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Thread: Weldon Chen's The Rise of Teyr

  1. #1
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    Default Weldon Chen's The Rise of Teyr

    Weldon had talked about a future version of Krynn where Teyr was powerful.

    I think this is a legitimate future based off the birth rates for Draconians and their low food consumption needs.

    I am curious about how Weldon had Teyr grow.

    Weldon, would you mind sharing your vision of Teyr and its rise to power?

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by ITA_CRX View Post
    Weldon had talked about a future version of Krynn where Teyr was powerful.

    I think this is a legitimate future based off the birth rates for Draconians and their low food consumption needs.

    I am curious about how Weldon had Teyr grow.

    Weldon, would you mind sharing your vision of Teyr and its rise to power?
    Sure. Basically, I went with what I felt were pragmatic choices needed for pure long-term survival. In that extent, the strong foundations of short-term survival would lead to a stronger nation. As I'm pro-draconian, what I say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. I'm sure others can spin my vision into a dark and despotic trampling of local peoples. So just in case my reply is TL;DR, I'll make my first paragraph a nice brief summary. So Teyr had several phases. First phase was installing Teyr as a nation by first securing the land with scouts, contacting local farmers offering protection, and developing a learning/education/spy program. Second Phase involved increasing trade, extending "scouts" as traders and spies. Traders therein would act toward making peace with neighboring nations, while learning key technologies. Phase three with the arrival of the dragon overlords, Teyr switched gears to make more inroads with overlords by offering draconians who are still the same "scouts." Information trading became the key goal. Overlords, through draconians were able to spy on one another while Teyr acts as messenger. Secretly, Teyr is offering information with other groups like the Legionaires, Solamnia, Nordmaar. With the threat of the overlords and the One God eliminaed, Teyr's goal remains the production of more technology to create a better national security, ultimately culminating in flying citadels. With flying citadels, Teyr has a mobile army, the ultimate scouting/spy/offense/defense platform.

    How did is come to all that? I simply placed myself in Kang's feet. So, in the early Fifth Age, Kang's new nation of Teyr needed to protect itself. On many sides, we had many people who still remember draconians being warriors for the Dark Queen. On the other side, we had Knights of Neraka, who feared the draconians and attempted to exterminate them at Myranta's fort. Kang and crew are surrounded by all sorts of enemies. In other words without some form of help or allies, Kang's group of draconians will not survive. The city of Teyr will provide some immediate shelter, but only for the city, not the land around it. A siege would ultimately starve everyone. First order of business would be to assigning military scouts to alert central command of any threats. Any potential alliances would be explored. I would say Kang's experiences with the dwarven village in Doom Brigade would be a good precedent of Teyr avoiding massacres. Destruction of local villages would being "do-gooders" from solamnia and other places. So peace must be made with locals, and that peace includes letting cooperative villages communicate. The only real services that Kang can give at this point protection, honest protection, of locals to gain their trust. And working for the farmers in exchange for food.

    In my opinion the first roads to building a real nation is with local farmers. They need protection from bandits and raiders as they farm and trade. So, survival means protecting farmers while fostering trade, with the hopes that mutual trust (or threat of mutual self-destruction) is preserved. That lead me to the idea that the draconians will be interested in trade. It's a good strategy in that traders are the early warning system for enemies, export of products, an excuse for armed escorts/"protectors." Farmers also helps take care of food problems. Until draconians learn to produce food, they will need to rely on local farmers to feed their incoming numbers. That lays in the second objective: learn to farm, and harvest responsibly so that Teyr can be sustained long-term. I'd like to think that draconians would plan for the worst. Kang would work hard to keep the draconians' baser instincts from killing people, probably with constant reminders that "do-gooders" can come with any excuse to exterminate the lot of them.

    And reliance on farmers, while safe on short-term, could be disastrous, if the food became poisoned. The best long term solution is learn how to produce food. Either get food imported (via the traders I previously mentioned) or learn to start growing crops and the meat that eats the crops. Kang and crew are engineers. So it seems to be a natural extension that the nation would take on the premise that all draconians either need to keep busy defending the nation, or learn skills and technology to help the nation. That was the fundamental idea of kang's education/spy programs. First, have spies (alongside the traders) learn how to effectively grow crops. Learn from the local farmers and then from other nations. Expanding on that idea, learning trade skills, such as smithy work (plows and arms) work toward the protection of the nation. Bring back those skills to serve the country.

    This would help protect the nation for the first five years, until the dragon overlords arrived. When SAGA first came out, and we learned that Dragon Overlords had taken over large swaths of land including Qualinesti, Solamnia, Kendermore, I was stunned. And in SAGA there was a lot of instances where the overlords had wild numbers of draconians under territory. While the SAGA design team left Teyr's situation rather vague, I thought that Kang would help survivors of those conquered nations. Personally, I think Kang, or at least Thesik and Fonrar would steer Kang toward alliances with humans. And that's because we have people like Hazzud showing the females that the other races can be allies. Also, at the heart of it, I think, to really be considered a race rather than monsters, you need to make other races treat you as equals. It seems the best way to fit SAGA and Draconian Measure, was to expand the trader/spy network. So information gathering turned into information brokering. I can see Teyr spying on overlords, using those same scouts/infiltrators to warn Teyr of threats from the overlords. At the same time, Teyr can aid neighboring non-draconian allies with intel on the overlords. That would also explain large numbers. Many are evil draconians. Some are sophisticated spies for Teyr.

    Interestingly, SAGA's premise was that all lands had some sort of protector dragon or dragon overlords. We had the big five. But in free lands like Sancrist, Schallsea, and Sanction, we had Silver dragons, Mirror, and Hogan Bight protecting their own little domains. So, I thought back on a dragon in the DL series that bothered me. The Silver Dragon Arscansia (sp?) captured 80 sivaks trying to turn them back into dragons. The adventure ended with her magical experiment failing. She killed those sivaks with dragonfire while in their cages, and then kills herself. I felt that was a serious WTF for every sizak, every draconian. But, I liked the idea that there's an insane dragon who wants the change her "children" back. So, despite that fact that she killed herself, I gave her a comic book death. She lives. She protects Teyr, without Teyr knowing it. And her purpose is to gather more dracos to complete her next experiment.

    So, after the War of Souls, we see Kang and company turn on Nerakans, freeing Sanction. (My hunch on Kang, Fonrar and Thesik was right).

    That's all I have time to type for now.
    Fanwank
    Formerly from Wikipedia, circa 2006-7,
    A fanwank is [...] an attempt by fans of a work of fiction to explain or justify plot holes or continuity errors, often through convoluted contrivances...

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