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Herbert West

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Jul 24, 2006
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Byzantium Burns​

A When The World Stopped Making Sense AAR by Herbert West



As a beta tester of Enil Migration Era mod, currently named When The World Stopped Making Sense (which I hereby propose to rename to something like "Corpse of an Empire" or simply Völkerwanderung), I have the opportunity to regale you with an AAR to showcase the mod (and get back into writing).

As the mod is currently in beta, expect some rough patches, and some cheating/manual bugfixing.

The AAR will mix story with gameplay, with the emphasis, at least so I hope, on story. I picked the Crimean Goths for their rather unique story potential, and because they have very good, proto-germanic names for their ranks and advisers.

Chapter I: The Last Rearguard
Chapter II: Alaric the Belated
Chapter III: A court of knives
 
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subbed
 
I'm keeping an eye on this.
 
Chapter I: The lone rearguard​

I could learn to love this land. The warm waters, as they splash around my feet. The wind, blowing the thousand salty smells of the sea my way. The light, dancing on hills and the meadows. Perhaps I could even learn to love its people. Swarthy, oily men, bronzed by the sun, their skin hardened by sea-storms, their language an offensive barking, their religion a powerless grovel before stone statues.

Perhaps I should. I am now old, grey of hair, and my brethren are few and far away, and they have turned their backs on me and our gods. I could die here, in the shade of these trees, and fade into the stories of this sun-browned folk. My kind would wither away like a tree with its roots upturnt, like a leaf torn by the winds of fate, like a fruit overripe, rotted, and fallen to the ground.

But I can not. I am the last of the goths. I am the last of my line. My ancestors howl at me from my memory, from their mounds, from their battlefields, from their bones, trampled by the Hun. I can not face them in the Great Halls as a coward, and limp, dried husk. I must make my ancestors proud. I must lead my people out of this darkness, out of this stinking, fly-ridden half-island, out of this comfort, this softening, sickening pit of foreign smells and foreign people. Our numbers must be a throng of people. Our mothers and sisters and daughters and wives must raise our sons to be great warriors, they must bear us many children, so we may take revenge upon the world that has wronged us so. We must smite our enemies, we must make due our debt in blood to our fallen brethren, we must carve ourselves as new home, with the strength of our arms, and the fury of our hearts!


We are the Goths! Our ancestors spillt their blood in offering, and were granted the crossing of the Great Frozen River by the spirits of the bend.

We are the Goths! Our forefathers made the romans bleed, they sacked their cities, they crushed their false gods, they raped their woman and slaughtered their men!

We are the Goths! Our arms made us the best fighters of Little Atta, and we drove those weaker before us!

We are the Goths! When the Huns grew frail, we crushed their bones into the dust, and made them grovel before us!

We are the Goths! Our brethren, fallen to false idols as they may be, have carved a mighty empire out of the corpse of the frail Romans!

We are the Goths! Our destiny awaits us over those waves!

We are the Goths, and Byzantium shall burn!
 
Subbed!!
 
Subbed.
 
Chapter II: Alaric the Belated

The words of the Grey Wanderer and the Thunderer fill my spirits like a cupfull of good, aged, thick mead. The weakness leaves my bones, the clouds part from my mind, and for the first time in many, many winters, I wonder what goes on beyond the walls of my hall. Why my people, my Karls never saw fit to get rid of me, I will never know. Perhaps my fame, earned on the field of battle against the huns, still carries weight. Perhaps they are still as weak of spirits as I was before. Or perhaps they just hoped to outlast me. Gods know, they were close to being proven right.

But it is ill use to ponder the past. My line can not end with me. Countless of these misbegotten local wenches can attest to my virility, but true Goths will not follow a half-breed and a bastard. No matter my spirits, my age shows not only in my hair, but in my loins, and I need myself a good, proper wife of our people, so she may bear me a son and continue my line. I can barely lift my sword, and I know I shall see my ancestors before I see him ride, but through him, the blood of the last, true goths shall flow. He shall be my legacy, my heir, and, Gods willing, the bane of all Greeks.

There are no woman of my own kind fit to bear my seed, but perhaps my distant cousins, who now reside in the dark forests the cradle the great river Rhine, are willing to give one of their own to us, their lost, ill-begotten kind.

01_Radegund.jpg

Radegud, a princess of the Thüringi, distant kinsmen of mine, accepted my plea for marriage, and we wed shortly after, under the warm, soft skies of Midsummer. She is a pleasant woman to behold, young, fertile, but not too bright. She will have to do, and besides, I married her for her hips, not her mind. I hope she finds this half-island to her liking. The Fates will surely curse her with many years of widowhood in a land quite ill-fitting to her.

But that matters not. There is only one thing on my mind, and I set to work as soon as the Gödi spoke his words, and we got into our tent. She proved to be no different that the woman of this land, as my seed found rich soil in her body.

02_pregnant.jpg

My duty to my blood and my loins fulfilled, I now mount a different kind of horse. It has been years since I surveyed my realm, and I must assure my unborn sons inheritance is well kept.

Not that there is much to survey. Barely enough land to support four great halls, and a couple of cities and temples strewn in between. All those Halls know me as their house-lord, though I have not visited most of them in years. Some of my people chafe at this, rumbling about wanting to hold lands bigger than their due, claiming that I am too old and unfit to care for all of it. Right though they are, these lands are mine to rule as I see fit, and I will not cast to those dogs what my son stands to inherit.

