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Nation Name: The Great Storm Empire of Naqatl, commonly just the Great Storm Empire
National Demonym: Naqatli
Type of Government: Elective Theocracy. I'll explain below.
Head(s) of Government: The Rain Emperor. Each Rain Emperor is elected from amongst the priest-kings that themselves rule each city-state that makes up the Great Storm Empire. Each individual reign is five years long; if another Rain Emperor is elected, the previous one is ritually sacrificed to ensure prosperity for the new Emperor. Unlike blood sacrifice in our world, this actually works. Most of the time. Sort of.
History/ Background Info: Later.
Nation Relations:-
S'laaeth: Never trust a lizard. At least a priest'll stab you in the front. And also pull your heart out and call forth all the mana in your body to leave in a blue spiral.
Bjergavjern: We have a sizeable dwarf community because they thought there was a better chance of them not being killed here than in their home country. Here. Think about that.
Verdasou: Very cordial relations. After all, they keep sending us gifts of warriors to be sacrificed! Oh, they might say they're invasion forces trying to loot and plunder our gold reserves, but that's pirates for you, eh? Always playing so coy...
Nation Name: The Great Storm Empire of Naqatl, commonly just the Great Storm Empire
National Demonym: Naqatli
Type of Government: Elective Theocracy. I'll explain below.
Head(s) of Government: The Rain Emperor. Each Rain Emperor is elected from amongst the priest-kings that themselves rule each city-state that makes up the Great Storm Empire. Each individual reign is five years long; if another Rain Emperor is elected, the previous one is ritually sacrificed to ensure prosperity for the new Emperor. Unlike blood sacrifice in our world, this actually works. Most of the time. Sort of.
Exports:-
Imports:-
Primary Industries: Agriculture, Cash Crops, Mining, Aquaculture
Currency: ez (1 ez = 100 eztli), backed by gold
- Precious metals (gold, silver, platinum)
- Gems
- Jewellery and similar prestige goods
- Tropical hardwoods
- Rubber
- Hemp
- Dyes
- Maize
- Electrical Goods. Yes, really.
Imports:-
- Machine Tools
- Steel
- Chemicals
- Natural Gas
- Canned Goods
- Health And Safety Legislation (they don't actually do this, but they probably should.)
Primary Industries: Agriculture, Cash Crops, Mining, Aquaculture
Currency: ez (1 ez = 100 eztli), backed by gold
Thunderbolt Pyramids: The stepped temples of the Great Storm Empire are focal points not just for the populace of the cities, but also for works of magic. Mass blood sacrifice is fairly common, though the blood of noble or powerful families is more prized by the mage-priests for their craft. The blood magic of the Thunderbolt Priests keeps the harvest bountiful and the mines safe-ish, as well as control the weather. When the volcano erupted in the north, the reigning Emperor co-ordinated over a hundred simultaneous mass sacrifices, including his own, to protect the land from its ravages. The nation runs on blood, and the Thunderbolt Pyramids have thus become a combination of a magical research laboratory, temple, seat of government, power station, and factory. The central discovery was this: all living beings contain some minor portion of magic. Extracting that magic is easy; extracting it without killing the being is far harder. Mage-priests have powerful affinities for magic of various types, and form a caste analogous to the scholar-bureaucrats of our world's China; they build great machines that are powered by the mana extracted from the sacrifices, as well as store that mana in elaborate carved stones that burn with a wine-dark power.
