Under Sleeping Suns: The Late, Great, Rajual DaCarda

I was going to write a protracted essay on the evils of the Racial Monoculture in Fantasy RPG's, and how desperately I've rallied against that in Under Sleeping Suns and The Wild Frontier, but I decided instead to write about perhaps the single most influential historical figure in Under Sleeping Suns who wasn't an Eternal King, empowered with power stolen from the Gods Of The Kever upon their deaths so long ago. So, instead of an essay that would have spent a long while preaching about how Monocultures as the default standards for Non-Human races might be easy, it's certainly not realistic, you get a character piece about a man who helped define an era - and who may even have left some fairly dire warnings in the works of his last twenty years of life.

When developing Under Sleeping Suns, the foremost thing I wanted to focus on was the sense of discovery, enlightenment, and overall "we're coming out of a really horrific and bad time and into one of hope, optimism, and change" that essentially gripped the entirety of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa during the Renaissance. Sure, it wasn't all bells and whistles and golden coins for the masses – The Catholic Church got some of its most devastatingly wretched practices during this time, and there was certainly no shortage of racism, cruelty, inequality, and the other evils of society – but here's the thing: Life was (generally) getting better for everyone. For the first time in a long time, the common person might have time for that most unheard of all things: Leisure. Which lead to another nearly unheard of quality for the common folk: Learning.

When you combine those two things, you end up with a lot of people knowing a little about a lot of things. You end up with people learning for the love of it, going out of their way to start gathering knowledge, so that they might better themselves and have a chance at making a better life for their family. During the Renaissance on our own Earth, the literacy rate skyrocketed. It was still nowhere near the saturation we have today, mind you, but with the development of the printing press, books were suddenly cheap to produce and the demand skyrocketed – both for the ability to obtain them and the ability to read them. Now you had music, now you had poetry, now you had fictions and histories and everything associated with them.

To bring this sort of thing about in the game world, then, I needed a lynchpin figure. Someone who could look around him and gather all of these various things together into one great whole about him and say "Hey, folks, look what we're doing here. It's this pretty great?"

Enter the figure of Rajual DaCarda.

Son of a fairly wealthy family, young Rajual was not content to live the life of an idly rich merchant prince, and set out to better himself in any way he could. He studied the sword from any schola that would take his money (and there were more than a few of those). While doing this, he studied the arts of sculpture and painting with multiple masters, learning the arts of form and motion. He challenged the Guild System to become an established and respected engineer, and wrote a body of literature that to this day has yet to be matched in volume and depth by any of those seeking to rise to or surpass his level. And this was before he turned 30.

At age 40, writing in his treatise "On The Rebirth Of The Livelihood Of The Mind," DaCarda coined the term "Re-Nascent Life" - The Rebirthed Life, or Renaissance - as the state of enlightenment and learning that was taking hold of his beloved Cualish Free States and their allied nations of Angarn and Cymrik (DaCarda frequently spoke of the people of Vetris in the north, but usually only in such terms as "Uncouth," "Bare-chested oafs," and "Do know how to drink"). He pointed to the marvels of engineering, literature, and art that had been birthed from the minds of men and women who, prior to this particular era of history, would have gone undiscovered due to their creators having had no such opportunities. He espoused the education of every male and female child of every family, regardless of their level of social strata, as the only way to ensure that this boom in creativity continued unabated. Although the Church Of The Nine already gave schooling to all children four days a week for six months in the year, DaCarda campaigned (unsuccessfully) to have the school week expanded to five out of six days a week, year-round, with exceptions only for holidays and deaths in the family. He would go to his grave insisting that he was right about this, but would accept that some battles could not be won by even the greatest of men.

DaCarda established multiple schools of art and literature, and was an accomplished playwright and poet. He was known as a patron of inventors and musicians, frequently inviting dozens of each into his various villas and cottages so that they might have places to live while pursuing their master works. He frequently funded orphanages for entire years at a time, and would pick one a month to visit, where he would stay the length of the month, teaching the children on days they were not learning at the Temple Of The Nine.

