Cornman8700
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MT 314 - Let Them Eat Pie
🕑 Added 2025-10-20 12:07:10 +0000 UTCCongratulations on establishing your very first benevolent dictatorship! It’s efficient, stable, quick to adapt, and burdened by the inevitability of corruption. Every day that you wear your crown, you’re telling every single one of your subjects that your judgment is better than their own!
Luckily for the peons, you’re a wise and mighty philosopher king.
Your deeds and disposition have unlocked the intrinsic skill Statecraft!
Statecraft: The art of conducting the state. Statecraft assists you with the management and operation of any form of government.
For every level of Statecraft, you gain one Mystic Magister. A Mystic Magister has a perfect recollection of the laws of your nation, along with all information made publicly available by your government. Further, a Mystic Magister can be imbued with any knowledge you possess, allowing you to enhance or specialize different Mystic Magisters to serve different functions.
By default, Mystic Magisters are incorporeal entities with rudimentary intelligence and decision-making capabilities whose primary function is to disseminate information to those you deem worthy of receiving it. Mystic Magisters are highly customizable and can be improved through, among other things, Statecraft evolutions.
You currently have one unoccupied intrinsic skill slot out of twelve. Would you like to accept the intrinsic skill Statecraft?
Note: Accepting Statecraft will trigger several retroactive intrinsic skill rewards based on the founding of your nation.
After the mass pledge of fealty, there was an epic, stereotypical Renaissance-style feast where I sat at a wide table at the head of the room, flanked by my honorable council members as I chewed on an oversized turkey leg. One instance of focus was being spent engaging with the people and festivities, while another was crawling through the intrinsic skill on offer. Nowadays, I had a lot more access to relevant information via Grotto than I had when accepting most of my earlier intrinsic skills. I didn’t have to rely on the vague description the System gave me, although this one did a better job than most.
Grotto went through a number of potential evolutions the skill might offer, all of which would make running Closetland infinitely easier, even if I had to do it from a distance. The kingdom was shaping up to become a potent force multiplier. It was an entire nation that I could literally call upon at any time, and if we played our cards right with the Delves that Grotto and Throne were building out, the Delver population would rapidly become one of the densest in the world, from a per capita perspective.
Tearing open a Deific portal to call down an entire Delver army at any time and in any place sounded pretty good to me. Amateurs brought tactics, professionals brought logistics, and King Xor’Drel brought the entire Closetland military in his back pocket.
Statecraft was, likewise, a force multiplier for my ability to manage that kingdom. It wasn’t flashy, and it had a more indirect impact on my build than a skill like Reconnaissance might, but there was every chance that Statecraft could become the largest overall contributor to my personal power of any intrinsic skill that I possessed.
Plus, Grotto kept hounding me about how I hadn’t filled my twelfth intrinsic slot. It was time to fulfill the Delve Core’s fondest wishes and finally start walking around with a full build.
I accepted Statecraft as my final intrinsic skill. For this phase, anyway. Who knew how many more slots we might get in phase 3?
You have founded your first nation!
You have gained a total of 100 citizens!
You have gained a total of 1,000 citizens!
You have founded your first city!
You have founded your capital city!
Your nation has been formally recognized by several major world governments: Eschendur, Kingdom of Hiward, Littan Empire!
Yara, Godqueen of Civilization, has blessed your kingdom!
Sumrann, God of Harvest and Bounty, has blessed your kingdom!
Sam’lia, Goddess of the Seven Organs, has blessed your kingdom!
The Eschenden, Gods of Land, Sea, and Air, have blessed your kingdom!
Nephithaya, Goddess of Ancestry, has blessed your kingdom!
Chalgoth, God of Blood and Steel, has blessed your rule!
Your Statecraft skill has increased from Level 1 to Level 15!
Please choose your first Statecraft evolution.
I tried not to read too deeply into all the gods and goddesses blessing Closetland or, in Chalgoth’s case, my rule. Just another day in the life of a god-wrangler. As for the evolutions, their descriptions took further shots at my integrity as per usual.