Butterfly Heroes: The butterfly is a symbol of inner strength among the Naqatli, for it lives but a short time and yet creates beauty from its own flesh. Thus is something seen as pretty wimpy in other cultures a symbol of martial prowess in the Great Storm Empire. When the Empire first encountered mecha from across the world, it worried them greatly... because it meant that the world was catching up. The priest-kings often created giant warriors, hewn from black stone and equipped with mighty weapons, as symbols of the power of blood and of their cities. After the advent of gunpowder weaponry and artillery, they became mobile gun platforms, a rifleman armed with a tank gun. How were they powered? A squadron of soldiers, ruthlessly drilled over the course of a whole year, was immured in the central atria of the Butterfly Hero in devices akin to iron maidens. Now, of course, the priests are beyond such trivialities; while there still isn't exactly a standardized model, the Great Pink Emperor (the standard line-of-battle mecha-equivalent) is made from concrete, inscribed with microscopic precision, and with over a hundred trained soldiers immured within. For ranged combat, they field a variety of weapons, ranging from cutting-edge anti-tank cannons to machine "pistols" that spew heavy-calibre bullets in monstrous numbers to honest-to-God bows and arrows; the only common theme between one Butterfly Hero's armament and another's is that they're crackling with blood-powered magic. For melee combat, the fact that it's a fifty-foot concrete statue tends to suffice, though certain cities still arm their Butterfly Heroes with giant maces or axes to clear paths through the jungle... or just bash people apart. The thing about the Butterfly Heroes is that they don't really fight like conventional mecha; they fight like really big warriors. They're fast, they're nimble, they're agile, and they have an incredible range of motion. They're also painted in eye-searingly fluorescent colours; let people who can die when a bullet hits them wear camouflage. This is a Hero, and Heroes must be seen.
White Gardens: While one might think that blood magic is inherently the magic of death, it's really not; at least, not to the priests of the Great Storm Empire. The enormous amounts of blood-drained corpses generated by their sacrifices don't go to waste. Instead, the bodies are taken back into the temple complex and rendered down into fertilizer for the great floating gardens within the cities. A kind of primitive hydroponics system, these are huge fields around a lake or body of water that are actually on the water itself, and these magically-drained corpses are a wonderful source of nutrients for an already rich soil. Maize is a reasonably common crop, and it's a staple of the local diet; other crops include chili peppers, tomatoes, squashes of varying types, and cocoa beans, but the staple crop has always been amaranth. Not only is it a highly nutritious cereal crop, the leaves, roots, and stems can be eaten as well, and they also have the effect of attracting hummingbirds. These brightly-coloured birds are seen as proof of the gods' favour for farmers, and are also seen as a delicacy and proof of a woman's skill at farming.
Butterfly Heroes: The butterfly is a symbol of inner strength among the Naqatli, for it lives but a short time and yet creates beauty from its own flesh. Thus is something seen as pretty wimpy in other cultures a symbol of martial prowess in the Great Storm Empire. When the Empire first encountered mecha from across the world, it worried them greatly... because it meant that the world was catching up. The priest-kings often created giant warriors, hewn from black stone and equipped with mighty weapons, as symbols of the power of blood and of their cities. After the advent of gunpowder weaponry and artillery, they became mobile gun platforms, a rifleman armed with a tank gun. How were they powered? A squadron of soldiers, ruthlessly drilled over the course of a whole year, was immured in the central atria of the Butterfly Hero in devices akin to iron maidens. Now, of course, the priests are beyond such trivialities; while there still isn't exactly a standardized model, the Great Pink Emperor (the standard line-of-battle mecha-equivalent) is made from concrete, inscribed with microscopic precision, and with over a hundred trained soldiers immured within. For ranged combat, they field a variety of weapons, ranging from cutting-edge anti-tank cannons to machine "pistols" that spew heavy-calibre bullets in monstrous numbers to honest-to-God bows and arrows; the only common theme between one Butterfly Hero's armament and another's is that they're crackling with blood-powered magic. For melee combat, the fact that it's a fifty-foot concrete statue tends to suffice, though certain cities still arm their Butterfly Heroes with giant maces or axes to clear paths through the jungle... or just bash people apart. The thing about the Butterfly Heroes is that they don't really fight like conventional mecha; they fight like really big warriors. They're fast, they're nimble, they're agile, and they have an incredible range of motion. They're also painted in eye-searingly fluorescent colours; let people who can die when a bullet hits them wear camouflage. This is a Hero, and Heroes must be seen.
