Stoneheart Concord

The only thing the giants agree on¶

The Stoneheart Concord is the nearest thing the giants have to a state, and calling it one overstates it considerably.

The Concord is an agreement, of long standing, among most of the peaks. It settles boundaries, adjudicates claims, and does nothing else. There is no Concord army, no Concord treasury and no Concord law beyond the adjudication of ground. Giants who live outside it are not rebels; they are simply giants who have not needed the arbitration, and several of the oldest and most respected individuals on the map have never attended a session in six hundred years of life.

Cairnspire is where the Concord sits when it sits. Sessions are called rarely, run for years, and are attended by whoever considers the matter worth the walk.

Pressure rather than cataclysm¶

The Concord moves mountains by will, not by catastrophe. Expansion is gradual, inevitable, and heavy enough to reshape what lies beneath it.

A settlement is not legitimate the day a marker goes up. It becomes legitimate once the land has been worked long enough to bear their mark, and giants disagree with each other about how long that is by margins of decades. One century a valley is disputed. Some century after that it is obviously theirs, and the dispute is a thing in somebody's archive.

The claim is premature.

Concord ruling on a disputed valley, issued after ninety years of deliberation

The arithmetic of very few¶

Six centuries of life and a fifth of the human birth rate means the Concord will never be numerous and has built its entire politics around never needing to be.

Where other powers move armies, the Concord moves a handful of individuals and a great deal of stone. Losing one giant is a generational catastrophe for the Concord and an unremarkable afternoon for whoever managed it, which is why the Concord does not fight wars so much as decline to be finished. Kill enough of them and you have not won. You have postponed something, and they have the span to wait out the postponement.

Two exceptions on a hostile map¶

The Concord stands twenty-five points below neutral with essentially everyone, which is less a policy than a summary of how giants regard the affairs of smaller peoples: real, presumably urgent to the participants, and not a reason to alter one's route.

Two exceptions sit at neutral rather than below it. The Eldrin share their faith and their timescale, and an argument between the two has been known to lapse simply because neither party followed up within a lifetime. The Goetern earned theirs differently: they are the only small people who have never once tried to move a giant off anything, and the Concord has noticed, and mentions it about once a century.

Meeting them¶

They will not notice you at first, and that is the good phase.

Concord attention is slow to arrive and extremely difficult to redirect once it has. Trade is possible. Negotiation is possible. Speed is not, and any arrangement you make will be honoured long after everyone who made it on your side is dead, which is a better deal than it sounds and a worse one than you will want.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.