Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

I feel like this is pretty good exposition for a closing chapter.

From “Six Essential Techniques for the Indispensable Tutor” by Professor Ara Dalaasia

History lends a veneer of inevitability to the past. Education is a large part of this, as we are taught in a context of getting answers correct, memorizing key facts that mattered about the outcome, and naming influential figures. As I prepare young minds for politics, I present history across two sides; what could have happened, and what did, in the end, occur. I feel it is critical for the minds that will shape our future to understand that the swirling mass of successes and failures upon which decisive events rest could have produced other outcomes that would seem equally unavoidable. I teach them to distrust certainty, interrogate inevitability, and consider alternatives. Only then can the news of the day connect with interpretation of the past—only through the diaphanous veil of ‘what could have been.’

From “Disambiguating Scholarly Speculation in Akorosian Linguistics” by Professor Lativan Smek

Look, if you don’t have an academic theory to push or an image as a proper grown-up expert to defend, it is perfectly reasonable to accept the common understanding of how Doskvol got its name. The Skov kingdom built the mine and called it “The Skov’s Coal” and that translates to “Doskovol.” The extra “o” in the middle was dropped along the way to common usage.

Pinning down the origin of the nickname “Duskwall” is even simpler, as it stems from a single point of misunderstanding compounded by lack of correction. In the 380s, the Dagger Isles were expanding their trade routes in lock step with their improved shipping hulls and rigging schemes. Under the Sail Sultan, Lord Masaath, a daring cartographer named Sirinaav Kraylatha was given a golden statue with the dimensions and likeness of each of his family members in exchange for an authoritative map of the Void Sea and its interruptions. His occult charting techniques were fiercely accurate, in contrast to his grasp of Akorosian. He wanted the Dagger Isles charts to be unique, so he bypassed the Akorosian name for the port (North Hook) and penned in “Duskwall.”

People normalizing that nickname are signaling that they were influenced by the criminal underclasses. The nickname only got purchase among those who dealt extensively with Dagger Isles nautical types, and the main reason to do that was the smuggling of luxury items.

From “Deadly Doctrines: a Chronical of Duels” by Fr. Danrhysi Solcunias

The Church of the Ecstasy of the Blood has a problem when it comes to vampires.

Ideally the world is divided up into “physical” and “energy” and we exalt the physical and condemn the energy. An initial lazy repudiation of that theological structure points out how ideas, relationships, experiences, meaning, and sensation are not tangible yet are foundational to human experience—the Habitation Anchor Precept counters this by insisting that none of that exists independent of physical presence, either in a body’s mind and blood, or in a physical book. They are anchored, they live within a physical presence, and therefore they are acceptable.

Using analogy to sow doubt and confusion is a trivial pastime that scholars and aristocrats elevated to an art form—art fueled by constraint. They maneuver within the laws of poetry to craft sonnets, or build around limitations of pigments, perception, and canvas to paint.

Are vampires excused in the Church theological structure because they are ghosts who have an artificial Habitation Anchor? How is vampiric essence less anchored than ideas, captured in a record of ink and language, committed to the flesh of a blank-slate book that had no meaning before it was connected there? If an idea is written on a chalkboard that has hosted many ideas but been erased, is that idea now suspect because its habitation is temporary, even if the same idea is written in a book? As with ideas and writing, so too with possessing ghosts, and the peak of the form in ghosts melded with a body permanently.

Theological purity was never going to win out over aristocratic enlightened self-interest. The Felswift Report was produced by the Doctrine Committee almost three hundred years ago after a long and contentious process of theological examination (Church records note over 1,200 duel challenges inspired by related doctrinal points over half a decade, with 146 recorded deaths resulting.) In the end, reinterpretation of the Habitation Anchor Precept was codified to allow dynastic hives of ancestral ghosts (properly regulated, of course) as well as allowance of vampires if they could demonstrate that their spirit and their vessel were both faithful to the Church in their respective lives.

Thus you have the open secret of Lord Scurlock’s vampirism excused by the church. An entire tier of blackmail against the wealthy harboring the dead evaporated from sin to distasteful choice. Because of the apparent shallowness of philosophical engagement with the problem, and the transparency of a solution favoring the wealthy and powerful, the Felswift Report is frequently the door through which believers move from viewing Church thought from the inside to examining it from the outside—not as the faithful looking to improve, but instead as the cynic cataloging the wealthy’s self-service.