White Gardens: While one might think that blood magic is inherently the magic of death, it's really not; at least, not to the priests of the Great Storm Empire. The enormous amounts of blood-drained corpses generated by their sacrifices don't go to waste. Instead, the bodies are taken back into the temple complex and rendered down into fertilizer for the great floating gardens within the cities. A kind of primitive hydroponics system, these are huge fields around a lake or body of water that are actually on the water itself, and these magically-drained corpses are a wonderful source of nutrients for an already rich soil. Maize is a reasonably common crop, and it's a staple of the local diet; other crops include chili peppers, tomatoes, squashes of varying types, and cocoa beans, but the staple crop has always been amaranth. Not only is it a highly nutritious cereal crop, the leaves, roots, and stems can be eaten as well, and they also have the effect of attracting hummingbirds. These brightly-coloured birds are seen as proof of the gods' favour for farmers, and are also seen as a delicacy and proof of a woman's skill at farming.
Primary Species: Papalotli
The papalotli are roughly human in shape, though taller and more lissom than most humans who aren't catwalk models. Their wrists are ball-jointed, like a gibbon's, giving them extremely fine motor control; they also have quite dense muscle mass, especially in their legs. The most obvious inhuman characteristic about them, however, is the wing membrane that stretches from their forearmsto their ankles. Not only is this, y'know, an enormous flap of taut skin, it's also bedecked in dazzling colours with psychedelic patterns. The papalotli can glide short distances with these membranes, and it is something of a sport for them. The wing membranes do fold down, allowing them to wear clothes; not that they tend to cover up much, except to keep the rain off. A waterproof poncho-looking thing made of capybara wool impregnated with rubber is about as much as they tend to wear, aside from jewellery in a variety of styles and places. They're a short-lived species, with the oldest in their ranks tending to pop their clogs at around fifty, and that's a recent development involving experimental blood magic; however, they make up for this by being fantastically fertile. It's not uncommon for papalotli women to have half a dozen children in a single litter. They're also not exactly maternal; papalotli children are seen as expendable, and a priest sacrificing a young boy to bless a harvest or a young girl to protect a warrior is a familiar sight in the fields. Thankfully for the children, they mature fast, arriving at adulthood by around three or four.
Population: ~317,270,000 souls
~302,240,000 million papalotli. I said there was a lot of them.
~12,800,000 humans
~1,500,000 sun elves
~650,000 dwarves
~80,000 dark elves
Culture: Naqatli culture is extremely sophisticated, with architecture and sculpture seen as the primary art forms. They use an alphabet of 40 symbols and use both paper and stone tablets - stone for things that they really want to last, such as government proclamations. There's also the whole "blood all over the fucking place" thing, but we've covered that in detail already and I don't want to bore you with more talk of brutal blood magic rituals. =]
Religion and Other Beliefs: A huge pantheon of gods which this margin is too narrow to contain. However, the king of the gods is Huas Li, the Lord of the Rainbow. Huas Li is the god who judges souls before guiding them to the afterlife; those who died as sacrifices are taken to the Great Garden, wherein they will be at ease for the rest of time. One imagines it's a bit crowded. Those who led bad lives, however, are brutally assailed by him, and ground into dust by blows from his enormous star-headed mace whilst still conscious enough to scream. It's a common bedtime story.
Location/Territories: The Great Storm Empire stretches from the Irridane Strait in the north to the Green Sea in the south, from the Chain Islands in the Great Expanse in the east to the Long Cloud mountains in the west. The Empire itself is a patchwork of territories, each centred around a temple-city rich with gold and blood. To list them all would be a Herculean task.
Climate: Sweltering, humid, and kept that way by blood magic.
