The Crawling Empires

Empire is not a place. It's an idea. There is a core, it is bound by a philosophy. It uses wealth and force to extract resources to sustain itself and grow. that growth is used to obtain more colonies, extract more resources, and so forth.

Is that not a man?

Men are not sessile.

They move.

Thus, so do empires.

There are scholars who say in the ancient days before the fall from grace and the end of rational history, they were just a kind of realm, like a kingdom or a republic or a city-state or what have you. Indeed, they point to certain places on the map and say this clearly is an empire. The common folk sneer at this. If it's an empire, why doesn't it move? Might someday, but it doesn't now, so it's not.

If the Gospels are immortal living ideas untouched by Primeval Sin, the Empires are ideas obsessed with them. They devour lesser realms, they devour each other, they devour their subjects. Only the core grows, only the core matters. Their lives measure in centuries, even millennia. There are legendary ones among them. And yes, they move. They are a collection of language, law, and legacy. They abandon territories and their armies find new ones. Their core migrates from one center to the next as the gravity of its borders change. Land means nothing, only blood matters, only power matters.

It is said that something like true Titans can be found among some of them, reborn. No more than a handful each at best, more often but a single one, and nothing compared to the old Titans, the ones that Heaven struck down. But something more than a demititan. Something on the cusp of becoming. But whatever they might become, none have reached it. Others may be ruled by stranger things, like inhuman daimons, or queer and potent members of the Living Dead, or immense golem-calculators, or another inhuman regent even more difficult to imagine (though they may not be directly associated with Primeval Sin, they no doubt converge on some similar consumptive fixation). Normal humans cannot manage something so bafflingly complex as a Crawling Empire, that much is sure.

It may take centuries, decades, or just years for a Crawling Empire to arrive somewhere or to leave it. Their soldiers come, the locals are worked, and then the move on. Not in a literal sense, but their forts are abandoned, their elites migrate, the people more Empire than local leave with them. What is left is the fallout, ruins, mistakes, broken lives... and abandoned wealth, stores of arms, and Gnostic secrets.

Most of the Still Realms (used to distinguish a normal polity from these living ones) lie in the margins, between them. Together, they and their neighbors can rarely resist one of the Crawling Empires if it truly wants to go through them, but they can put up enough of a front to divert its course. Like a river, they take the path of least resistance. Sometimes this is a brave, unified defense. Sometimes it involves devastating a rival so it goes after them and not your lands.

And like any apex predator, they are surrounded by vultures. Brigands and mercenaries looking to profit off the scraps, sorcerers selling their services to the richest clients in the Known World, and genuine monsters that know where there is Empire, there is war, and where there is war, there are corpses. 

Make no mistake, they can be killed. The logistical complexity of their glacial movements is something that can be targeted. Lines of supply can be severed, the migration process interrupted. Some Still Realms have dealt enough such damage that an Empire simply... fell apart. It no longer had the bureaucrats, the money, the institutional knowledge, to retain itself. And like a beached whale, it was picked apart by scavengers. This is a perilous venture, but a far easier one than facing an Empire's armies in the field. 

But, you may ask, why do the Empires crawl at all? What bid them to move? Why can they not stay?

Remember? The old order ended when those unworthy of Heaven sought to reach it. The earth shudders and groans. Time compresses like a spring. Space distorts. A great and terrible monster or an inhuman host swarm from the Dark Continents, or the Outer Black, or some place outside the Known World. Not all the time, not every day, certainly not everywhere. But enough. No one place stays the same forever. A single twist of fate can alter a landscape politically, physically, spiritually. Past a certain scale, one cannot remain still without a tragedy falling upon them. You are like a tarp spread taut and thin beneath a storm of knives. Stay under the clouds and you shall be cut apart to lesser tapestries. When land becomes bad, it must be abandoned. When a war becomes too costly, it must be conceded. And when prey is discovered, it must be consumed.

So realms grow.

They suffer.

They break.

Or they crawl.

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For a long-term Hexcrawl (heh) I see a Crawling Empire as a region-reshaping event. You can be sure any large NPC factions will be keeping an eye on it if not actually dealing with it. You could start a campaign during a Crawling Empire's arrival, it's occupation, or departure, or even its collapse, and get plenty of drama. It might try to take the whole map, or just a chunk, a tendril of its main mass snipping off a choice morsel. Their weaknesses are their logistical complexity and their low defensive morale. Their system is a very complicated machine with a lot of moving parts. They rely on their masses of plundered wealth to make it work, and to insulate it from harm. But if you burrow in and strike a blow,  it can be devastation. You can cut off a tentacle, clip its spine. And morale is low because at the end of the day, its armies know what this is about. So long as the core is safe, losing out on a single front usually isn't that bad. They can pick another target or take another direction entirely. Their rulers tend to be as pragmatic as they are deranged, focused more on the safeguarding and perpetuation of their society/memeplex than they do about spreading it across the world. Thus, unlike a normal empire, their arrival is not necessarily a permanent change. They come, they plunder, perhaps for months or years or decades, and then they can just leave. Like how worms churn the earth to aerate the soil, the Empire shall leave a disturbed ruin in its wake, one ripe for plundering by venturesome folk.

You may have also noticed, but I'm also playing around with some pretty big timescales here. Rest assured I know how crazy millennia are to casually drop as a nation's lifespan. But I am playing with the idea of fantasy stasis.  What would it really be like to live in a world of no general progress forward technologically? Everything festers, groans under its own weight, has layers upon layers, develops in complexity in one way as it languishes in another. Cycles repeat, metastability forms, things get weird. You also may have noticed, there are ways to become quite long-lived yourself. This plays into other general themes I'm working on here. I guess an inspiration is actually the manga Blame!, and an idea seeded into my head is "what if Killy was, like, a knight, and the silicon life and such were also some kind of knights, and spending hundreds of years wandering a desolate incomprehensible hostile landscape was just something knights could do?"

So yeah, I will be going further into this.