Miscellaneous: Eight Flower Kingdom (Spoilers)
Added 2024-04-24 12:00:11 +0000 UTCPotential spoilers below, you have been warned.
I have put in way too much effort designing the background for the Eight Flower Kingdom, and most of it is almost certainly not going to make the cut to be in the story.
My main reason for doing this was so that I had a solid platform to work from when developing the events that will unfold here. However, I don't want to just let this extra information gather dust in my brain. I figured I should go ahead and share it with you.
I used several different descriptions of the Bagua to try to develop a working system for this Kingdom, but here is one image that contains a lot of it.
Credit to: https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/Chinese_Customs/bagua.htm
This gives the associated colors, locations, and related ideas for each of the Bagua's elements. Matching the elements of the Bagua to what has been established for the Nine Rivers Continent was a whole different level of problem, though. My final decision, based on descriptions in other sources was:
Heaven - Metal
Water - Water
Mountain - Light
Thunder - Lightning
Wind - Wind
Fire - Fire
Earth - Earth
Marsh - Darkness
Center - Wood
Connecting heaven to metal seemed strange to me, I was planning to place light in that position, but most sources marked heaven as the 'big metal' element, so that's what I went with.
Attached is an excel file showing the order of Flower selections. I wanted to match this with the sexagenary cycle, but 8 doesn't divide into 60 very well. So, we have the 8 flowers, the queen, and a period of rest, making three cycles of 20 years within the greater 60-year cycle.
Comments
While you are right, this was a natural outcome of trying to match it with the sexagenary cycle. I didn't even plan or expect there to be pairing, it's just something that happened. If I wanted to break away from the cycle, I would do it completely differently, just have 9 sets of 10 year terms.
Greg Tolley
2024-04-24 16:18:42 +0000 UTCNope. That's just hope things fell. I was more annoyed than anything that the Bagua has two elements associated with 'wood,' but they are wind and thunder which already existed as independent elements in my world, so I didn't want to place the wood cultivator in those positions. Only place to put wood was in the middle.
Greg Tolley
2024-04-24 16:14:07 +0000 UTCNah, that was people using the water element. Ice isn't a separate one. The blessing was ice based, but ice isn't an element. Water cultivator was a blessing related to freezing.
Greg Tolley
2024-04-24 16:08:59 +0000 UTCLooking at this, it seems Mei was hinting that next time she should have Wind affinity for the Wind city of prosperity.
Arkeus
2024-04-24 14:58:03 +0000 UTCOk, checking the excel it works as you said with the 9/11 years, with how you are flipping years and elements. It is much complicated than the 6×10 cycle I was assuming.
skewness7
2024-04-24 14:29:12 +0000 UTCI hope you had fun setting this all up. It seems convoluted but also perfect for a cultivation based government. I have to ask did you set this up this way so Fang could become king? I don't think he would want to marry anyone for a while but if it's just about getting the karma maybe he would.
Aaron Johnson
2024-04-24 13:52:20 +0000 UTCCould I suggest a way to make the schedule somewhat more symmetric? Currently, the cities come in five pairs, with each pair assigned to a pair of years; for example, Fire and Wind are in years 4-5. Those cities get rulers every ten years; so in years 4-5, 14-15, etc. for Fire and Wind. And every ten years their order switches, in a sort of twirling dance; in years 4-5 it is Fire-Wind, but in years 14-15 it is Wind-Fire. Sadly, right now the pairs are: 0-1: Rest-Water 2-3: Center-Thunder 4-5: Fire-Wind 6-7: Earth-Mountain 8-9: Heaven-Swamp I'm not certain what the most natural way for the other cities to be paired up, but certainly Center and Rest should be the ones paired up, right? That would make it so that the queen is crowned right before a year of rest and the king right after one, and between rests every city gets a new ruler. This is in contrast with what happens now, where Water lands right before & after rest days, with two leader changes between Renewal-Contemplation and zero between Contemplation-Renewal.
PrimalShadow
2024-04-24 13:26:29 +0000 UTCEhhhh, I think that unless you intended for it to be extremely confusing, you need to rework the groom/flower explanation. Maybe making explicitly clear that the flower has two different roles, first as lord then as consort. Also taking into account only the periodic nature of the successions groom and flower should both rule 10 years. Unless the flower take the first year of the groom, the rest years are consecutive (years 10, 11) or some other reason
skewness7
2024-04-24 13:26:14 +0000 UTCYou actually dove into the swamp that is bagua, I don't know if I should respect or pity you now :). I don't know why the trigram of heaven/sky is associated with metal either but at least it makes more sense than also being associated with lake/march. At least metal is all about letting go of yin and associated with wealth and prosperity so it makes a bit of sense. My personal theory is they first tossed 3 coins for each of the 5 elements till they had non conflicting results and then divided up the 3 leftover ones in a drinking game. Once you are drunk everything makes sense and once sober you have to save face and defend what you did :)
Game Devil
2024-04-24 13:00:24 +0000 UTCThis all seems convoluted and confusing. As expected of a cultivator society. Nice !
Epeen
2024-04-24 12:35:33 +0000 UTCI would like to remind you that you have previously introduced Ice as an element. I am talking about that time where he was alive and watched when the Su clan was attacked. At that time the switching element dude (I cannot remember his name) was using frost/ice to kill him.
Ninetails
2024-04-24 12:27:00 +0000 UTC
