Drawing Maps - Season 6 Faction Creation Pt. 7 - Time and Space

Hello everyone! Welcome to the final pre-PARTIZAN episode of Drawing Maps. I’ve got a lot to go over today, as this is a very exciting update that will fill in some final worldbuilding details about the setting of PARTIZAN. Because of how dense this is, and because this post combines two types of update material, I’m double marking this update as both Mapmaker and a Drawing Maps post. I don’t do that often, but I think as this episode continues, you’ll see why I’m doing it this way.

Like I said last update: This week’s post is going to be about the larger world of PARTIZAN and the Divine Principality. The calendar, its history, the way the Stels think about Partizan itself, and the way they relate to one another in other places across Divinity. That’s a lot I know, and that’s why I’ve done my best to totally script this episode out. That said, while I’ll do my best to keep to this script, there may be a couple of small details that slip out in the recording, so it’s probably worth a listen! 

Anyway, let’s start with something I’ve been dying to talk about: the Divine Calendar.

The Divine Calendar, the Principle Constellations, and the Length of a Year

As you’ve probably guessed from the recent intros of the Road to Season 6, when we begin PARTIZAN, it will be the year 1423 of the Divine Principality’s Perfect Millennium. But what does that mean? Why is it the Perfect Millennium? How long is a year in space anyway?

So, let me break down the ridiculous, terrible way that the Divine Principality manages time and space (because managing something is the first step towards obliterating it). It’s sort of complicated, so I’ll take it slow and start with a clear example.

Wherever you live in the Divine Principality, whether that’s on the six-fold province of Partizan, at the front lines of the Unbroken War against the Branched, or on the Apostolosian capital of Aretemisios, the year 1423 will have 10 months, each of which will have 50, 25 hour days. This is a fact with a lot of implications. Here are a couple to start.

As listeners, it means that a “year” in the Perfect Millennium is meaningfully longer than the years we’re used to. Years are long, and living on an inhabited, hospitable world means that you’ll often go through an entire set of seasons more than once per year. This is disorienting! Because of that, that people who live on planets need to rely on almanacs (like the official and true one provided by the Palace information service) to convert the Divine Calendar into actually usable information. 

But you’ll never forget what month it is: If you’re on a terrestrial world, a major space station, a colonized asteroid field, or any other population center of note, the current month broadcast to you not only via news updates and traditional calendars, but by way of the Principle Constellations, the set of ten faux-constellations that dominate the sky. Whatever given month it is, that constellation will be large and central to the sky—seeing it move into place is a key part of new month ceremonies across the Principality.

Here is a list of the months, with their joining constellations:

 Month of the Sphinx (Month of Stel Kesh) 

Month of the Pedestal (Month of Aspirational Hierarchy aka “The Simple Constellation”)

Month of the Phoenix (Month of Stel Nideo)

Month of the Crook (Month of the Shepherd’s Crook - the group that the Lambic House is tied to, from a past Drawing Maps update)

Month of the Dragon (Month of Stel Orion)

Month of the Ox (Month Venerating Those Who Work for Our Great Principality)

Month of the Chimera (Month of Stel Columnar)

Month of the Book (Month of Our Bipartite Faith)

Month of the Serpent (Month of Stel Apostolos)

Month of the Partizan (Month Commemorating the Unbroken War with the Branched)

Why ten months? Because each Stel gets two, more or less. One for the Stel itself (featuring the mythological creature that symbolizes said Stel) and once for some extra thing important to the faction in question. 

But wait, Stels Orion, Columnar, and Apostolos all joined well after the Principality was formed? Yup. And for a while, I thought that meant that the calendar was simply divided up every time a stel joined. That’s certainly a reasonable way for things to go. But that… didn’t happen. Instead, the Principality added months to the calendar. Which means that during the Dawn, Ascendant, and Miraculous Millennia—all of which were before Stel Orion joined the Principality—a year was only 200 days. Again: Lots of implications!