DaCarda is responsible for the phrase "A Man should not be only one Man, he should be as many Men as he can hold in his heart." To DaCarda and his disciples, this was a mantra of a personal plurality - a dedication to the concept of continuing one's pursuit of knowledge and learning throughout life, ceasing only upon death. A devout follower of The Nine, DaCarda believed that when he rode the River Of Fate down to the throne of Shakur, The Restbringer, God of Death and Justice, that he would go before that final arbiter with a heart as full of life as he could muster. He would show the Righteous Judge that his heart was bursting with life, and that he had earned his rest and his peace. To DaCarda, the ultimate sin was that of ignorance. "We worship Gods," he wrote. "That are lead by Wisdom, tempered by Arts, guided by Medicine, and forged in Strength. They are kept sane by Mirth, and kept whole by Love. They know Justice and they know the face of the World. If we are to stand before them as spirits, we should show them we've taken their lessons to heart. We should at least have died trying."

For all of his devotion and piety, however, DaCarda saw that certain traditions and social norms were in fact holding he and his contemporaries back in the realm of learning and discovery. For a full ten years of his life, DaCarda campaigned against the Church Of The Nine, seeking to overturn the laws and prohibitions against the study and dissection of the dead. A practice long held to be sacrilegious and bordering on a form of spiritual evil, DaCarda pointed out that the prohibition had been enacted due to the remembrance of the practices of certain of the Eternal Kings - the Books Of The Nine professed quite clearly that upon death, the body was but an empty shell. Nowhere within the Book Of Shakur, nor any of the other Books, was it stated that the spirit remained within the flesh. Unafraid to face imprisonment or excommunication, DaCarda's campaign was ultimately successful, and opened up an enormous avenue of learning for physicians and even the order of the Woundhealers, themselves. His original manuscript on the function of the various muscles, bones, and tendons of the body quickly became required for all healers seeking to serve in the Allied Armies against the Kolanthans in the Great War.

For all of these qualities, DaCarda was not without his flaws. A sad factor to his makeup was that for the bulk of his life, the man so beloved by many was an avowed Human Supremacist. DaCarda's philosophy ran toward the bigoted, and walked well over that line in many cases - going so far as to suggest that it was in the nature of the Haran and Ulehu, those two companion races to that of Man, to be naturally lazy, indolent, and prone to larceny. The reason their lot in society had never progressed past the squalor and poverty of the "Small Quarters" of the cities and outlying communities, he professed, was because it was merely who they were - they could no more change their basal natures than a single man could change the coastline of a nation. To DaCarda, for the bulk of his life, he saw them as an addendum to society, an afterthought of creation - their small stature belied their small spirits. And though he wished them no ill will per se, to DaCarda they were little more than highly advanced animals, living on the shirttails and castings-off of Humanity's greatness. Patronizing at best and offensive at worst, DaCarda penned a series of books on the Supremacy Of Man in which he outlined the natural and rightful primacy of Man upon Loris, stopping well short of the cries for purging and cleansing the non-Humans from the face of the world, such as found in the bloodthirsty rhetoric of the Kolanthans and their Inquisition.

It would be in the last forty or so years of his life, during what is called his Reflection Period, that DaCarda would recant this entire philosophy, and viciously attack any of his disciples who still espoused it. Penning a series of essays on the subject, DaCarda denounced himself and his own mind during that era of his existence, calling himself "a man who saw through untrue eyes," and "a puppet to the machinations of an older, darker world." Spending a large portion of his personal fortune, DaCarda negotiated with collectors, printers, and personal owners of his earlier works, and bought back every copy of those works he could, and had them destroyed. His newer essays, in which he attacked and dismantled every point of his earlier works, became masterwork examples of logical debate and deconstructive argument practices - used even today, a hundred years after his death - in the halls of higher learning.

