Finally the Splug Empire getting some love on Substack! Couldn’t tell you what’s taken so long. It’s such an amazing story — it’s not every day that a landlocked principality of hillmen grows into a continent-encompassing empire in the course of only ~120ish years. (By the end of things it stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.)

If that’s not impressive enough for you consider this: all of that growth happened under the same political leader! Grükk II Diomedes (born 1383 - died 1520) was a general, architect, doctor, theologian, and theurgist of equal skill, the wonder and terror of his age, and the empire he built reflected this multiplicity. Mature people can consider this as a complex whole. Are the Rendering Pits — some of which are still standing in the Old Capitol — a horror to even consider? Of course. But the same hand that designed them designed the breathtaking Hill Fanes of the Splugivinian Hinterlands and wrote the earliest known description of the mind as a cybernetic system.

No wonder the five greatest kingdoms of Europe had to unite to defeat him!