First, it means that the Divine Calendar is inconsistent as fuck. When you say that a particular minor war lasted for a year, well, which sort of year do you mean? Not only “knowing” it but “understanding” it is a key part of scholarship in the Principality. Learn their broken, stupid fucking calendar system or else you’re the fool. 

Another implication: Ages are weird! As players, we’re just going to use earth years to describe people—if someone says their character is 40, we mean Earth 40, and we pretend that translation is being done in world. (As a quick side bit of worldbuilding, I think the age of majority in the Divine Principality is “7000 Days,” a convention that came about when Stel Orion first joined and the calendar changed. Your 7k Day is a big deal. If you’re of means, you definitely have a party.)

I’ve started gesturing a bit at something else here: The Millennia. The game takes place in 1423 of the Perfect Millennium. How many other millennia are they? If the Perfect Millennium is currently 1423 years long, how long are the others? Fair questions. Let’s take a look at the Microscope map, except this time with names of Millennia added where appropriate for ease of use: 

It turns out, it’s real easy to more or less map each “era” from our Microscope game to a one of the Divine Calendar’s millennia:

The Birth of the Divine Principality becomes the Dawn Millennium, starting from the moment Aram Nideo became the “Resolute Regent” of the new empire and recognized the Divinity of the machine that would go on to become the Divine Past. 

At this point, I don’t even think the Principality used this calendar. Even through the second Microscope era, the Age of Local Expansion (which would eventually be called the Ascendant Millennium), the Principality likely still used a mix of calendars and systems, not quite unified into the empire it would turn into soon.

It was towards the start of the Time of Fables, in the People’s Palace on Kesh, under the leader who would become the Miraculous Princept, that the Divine Calendar was put into place, suddenly dividing the past 400,000 days into two even millennia, each with one thousand years, each of those years comprised of 4, 50 day months. It also set the next Millennium as the Miraculous Millennium. This happened soon after the adoption of the Many Stars Thesis and the creation of the Divine Principality as it currently stands, where Nideo’s Argument isn’t just an underlying ideology, but is state dogma. I bet that the leadership at this time thought that they’d settled this. But nothing is ever settled.

Nearly 1000 years (that is, 200,000 days) later, after the Principality had begun to recover from the first Perennial Wave, during the latter days of the Divine Clash, the yet untitled Living Princept recognized that the calendar had offered him an opportunity to leave his mark on the Principality. Once the Orion Combine was annexed and the Divine Collaborate defeated or assimilated, he would declare himself the Victorious Princept and then give this new Millennium his newly earned name: the Victorious Millennium. In the end, the Divine Clash did not see the Collaborate come under the fold, but all the same, it was a victory and so, as precedent demanded, he declared the start of a new millennium from the People’s Throne on Kesh. And maybe it was in a sort of spite towards the Collaborate that he gave Orion two months on the calendar (worth noting: I suspect the specifics of what those months represented took some time to decide). This yet again forever changed the way time would be counted, and set precedent in place for future Princepts to do the same as they brought additional Stels into being.

Which is why, once Columnar was successfully courted at the turn of the next 1000 years (which now is to say 300,000 days), the Living Princept of that era declared the coming age the Perfect Millennium. Four stels doubled the number of the Principality’s first duo, and for this Princept, it was hard to see what, if anything, could be missing. Columnar had joined without (the records say) a single shot fired on either side. There hadn’t been a proper war since the Divine Clash, now over 1000 years ago. Sure, there were still small, internal conflicts and skirmishes, battles over inheritance and territory. But these were internal battles, and that was after all the point of the Many Stars Argument. It seemed like the Principality had reached its final, unified form. Now it need only stretch its arms, one Stel across each quadrant of the galaxy. But again: Nothing is ever settled.