The papalotli are roughly human in shape, though taller and more lissom than most humans who aren't catwalk models. Their wrists are ball-jointed, like a gibbon's, giving them extremely fine motor control; they also have quite dense muscle mass, especially in their legs. The most obvious inhuman characteristic about them, however, is the wing membrane that stretches from their forearmsto their ankles. Not only is this, y'know, an enormous flap of taut skin, it's also bedecked in dazzling colours with psychedelic patterns. The papalotli can glide short distances with these membranes, and it is something of a sport for them. The wing membranes do fold down, allowing them to wear clothes; not that they tend to cover up much, except to keep the rain off. A waterproof poncho-looking thing made of capybara wool impregnated with rubber is about as much as they tend to wear, aside from jewellery in a variety of styles and places. They're a short-lived species, with the oldest in their ranks tending to pop their clogs at around fifty, and that's a recent development involving experimental blood magic; however, they make up for this by being fantastically fertile. It's not uncommon for papalotli women to have half a dozen children in a single litter. They're also not exactly maternal; papalotli children are seen as expendable, and a priest sacrificing a young boy to bless a harvest or a young girl to protect a warrior is a familiar sight in the fields. Thankfully for the children, they mature fast, arriving at adulthood by around three or four.
Population: ~317,270,000 souls
~302,240,000 million papalotli. I said there was a lot of them.
~12,800,000 humans
~1,500,000 sun elves
~650,000 dwarves
~80,000 dark elves
Culture: Naqatli culture is extremely sophisticated, with architecture and sculpture seen as the primary art forms. They use an alphabet of 40 symbols and use both paper and stone tablets - stone for things that they really want to last, such as government proclamations. There's also the whole "blood all over the fucking place" thing, but we've covered that in detail already and I don't want to bore you with more talk of brutal blood magic rituals. =]
Religion and Other Beliefs: A huge pantheon of gods which this margin is too narrow to contain. However, the king of the gods is Huas Li, the Lord of the Rainbow. Huas Li is the god who judges souls before guiding them to the afterlife; those who died as sacrifices are taken to the Great Garden, wherein they will be at ease for the rest of time. One imagines it's a bit crowded. Those who led bad lives, however, are brutally assailed by him, and ground into dust by blows from his enormous star-headed mace whilst still conscious enough to scream. It's a common bedtime story.
Location/Territories: The Great Storm Empire stretches from the Irridane Strait in the north to the Green Sea in the south, from the Chain Islands in the Great Expanse in the east to the Long Cloud mountains in the west. The Empire itself is a patchwork of territories, each centred around a temple-city rich with gold and blood. To list them all would be a Herculean task.
Climate: Sweltering, humid, and kept that way by blood magic.
Standing Military:-
Army: Rough estimate
Navy: Even rougher estimate
Great Storm Heroes: 100 mechs
NB: This is a rough estimate for the standing army under (for want of a better word) federal control; while the city-states all declare war whenever the Rain Emperor does, they are under no obligation to field more than a token force. However, Imperial military doctrine is based on three words: We. Have. Reserves. This is helped by the fact that as soon as papalotli boys reach adulthood, and sometimes before if they're big enough, they begin training as fighters. While individual city-states tend to have comparatively small standing armies, almost every male papalotli and quite a few of the female ones is essentially a reservist à la the Swiss military in our world.
Equipment:-
Standardization? In the Great Storm Empire? Don't make me laugh. While equipment tends to be based on a pattern (unless the priesthood of that city lacks the resources to make or maintain it), each city-state within the Empire has its own armouries and weapon development programs and even fighting styles. On top of that, individual soldiers are not only permitted but actively encouraged to customise their gear if it means they fight better. The one commonality is the use of pneumatic weaponry.
As far as the individual infantryman goes, the Great Storm Empire's boots on the ground are almost comically under-equipped compared to almost every other major polity in the game. I remind you that this was also true of the Red Army during World War II. Most cities use a variant of the Monsoon-pattern "windrifle" as the primary firearm, a rapid-fire weapon that uses compressed air to propel a bullet rather than an explosive charge. The original Monsoon windrifle fires a .75-calibre lead ball with an approximate muzzle velocity of 500 metres per second; it also has a quite ingenious system of recoil compensation along with a handy bullpup configuration to make it pointable and not break the shooter's arms. It takes a 50-ball magazine, which it can discharge in a semi- or fully automatic manner, and the pre-charged gas bottle is good for approximately 200 rounds at full power and 200 more at diminishing levels. It's also damned near silent compared to similar chemically-propelled firearms, and produces neither smoke nor muzzle flash; the most you'll get is a fine mist of condensing air. Overpenetration is obviously something of an issue against light infantry, but there's a reason they're not dropping to a mid-powered round - Naqatli warrior culture deems it a far greater expression of prowess for a soldier to take captives than to kill the enemy, and paradoxically, overpenetration in that regard makes it more likely for the person struck to stay alive.