Absolutism
When you just can't trust anyone else in the whole wide world, you have to do it yourself.
You gain 1 additional instance of focus for each evolution you have in Statecraft. These instances of focus can only be used to perform acts of governance, such as holding court, creating or enforcing laws, entertaining foreign diplomats, or sleeping with your many concubines.
You can focus to inhabit one Mystic Magister of your choice, allowing you to take control of the incorporeal being or even shape it into a tangible doppelganger for a variety of purposes, such as having a physical presence in your kingdom while you are physically somewhere else, spying on your citizens, or sleeping with your many concubines.
Tangible doppelgangers share your physical attributes but have only 1 HP, making the doppelganger easy to destroy in the event of a disaster, an attempted assassination, or when Ishi discovers you using it to sleep with one of your many concubines.
Populism
Lower yourself to understanding the perspective of a member of the unwashed masses; we know you can do it!
You can ask any question and receive a weighted report of how citizens in your kingdom would answer that question. For example, you could ask, “What’s the biggest problem in Closetland?”, “Where is the best place to work?”, or “How do you show your eternal and unwavering affection for our Most Glorious Ruler?”
Additionally, you can initiate a referendum using your Magisters. You can propose any resolution for your government, which citizens can vote on by visiting a Magister. Obviously, the votes don’t matter, and you can do whatever you want, since you don’t trust your own citizens enough to provide them with any real civic power, but at least they’ll think you care about their opinions.
Fascism
Why only rely on your force of personality to crush the naysayers when you can use actual force as well?
Your Magisters gain a Grade equal to the number of evolutions you have in Statecraft, with an attribute distribution identical to your own, and gain the ability to use any of your skills.
Your Magisters use your senses and reasoning to constantly scan their environment for entities you would consider hostile to you or Closetland, alerting you whenever one is discovered. You can direct the Magisters to attack, detain, question, monitor, or ignore any such individual or specific individuals at your will.
I was not particularly happy with the names of these evos and what they implied regarding my future rule. At the same time, I didn’t really care about the System’s judgment. I’m sure that if I’d established a carefully considered pure democracy, it would have had something snarky to say about voting rights and Closetland’s average IQ. If I’d made an attempt at establishing a utopic socialist wonderland, it would have probably praised me for the genius idea of making everyone equally poor instead of building an elite upper crust on the backs of abject poverty and the exploitation of the middle class.
Something like that. I didn’t have deep thoughts about it.
In regards to my choices, I liked Absolutism. It gave me another bonus brain to manage the kingdom, letting me continue to contribute while I was busy kicking ass somewhere else, or helping me double up on brainpower when I was entirely focused on governance. The ability to take control of a magister was also nifty, letting me be in two places at once, or even in one place twice. It had shenanigans written all over it.
Populism was neat, but its ability to get a weighted report and host a referendum fell into a category of things that I could mostly do without magic. The evo made it crazy convenient, but that was it.
Fascism, at Level 100 Statecraft with five evolutions, would give me a small army of 100 Grade 5 Magisters to act as national defenders or a kind of police force. It was neat and didn’t have to be evil as shit the way the evo made it out to be, since an army of Grade 5s was basically untouchable by a mundane hostile force, no matter their numbers. But… eh, an army of Grade 5s also made me say “so what?” I could sneeze at 100 Grade 5s and wipe them out of existence. The surveillance was the best part of the evo, and we already had that locked down with Grotto.
As mentioned, I was looking for force multipliers. Absolutism multiplied the force that was me, so that’s the one I took.
There was a mild hubbub at the feast when fifteen androgynous ghostly figures appeared behind me. Each Mystic Magister’s body looked to be made up of blue mana vapor, and all of them were wearing a set of black robes and a white powdered wig. They came with their own controls, which I could pull up on my interface, and I quickly did so to review their visual settings. I cancelled the default setting and gave them a random distribution of male and female. Then I made a game out of selecting their individual appearances throughout the rest of the feast while dessert was served, which was a fantastic selection of various delicious pies.
