Tiny Steps Scholars' Redoubt History

A Timeline of Events in the Scholars’ Redoubt:

Year 1:
The world changes forever as humans cease to be and bugs take on new forms. Suddenly cognizant of the remnants of another civilization even as it wound down around them, suddenly with new forms and most importantly new minds, bugs have no idea how to react, in the area that would become the Scholars’ Redoubt or elsewhere. Chaos reigns, but initial responses do differ greatly – in the southeast of the area, red ants inhabit former human houses, making them cities, and band together, driven by the ant urges they have no way of adequately answering. They ultimately form an alliance along religious and military lines, and these same urges prompt them to turn towards their northern neighbors. In the northeast of what is now the Scholars’ Redoubt, black ants inhabit former human houses, making them cities, and band together, driven by the ant urges they have no way of adequately answering. They ultimately form an alliance along governmental and military lines, and these same urges prompt them to turn towards their northern neighbors.
The ants go to war, and it rapidly grows in scale. Between them and to their northwest, other bugs are caught in the crossfire – and in this area in particular there is little order, as a myriad of different bugs have a myriad of different responses to their new state. Many, many bugs panic and fail to do much – a couple of cities in the west are inhabited by hive bugs that don’t have the resources to control more than one or two house, the rest are either inhabited or rejected or some clumsy mix of both by many kinds of non-hive bugs.

Years 1-15:
Changes over this time period are very much significant and wide-ranging, but they are gradual, as bugs slowly put together their societies. For both red ants and black ants their institutions develop and become more deeply rooted within their societies – figures in the red ant religion here meet and meet with those further away and come to agreements on doctrine and make further proclamations of their cooperation in the progression of their holy societies, and figures in the black ant militaries and governments hash out shrewd political agreements and decide upon organizational similarities and ideological agreements. The upshot of this is that the black ants and red ants in most of the world form mega-alliances that are some of the most powerful titans of the world. This period becomes the zenith of the power of the black ants and red ants as distinct and unified entities, and their war grows intense, frequently crossing over into other bugs’ areas and causing destruction, but for now leading to the ascension of these two entities as powerhouses.

These fifteen years are a much more mixed bag for other bugs, however. On one hand, the other bug species discover their identities during this period – the small population of termites puts together a pretty well-organized city, as does a somewhat larger population of bees and a population of wasps (primarily hornets). Each puts together a couple of cities, though the wasp cities see some turmoil thanks to containing quite a few refugees from the north. The other houses in the region become occupied by many kinds of non-hive bugs, such as cockroaches, beetles, moths, spiders, and others which form cities with fairly loose and cooperative government as they tend to mix in cities. Other bugs, however, such as mosquitoes, flies, and butterflies, and others (and some spiders) reject the houses and form smaller towns or roaming groups within the area. However, their existence is thoroughly dangerous – not only do these bugs sometimes squabble among themselves, but they’re prone to getting caught up in fighting between ants (especially the ones between the ants) and even when they aren’t they face a grave threat – the Marauder’s Agreement to the southwest is at its most powerful during this point in time, and savage and relentless raids leave many bugs dead and many others dealing with cleaning up the scraps after having been thoroughly looted by the marauders. It’s a situation sometimes fine and sometimes desperate for the non-ant bugs of the area.

Year 15:
Things begin to get particularly bad at this point, for multiple reasons, and more and more bug-people start wondering why they’re in the situation that they’re in. In the red ant and black ant territories, the ants have reached the zenith of their power, dominating the entire northeastern half of the world, but at the same time as they reach this level of might, the constant warring has begun to take a toll, as the ant armies slaughter each other on the battlefield. At this time, the first generation of bugs in the world is starting to fade out – many bugs were already adult by the time they came to be, and the first generation has been dwindling and growing more elderly. The second generation, increasingly growing in prominence as its members have been reaching adulthood, and somewhat less strongly connected to the urges that drove the ants to war in the first place, start to wonder why they are fighting.