Three big things follow the declaration of the Perfect Millennium: First, the Schism and Reformation of Asterism, during which the Prophet Logos miraculously transforms most of the barren moon of Partizan into a blissful, bountiful world, an act that would eventually lead to the creation of the bipartite system of faith, with both Received and Progressive Asterism serving as state faiths. At some point, this system becomes the second “Columnar” month. What happened to the previous month? Was another constellation abandoned? Draw maps, leave blank spaces…

The second big thing that kicked off in the so-called Perfect MIllennium was the war against the Branched and Apostolos, aka the Unbroken War. This began at or around the year 500 PM, what would be the halfway point of the Millennium under normal circumstances. But circumstances changed.

First, the Branched take firm control of Kesh. I say firm, because over the course of this endless war, Kesh would be controlled in part or in whole by all three powers at war in the Golden Branch. But eventually, the Branched took Kesh and enough surrounding territory as to begin to integrate it into its polity. 

The precedent didn’t account for this: The Princept must declare their new Millennium from the People’s Throne in the People’s Palace. Princept after Princept tried to retake Kesh, and Princept after Princept failed. 

This goal was even the reason for our third “big thing”: The ploy to assimilate Apostolos into the Stel—which we described in our For the Queen and Microscope games. But to assimilate Apostolos—former enemies—without giving them proof that they were real citizens of Divinity would be to ask for rebellion, especially if the ploy was ever revealed. And so this part of the Divine Calendar Precedent was discarded: The Princept made the announcement from the Apokine’s Dais on the frontline world of Apostolos—a risky endeavor. The calendar would take two more months, 100 more days, and the two constellations that would go with them.

And so, from that point forward, the Perfect Millennium became a calendar of 10, 50 day months. Here’s a loose timeline of everything said above with a bit more detail and dates. (apologies for not reading this part off, it’s… a lot):

Dawn Millennium (4 months, 200 day years)

01 DM: The Birth of the Divine Principality

15 DM: Aram Nideo Pens the Many Stars Thesis

| (Early conflicts between noble houses and minor warlords) 

1000 DM: Transition to Next Millennium

Ascendant Millennium (4 months, 200 day years)

200 AM: Assimilation of Hypha (Dialect Game)

| (ongoing colonization and expansion, continued infighting)

1000 AM: Transition to Next Millennium: 1000

Miraculous Millennium (4 months, 200 day years)

10 MM: Adoption of the Many Stars Thesis & the Divine Calendar

| (Stabilization of the Principality, creation of Horizon)

400 MM: The Perennial Wave Event (Armour Astir game)

| (Spread of the wave, decline of technologies, slow rebuilding)

980 MM: Earliest Skirmishes of the Divine Clash

Victorious Millennium (6 months, 300 day years)

1 VM: End of Divine Clash and Formation of Stel Orion

30 VM: The Portcullis System comes online

| (Memory of the Divine Clash and local expansion conflicts fades from collective memory)

500 VM: Ech0 Game

| (Courting of the Columnar Tabulary Begins)

1000 VM: Principality Gifts the Columnar the Divine Commitment

Perfect Millennium (Part 1: 8 months, 400 day years)

1 PM: Creation of Stel Columnar

40 PM: Equiaxed lose semi-autonomous status

100 PM: Assimilative Perspective System taken offline/adopted into Palace

| (Ongoing Columnar Assimilation. The Launch of a Garbage Drone across space.)

423 PM: The Prophet Logos creates the Prophet Sea on Partizan

450 PM: Progressive Asterism is formed

490 PM: Tranquil Princept Bans Expansion into the Scutum-Centaurus arm beyond Partizan

500 PM: War against the Branched and Apostolos Begins

| (The endless war at the border of the Golden Branch gets name: “The Unbroken War”)

900 PM: Kesh is firmly captured by Branched

950 PM: Audacious Princept declares whoever re-captures Kesh can expand beyond Partizan

Perfect Millennium (Part 2: 10 months, 500 day years)

980 PM: Stel Apostolos is formed and Calendar Expands, but no new Millennium is named

1018 PM: The Resin Heart is Found in the Prophet’s Sea and the Disciples of Logos form

1100 PM: Apostolos is captured by the Branched

| (The Unbroken War becomes a norm of life. Constant and expected.)