We ended up with magisters representing all of Closetland’s races, but somehow wound up with three Carbuncle magisters, which was a gross overrepresentation of that particular minority. But everybody thought they were cute as shit, so no one cried foul.
As the night went on and the drinks flowed freely, some of the magisters ended up looking quite silly. Others ended up as definite thirst traps. I had to step in and establish some ground rules that insisted on clothing, although the line between nude and dressed got quite blurred.
While the magisters looked like people, they weren’t self-aware and, in fact, had little more than rudimentary scripted responses. I watched with some amusement as a few fellows took their shot with a bikini-clad Timan magister, who responded to their advances by offering them some nutritional advice. Two of them thought it was a random response, but one understood how subtly he’d been dissed, then went back to the buffet for some high-protein foods. I expected to see him in one of the gyms later on, trying to slap some muscle onto his thin frame.
I quickly checked some other settings on the magisters’ information base and noted that they were currently pulling from all of my personal knowledge on “non-hazardous” topics. That apparently included a lot more information on personal nutrition than I’d realized.
When we got to the final magister, I used Absolutism to take it over, and watched in real time as the ghostly entity transformed into a mirror copy of myself. I played a shell game with my clone, using portals and Shortcuts until nobody knew which one was me and which one was me, but with less health. Then I did the rounds at the feast, shaking twice as many hands and spending twice as much subjective time at the party as I would have without the skill.
Eventually, things had to wind down, and the feast had to come to an end, but not before we dealt with the matter of Old Krimsim, new name pending. There were several naming options presented, each one chosen by the people of the kingdom. Names such as Libers, after the god of freedom, Arlosville, as a misguided attempt at flattery, and Pocketton, to stay on theme, among others.
In the end, the new name came about because of a translation error that created a misunderstanding that was subsequently cleared up, but at a point when the damage had already been done, and it was too late to walk things back. My own words had inspired the informal name for the city that everyone had been using for a month now.
You see, whenever I spoke to a Littan–the population of which comprised the majority of Closetland–I automatically spoke in Imperial, unless there was a reason to favor a different language. Whenever I mentioned the city of Old Krimsim with the subsequent clarification of “new name pending”, to indicate that a new name would soon be chosen, my translation into Imperial failed to properly account for the context of what I was saying.
Instead of saying “Old Krimsim, new name pending,” what I was actually saying was “Old Krimsim, new name: Pending.”
Every time I’d talked to a Littan over the prior several months and mentioned Old Krimsim, I’d been telling them that the new name was literally “Pending”.
So, the capital city of the kingdom of Closetland was formally recognized as being named Pending, which is what all of the Littans were already calling it anyway.
With the feast feasted upon, my Statecraft intrinsic accepted and evolved, and another brilliant name added to Closetland’s maps, everything was tidied up in preparation for the world summit.
I was very much looking forward to my speech.
Comments
McIntosh Ewell
What I'm wondering is how loosely the system defines concubines... and congress. For instance, is communing with Sam'lia suitably intimate to count? I imagine having goddesses in your harem would be worth a level or two. Also, I feel like diplomacy should be seeing some gains from this development
ValkyriaObscura
When you're the Head of State, isn't any action you take arguably an act of statecraft? Your reputation is a form of diplomacy after all.
ArtHunt
I like that Chalgoth is the only god who blessed Arlo, not his kingdom. Definitely my favorite god.
Nine
So statescraft improves general ability as a ruler and gives a free system of beurocrats? thats OP
GrandSageGand
Given he took the evolution related to it, would Statecraft level from sleeping with his many concubines, really I just want an interaction where the System refers to those around Arlo as his concubines and Grotto out him for it
Ers20
I feel like Arlo's lack of deep thoughts on the matter are entirely voluntary, considering how he can cram study on any subject he wants...
Throh_goblin Lord
What puns can be made out of pending for visiting diplomats?
