Vilageidiotx

I, Arabicus: An alternate history RP set in Late Antiquity

I was thinking about using the House of Karen, one of the Seven Parthian Clans,

@babbysama

I was hoping somebody would take up a Parthian family. Go for it.

Also, what year will we be starting in, or has that been decided yet?

@babbysama

634 AD

Given the rise of islam happened in the context of a still prominent Roman Empire, wouldn't this cause serious butterflies to the faith

@Nilesapa

It could, but i've chosen not to change it for the sake of simplicity. Like any alternate history, i'm just tweaking what I want to really. As for the stability question, the Roman Empire survived but it isn't necessarily stable. The Empire would still be experiencing the teetering internal cohesion it had been experiencing since the Severans. In the real world, the Eastern Empire sort of played at being the total Emperor for a few centuries, and many of the Germanic Kings were at the very least playing lip service to the Imperial title. In doing so, the Germanic Kings gained legitimacy among their still often Roman subjects, and the Emperor got to pretend that the Germanic Kings were just ruling in his stead.

In this scenario, however, the Roman Empire is physically stretched across this land. They have to pay to defend it, to man the borders, and when there are border incursions they have to fight them off. We can just as easily say that the bloody wars with the Parthians also still went on, meaning that both Empires will be somewhat exhausted.

But of course it is alt history. Who the hell knows how we will end up letting this play out.

I have interest, but unsure where to go. Although I do ask, are Knights a thing here?

@Nilesapa

More or less. There would be no chivalric code or knightly orders of course, but the concept of giving land to your household guard or heavy cavalry wouldn't be strange. In some sense, Knighthood derived from how important heavy cavalry in the period of the late Roman Empire, and it shares a sort of mixed heritage with the Germanic household guard and the Roman equestrian class.

And I personally will probably use this term, and a few other anachronistic terms, to put some emphasis on how we are evolving out of antiquity and entering the medieval world.

I, Arabicus: An alternate history RP set in Late Antiquity

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Zachary Karabell, in an aside in his work 'People of the Book', said that the arguments about the nature of Christ came about due to the absorption of Pagan Philosophy in the Christian Faith.

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<Snipped quote>

@Letter Bee

I do know this was true with the Arians. If you are an educated Roman with lessons in greek philosophy under your belt, then all this shit about varying levels of divinity and humanity can be made sense of, but if you are a Germanic coming from a religion where the Gods were Gods and the heroes were heroes, it made more sense for their to be complete separation. And they kept that separation going for a long time because it allowed Germanic culture to remain separate when they occupied Roman territories.

Colours in the IC

When I was a kid, there was a year or so where everyone made fun of my father because he made a woman he worked with cry. We were like "Aww, you're such a mean guy!" and he took it in stride because giving each other shit was just how we were raised, but I was reminded of the reason he made this girl cry when I started reading this thread. Basically, he is a machinist for a living, and he was in charge of supervising the floor. She was younger than him, but I don't remember how much younger because I never actually met her. Anyway, she was supposed to write reports for either him or one of the higher-up managers, but she had this habit of drawing flowers and bunnies and shit like that all over the reports. Just really into doodling I suppose. Anyway, my father told her that it was incredibly unprofessional to doodle all over reports because it made them all look bad to management, and so she cried.

Presentation isn't something to gawk at. Certain lapses of presentation signify something broader about the presenter. In the same way a resume written in crayon suggests the applicant isn't taking their application seriously, or a traditional novel written in comic-sans might suggest an author who doesn't not respect his readers, or inventory reports with flowers and bunnies drawn in the margins looks unprofessional, an RP written with colors suggests immaturity in the RPer. I'm going to be blunt here, the attitude that it is difficult to read without runescapeing out all your text is an example of what I mean. If you actually actively hate the words themselves, if you have contempt for the writing and feel like the text needs to be gawdy and colorfied, then I don't want you in an RP with me. The idea that you use colors to symbolize who is talking suggests to me you want to skip the text and just read bits of dialogue, which is fine if we are preteens twittering twilight fanfic, but if we are going to write something with substance then all the shit in between the colored dialogue matters just as much as the dialogue itself.

