes. May instead be a concentration spell with unspecified duration. Standard portal size is slightly larger than a human.
Portal edges are hazardous, able to cut cleanly through any tested object. Edges have shining light for unknown reasons.
Disruption is hazardous for anything in the portal, but not instant. A space mage will have time to get clear, but a muggle likely won't notice until it's too late.
Strategic Portal (High*) [Prototype 0.25] - Creates a portal between two points. Requires mages at point B to create an beacon and cast half the spell. Is mana-intensive to maintain. Size can vary, and it's effectively limited to a 15 foot diameter before becoming too draining and inefficient. Seems to gets negligibly more expensive at longer ranges.
*Expected to become a medium level spell after the spell is improved.
Turn time is 4 years.
It is the year 510 BC. Historically, the Greco-Persian wars started in 499 BC.
Remember: Your ruler gets 4 dice to assign for city projects, your advisor gets 1 dice, and your mage guild gets 1.
Author
Topic: Fantasy Greek Hegemony (SG) (Read 2643 times)