Compressed air weapons come in other variants too. A common support weapon for naqatli infantry is a Howling Gale-pattern (subject to customization and so forth) heavy machine gun that requires a three-man team to operate; two to control the weapon, and a third to carry the gas tanks and charging equipment. The HG is capable of laying down a truly withering amount of fire from its single smoothbore barrel without much in the way of wear and tear. It's also far from a marksman's weapon, opting instead to hose down the enemy with lead and hope someone gets hit; given that it's a 1.25" ball round with a very high muzzle velocity, anything that gets hit? It fucking stays hit. This includes vegetation, which has given it the nickname of the Lawnmower among the naqatli military. Also not a marksman's weapon is the Cloudburst super-light mortar, which fires a 50mm grenade made of converted mining explosives and earns its name by weighing all of about eight pounds. The Cloudburst is seen very much as a scout's weapon and is given in large numbers to the forward operations units. Uniquely among the world's infantry, these forward ops units are entirely mounted... on collapsible-framed bicycles. Stop laughing. Bicycle infantry of this kind are a potent force in the dense jungles of the Great Storm Empire. Faster than a man on foot, more nimble than a conventional off-road vehicle, and much quieter than a motorcycle, the bicycle scouts of the naqatli military machine allow commanders to harry enemy supply lines and camps with barrage after barrage of 2-inch grenades, almost silent courtesy of their compressed-air propulsion. Finally in the "common support weapons" category comes the Roaring Elephant-pattern anti-materiel rifle. Its "dump tank" technology makes it just about the most powerful compressed-air weapon in the arsenal of the Great Storm Empire, as it fires a rifled steel-cored 2-inch round weighing in at approximately 6lbs and possessed of an insanely high muzzle velocity. It's designed to take out hard targets and burst through vehicle armour, or at least cause enough spall to shred the crew inside. Interestingly, it's one of the very few pieces of naqatli wargear to have been designed by a non-papalotli, in this case a human woman originally from Southern Verdasou; this is probably the originator of the rifle's nickname, "Mrs. Carruthers".
Magic Prevalence/Usage: The Great Storm Empire runs on the mass blood sacrifice of the naqatli, and while this has led them to do some remarkable things, it's not exactly designed for the battlefield. It starts from this basic premise: all living things contain magic, in some quantity or another. Successfully extracting, capturing, and storing the magical energy of a living being is possible; if anything, it's quite easy, especially en masse. The problem is that doing so without killing the person is as close to impossible as makes no difference. The other problem is that the capture of this energy is almost impossible to do in the field, so to speak; doing so in an efficient manner requires an elaborate capture device, built preferably from a material that was never alive (such as stone or metal), that raises the sacrifice above the treeline (to prevent interference), and yeah okay it's a big temple. Storage is even trickier, requiring a permanent repository of non-living material as well as an output point for priests to call upon it. This isn't the kind of magic that leads to beardy blokes in pointy hats slinging fireballs around the place. It is a magic of rituals and of slow, grinding power, the magic of a factory and the magic of an engine.
The other problem is one of scale, specifically scaling down. While it's possible to create magic items in the conventionally understood sense, it's very difficult for them to stay that way. The magic used to power their special effects can burn out rather fast... for human- or papalotli-sized items. Naqatli blood magic works waaaaay better when powering large objects (there's interesting research going on into why that is even now), but it's also easier to have ancillary power sources in a large weapon. Basically: no magic swords for anyone except Butterfly Heroes. Magic-powered motor vehicles also struggle to be efficient until we're looking at things on the scale of tanks and articulated lorries, and those tonnage requirements mean that flight would be impractical unless you wanted to build, say, an entire floating temple. However, since the papalotli have no cultural imperative to fly - being essentially someone's sugar glider fursona - this hasn't happened, for which we can probably all be quite grateful. As things stand, magic only really powers the Empire's much-depleted naval assets, and even then it's as a secondary power source.