The poems, fictions, and plays of the latter half of DaCarda's Reflection Period adhere to this, as well. His final series of plays, an eight-piece work that track a singular antagonist known simply as "The Villain," take the audience from dramatic reenactments of The Sunfall, the cataclysm that brought about the end of the Kever Age, to the final undoing of Elari Rex, The King Of Books, an event that would presage The Rain Of Glass and with it the ultimate destruction of Harak-Ur. The Villain, who is never called by name within any of the plays, but who is known in each of them as "Vorasi," an old Kever word for "Starving," treads softly and carefully through each of the plays. His presence goes unnoticed in each of the eight works, save by the pure - be they pure in innocence or pure in corruption - whereupon he turns them to his own ends, leaving them alive and distraught with the knowledge that they must live to tell the tale of The Villain to the next victims in the next play. Ultimately, in the final of the eight plays ("The Dark"), The Villain Vorasi is revealed to be the secret editor and censor of the very books that make up the entirety of the Great Library Of Kings. He is revealed to be affecting the life and perceptions of the daughter of the Head Librarian, as well as being clearly in league with the Shadow of the King Of Books. Manipulating not only the Shadow, but also the Head Librarian and The King Of Books himself, The Villain is shown to be the architect of the evil that has spread throughout each of The Eternal Kings, and is responsible for the devastation of not only Harak-Ur, but that of Kever ages past.

These last works of DaCarda are, to this day, the source of great debate. Never before in any of his plays or fictions had he recycled a character so eagerly, and never before had he bothered with such consistent and persistent themes in his work. A champion of diversity, to see such a constant theme throughout a long series of plays strikes most who study DaCarda as unusual, to say the least. "The Dark," especially, is the source of much debate, as The Villain states clearly that all of his works will need to be repeated in the coming age, and that he will travel hidden with Man and the Small Cousins out of this Land of Kings, out into the Safe Havens, and there - like a spider - he will lay his web once more. His final actions are to call the "writer" of the play out onto the stage, whereupon the two spit upon one another, draw their swords, and begin to grapple as the curtain falls. To many, this shows that DaCarda was grappling with his own guilt over the diatribes and disservice he had done to the Haran and Ulehu for most of his life. To others, it is a metaphor for the very act of writing such historically influenced plays in the first place - the writer must wrestle with the history and truth of the thing in such a way as to make it entertaining, and not merely yet another lesson in history. Still others hold that DaCarda was leaving a clear message about the nature of Humanity and its inherent spiritual battle between good and evil. Whatever his intention, the world may never know.

On his death, DaCarda left behind a legacy of over two dozen children (legitimate... mostly...), none of whom would ever go on to inherit his lands or his fortune. Upon his death, the entirety of his property was given over to the City State of Carth, where he had been born and made his home for the entirety of his hundred and twenty-eight years of life. DaCarda's incredible longevity (he made it over twice the lifespan of most men of his time, and was known for the robustness of his form well into his seventies) has been the source of much debate - there are those who think he was a Black Blood, descended from the Line Of Kings, while others believe that he must have used some manner of alchemical concoction or magic to lengthen his life. His diaries give no indication of either of these courses, however, giving the indication of a man who thanked The Nine every day for his incredible lifespan. Following his death, the monetary portion of his fortune was doled out evenly among the Haran and Ulehu citizens of Carth, with stipulations that half of each purse was to be used to build up their homes and boroughs "to a standard of pride." Interestingly, DaCarda left some two-dozen manuscripts unfinished, each written in its own particular cypher, of which only one key has ever been found. When it was translated, the book was discovered to be a transcription and translation of the latter history of Kever, or at least DaCarda's imagined version of such a history. If it is a factual transcription, the work that DaCarda was using as his source material has never been found.

Rajual DaCarda, born in AY 10, died in AY 138. Fathered twenty-nine children, grandfather to many more. Engineer, artist, poet, swordsman, and renowned speaker. Found justice and equality in his heart before his death, and, ultimately, the driving force behind the continued push toward learning and enlightenment among the people of the known world.