1399 PM: The Living Princept, Dahlia is born.

1400 PM: ██████████ ████ is born. ███ ██████ is working as ████████ ████████ for ███ ███████.

1408 PM: ███ ██████ ██ ███████████ ██ ██ ████ █████.

1410 PM: ███ ██████ ██████████. Dahlia is taken hostagein the process, marking Stel Nideo with great dishonor.

1411 PM: The Apokine rescues Dahlia. Raises them as their own, promising to protect them until it’s clear that Kesh can. Stel Nideo promises to absolve its sin.

1418: Dahlia becomes Elect of Commitment, takes Apostolosian gender neutral they/them pronoun, declares that they are both the Apokine and the Princept, and reveals the ploy which brought Apostolos into the Principality. Stel Kesh denies both this claim and Dahlia’s claim to the throne, and instead submits that Cynosure Whitestar-Kesh is the true Princept. Negotiations break down, and armed conflict begins almost immediately wherever the two share borders or assets. Stels Nideo, Columnar, and Orion officially remain Neutral until evidence of the True Princept emerges.

1423 PM: Present. ███ ███████ ██ ███████ ███ ██████ ███████ is deployed as a support squad to the small town of Obelle, which borders the Apostolosian Barranca to the north and the Prophet’s Path to the south.

Whew. Okay. So… that’s the state of the calendar. The Obliteration of Time. Now… let’s talk about Space. Let me introduce you to…

The State of All Divinity and the Blessed Moon of Partizan c. 1423 PM

Holy shit this map. HOLY SHIT THIS MAP. Thank you so much to the incredibly talented Annie Johnston-Glick (@dancynrew on Twitter), who I commissioned to turn my chicken scratch map into this illuminated map of the Divine Principality and the key areas its connected to. Here’s the draft map I sent her (along with those constellations above, which I'd randomly thrown together on a whim a couple of months ago), for comparison:

(Two quick things that are different from the version of this map that I showed on screen during past streams: 1. We’ve rotated the map on its side so that we could do the “Beware the Eye of Perennial, Adversary Unblinking” bit. 2. I’ve swapped the places of the Stel Kesh and NIdeo. Originally Kesh was on the other side of the galactic center, but because of where I knew the Twilight Mirage was, It only made sense for NIdeo to have grown out around it and contain it in its interior.)

So, what all can we learn from this map? Here’s a few things:

1. The only place that all five Stels actually touch is at the Prophet’s Sea, which is the name of the larger star sector that Partizan is in. The only other place it comes close is the Golden Branch, which is flanked by Kesh, Nideo, Columnar, and Apostolos. But while everyone borders the Branch itself, Apostolos only borders Nideo and Columnar only borders Kesh.  Also, it’s worth saying that this map is extremely general, especially at areas of great conflict, where the 2D nature of this map falls apart entirely.
   
2. Implicit in that last little bit: Stel Orion (which is huge in terms of raw “spatial” control, maybe as big as all of the old OriCon and Automated Diaspora put together) is the only Stel not sharing a border with the Golden Branch. In fact, Orion only directly borders Columnar space and Partizan. Even if Apostolos wanted to do some sort of super long play attack across dark space, they’d first have to cross the Scutum-Centaurus arm which is forbidden.
   
3. An interesting note: Annie and I brainstormed a lot about what to call the Scutum-Centaurus arm on this map. Did I want to emphasize the fact that it was forbidden territory? Or the fact that it was being held up by this shitty colonialist empire as a prize for whichever Stel “won” it? In the end, I settled on Caelestia Nullius, which is a modified version of Terra Nullius, a latin phrase that means Nobody’s Land and which serves as the bullshit justification for a lot of historical colonization. “Ah,” says the settler, ignoring indigenous people all around them, “This is nobody’s land, which means that I can seize it as my own.” There are of course people living in the Scutum-Centaurus arm, and even the idea that “winning the right” to colonize those people and extracting the resources in that arm is from the jump a broken and immoral process, and one with human historical precedent.
   