The greatest piece of magic ever worked by the naqatli was just after the Eruption. With ash clouds blanketing the landscape and choking the sun from the skies, the forests of the Great Storm Empire began to die. This was most keenly felt in the northernmost cities, the ones along the coast of the Strait of Irridare. Reports began trickling in of harvest failures and crop die-offs, and the spectre of famine, once thought banished from the Empire, crept back into their world. The usual blood rituals to secure the harvests simply weren't powerful enough to meaningfully aid in the farmers' plight, and several coastal temple complexes descended into violent, bloody insurrection. Realizing that they had to do something, the reigning Rain Emperor issued something rare to the point of unheard-of in the Great Storm Empire: a nationwide, binding, peacetime decree. The impact of the worldwide winter was making itself felt across the Empire, the decree said. It had poisoned the very skies against the naqatli. A great sacrifice would take place. Two boys and two girls from every family in the kingdom - every single one - along with millions of adults were to be sacrificed at the same time, under lunar auspices and with the national co-ordination of the entire priesthood. The resultant spell would be based on the typical harvest ritual, but burning blacker and more powerful than any attempted in the history of the Empire. If the spell was not cast, the sheer volume of mana released could cause temples to literally explode up and down the country. The future of the naqatli was more uncertain than ever, but one thing remained true: it was a future of magic, inscribed in stone and written in rich, red blood. Even then, even then, it was a stopgap, a few years of borrowed time while refinements were to be frantically carried out on the harvest spells of the nation. It wasn't a good plan, but it was the only one that a panic-stricken nation even had.
In all, adding in preliminary sacrifices to prime the pumps and other complex rituals to fortify the central temple complex of the imperial capital against detonation, roughly 15% of the total population of the Great Storm Empire was killed to power the Great Ritual of the Emperor's Tears. The life force of tens of millions was wicked away to provide a kind of umbrella, keeping the jungles warm and the harvests coming. The priesthood returned to the northern cities, and indeed the next Emperor was elected from one. Blood and power washed the nation of ash, and still does... for a time. Now, the spell is beginning to fade. The weather cools, the ash comes, the north grows restless. The population cannot sustain another casting of the Emperor's Tears. What happens now... who can say.
Army: Rough estimate
Infantry: 280,000
Artillery: 15,000
Logistical Support: ~170,000
Artillery: 15,000
Logistical Support: ~170,000
Navy: Even rougher estimate
Coast Guard: 265 light ships, 600 patrol boats
Brownwater Navy: 135 river monitors, 200 fast attack hovercraft
Littoral Navy: 80 dreadnoughts
Brownwater Navy: 135 river monitors, 200 fast attack hovercraft
Littoral Navy: 80 dreadnoughts
Great Storm Heroes: 100 mechs
NB: This is a rough estimate for the standing army under (for want of a better word) federal control; while the city-states all declare war whenever the Rain Emperor does, they are under no obligation to field more than a token force. However, Imperial military doctrine is based on three words: We. Have. Reserves. This is helped by the fact that as soon as papalotli boys reach adulthood, and sometimes before if they're big enough, they begin training as fighters. While individual city-states tend to have comparatively small standing armies, almost every male papalotli and quite a few of the female ones is essentially a reservist à la the Swiss military in our world.
Equipment:-
Standardization? In the Great Storm Empire? Don't make me laugh. While equipment tends to be based on a pattern (unless the priesthood of that city lacks the resources to make or maintain it), each city-state within the Empire has its own armouries and weapon development programs and even fighting styles. On top of that, individual soldiers are not only permitted but actively encouraged to customise their gear if it means they fight better. The one commonality is the use of pneumatic weaponry.
