Mar 15
The Xhorhas arc is great
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The Xhorhas arc is great
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One of the best bait and switches that Matt pulls in Campaign 2 is the way he completely sets the Nein up to believe that the Dynasty is this brutish, scary place using nothing but propaganda and effects that the characters will find ominous (for example, drow wanting to live in darkness makes sense, but as humans it can feel foreign and threatening).
He purposefully puts them in contact with people from the Empire who are biased narrators and doesn’t tell the party that they’re biased. He lets them do research in the Empire but that research is all slanted to make the Dynasty seem as foreign and alien as possible. It’s such a perfect illustration of how propaganda can dehumanize its targets, and because this is a fantasy world, the players and the characters don’t have enough knowledge of Xhorhas to be able to tease apart the lies and spin to find the truth.
So Matt sets them up to explore the Dynasty with their only information about the area from the Empire, and in the beginning, the Nein see what they expect. On rewatch, WE as watchers know that this is just another culture of people, that the Dynasty is in some ways kinder than the Empire but still a colonizing force in Eastern Wynandir, and that the Kryn are just as much a mix of good people and bad people and ordinary people trying to live their lives, like anywhere else.
We get to watch in real time as the characters discover this for themselves, and it’s such a fascinating study in the way that personal experience and connections to people who have been dehumanized can effectively help in deprogramming biases. The Nein’s attitude starts to shift in Asarius, but we don’t truly see them accept that the Dynasty is like anywhere else until they start living in Rosohna.
I doubt this bait and switch was planned in this form back when Beau and Caleb first researched Xhorhas, but it’s really brilliant the way Matt runs with it once the party decides to go to Xhorhas to rescue Yeza. Rewatching these episodes, I’m always fascinated to watch the Nein’s slowly-changing attitudes to the Kryn while knowing that this is going to become one of the places that they eventually call home. It’s just so well done.
Locations: Kryn Dynasty's lands The Mighty Nein | season 1
God I love the Barbed Fields, coolest visuals in Exandria.
hey hi hello i'm back to unintelligibly rant about more mighty nein cause i want to have better media literacy skills and it turns out you actually have to engage in discussions with other people to get better (oops image that)
anyways.. y'all i have so many thoughts on the kryn dynasty... especially in its function as a direct contrast to the dwendalian empire... (and fair warning i might be about to spew the most surface-level analysis people have been talking about for years i dunno)
so, the empire is where the nein start, right? zadash is our main base, it feels homely to the point that early on caleb's constant unnervedness and paranoia appear strange until we slowly start to peel back the layers of corruption and find out he was the only one with acute awareness of the rot within the system all along; it's the wolf in sheep's clothing of the exandrian states. and one thing it does really damn well is incite distrust towards any and everyone to the east of the ashkeeper peaks. the animated series relativizes that sentiment a little by exploring essek and his motives a lot earlier, but boy howdy, back in the original campaign all that talk of "cricks" and undying insectoid elven warriors had me fully ready to witness a slaughter the moment the nein stepped into xhorhas.
so when they are instead celebrated as heroes for returning the stolen luxon beacon, the praise they receive from the dynasty's literal queen herself is a very welcome change of pace from the scrutiny of the empire's ever-watchful law enforcement. (like, she gifts them a fucking mansion within a week of arriving in rosohna, i cannot stress that enough..) so, i think it's fair to say that all this hospitality leads us as the viewers to believe that "man, the kryn aren't so bad after all"; that "maybe, all that vitriol they're spewing in the west is racism and propaganda to distract from the glaring corruption within the empire's own apparatus".
and yes. yes. very much yes... but also perhaps not only yes. hear me out.
i believe that what makes the dynasty seem objectively superior to the empire - what makes the empire feel like the problem child whose higher ups need to be removed from their positions of power while the dynasty's power structures get to remain the way they are - is the fact that the nein experience the nicest parts of a veeery flawed system, cherry-picked and presented to them by the (albeit secretly rebellious but still) highly priviledged first-born son of the second-most influential family in the entire country. essek is our no.1 source of information, not only on dunamancy, but on luxon worship, on dynasty culture and most importantly: on the relationship between religion and state upheld among the kryn, and the fact that all of that information gets filtered through his perspective before it reaches us MATTERS SO MUCH.