The other bugs, meanwhile, have been suffering heavily, as the Marauder’s Agreement now just starts to crest off of its peak of power. The Domains of Cooperation begin to organize to the south, but the Marauder’s Agreement is more aggressive than ever, seeking to find growth through raiding more furiously now that that growth is getting hard to come by. Caught between the increasingly vicious war between the ants and the increasingly vicious Marauders, the non-ant bugs here have been squabbling less and less in recent years, but it is at this point that a few groups in the area start to band together in quasi-official terms, working together to try to discover an edge to put them ahead of the competition. With only some of the groups among the mixed bugs of the west of what is now the Scholars’ Redoubt region being seriously militaristic at all, this cooperation tends to take the form of commerce and research, when they can manage it.

Year 17:
As Marauder attacks become more and more frequent, the mixed group of bugs in the west and between the ants begins to cooperate more and more strongly. At this point, they really begin to cement an identity together as the “many bugs”, a still loose coalition of those non-ant bugs who felt collectively victimized by the ant wars and by the Marauders, even despite the typical division between hive bugs, other urban bugs, and rural bugs, and this growing cooperation ultimately peaked with the creation of the Scholars’ University. Feeling incapable of catching up with simple military force, the many bugs focused their efforts on technology, craft, and magic, and as they devoted themselves with a desperate energy to doing so, some of the bright minds that they were trying to cultivate worked to guide the many bugs’ efforts into the creation of a large institution to train their ilk and research in. This ultimately bore fruit – the small mixed city of Shells Gathering, one rather sparsely populated even for its size, was chosen for its central, relatively secure location and it was converted into a gathering point for those whose curiosity and expertise drew them to research. This became the Scholars’ University, and over the next couple of years that followed, the University grew and grew and grew into one of the most powerful organizations of the many bugs.

Year 18:
A profound famine hits the northeastern-most black ant territories, those far outside of what is today the Scholars’ Redoubt. Many ants die, and the black ants that survive here leave to the rest of the black ant territories. This includes the black ants here, and this rapidly becomes a large problem – with more ants around, the war grows more intense, and even the highly organized black ants struggle heavily to provide. But with politics among the black ants pushing heavily for more fighting here, the tide of this seems to only be speeding up. General Vigilant, leader of one of the most prominent black ant cities and a second-generation ant (thusly relatively young), grows very tired of this and searches for a way out. The red ants, meanwhile, have been dealing with problems of their own – lesser in number, they have been steadily losing the war, and the increasingly aggressive Marauders have even been attacking them, a new development. Finding the current course unsustainable, Hierarch Ponderer, a fellow prominent second-generation red ant ruler lives up to the reason for his name and ponders what to do to deal with it. The two come to a secret agreement and decide to rein back aggression against each other.

Unfortunately, it does not stay as secret as they’d hoped, and more loyal ant cities raise arms against the more skeptical ones, causing the whole situation to begin to destabilize. This benefits the many bugs, though – the war takes on a primarily east-west dimension and taking place largely in ant lands the spillover much decreases.

Year 19:
With the new dimension to the fighting, Hierarch Ponderer and General Vigilant elect to create a more formal peace treaty. Meeting at a neutral city (formerly populated by mixed bugs but largely abandoned for several years following a particularly violent battle), Ponderer and Vigilant sign a treaty that turns this city into a powerful fort, the Redoubt, and in the Redoubt they create the Council of Leaders, a council that represents the various ant cities tired of the war, including those of Ponderer and Vigilant, taking largely military officials from each city to discuss strategy. With the Redoubt and the Council of Leaders providing a firm base for coordination, the peace-oriented ants largely stop fighting (even if there are still occasional skirmishes to this day) and collectively start doing significantly better in the warring against loyalist ant cities and the ant cities to the east. The war does not come to a conclusion here, but the ants around the Scholars’ Redoubt begin to stabilize their situation as the loyalist cities begin to lose.

