I had a brief but productive chat in the Discord about the fantasy economies in Barony. It's not the kind of setting where these things are particularly worked through or watertight, and it's not something I get specifically interested in in worldbuilding, but I do think it's worthwhile having some handwavey grounding for how things work.
The Barony has an artisanal culture, and things are mostly made by highly skilled individuals. There are organised associations and guilds in the capital, and Petty Kingdoms keep their own specialists as a matter of pride. A workshop can be highly organised and productive, but it will always be run by an individual master craftsperson, who will take apprentices, and who will significantly live by their reputation.
Complicating this, artists and entities working together are capable of making things that have no professional precedent, sui generis. This process is not usually geared towards useful, productive aims - there are no gunsmithing entities inventing cartridge ammunition or whatever - the useful products are downstream of whatever the entity was brought into being to describe, as explained in this post. Artists generally cannot explain how they do what they do to artisans, and most of the time these products only exist for as long as specific artist is around to build them. The example we were discussing was amplified and distorted music in the capital - a huge deal for local musicians and partyhead bravo gangs, and certainly culturally significant if you are interested in music and abstraction, but also understood to be an expression of a unique and non-reproducible sensibility. No one would think to try to make more of this thing after the artist died, although they might try to contact the surviving entity to get access to it if they were interested.
As a brief note on cultural distinction - Baronials exposed to noise music would understand it as different to music that had come before, exciting in its newness, possibly (depending on factors like whether they like it, like the people associated with it, etc.) representative of an important shift or evolution in what is possible for music. Those who live in the White City would understand harsh noise music (regardless of whether they have ever heard anything like it) as equivalent to other types of music, and would delight in being able to describe this equivalence - every point of distinction can be matched to and cancelled out by a point of continuity - how two things are alike and not alike, and the training/subtelty to articulate different positions along this spectrum. This is one of the reasons that Baronials feel provincial to Imperial Citizens.
The White City are not an industrial power, but they do manufacture at scale, and in standardised ways. They don't quite have factories, but they transform captured cities and towns into production centres dedicated to specific material goods: armour, razor wire, guns, drugs, propaganda, prison services, food production, etc. Thus you have wire town, gun city, prison town (probably prison town 22 lol), steel city, etc. They use quotas and randomised inspection to ensure production levels and quality of materials. Citizens aren't expected to be material producers (although there is no law against this, and many pursue 'normal' professions) - their role in the state is first: as cultural exemplars, and second: as soldiers, either in the citizen militias, or professionally in the army.
People in the White City do not produce entities like they do in the Barony (some vague sense that the empire itself is some vast, rapacious gestalt entity type thing, possibly produced in a Leviathan type way by the dreams and nightmares of the child emperor and his giant attendants), but they DO have an iterative, engineer's approach to cultural products - to follow the example given above, if harsh noise music is something invented in the Baronial Capital by an artist who starved themselves for a few weeks searching for visions, and is then enjoyed by like fifty people in something akin to a self-consciously avant garde and jealously secretive scene (and treated in that context as unique, a rupture, outside-of-relation with other cultural practices around it), in the White City it would immediately be incorporated into the image game, which means that everyone would have something to say about it (and that their opinion and position could change moment to moment, without anyone understanding this as a hypocrisy), and it would be placed in relation with everything else, and understood in a way that was more or less contingent on these relations. You can't have an image of genius, or a sacred image. Nothing, at a fundamental level, is separate (the act of trying to assert a separate-ness marks you as a provincial). The image game can metabolise anything, which insulates the Citizens - you can excite them, but you can't impress them, not from the outside.
If you come across one of the harsh noise Bravo gangs in the Baronial Capital, and their pet artist is doing her thing, you will find that none of them feel pain (-1 to all physical damage) or test morale while the music lasts.
 |
| The very great Merzbow, doing their thing. |
No comments:
Post a Comment