Amulta

Amulta lies west, past Yovincia and short of Escaria: a small country, rich in magic, and some thirty-five years into a war with Peredhel that neither side has been able to finish. It was never a large nation. Close to a fifth of what it held has gone since the fighting began, and Amultans count that the lesser of the two losses. The greater one is people. That a country should value its own citizens above its own ground is not lip service there, and it is the first thing its neighbors notice about it.

The Amultese stand out on the continent for how well they are schooled. Stringent education laws bind the young of the whole nation, and even rural communities turn out people who can do arithmetic, argue philosophy, hold a language and recite a history. That once drew immigrants for the quality of the life alone. The war dimmed it. The courts of Amulta are still the standard other courts are measured against, and a manner learned there passes anywhere.

Magic in Amulta is inborn and carried in the blood, less a study than a limb a person cannot see. Children are tested for it in their schooling years, the well-off earliest, and a child found to have it does not go on to have an ordinary life. Amultese magic is not sorted into the schools the Arcane Congress teaches; it groups its arts its own way, and it shares enough ground with Mól working that Amultese scholars still sit exams in Taal.

Structure

The capital is Heplon. Gwenivere Velmont was born at Orvhilm. Nobody who reached Idir has described either, or anywhere else in the country. What travels out of Amulta is its people, its goods and its war.

It has not always been a country. Amulta was part of Galderia once and parted from it peacefully, in a secession the Korovsk house led, as Yovance did. Galderian histories put the parting well over a hundred years ago and hold that Amulta took most of Galderia’s magic out with it. House Junta counts nearly two centuries of its own rule over a country it says it has held since the founding. The two counts have never been squared.

Amultans bury their dead under stone cairns with the effects that mattered to them, for their passage, the stone lettered with a formal monogram naming who lies there. It is a custom they share with Galderia and Yovance, and like both of them they keep no engagement-ring custom at all. What they export besides wine and cheese is literature, and a good deal of the literature is romance novels about the ice wall, some written by Amultans and some by Escarians writing about it from outside.

Government

The crown sits with House Junta and has since the founding. Queen Lucilia Sofia Junta rules, with a reputation for kindness and for holding to the principles the nation names for itself, which has set her against houses lately more interested in their own preservation than in any national obligation. Her husband is Gaius Cassius Junta. Beside her always is her advisor Octavius Devault, called Uncle long before he became one by marriage.

By tradition the monarch of Amulta must be a person of little or no magical capability. In a country where a child’s magic decides that child’s whole life, the one seat nobody is born able to hold is the crown, and that is meant to let all of Amulta’s people feel represented in it. Amultans abroad speak of a princess who has since become queen.

Power Structure

Eight noble families govern beneath the crown, each with its portfolio:

• Arcium: discovered Amulese magic and spread it. High Lady Laney Arcium oversees magic for the nation.
• Bombo: the military, under High Lord Garrett Bombo.
• Bryntel: the national imports and exports, under High Lord Tedric Bryntel.
• Izhech: banks and finance, under High Lady Elyse Izhech.
• Junta: the royal house.
• Katar: craftsmen turned siege-engine makers, under High Lord Ishmael Katar.
• Korovsk: led the peaceful secession from Galderia, under High Lady Nadia Korovsk.
• Orvhil: knowledge and education, devout of Winifred Orenda, under High Lord Rowan Orvhil.

The military divides into branches, of which three are counted major: the Gish, warriors trained to fight with magic in hand; the Mistral, the mages; and the Preclarum, who gather intelligence. Beneath those sit the engineers, the offensive and defensive armies, the navy, and the Venator, who hunt magical beasts and mages. Gwenivere Velmont trained to the same ice magics as the rest of the Mistral.

Not everything with a hand on Amulta is Amultan. The Jewels of Erôth sit there geographically and answer to no nation at all, and are reputed to raise orphans into companions, diplomats and spies.

Laws

Slavery is outlawed without qualification, and Amulta will not associate or trade with a nation that practices it however that nation dresses it up. Its citizens grew wary enough of the alliance with Yovance on that account that Amulta came out in support of Yovance’s slaves in their bid for liberation and a nation of their own.