4. There are a lot of location names here, and some are new. So: Counterweight, the Twilight Mirage, Sol… you should know those. Lenaphon IV came up briefly in Twilight Mirage, in the short story Guaranteed Events. The Crown or Crown City was the pre-Perennial Columnar capital. The ruins remain today, though I suspect they’ve rebuilt around them, and they’ve become a tourist destination. The 10th Coronet, deep in Orion space, is where the council that leads Stel Orion—which is called the Nine Coronet, as you may have heard in one of the Road to PARTIZAN intros—meet up. Finally, there’s Artemisios, a world named for one of the great historical leaders of Apostolos, and with Apostolos itself lost in the Unbroken War, it has become the largest population center and ad hoc capital for the Stel.

Something this map doesn’t show, and that I’d love to get at in more detail at some point in the future, is the way in which these borders are porous, at least to some degree. While PARTIZAN is the only major world in the galaxy where all five stels currently have large scale settlements, militaries, etc., it’s not rare at all to find key institutions from one Stel showing up deep into the territory of another Stel. The Church of Received Asterism, major Orion companies, Kesh-funded academic institutions, Columnar R&D labs, Apostolosian military outposts—these often will pop up even in “rival” territory. 

Because, as a reminder from above, while small skirmishes and even fights over land have happened throughout, the Principality has been standing for 5000 years. Even the youngest Stel, Apostolos, joined 463 years ago (which is 600+ years in our calendar). The body has not broken, yet. Even during open hostilities, there are rules about access to state infrastructure like the Portcullis system, the Palace, and space launch systems. Maybe that will change with time, but those will be big changes that threaten the structure of the whole.

I say all this because I’ve already heard a lot of talk from folks wanting to run a “home” game elsewhere in the Principality, and have even had people ask me questions about whether X or Y is more likely. I wish I had the time to go DEEP into this stuff, but given how long this already is, all I can offer are some very quick ground rules/inspiration for you:

1. You can and will find the churches (Received and Progressive Asterism) everywhere. The former is a major, centralized structure with clear hierarchy and reporting structure (go back and look at the Nideo update for those specific titles). Progressive Asterism, on the other hand, is more of a continuity of faith, with lots of individual churches dedicated to individual Divines as if they were saints, spirits, or gods—or as always, aspects of some other real monotheistic god. There’s a lot of breadth in what Progressive Asterist belief looks like. All that said: You could still tell a story about, say, a Received Asterist church so far away from the Cycle (the Church’s leader) that they do things differently, with extra corruption or even heretically. Or, you could tell a story about a more tightly organized set of Progressive Asterist churches. Imagine a cult that has built a belief around a set of Divines, as if they’re more important than the others!
   
   If you extend this style of thinking—focusing on how social relationships reflect both material circumstances (like distance and resourcing) and the point at which ideology becomes practice (how do subcultures organize themselves?) and you’ll be able to plop a game anywhere in Divinity.
   
2. Inside of the Principality, at this point in history, it’s rare to find undeveloped land or uncolonized civilizations. There may be pockets here or there, but there’s been 5,000 years of genocide, through military action and forced assimilation. None of the Stels are free from this behavior—even Apostolos, who expanded as an empire even before they joined the Divine Principality. This doesn’t mean you can’t tell a story about a civilization under threat—and we’ll even touch on this within time—only that there must be something truly remarkable happening if they’ve avoided it thus far.
   
3. In terms of proximity/rivalry, the most obvious places to put a game (besides PARTIZAN) where there would be overlap between factions: Nideo/Kesh, Nideo/Apostolos, Columnar/Orion, Columnar/Kesh. And of course, everyone + the Golden Branch. Which leads me to point 4.
   
