Let me talk to you about Cobrin’Seil, a big country, a big war, and something gay.
In Cobrin’Seil there are essentially two nations that represent the cultural normal. One, the Eresh Protectorate is widely distributed and shares culture freely with almost everyone, and typically only refuses to show up if you tell them not to. The Eresh Protectorate presents a sort of progressive vision of culture, of how nations ‘should’ be, and their counterpart, the other largest country in the world, is Dal Raeda. Dal Raeda is enormous — sometimes glibly called ‘a hundred days ride, side to side.’
It’s also a comparatively conservative nation, with old structures and rules in place, an entrenched noble class, and actual factual feudalism being the organisation system of several provinces within living memory. Feudalism is over, ostensibly, since the birth of the last King, who reformed the legal system to consider rights to belong to people first, and land second, and that was a novel philosophical position that just also coincided with the aftermath of other reforms in other countries almost a century beforehand. It wasn’t even the King’s fault – his father is the one who made the reforms, setting them up to kick in with the birth of his son, to coincide with a New Era.
The new era didn’t actually change that much.
Still, it means Dal Raeda is a nation that has been undergoing extensive reforms for basically the last lifetime. If you live in Dal Raeda, you’ve seen magical street lights appear in most cities, floating and alarmed eternal lights hovering over the roads. You’ve watched trained bards travel to small villages and start teaching kids how to read, with central government backing. You may have even seen the building of church apothecaries, an official building where clerics can come and minister the sick and unwell with no expectation of payment. It’s slow, it’s not like the integration of these systems in other countries, though. Dal Raeda has street lights – it doesn’t have the trains yet.
While the Eresh Protectorate is a dynamic set of city states where the legal code can be updated on the fly thanks to an active judiciary and division of powers, Dal Raeda is organised on a slow set of treaties and noble titles, dividing the country up into the Great Provinces, and the noble families that run them by right of birth. Sort of. There’s some asterisks in that tidy organisation. The list of provinces, in order of ‘least important to this conversation’ to ‘actually matters after the background intro is done,’
- Brin Proper, the capital city which is technically its own Province
- Virret Keep, a single castle which claims ownership of all the river networks and islands of the country (which means it’s technically, run by a Castellan).
- Theilan, an island province off the coast, which was founded around a guild of assassins
- Willowsebb, a heavily forested area with a strong druidic tradition
- Glotharen, who brought a note from its parents to be ignored in the list
- Danube, the only province with a (typical) land border
- Sanders, the military powerhouse of the nation, and probably the most traditional place, and one of the two subjects of this piece.
Now, these are setting components that have existed since I invented them as a teenager, when the place was called Kyngdom. They have leaders, and I have done a good job of not centering them when talking about the places; I think that a leader-first vision of locations runs the risk of turning countries and states into subordinate narratives of the individuals running them, a sort of Great Man History problem. Some of these leaders have names, but largely, it’s not important.
Thanks to the presence of Brin Proper, as a hub in the centre of the country, Sanders and Danube are the two large mainland provinces that don’t share a border. The border they don’t have isn’t actually very large – it’s a city. You can walk around the outside of the city to reach the gap and sure it’s a two day walk, but it’s not like these two provinces are really distant from one another in geographical terms. But much is made of the fact that they don’t have a border, that they are the ‘near distants’ – because Sanders’ capital is near the coast and Danube’s capital is almost the opposite side of the country, near the land border.
These two countries, so near, but that cannot touch, because of the confines and demands of the royal city, and its proprietry; this, too, is yuri.
Anyway, back when I made these provinces, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that I made both these leaders women. That doesn’t sound like much but I was a kid, and I know I still tend towards defaulting male for NPCs. I have done the math on what a majority female cast of characters feels like for me and I know my judgment on it is bad. Anyway, of the seven leaders of Provinces, two are definitely women, and they are Dux Sanders and the Marquess Danube.
Dux Sanders is the knightly imperator of the Sanders province. Sanders has a large standing military, a holdover from when the province quartered the national army. Sanders also has the Sanders Stable, an enormously powerful independent organisation within the country, which does not sell horses – it lets you pay to caretake a horse. Sanders horses are horses that are so respected and valued for their skill, prowess and endurance that if you die, with that horse, the stables comes back and repossess it. The stables performs true resurrections on horses that have passed before their natural ends.
Dux Sanders is a tower of a woman; almost seven feet tall, she ensures she is seen in public almost at all times wearing at least partial armour; breastplate and cuirass. She is blonde, with hair that she normally wears braided around the back of her head, and is typically described as handsome. In a society that still has a number of chauvinist trends, in the most traditional part of it, she holds onto the power of her province through a sort of performative knightly masculinity. Stern and powerful, demanding and assertive, she is every bit a duke as the other former dukes, hence rejecting the title Duchess.
Danube on the other side of the country is smaller, by a significant margin, and it is known as the trade hub of Dal Raeda. It can trade with Eresh — not just the Eresh Protectorate, but Eresh itself — and this trade has brought with it technology like magecraft, guns, trains and interactions with the Great Tradehouses. Marquess Danube on the other hand could best be described as a ‘Rapier Girl.’ Her aesthetic is much more that of a French duelist; hat, ruffled shirt, sword at the hip. There are all sorts of arcane bylaws about her that protect her position, and she’s even trying modernising democracy within Danube.
The laws for war inside Dal Raeda have a bunch of clauses, which mean that it’s not just a matter of Sanders asserting its superior military over everyone. These laws are silly and foolish to any modern vision of war, and Danube even is building to prepare for a time when military rules are different. I mean, you can’t have the biggest military just automatically win, that’s basically saying the largest population wins, that’s no better than rank democracy. Danube’s rapidly modernising edge and Sanders’ immense army are very clearly seen as the two major powers that are going to clash, and decide who is the next monarch of Dal Raeda.
And all of this is to say, all of this and this description and this amateur geography about a country that is very close to Generic Fantasy Kingdom Kingdom, in the context of Cobrin’Seil, is that after introducing these political figures to my players, and explaining the tension between these provinces, a common thread comes up:
“They’re girlfriends, right?”
And like… this is the structure, isn’t it? Two estates, alike but unalike, competing and conflicting. Two women, doing the best for their obligations as best they can. Alienated from everyone around them, even at their own level of immense privilege. They’re even positioned to do a kind of duel!
Who knows how this story goes.