The locals do not like me either. They call this land the Bosporus, and themselves they name Bosporans. Not much imagination, a trait that is nowhere more profoundly seen than in their religion. They bow to but one god, and call him simply "The Most High", or Hypsistos, in their broken tongue. What God has no name, but only a title? Dimwits, the whole lot of them.

03_realm.jpg

Their vileness knows no bounds. One of my Karls, slewn in the battles we waged against the oppressor Huns, lies unburied, his bloated body coated in maggots, his skull shining bright in the sunlight. We water our horses by a nearby stream, and give his soul a proper burial. In the night, his soul, now free to drink with his kind, thanks me for freeing him from the fate of a draugr, and reveals where he buried his possessions. Meagre as they were, my realm is poor, and his offerings are a welcome addition to my hoard.

04_burial.jpg

As my horse carries me to the gates of Karlsholm, my two-legged, golden-haired mare runs to meet me. The Gods have blessed me with a son! My bloodline is secure! When he was born, she wrapped him in a set of ermine pelts, one of the last remaining things I earned myself with a sword, and not by tilting this soil. I named him Ermine-Clad, to remind him of his destiny. The greeks over in their big cities call themselves purple-born. It will be fitting that they fear another kind of cloak.

05_son.jpg

Ermingeld I named the lad. Ermingeld, son of Alaric, Chief of the Goths, Bane of Byzantium. So the Gods shall see fit.

My lands and line in order, I receive traders, wanderers, and passing warriors to tell me of the lands the goths to not yet hold sway over. My wife, dim as she is, told me of the lands of our cousins. Most of the germans still stand true with their old gods, but the treacherous Rugir and the Burgunds have fallen to the Nameless God of Rome. A God that should have died with his empire, now cast to ruins by Odoacer, but Odoacer himself now swears by the words of Arian, that traitor to our people.

My close brothers, the Ostrogoths, have likewise abandoned the Wanderer and his house, and the Visigoths have carved themselves a mighty empire far to the west. They too, now kneel before crosses. It seems my son will have to fight alone. Only we remain steadfast in our beliefs. Perhaps one day, we might show our lost borhers the errors of their ways.

06_germans.jpg

Closer to our pastures, the last, broken chief of the Huns still reigns. He stiles his meager posessions as an empire, but the sea of slavs and bulgars that surrounds it shall soon prove him otherwise. And if they fail, then it is up to us to stamp out the last of this weed. We must stay vigilant and make sure they do not do the same to us. Fighting the Hun united us, but now, they could easily fall upon us like carrion birds, picking at our weakened bodies.


07_closetohome.jpg


And to the south, of course, lies the mighty empire of the Greeks. Eastern Rome they call it. It is there that my son will claim his birthright. It is there that the Goths shall once again rise to glory!

09_revolt.jpg

But that shall have to wait. Even with his vassals hating him, the loyalities of his underlings divided, and the commoners of his city cursing his foreign nature, the Basileos, as he calls himself, can call up more than sixty hundreds. I can not hope to match Zeno with my forces, for my Karls are less than ten Hundreds in number.

No matter. I can not give my son new lands, but I can give him a treasury, and a hoard of greek gold. Zeno fights the Despot of Egypt, who chafes under his authority, and my freeman raid his coasts unhindered. We do not have the strength to siege his holdfasts, but even the outlying lands of his empire are rich with plunder and maidens, and we take our fare share.

08_raid.jpg

I cough blood onto the silver coins my warriors bring me. Perhaps my ancestors scoff at the meagre haul. Perhaps they just long to sing with me. They shall not have to wait long. I will die soon, but I will die knowing my line is secure, and knowing I left my son a realm fit for him to rule, and a treasury filled with enough gold for him to carve himself a new homeland.

The greeks know me as a scoundrel, a looter, a thief, and in their eyes, I am indeed all those things.

00_Alaric.jpg



My son, they shall know as a scourge!


10_death.jpg








_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Notes:

1, Sorry for taking so long, I had some stability issues.
2, I am rather unsatisfied with the quality of my writing here. Please bare with me, I need to find my voice again.
3, I actually had to off poor old Alaric manually, as I forgot to save when he died. Lets see if his son can survive the court intrigue for the next 13 years. If not, I'll honestly cheat him back to life so I can continue.
 
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I agree with the heretic. This is great writing; descriptive yet not too descriptive!
 
Beware the Cross, one day you might join your brother Goths before them. ;)
 
great update! can you please show the traits of the boy?
 
Sorry guys, I have been busy with my PhD. I definitely want to do an update before friday, though.

I have also encountered some snags with my trial playthroughs, like a Nicene Roman ERE Emperor, who, while unloved and having only 4k forces as top levy, can call Odoacer (now Roman and Arian), and his 30K italian troops into his holy war against me. Which is a bit of a bug, IMHO. I dont know if Holy War declarers could call their own heretics into the war, but I'm sure Arians and Nicene hate each other a lot more than they did germanics:)

Anyway, if my real playthrough comes to that, I'll probably pre-empt it by migrating, just for story purposes.
 
Sorry guys, I have been busy with my PhD. I definitely want to do an update before friday, though.

I have also encountered some snags with my trial playthroughs, like a Nicene Roman ERE Emperor, who, while unloved and having only 4k forces as top levy, can call Odoacer (now Roman and Arian), and his 30K italian troops into his holy war against me. Which is a bit of a bug, IMHO. I dont know if Holy War declarers could call their own heretics into the war, but I'm sure Arians and Nicene hate each other a lot more than they did germanics:)

Anyway, if my real playthrough comes to that, I'll probably pre-empt it by migrating, just for story purposes.

Load as Odoacer and get rid of his event troops if he has them, he shouldn't have any at this time.