4. I know there’s a lot of questions about the Branched, and my hope is to get to them in gameplay proper at some point, as they show up twice on the faction sheet. But barring that, the big things I’ve written for myself to remember about them:
   1. They’re a posthuman culture such that in my depictions of them in the forms they’d prefer to take, they’re not just striking but terrifying. I need to emphasize them as alien. The closest thing we’ve had like them, visually, is the Iconoclasts of Twilight Mirage. We can think they’re cool but we should describe them in ways that, if we were to see them directly in person, we would gasp. I don’t mean “they aren’t normatively beautiful.” I mean that they don’t emerge from or aspire to anything even the most oppositional and critical aesthetics of 2019 can’t imagine as beautiful. 
   2. Any time we show them in shapes that would please us is a tragedy. They coerce their own bodies so that they may do war well, or so that they may speak to humanoid life in a way that humanoids are comfortable with.
   3. They’re posthuman not transhuman. Generously: Transhumanism centers the needs and desires of a human subject, looking towards technologies to broaden the domain of the human across time and space. Transhumanism sees “the future” as “the future of humanity,” and though it is about opening up what “humanity” means, it fundamentally starts and ends at the human. Posthumanism is willing to discard the human entirely, emphasizing humanity as one gear in a massive, rattling machine of systems, pressures, and agents. Posthumanism doesn’t put the human above the weather or the rock, the star or the cargo container. A Branched, free from war with empire, might have more in common with a poem or power cable or a finch or a radio transmission than a chef, a soldier, or a senator.

Phew, okay. That’s more than I intended to write but so it goes. 

This has already been a huge update, and so I’m going to leave it on this. One more map. After all, while the one above is useful for fan games and for my own understanding of the galaxy writ large, frankly, it won’t matter much for the week-to-week play of this season. I said over on the Discord, months ago, that this really would be a game set in a single place, where the camera isn’t trying to follow a larger meta-plot, but is staying super focused on a set of characters and their actions on a single world. 

That world is, of course, wound up being the Blessed Moon of Partizan. And it looks like this. 

Yet again, Annie worked wonders on the rough copy I sent when I commissioned her:

So, proof again that Annie’s work is incredible. If you're thinking of commissioning her for anything, please know that she was fantastic to collaborate with and that her enthusiasm brought so much to these maps! Again, you can follow her at @dancynrew on Twitter. (Also, quick note: Please don't share these maps outside of the Patreon yet! They'll be in episode 00 of PARTIZAN, but for now, this is a sclusie just for those of you reading this!)

If I started listing what I loved about this map, I’d go on for another 4,000 words. So for now, please note that just about everything you see on this map has been discussed elsewhere in updates. As for the rare unexplained thing? Well, draw maps, but leave blank spaces.

For those curious, the "rough" map I sent Annie above was generated via the donjon Sci-Fi World Generator. Here were the attributes I used to find this pitch perfect map, which I played with for hours until I found something that felt right to the story we'd told.

Okay. With that I’m going to start wrapping up since I’ve gone on so long already, and since I don’t have too much more to add here besides general excitement. We’ve recorded episode 00, which will hit on the 19th, and two starting arcs after that, the first of which should start on the 26th or 27th. There, uh, obviously won’t be a holiday special this year, because we’ve poured all the work that would normally go into a Holiday Special into getting PARTIZAN off the ground.

My plan is to take a pause on these through the end of the year, and then to revisit them once the first arc of PARTIZAN has come out in the New Year. In the spirit of these worldbuilding updates, I’m going to continue to experiment with the format of these updates. So, starting in early January, I’m going to be going back to a stream format but with a whole new focus: GMing Post-Mortem. I’ll go over some of the prep I did ahead of the arc that will have already aired by then, talk about the things I had “on the table” that didn’t come up, take some questions from the chat if there are any, and then hopefully be able to turn that around into an audio post pretty quickly! 

It’s been really fun (though, honestly,  also really stressful!) showing y’all what that work looked like for the first time ever via these Drawing Maps updates. I hope they’ve been enjoyable for you, and I hope 2019 wraps up as smoothly as possible for everyone listening. Bye!

A transcription is available for this episode here.

 A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!