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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8780052" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I guess, after a fashion, I have answered this question? I didn't set out to do so, but an answer is there if people go looking.A bit over two millennia ago, the Genie-Rajahs ruled the Tarrakhuna, while the (now-absent) "El'Adrin" ruled the forests to the south, and the jungles to the north were inhabited by non-civic tribal cultures. The Genie-Rajahs kept most mortals in the Tarrakhuna under their thumb, often as slaves, and ruled through their prodigious magical might. Then, a bunch of stuff happened--it's complicated and the history is partially lost--but everyone agrees that the genies abandoned the world en masse for Jinnistan, their new country in the elemental otherworld. Mortals--humans, orcs, dwarves, etc.--took over the cities the genies abandoned, and also built a few of their own, though almost all modern cities are repurposed Genie-Rajah cities. (Kafer-Naum, the religious capital of the Safiqi priesthood, is one of the few moderately-large cities built purely by mortals, with no prior genie presence.)Around the same time as the genie exodus to Jinnistan, the El'Adrin civilization completely disappeared, leaving behind only a tiny remnant who (somehow) became the elves. The original El'Adrin were...different, somehow, and that difference depended on the nature of magic and the world as it existed at the time. Something--some major event--changed the world and altered magic so much, it would have meant the end of the El'Adrin and their society. So they figured out some way to project their entire civilization, wholesale, into a pocket dimension where they could wait until the world became compatible with their society again. Exactly why the world changed, and what needs to be done to fix it, remain unknown at this time. Their society was effectively a magocracy, but that wasn't really a big deal because all El'Adrin could practice magic, even small children could use at least basic magic, so "magocratic" and "democratic" blur together in this context. Every adult El'Adrin was at least a middling "wizard." (This last bit, the universality of magic in their culture, is technically not yet known to my players, but they'll learn it sooner or later; they've collected some legitimate El'Adrin remains recently due to Timey-Wimey Shenanigans.)Mortals who lived in the Tarrakhuna but not under the rule of the Genie-Rajahs were the Nomad Tribes, some of which still exist today (this is why the Nomads and the City-Folk are both considered "civilized"--they are one stock, just some of them chose to rule the abandoned cities while others chose to stay in the arid wilds.) Prior to the genie exodus, the Kahina, druids and shaman, were the primary magical force because genie magic cannot be directly taught (it's innate...sort of) and no genie wanted powerful archmage mortal servants anyway for fear they could become a threat. So the Kahina were the only real magical power bloc, and they were bound by ancient traditions and the desires of the spirit world, which does not like being used and abused and will fight back.A century or two after the genie exodus, the Safiqi priesthood sprang up, and slowly took over as the dominant religious system, providing a second religious mitigating force against uber-powerful arcane casters. However, the Safiqi have their own share of issues, and are vigilant against those who would try to exploit priestly power for personal gain in contravention of their doctrine, ascribed to the One, the Great Architect, the creator of all things. As a result, they have an internal police force which goes through special training and rituals to ensure their loyalty, which is given rather plenary power to hunt down heretics (which means people who were part of the faith but have twisted it to evil, not "nonbelievers" like most people think...) and other abusive/dangerous forces. This provides a further layer of protection against autocratic mages trying to conquer everything.Further, proper, actual arcane magic was only very, very slowly developed, over the course of roughly five hundred years (putting its full proper start about 1300 years before present) because experimenting with it is REALLY DANGEROUS. We're talking "if you randomly experiment with making spells, you may not just blow yourself up, you may blow up your whole house or, in extreme cases, your entire city block." This has made the Waziri mage order--essentially the Tarrakhuna wizarding equivalent of the American Medical Association--extremely conservative about how they develop their arts, and extremely secretive, jealously and zealously guarding their work until it can be published in an official capacity. So, more or less, they get an extreme level of deep and abiding caution beaten into them by their training, because the incautious people tend to blow themselves up, and on top of that the natural patterns of academia and "publish or perish" culture push them toward certain behavioral patterns which undercut their ability to simply amass vast amounts of magical knowledge single-handedly.Finally...the reigning monarchs of the various city-states aren't stupid. They wouldn't just sit around idly while upstart Waziri mages begin consolidating incredible power. Waziri are often considered very suspect if they start having major political aspirations, but oftentimes that simply results in some kind of arranged marriage with a secondary or tertiary child of some other city-state's monarch, preferably in Jinnistan where they can be even further removed from the mortal world. So you have both military control and political acumen existing in the hands of non-mages, and vested interest in keeping it there from both the nobility/aristocracy and the merchant/middle class. Outright mind control magic, as well as all forms of necromancy except proper resurrection of dead individuals, is expressly forbidden (for the same reason slavery is--slavery was something the genies did to mortals, it's a horrific crime to do it and has been for as long as mortals have ruled the Tarrakhuna.) Since it is generally pretty easy for Kahina or Safiqi to detect when someone is under true mind control, that avenue of gaining power very quickly is pretty well snuffed out, and most of the other conventional ones require rallying a large number of skeptical fellow-wizards against entrenched power structures that emphatically do not want to become dis-entrenched.Thus, we end up with the mostly-stable entente we have in the present day. The Safiqi have hardliners who would like to forbid all non-Safiqi magic, but the allure of Waziri-made items (which Safiqi can't replace) and the need for Kahina anti-spirit magic (Safiqi can banish spiritual entities that don't belong in our world, but cannot permanently deal with the spirits of the unquiet dead, as they are native; only Kahina can soothe them properly) means the hardline Safiqi never stay in power for even a full generation. The Waziri absolutely have hella ambitious folks in their ranks, and one faction thereof recently failed at a coup attempt, but a lot of them really are just bookish academics who wouldn't know what to do with proper political power and sure as hell don't want it because it would mess up their research schedule. Some traditionalist Kahina pine for the days when they were the top dogs, revered and feared by anyone not oppressed by the Genie-Rajahs, but the majority of Kahina are content to just go with the flow, adapting to the world that is and fulfilling the needs of the day.And of course the Genie-Rajahs have become the modern Jinnistani, just as political and backstabbing as they always were. It's in their interest to keep the mortal world stable and wealthy (who else would buy their fantastically expensive products?) but not too powerful magically. So they interfere when it suits them to keep things from getting "out of hand," in other words, to keep things from no longer favoring their position anymore. Though whether that's stable is a matter of fierce debate....</blockquote>

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