As far as the individual infantryman goes, the Great Storm Empire's boots on the ground are almost comically under-equipped compared to almost every other major polity in the game. I remind you that this was also true of the Red Army during World War II. Most cities use a variant of the Monsoon-pattern "windrifle" as the primary firearm, a rapid-fire weapon that uses compressed air to propel a bullet rather than an explosive charge. The original Monsoon windrifle fires a .75-calibre lead ball with an approximate muzzle velocity of 500 metres per second; it also has a quite ingenious system of recoil compensation along with a handy bullpup configuration to make it pointable and not break the shooter's arms. It takes a 50-ball magazine, which it can discharge in a semi- or fully automatic manner, and the pre-charged gas bottle is good for approximately 200 rounds at full power and 200 more at diminishing levels. It's also damned near silent compared to similar chemically-propelled firearms, and produces neither smoke nor muzzle flash; the most you'll get is a fine mist of condensing air. Overpenetration is obviously something of an issue against light infantry, but there's a reason they're not dropping to a mid-powered round - Naqatli warrior culture deems it a far greater expression of prowess for a soldier to take captives than to kill the enemy, and paradoxically, overpenetration in that regard makes it more likely for the person struck to stay alive.
Compressed air weapons come in other variants too. A common support weapon for naqatli infantry is a Howling Gale-pattern (subject to customization and so forth) heavy machine gun that requires a three-man team to operate; two to control the weapon, and a third to carry the gas tanks and charging equipment. The HG is capable of laying down a truly withering amount of fire from its single smoothbore barrel without much in the way of wear and tear. It's also far from a marksman's weapon, opting instead to hose down the enemy with lead and hope someone gets hit; given that it's a 1.25" ball round with a very high muzzle velocity, anything that gets hit? It fucking stays hit. This includes vegetation, which has given it the nickname of the Lawnmower among the naqatli military. Also not a marksman's weapon is the Cloudburst super-light mortar, which fires a 50mm grenade made of converted mining explosives and earns its name by weighing all of about eight pounds. The Cloudburst is seen very much as a scout's weapon and is given in large numbers to the forward operations units. Uniquely among the world's infantry, these forward ops units are entirely mounted... on collapsible-framed bicycles. Stop laughing. Bicycle infantry of this kind are a potent force in the dense jungles of the Great Storm Empire. Faster than a man on foot, more nimble than a conventional off-road vehicle, and much quieter than a motorcycle, the bicycle scouts of the naqatli military machine allow commanders to harry enemy supply lines and camps with barrage after barrage of 2-inch grenades, almost silent courtesy of their compressed-air propulsion. Finally in the "common support weapons" category comes the Roaring Elephant-pattern anti-materiel rifle. Its "dump tank" technology makes it just about the most powerful compressed-air weapon in the arsenal of the Great Storm Empire, as it fires a rifled steel-cored 2-inch round weighing in at approximately 6lbs and possessed of an insanely high muzzle velocity. It's designed to take out hard targets and burst through vehicle armour, or at least cause enough spall to shred the crew inside. Interestingly, it's one of the very few pieces of naqatli wargear to have been designed by a non-papalotli, in this case a human woman originally from Southern Verdasou; this is probably the originator of the rifle's nickname, "Mrs. Carruthers".
Magic Prevalence/Usage: The Great Storm Empire runs on the mass blood sacrifice of the naqatli, and while this has led them to do some remarkable things, it's not exactly designed for the battlefield. It starts from this basic premise: all living things contain magic, in some quantity or another. Successfully extracting, capturing, and storing the magical energy of a living being is possible; if anything, it's quite easy, especially en masse. The problem is that doing so without killing the person is as close to impossible as makes no difference. The other problem is that the capture of this energy is almost impossible to do in the field, so to speak; doing so in an efficient manner requires an elaborate capture device, built preferably from a material that was never alive (such as stone or metal), that raises the sacrifice above the treeline (to prevent interference), and yeah okay it's a big temple. Storage is even trickier, requiring a permanent repository of non-living material as well as an output point for priests to call upon it. This isn't the kind of magic that leads to beardy blokes in pointy hats slinging fireballs around the place. It is a magic of rituals and of slow, grinding power, the magic of a factory and the magic of an engine.
