To set the tone for the story to come, and the basis for the Conqueror's empire, I started them off with a selection from Justice, in specific the trial of Dytoclanes, as recorded by his student Attades.
Celestrones the Conqueror retook the island of Joranne in 105,732 in a storm of steel javelins, long pikes, and deadly spears. The warlord Jlando of Ruif, who had seized the mines of Joranne with deception and daring, didn’t stand a chance against the onslaught. None of his weapons could protect him against a short sword forged from Bazik steel.
After taking nine months to secure the islands, regroup, and outfit the army, Celestrones came to reflect upon the teachings of Attades. He had won a tremendous victory against a virtually defenseless foe. The battle was scarcely a contest, and had he not been fighting to retake his homeland, he might have wondered if there was honor in such a one-sided battle. For the first time, men had died under his command, and at his command. As Attades had taught him, he now realized the truth: in order to do the most good for the most people, it may be necessary to do harm.
And yet, Celestrones decided, the harm did not come from within the Bronze Empire; it came from Sathad. The giants of Chon Zin had assumed the throne of the Pharaoh, but in so doing, they had fractured Sathad into dozens of warring factions. The Inoren of the east were breaking away. Every warlord of Sathad promised his people riches, safety, and peace, but delivered only death and war. Tribute was exacted from the people to pay for endless slaughter over territory. What had once been a center of culture and civility, religion and trade, was now a disunited realm of barbarians. The giants had turned the river Galos into a fortification, a final barricade against encroaching barbarism. Had Celestrones known of the prophetic Abbadar, and that they had all fled, he would not have condemned them for it.
The job of protecting the Bronze Empire was not yet finished, Celestrones decided. In order to secure her fully, it would be necessary to bring peace to Sathad. That worthy goal would not be achieved without cost, but Celestrones was willing to make Sathad pay that price for peace. In the winter of the following year, he moved vast numbers of his iron-clad army across the straits to the mainland. Once his forces were assembled at the mouth of the Galos, he proceeded to sweep them north and east. Every warlord that stood in his way was either converted to his cause or trampled under. Every city that he captured peacefully was given its autonomy: they would govern themselves as they thought best, assisted by a satrap of his choosing, and they would owe only tribute and men for the army. Every city that resisted him was erased from the map.
As his armies spread east, they grew. Local warlords feared to stand in the path of such a mighty force of horsemen, archers, swordsmen, chariots, sorcerers, and elephants, and rather than die fighting him, they helped him against their more traditional foes. With the aid of one of his advisers, Oresthal, Celestrones learned the culture and languages of the Sathad people, and spread the language and alphabet of Joranne. He built cities in his wake, not for commerce or for farming or for conquest, but merely to manage the vast Empire he was building. Generals trained under him, learned his methods — both his brilliant military innovations and his unprecedented political ones. Despite his epithet, Celestrones was no conqueror and he had no interest in running anyone else’s affairs. By granting his conquered cities independence and peace he gained respect and admiration. He ruled far more successfully with peace and good management than the warlords had done with fear.
The conquest of the savannah took nearly five years, but in time Celestrones brought his armies to what he considered to be the rotting center of the endless fighting: the Great Temple at Pharo. From here the priests of the Temple collected great tributes, and from here the tribute was spent to finance the wars on the savannah. In a rage, and without hesitation, Celestrones ordered the city sacked, the Great Temple destroyed, the statues of all but five of the gods beheaded, and the High Priestesses of all the gods in the temple stripped of their wealth.
He ordered a city named Celestria built on its ruins. In place of the Great Temple, Celestrones built a courthouse.
Celestrones (M, 29) is the Conqueror himself: educated, determined, calculating but ethical, generous to his allies and ruthless to his foes. He is prepared to do whatever he must to secure lasting peace for Bazik and Joranne, and if this means forcing peace down the throats of her neighbors, so be it. In his wake he has left behind the Bronze Empire, two allied islands with a rudimentary common government, and in its place he has founded the Celestrian Empire: self-rule for all, within certain defined imperial boundaries.
His present headache is administrative governance. Formerly the Great Temple and its network of local priests was the center of the judiciary, dispensing legal judgments in the name of whoever claimed to be Pharaoh this month. Celestrones has had to demolish the entire thing and begin from scratch. The old code of laws written by Mlabmis to unite the people were a nightmare of exceptions, loopholes, and compromises between the many resident cultures. Celestrones does not wish to be consulted on every petty interpretation of the law, nor perpetuate the present system where a judge is permitted to pass lenient sentences on those who pay the biggest bribe, or who have the proper racial makeup.