Year 20:
Now equipped with much better magic, better-designed armor and more complex tools (such as climbing harnesses that allow for scavengers to be much more successful seeking food) thanks to the intense research of the rapidly-growing Scholars’ University, the many bugs begin to put up a much better fight against the Marauders’ Agreement – but given that the Marauders’ Agreement is only getting more vicious as the forming Domains of Cooperation to the south begin to outright invade them, this is not enough to actually cut off the raids. Some of the prominent polities among the many bugs, such as the bee cities and mosquito bands, decided that the best way to move forward was to extend an olive branch to the other bugs now simply trying to defend the region: the black and red ants of the Redoubt. The leader of one of the largest mosquito bands, Dog Leap, a mosquito who was known for being particularly fearless (named for an act in her adolescence of personally leaping off of a roof onto the head of a dog her mosquito band was hunting) arrived at the Redoubt and made a demand: that the many bugs be given seats on the Council of Leaders, and that they aid in each other’s conflicts. Though Hierarch Ponderer and thusly the red ants were eager, given that they were also struggling with the Marauders themselves, but General Vigilant and many of the other black ant leaders were much less impressed with demands being made. However, they were swayed by the offer made by the Queen of Dark Stone Hive, a bee city, who offered to allow the ants to participate in the Scholars’ University and also reap the technological and magical rewards of such. Impressed by the advances he saw in the Queen of Black Stone Hive’s entourage and from information he’d gathered otherwise, Vigilant agreed to this, and now the region came together as a distinct region, with most of the bugs there operating together in fighting off the Eastern Ants and the Marauders’ Agreement.

Years 21-25:
During this time period, the region finally begins to be known as the Scholars’ Redoubt (thanks to the University and the Redoubt, naturally) as this grand pair of institutions and the wide alliance that comes with them really solidifies – and as the sharing of magic and technology brought by the Scholars’ University mixes with the experienced coordination and military training brought by the Council of Leaders, the region becomes much more prosperous and much more powerful. The Eastern Black and Red Ants are eventually soundly defeated at the Battle of Black Lake and the Battle of the Fort of Grace respectively, as the Scholars’ Redoubt manages to send significant forces far enough into these territories to convince the other ants that continuing to fight will drastically affect their ability to fight each other, settling these territories into the decaying role of the Black Fields and Red Fields.
At the same time, efforts to fight off the Marauders’ Agreement have been wildly successful: though raids have not stopped, they are as often stopped and slain as not, and as the Marauders’ Agreement is rapidly growing weaker and now seeing serious challenges from the Domains of Cooperation and even the Magnates in addition to the Scholars’ Redoubt, the Marauders are seriously beginning to flounder in their ability to respond to these attacks, even as the hinterlands (relative to the areas near other regions rather than the coasts, that is) begin to empty as the various Marauders in the hinterlands of the Agreement start to move out towards its edges as loot trading starts to break own and try to push back the other regions.
(In Year 24, Wasp Hell to the north follows suit and also declares peace.)

Year 25:
The Sea-Folk, foreign ants with sea-going technology and very particular crew hierarchies, show up on the coast of the Marauders’ Agreement by complete and utter surprise and as this area is not well-populated, the Marauders have nearly no way to defend against it. Weakened and caught off-guard, the Marauders proceed to lose a huge chunk of their territory to the Sea-folk, and the former power nosedives even more rapidly than it once had, losing territory to every single one of its neighbors but the Scholars’ Redoubt, which is wary about attempting to incorporate new areas of land into its political agreements and institutions. However, for the first time ever, war is now largely absent from the region of the Scholars’ Redoubt. Ants and some of the many bugs occasionally skirmish, but only a scant couple of fatalities are ever expected (and usually not even fully intended), and raids from the Marauders or Eastern Ants aren’t unheard of but are now rare and almost never successful. Finally, the Scholars’ Redoubt is left to its own devices, and it begins to swell in population and prosperity to a degree extremely rare in the known world – to the point that it is now considered one of the four great powers of the world.

Years 26-30:
The Scholars’ Redoubt has been importing food for a while from the Tin Cities and Bees’ Fields, as the increased population is not *just* a new phenomenon, but the amount of food that must be imported begins to grow precipitously as the region’s population really takes off. It’s expensive and some of the leaders of the region begin to worry about its sustainability, but though food has become somewhat expensive (especially as the Banner Tribes start to present an extreme threat to the Bees’ Fields) it has not yet reached the point of a crisis. The Scholars’ University begins to decline in reputation as several ventures undertaken by the Scholars there end in failure – attempts to discover agriculture fail as the Bees’ Fields are well aware that exports to the Scholars’ Redoubt is a vital lifeline for them and as the Noreast Villages are simply extremely distant and not well interested, and attempts to learn advanced metallurgy from the Smiths fail as the Smiths consider their techniques to be *their* techniques and expertise, belonging to them. The Scholars’ University is still very active and its place in society is one that is heavily formalized and not going to be destroyed any time soon, but military leaders in the Redoubt have started to take their requests not very seriously at all.