real quick, a little background on little old me: i grew up around a bunch of frustrated, bitter, low income working class people living paycheck to paycheck well into their 40s and 50s because the bootstrap myth is a fucking scam and upward mobility is a joke. so one of the beliefs i grew up surrounded by was the notion of death as the great equalizer; "it don't matter if i'm takin' the bus and that fancy bastard down the street's got a mercedes, we both only get one life and once it's over we're both just rottin' piles of meat in the ground", they would say and, to be completely honest, whether i wanted it to or not, that became a fundamental part of my worldview.
so imagine my horror when matt introduced a society in which that is simply not the case; a society in which the uppermost echelons have discovered a ritual that functions as a cheat code around the permanence of death, and just like that, the little man's last bastion of equality goes up in flames. climbing the social ladder is no longer about whether you live in a castle or a shack, it's about how much time you get with your loved ones, about how many chances you get to live a life that is fulfilling to you. because really think about which members of kryn society have been confirmed to be consecuted: members of high-ranking dens like the kryn, the mirimm and the thelyss and high-importance warriors like olomon and thuron; people who are useful to the system, people who are "worth" reincarnating because their continued existence in exandria holds the promise of future loyalty to the crown. like, do you think zorth, the crazy goblin moorbounder breeder without arms from asarius, is consecuted?? no, of course he fucking isn't. what would he contribute? and this all makes it sound like consecution is a secular affair, a worldly reward for high performance, like a merit award that comes with the world's craziest benefits package, but that's the thing: it's fucking not.
consecution is deeply entrenched in luxon worship, we have essek on record saying that consecution is expected with advancement within the religion except for the priviledged dens, who basically get a free ticket from birth (c2e91, 31:28). this shit is sold to the citizens of the dynasty as a form of devotion to the religion they base their whole damn lives around, when in reality, the average joe working as a fishmonger in the outskirts of the realm could pray to the luxon twice as much as all the den members in their cushiony little mansions put together and he'd still never get consecuted because it's not about devotion to the higher power, it's about devotion to the people who pass out the immortality tickets, to leylas kryn, to the throne and ultimately, the system.
if the empire suffers from corruption in the form of nasty, jaundiced old mfs snatching arcane prodigies off its universities' hallways to be hitmen, the dynasty suffers from corruption by way of its frankly disgusting lack of separation between church and state and its willingness to dangle the promise of a chance to reshuffle the cards they were dealt over the heads of its lower class.
i've laid awake at night many a time wondering how the back half of c2 would have played out, if the nein had experienced the dynasty and xhorhas in a more organic way. like how would they have been treated, had they been nobodies just like they were back in the empire, instead of having their experience of the system clouded by the bright queen deciding that they were "part of the good ones" the second they stepped on her turf?
but oh well, i guess that's just one of many things we'll never know...
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A long while ago I started a Mighty Nein rewatch, and I started noticing something that Matt was doing with his DMing during Campaign 2. I mean, there's lots of experimental things Matt does in C2. I think it was his chance to be really intentional with his world building and story telling post-C1 in a way that is hard to do when you aren't sure if your game group will be able to keep meeting on schedule every week (or month, or couple months... such are the pains of scheduling dnd).
But the thing that caught my attention was the way that Matt seemed to be engineering a world in which his players would be innately prejudiced against the Dynasty and the beings who came from those lands. He was playing on the usual expectation of monster = bad (see the gnolls, goblins, and trolls they kill early on), plus the propaganda and bias of the Empire and even third party sources like the Cobalt Soul, plus the simple depiction of desperate people as dangerous and scary, to distort how his players thought about Xhorhas and The Dynasty.
If you want a really good breakdown of that, I highly recommend reading the-kaedageist's post about Matt bait and switching his players.
So what I did during my rewatch was note down every time any mention of Xhorhas or the Dynasty or the creatures from the East were mentioned. You can see all of it after the cut, and it's pretty crazy. There's hardly more than an episode between mentions of Xhorhas or something related to it until we get to the pirate arc. Xhorhas haunts the narrative significantly and, I think, very intentionally. And every mention until they get to Xhorhas itself, barring maybe one, has a negative tone to it.
This is, for me, one of my favorite things about Matt as a DM. He will sit on his little secrets for years until the time is right to reveal them. It can give moments like the Nein's travel through Xhorhas and reevaluation of their prejudices so much weight. Now that we've gotten to this point in Nein Again, we're getting to see the scales fall from their eyes, and damn if that ain't beautiful.
Lots of episode by episode notes below the cut:
The Mighty Nein meeting and gaining the royalty favor. Leylas Kryn is the Bright Queen in Xhorhas.
She is voiced by Matthew Mercer in @criticalrole.
The Mighty Nein's Xhorhaus probably brought down the neighborhood's property value