The other problem is one of scale, specifically scaling down. While it's possible to create magic items in the conventionally understood sense, it's very difficult for them to stay that way. The magic used to power their special effects can burn out rather fast... for human- or papalotli-sized items. Naqatli blood magic works waaaaay better when powering large objects (there's interesting research going on into why that is even now), but it's also easier to have ancillary power sources in a large weapon. Basically: no magic swords for anyone except Butterfly Heroes. Magic-powered motor vehicles also struggle to be efficient until we're looking at things on the scale of tanks and articulated lorries, and those tonnage requirements mean that flight would be impractical unless you wanted to build, say, an entire floating temple. However, since the papalotli have no cultural imperative to fly - being essentially someone's sugar glider fursona - this hasn't happened, for which we can probably all be quite grateful. As things stand, magic only really powers the Empire's much-depleted naval assets, and even then it's as a secondary power source.
The greatest piece of magic ever worked by the naqatli was just after the Eruption. With ash clouds blanketing the landscape and choking the sun from the skies, the forests of the Great Storm Empire began to die. This was most keenly felt in the northernmost cities, the ones along the coast of the Strait of Irridare. Reports began trickling in of harvest failures and crop die-offs, and the spectre of famine, once thought banished from the Empire, crept back into their world. The usual blood rituals to secure the harvests simply weren't powerful enough to meaningfully aid in the farmers' plight, and several coastal temple complexes descended into violent, bloody insurrection. Realizing that they had to do something, the reigning Rain Emperor issued something rare to the point of unheard-of in the Great Storm Empire: a nationwide, binding, peacetime decree. The impact of the worldwide winter was making itself felt across the Empire, the decree said. It had poisoned the very skies against the naqatli. A great sacrifice would take place. Two boys and two girls from every family in the kingdom - every single one - along with millions of adults were to be sacrificed at the same time, under lunar auspices and with the national co-ordination of the entire priesthood. The resultant spell would be based on the typical harvest ritual, but burning blacker and more powerful than any attempted in the history of the Empire. If the spell was not cast, the sheer volume of mana released could cause temples to literally explode up and down the country. The future of the naqatli was more uncertain than ever, but one thing remained true: it was a future of magic, inscribed in stone and written in rich, red blood. Even then, even then, it was a stopgap, a few years of borrowed time while refinements were to be frantically carried out on the harvest spells of the nation. It wasn't a good plan, but it was the only one that a panic-stricken nation even had.
In all, adding in preliminary sacrifices to prime the pumps and other complex rituals to fortify the central temple complex of the imperial capital against detonation, roughly 15% of the total population of the Great Storm Empire was killed to power the Great Ritual of the Emperor's Tears. The life force of tens of millions was wicked away to provide a kind of umbrella, keeping the jungles warm and the harvests coming. The priesthood returned to the northern cities, and indeed the next Emperor was elected from one. Blood and power washed the nation of ash, and still does... for a time. Now, the spell is beginning to fade. The weather cools, the ash comes, the north grows restless. The population cannot sustain another casting of the Emperor's Tears. What happens now... who can say.
History/ Background Info: Later.
Nation Relations:-
S'laaeth: Never trust a lizard. At least a priest'll stab you in the front. And also pull your heart out and call forth all the mana in your body to leave in a blue spiral.
Bjergavjern: We have a sizeable dwarf community because they thought there was a better chance of them not being killed here than in their home country. Here. Think about that.
Verdasou: Very cordial relations. After all, they keep sending us gifts of warriors to be sacrificed! Oh, they might say they're invasion forces trying to loot and plunder our gold reserves, but that's pirates for you, eh? Always playing so coy...
Apologies for the crapness; HeroMachine is... lacking in a lot of respects