Today’s topic, folks, is Averic history and culture, and I’ll talk briefly about some of the concepts and ideas I thought about when I created Averim.

The first thing you need to know about Averim is that the Averics started as colonists of colonists – that is to say, they came from the Narvith empire, who themselves came from “lands unknown.” Just exactly why the humans left their old lands has never been discovered (translation: I haven’t fully decided, but I have some very interesting ideas for a future book or three), but no one living today remembers the reason. This means that, Averim has a lot in common with the settlement of the American west. As the humans drove across the plains, they just assumed that the scummy orcs would get out of the way. And, for a long time, they did – “Manifest Destiny” at its finest. This basic idea shapes how orcs and humans interact with each other, and how the humans came to settle the center of the continent of Aromathus.

The second thing to remember is that Averim ended up being based on the Roman Empire. I love this analogy, for it simply works.

A little history from our world: Rome was founded sometime around 750 B.C. Without getting into all the details, originally, it was a single city-state, much like those in ancient Greece; meaning it controlled the area of the city of Averim and the surrounding country side, and not much else. Averim, like Rome, benefitted from the local geography – it is located on the northern shore of Lake Taavish, and the River Maajal is a major tributary of the Mississippi River - like Ishkar River. Therefore, it had good climate, easy transportation, access to goods, etc; all that stuff you learned in geography class.

Well, OK, I admit that these things were decided after the map was drawn, but it does make sense.

Anyway, Averim was a city state with several advantages, as I just stated, and for several hundred years of the timeline, that was enough. But when I created the world, I decided that there had to be a great series of wars and upheavals for one simple reason: When playing D&D, I needed a reason for there to be all kinds of magical “goodies” floating around for adventurers to find and play with.

Yet there was more to it than that. From the start, I decided that Averim would be a world of great empires as well as smaller kingdoms. This meant that there had to be a reason why a bunch of colonists formed a great empire with medieval technology and government, and that there also had to be a reason things didn’t fall apart.

Think of it this way: When my friends and I created the world, there was a lot of “Hey, these people live here.” That works great for a D&D game, but the part of me that is a trained historian went, “So WHY do these people live here and those there?” Over time, I came up with the idea that humans were agents of change and chaos, as I said. So… someone lived there, and the humans came in and changed that. Humans became “conquers” of the central portion of Aromathus much as Europeans did with North America.

But back to my Roman analogy. Averim existed as a single city-state for several hundred years, but I needed a series of wars, right? So here is where fantasy meets the history.

One of the themes I like to play with is wars/conflicts between deities. Simply put, why didn’t each deity create a world of their own? Well, what else are immortal beings going to do all day but compete with each other, right? Why else would they create a single world for all their worshippers to live in? Even though the gods of Aromathus don’t involve themselves directly in the affairs of mortals, they enjoy watching “their” races compete with each other – much as the gods of ancient Rome were supposed to have done

Well, theology is beyond our topic today, so I’ll leave it at the fact that the god of the orcs was pretty upset when a “younger” deity says “Hey, my people just kicked your people’s butts! Take that Grummish!” This is even more true when the god in question is the god of war, and his chosen people just got their butts kicked by a bunch of upstart followers of the sea god. So what’s any self-respecting war deity do at that point? That’s right. Get revenge!

I decided this was how the Empire of Averim was born. Grummish whispers sweet nothings into the ear of an Averic prince, and then blesses him after he comes to power. He then blesses his armies as well, and before long, Grummish is tweaking the sea god back. “See? Your people aren’t all that cool. After all, they didn’t really become great until I helped them. Take that, Urnomox!”

At the same time, Grummish is punishing his own followers for being so pathetically inept. This means that Grummish, who delights in combat and slaughter, accomplishes many things at the same time. He tweaks his fellow gods, punished his followers, and has a memorial to himself made at the same time – a great empire built on the opposition to orcs is based on the favor of the orc god. How ironic, right?

Back to Rome again. Ancient Rome on Earth slowly expanded as well, much as Averim did during the reigns of Justarias and Norazon (check out the timeline for details!) Over the course of many years, what started off as a simple kingdom becomes a larger one, and then a huge empire, and this entails a few things. First, like all huge empires that I know of, expansion becomes kind of a drug. Or, put more “historically,” in order to pay for the protection and policing of round of expansion, you need to conquer and loot more territory – and this starts a cycle.

Consider this quote from a book I am currently reading on Napoleon. “…France had become a kind of war machine, capable of keeping its balance only in a state of national emergency, mobilizing, plundering other nations, fighting war after war. If war should cease, the whole edifice of repression, colossal military expenditures and subject peoples would come crashing down (Robert Harvey, The War of Wars; pg. 688) .” This happened in ancient Rome, in Napoleon’s France… and in Averim.

Those other empires eventually came crashing down, but Averim hasn’t… yet. However, Averim is constantly at war with the orcs, frequently with nations it has conquered, and far too often with the dwarves and elves. On the other hand, were either the elves or the dwarves ever to decide they’d rather live in wide open grasslands instead of ancient forests or mountain strongholds… Averim exists in a perpetual state of war, for were she ever to rest, her downfall would soon result.

The second thing that it entails is that unlike most medieval kingdoms, Averim has a professional army. While some of you readers may not know it, professional armies in medieval settings are NOT common – the average feudal lord has far too much to worry about simply surviving day – to – day to worry about maintaining a standing army. Or, put another way, your average feudal lord has to worry about growing crops, maintaining his castle, and fighting off marauding bandits to have the time – or the money – to worry about feeding, arming, and paying soldiers. Sure, he will have some trained men to guard his castle, and maybe a few constables to patrol his borders, but an army? That simply costs too much.

Actually, this is one of the reasons feudalism developed – to allow the king to have an army. King Bob (I always name generic guys Bob, for some unknown reason) agrees to protect Duke Frank in a time of war. In exchange, Duke Frank agrees to provide troops, money, or service in exchange for that protection. Why? Because going off to war is expensive, as anyone who has been paying attention to Iraq knows. And without large amounts of land – and large numbers of people to tax - there is no way to pay for an army. Therefore, the only people who can afford suits of armor and expensive warhorses are the nobles.

This is why, as an aside, that all those fantasy stories where huge armies are running around really, really annoy me. They simply didn’t – couldn’t – exist. But I digress. J

Averim, though, is based on the hypothesis that Rome never fell. Again, back to out history: the Roman legions we see in movies like Gladiator represent something that wouldn’t exist in someplace like Tolkien’s Middle Earth: there are no nations big enough to support them. The battles of the later Roman Empire were too big to be fought in, say, the year 1100 for the same reason.

Rome, though, was a large and (relatively) stable empire with a hug tax and population base, and could afford to support a standing army; it also had a need to. Remember my comment about “Rome vs. the barbarians on the Danube” from my last post? That’s why. When the Roman’s finally stopped expanding, they realized they had a good thing, and they wanted to keep it for themselves. So the Romans set up border forts all along the border, from the North Sea, down the Rhine and the Danube, to the Black sea. The legions are garrisoned in those forts, and their task was to patrol the border an keep the barbarians (or, more accurately, anyone who wasn’t Roman), out.

See the parallel to Averim? I did. But instead of the barabians being Germans or Huns, their orcs. And when Tarn Nohmahl joins the army at eighteen, he isn’t a peasant conscripted by his lord, he is trained and joins an army with a tradition going back thousands of years. And while the system isn’t exactly that of Rome’s, they are similar enough that those of you who do know a little about ancient Rome will see the difference.

Well, that about covers this lesson. In a future post I’ll move on to other nations of the world, starting with the Orcs…