Like, if you are coming out and telling me now, in this thread, that you don't have the attention span to actually read a thing straight, then you've proved every point I have made.

I, Arabicus: An alternate history RP set in Late Antiquity

The big schism, the division between the Catholic west and Orthodox east, would not happen. That evolves out of head-butting politics between the Papal sphere of influence and the Imperial sphere, but in this world the two spheres would be more or less one and the same. You would probably get uppity Popes from time to time trying to insist their word comes before the other patriarchs, but with Imperial power present in the west it is unlikely any Germanic kingdoms would accept Papal primacy since it would do them no good. Remember, accepting Papal primacy was how Charlemagne got made an Emperor.

That means that the worlds "Catholic" and "Orthodox" will be interchangeable words for the Chalcedonian dogma.

However, as Aaron said, there was a Monophysite split between Alexandria and the Orthodoxy that would have happened regardless, and they became very popular on the eastern fringes. You'd see it entrenched in Egypt and East-Africa, popular in Armenia, and influential in Syria. Also in Syria, particularly deeper in Christian parts of the otherwise Zoroastrian Persian Empire, you would have the Nestorians. Historically many of the Germans were Arian as well, though whether or not Arianism would have lasted in this situation is hard to tell. Miaphysitism happens later, and represents the moderation of the Monophysites.

Now, the meaning of these terms seems really petty to me and probably most modern people, but it was important to people in this time period. I will try to explain them though.

The Orthodox position is that Jesus was both divine and human at the same time, and that this divinity and humanity were distinct but acting in tandem.

The Monophysites held that Jesus was divine and that was that. One nature, not two.

The Miaphysites who later evolve from the Monophysites and represented by the modern Coptic churches held that Jesus had one nature, but that this one nature was some sort of mix between divinity and humanity.

The Nestorians, who are the Syriac christians of the modern day, believed that Christ was bother divine and human but that these two aspects were completely separate. They are different from the Orthodox because the Orthodoxy saw the humanity and divinity as being equally present, the Nestorians saw Jesus as a human with divinity inserted post-production.

The Arians believed that Jesus was the son of god, but that he was not divine, but was a separate subordinate human son kind of like a Greek demi-god.

There is also the Donatists, who you will see mentioned if you research this stuff. They probably would not be present in the RP, as they were mostly worried about the nature of apostasy, which wouldn't be common in the 7th century. They were popular when large parts of the western world were still hostile to Christianity, and they represented the faction that believed that anybody who renounced Jesus, even under duress, could never be forgiven or allowed to receive the Eucharist. It is possible this idea might resurge in the face of Islam.

Now, if there is anybody better at theology than me, please speak up, because the theological divides make very little sense to me and I don't understand why anybody could ever have cared. This was shit that nearly brought the Empire to civil war several times, and it would have divided everything from rival street gangs to aristocratic families. And that I truly don't get.

Cat

Could be. The ears look right at least.

Blisssssss

Ok, let's try this again. Think Billy Joel, breath Billy Joel, post Billy Joel.



Fuck.

West Korea's Annual Presidential Election

Huh... most of these candidates aren't Korean at all.

@Loud Angry Dead

West Korea is very open with their electoral processes.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

That's the most Trump has actually been worth in a long time.

Blisssssss

Did somebody say Billy Joel.



Whoops, that is not Billy Joel. I fucked up.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

twenty-something odd Republican field.

@Byrd Man

When I read this, I thought you meant /pol/ or something. Then I realized you were talking about the number of Republicans, not their age and social condition.

It's going to be an interesting race for the right. They have to run the gauntlet between the young, moderate economic conservatives and the older wing-nuts. If Trump pulls a Perot, we might just see a split vote.

Of course, this election will probably end up being a meaningless go nowhere Bush vs Clinton "Lets say the same things with different words" type of event, in which case i'll go third party again.