Empire of the Bear: California, Reconsidered
Prof. Harvey Z. Stackbean, University of Portland Press, 3602.
Prof. Harvey Z. Stackbean, University of Portland Press, 3602.
Students of ancient medieval or post-Event medieval history are taught to remember the old adage: “Empires are swiftly built under good emperors and wither just as quickly under the bad”. Nowhere was this truer than the Celestial Empire of California, born in strife and disunity and ended in the same manner. Every history textbook has the basic outline of Empire, from Elton the Lawgiver’s philosophical conquest of the warring states of California and his subsequent crowning as Emperor in Sacramento; to the dying days of Chad the Boneless as governors and prefects overthrew Imperial authority to rule in their own right; to the steady, quiet consolidation of strength amid chaos and Imperial vulnerability under Elton III and Reuben I; to the reign of Matthew the Theologian and his descendants; to the crowning glories of the reign of Presley II the Uniter or the Magnificent, genetically unrelated to Elton I and Matthew but embodying their spirits more than any other; to the slow complacency and rot at the heart of the Imperial court and bureaucratic state in the reigns of the Stephens; and finally the sudden collapse at the hands of Empress Karen the Mad and the resulting end of the Yudkow dynasty.
The period of the Nine Good Emperors is famous, and justifiably so. It was a time when arts and culture flourished in Sacramento and beyond, where artifacts of the ancients were lovingly restored to usable states by Imperial artisans, where Americans rediscovered some of the peoples beyond the seas. It was a time of great religious zeal and turmoil, as many faiths died out among the continent’s nobility entirely, yet simultaneously heavily syncretizing with others in the general population. It was a time of ever-increasing prosperity, interrupted only by the all-encompassing system shock of the Red Death, or, as it was called in the Empire, the Thrax.
Looking beyond the pomp and glamour of the Imperial court, however, and treating the development and disarray of Empire less as a result of big personalities making big decisions and more as a logical extension of inexorable, unavoidable trends may be a less exciting endeavor than pruriently recounting the syphilitic insanity-filled intrigues and scandals of the post-Presleyan court, but it makes for better history. That said, it is most certainly no coincidence that, virtually the second an unworthy heir sat the Celestial Throne, the overextended empire collapsed under its own weight. It is important to explore and bridge both of these dynamics if we wish to truly understand the Empire of the Bear. As such, while this history will take the form of, broadly, a series of biographies, I will attempt to undermine and complicate this simple tale as I tell it, bringing out the “stories behind the stories” that we all know.
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Hey folks. While this is not my first try at writing an AAR, it's the first time I've gone beyond an introductory post with basically nothing but a concept towards actually playing and writing the thing, I've already finished the game, but I didn't decide to make it an AAR until I was done and I don't have many good saves to look back at, so all the pictures that will hopefully come in future will be taken from just before the end of the game. It's also worth noting that I used all DLCs except for the Ruler Designer, which I do not have, and that this was not an Ironman game. I ran some console commands in a few places, but nothing really egregious. Some gold here and there, mostly. I made one very important figure Quick because they already were getting super-high base stats (an 8-10 in everything; it was nuts). Other than that, there wasn't a ton that I did. The impetus to write this came a few days after I'd finished rereading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, a really fantastic book. I'm trying here to make our friendly narrator a much more pompous, longwinded version of her. More (and longer) posts should be coming soon. I really want to be the first person to actually finish an AtE AAR here. Hope you guys enjoy!
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