Every citizen serves. Service begins at adulthood, runs no less than four years, and what a person does in it is set by physical and magical ability. For the mage-born the service began long before that: once magic is identified in a child, the training becomes the life, and it bends toward the wall, the war-healing or the battle-magic as the ability allows.

Education is fixed in law and is the reason a rural Amultan can hold a philosophical argument. The war has narrowed what is taught. Where education was a right, it has become, in the main, education for the war, and every line of magical research runs to the same end: enhance the defense, keep Amulta from falling, win the war for self-preservation.

Demographics

People	Share
Humans	71%
Hobgoblins	19%
Peren	8%
Other	2%

Almost all of Amulta’s rulers, if not all of them, have been human.

Foreign Relations

Peredhel

The war is the country. Peredhel is far the larger and better supplied, and by the arithmetic of raw force should have finished this a generation ago; it has not, because Amulta answers with magic. The first years went Amulta’s way and won back the ground between the lakes Videstall and Kamfell. The unit that led that charge was called Gish by the Peren who faced it, a foul word of theirs meaning something near to savage, and the Amultese took the insult for a badge and then for the official name of a training style. When Peredhel had spent itself imprudently and victory looked certain, Amultese mages raised the Sempergel between the two lakes so that no more land could be taken at all. Then Peredhel fielded magically equipped warriors of its own, and the war became what it is.

It is not always hot. It flares and subsides under constant trade pressure and freezes again against the wall, and the wall now eats most of what the country earns. There are Amultans saying openly that it is time to let it melt. Peredhel tells the same war differently: that it wants the market in magically infused goods, that Amulta was the unrivaled maker of them and is the thing standing in the way, and that for every Amultese soldier lost Peredhel spends ten or more.

Galderia

The parent country, and still an ally. Longstanding treaty keeps food and materials moving to Amulta and is a good part of what makes a generational siege survivable, and Amulta has sent Gish to bolster Galderia in return, back when its own defenses looked secure enough to spare them. Galderia is known for its sword-canes; the Amultan offshoot was the spell-cane, a cane infused with arcane magic that will release simple magics from it. They were always rare and are rarer now, for want of the resources to make them.

Yovance

Yovance seceded from Galderia as Amulta did, and shares Galden with both. It also has treaty with Amulta and supplies it. It is also a slaving nation, which is the whole difficulty: Amulta trades with a country whose practice its own law forbids, and has taken the side of that country’s slaves against it.

Escaria and the Arcane Congress

The reagents that arcane focuses and components are made from came from Escaria by trade, and that trade stopped abruptly some three decades ago. Why a long-standing ally estranged itself was never discovered, and Amultan speculation lands on the Arcane Congress, which has worked to impede Amulta for centuries and regards the Amultese as unwise children playing with forces they do not understand. The Congress’s own account is that Amultan training is practical where its own is theoretical, that the Gish learn a narrow magic under strict oversight, and that this is a virtue of discipline rather than a defect of education. Whatever the cause, the flow of reagents never resumed. New magical creations out of Amulta have become an exceedingly rare thing, and the arms and armor imbued with magic everlasting that the country was once known for are made by few and remembered by fewer.

Campaign Updates

The party has never set foot in it. Amulta reaches them through the people who left it. Gwenivere Velmont is the one the company knows, and the first thing she told them about her country was a disease: rare, perhaps carried in the blood, that eats a mage’s ability to cast and does not give it back, with Lady Arcium named as perhaps the one person alive who might know better. Then there were four soldiers who had walked away from the war and been taken in the mountains by smugglers running people down the river into Idir. Harveen and Jaden were freed and asked at once to go west and get their own people out. Of the two who went missing, Raerin Corvain was found dead under a cairn lettered with his initials, buried by Aldred, who has not been found at all.

Beyond that, its reputation is contested. One man said Amulta is not exactly a nice place. Another said he had heard the people there were good, and had thought it a good place. The first is out of Peredhel, which has been at war with Amulta for decades, and may be carrying his own country’s propaganda around in his head.