His tutor, Attades (M, 68) has accompanied him on this prolonged mainland expedition in order to moderate his more militant tendencies. Attades's recommendation is to implement a system similar to what he described in Justice: the punishment of law would be placed into the hands of a judge, with an investigative panel of philosophers at his disposal, who would analyze the various arguments, circumstances, and evidence of each case in order to determine into which ethical category the accused's behavior fell. Attades defined many kinds of behavior, such as an unjust wrong, a justifiable wrong, a necessary wrong, and a righteous wrong, in addition to a selfish right, a shared right, a retributive right, and many others. That, he says, is the model from which we begin to build perfect justice. We analyze the context of the crime and the status of the criminal, before dispensing an appropriate sentence.
Oresthal (M, 37) is, like the Conqueror himself, a student of Attades. He has pursued the philosophy of his master into a primitive form of scientific quantification and categorization. If good and bad are relative, and dependent upon a finely balanced understanding of the nature of all things, reasoned Oresthal, then one must begin by first calculating the nature of all things, by which actions and ethics can later be determined. At the side of the Conqueror, Oresthal has been learning a great deal, studying everything he can find, employing batteries of scribes to document his findings on plants, animals, cultures, languages, history, cities, technology, magic, and the people themselves.
Oresthal's recommendation is to preserve the old ways. He isn't convinced that imposing an entirely new system of justice will work unless they first understand all of the complexities of the old one. The people are accustomed to consulting their priestesses as moral judges. Only the priestesses, professionals in moral analysis, had the training and insight into the arcane and twisting legal precedents. The common people didn't understand the ways of the heavens and couldn't settle the law themselves. Before we discard all the foundation of law, we must first know what it is we're destroying. What may we safely retain, and what must we cast out? Five races came together at Pharo, and from five peoples the law was intertwined. To sever that tangled knot of law is to unravel the fabric that holds these varied peoples together.
Celestrones does not have an answer. Although he doesn't approve of letting the gods meddle in mortal law, he is practical enough to realize that no system will govern if the people themselves don't like it. If we install an unpopular system, no cases will be brought before the courts, Celestrones argues, and the people will simply go to settling the cases informally among themselves. Besides, he says, the principles of his empire are at stake: I promise my subjects safety, fairness, and self-governance. How can I give them self-justice without giving them back the judicial system of corrupt priestesses that they had before?
What The Players Decided
First, they stared at me in shock. Joe the Leader turned to his phone.
"Now we have to set up a system of law for a whole conquering empire," he texted to Jean, who was absent this week — she's an attorney. "Thanks for skipping tonight."
"LOL," she texted back. A big help, I'm sure.
Dave the Artisan stared gloomily at the others. "I miss the days when we just had moon tigers to worry about."
It took the players a little while to get their feet under them and come to grips with the massive and important task they had before them. In addition to devising a method for determining guilt or innocence, they wondered how they would implement a system of fair punishments.
"We could just put the priests in charge of that part," Connor said. "Obey the law and you get to go to heaven."
"We're going to build the afterlife into the legal system?" Joe exclaimed.
They turned to the list of magic spells that I had made available to an Iron Age society. Joe pointed down to one item. "Compel Truth. Just puttin' that out there."
Magic would become the essential structure of their legal system. A magical item would be enchanted to compel truth and, hopefully, dispel any existing enchantments. Joe suggested a magical book that the witnesses put their hands upon. Jack, in turn, suggested a magical lasso made all in gold.
The Players examined the uses for judges, a court system, and a jury. "We have this idea from Justice about a judge, and he's got a panel of philosophers to investigate," Joe said.
"We have something that makes them tell the truth," Connor pointed out. "Why do we need any of that?"
You'll still need to know which witnesses to bring in, I said.
The Players didn't want to cast out the priestesses entirely, because that was the basis for holding the Empire together. They broke down the five remaining gods that Celestrones had not destroyed — the five that the Bronze Empire itself worshiped — and used that as their starting point.
Without restating their arguments and digressions in their entirety, they elected to establish a court of five judges. Each judge would have a part to play in pronouncing sentence, and a specific role to play during the trial, based on the god or goddess whom he represented. Dave was the God of Truth, who would be moderator of the court and who would command the panel of investigators as necessary. Temu, played by the absent Jean, was Goddess of Justice, so her judge would represent the defendant. Joe was God of War and Conquest, so his judge would represent the prosecution. Jack, as Storyteller, would have a judge to represent the history of the law, as well as to transcribe the events of the court. Connor was Goddess of Fertility, which didn't have much to do with law, but as a general hand-wave toward his role of Mystic, they said his judge would be responsible for any magical proceedings.
Results
I won't know the results of this round until I prepare for the next round.
