Part 41: Sacred Time

The Orlanthi year is broken up into 5 seasons(Sea, Fire, Earth, Dark, and Storm) and the Sacred Time(which is when all Orlanthi perform the rituals that renew the world). Despite what the music would indicate, we begin in Sacred Time, where we get a screen showing an overview of our clan.



The game mentions that we already have friends and enemies here, which means that there will already be a few clans feuding with us(which means they're more likely to attack us often), a few who are allies, and a few we already have trade routes with(meaning we get some extra goods thanks to the profit from these routes).

The symbol on the hill reminds us that our main god is Elmal. The nearby shrine is to Elmal and provides the Steadfast blessing, which improves our chances in battle when we're defending. Not the worst blessing in the world, but not the best either - after all, it only takes effect if someone else decides to attack us. It's hard to see, but there's a weapon sticking out of the fields in the middle of all the text. That's a shrine to Urox, and provides the Berserker blessing. This increases our chances of victory, but it's a double edged sword as it causes more deaths and wounds on both sides.

We have 105 hides of barley, wheat, and rye that should provide enough food for 731 people, if all goes well. We have 750 cattle - cows represent the wealth of a clan, and provide milk and meat for us. We have 1494 pigs, which are occassionally butchered for food, and can be mass butchered if we're facing a food crisis. We have 1462 sheep, which are primarily important in their role in maintaining shrines.

In the middle we can see our settlement and find out some things about our population. We have 272 carls who raise our cattle and work in the fields, 135 cottars who raise sheep and also work the fields, 10 thralls, 8 hunters who bring in enough food for 16 people, 28 nobles being useless around the clan hall, 10 weaponthanes looking for someone to beat up, and 10 crafters producing 31 cows worth of goods a year.

But enough about all those numbers - it's time to allocate our clan magic!


What the fuck is a Chalana Arroy worshipper doing as clan leader? There's an Elmali right there. (If you don't know who I'm talking about, it's Sarotar - Elmal worshippers are represented by a little horse rune on their portrait. Chalana Arroy worshippers like Orlkarth get three lines instead, which are supposed to represent bandages) No matter, the first thing we're going to do after Sacred Time is rearrange the clan ring anyway.

Our omens are mostly bad - food is always important, and as a new clan, we haven't had time to get a hilarious surplus yet. That heroquesting omen is usually good, but again, we're a new clan, so we don't know enough about the myths to heroquest safely.

Here's a rundown of what the non-obvious categories do:
Mysteries: Increases our chances of learning new blessings and myth details from the gods when we sacrifice for them.
Quests: Improves our chances of success in any Heroquests we perform.

And as a side note, we can spend magic in individual battles, but each point of magic we use in the War category counts as if we'd spent that much in every battle during this year.

We have 7 points of magic to spend. We don't have to spend it all here; events pop up where we can use our magic stores, and any unused magic carries over from year to year. You can see how many points we can allocate to each category by the number of boxes next to it. This can change depending on the gods represented in our clan ring, but we'll always be able to put at least one point of magic into each category.

All the categories here can be potentially useful. As with most things in the game, there are no right or wrong choices here, merely a decision of what our priorities are.

How are we going to allocate our clan magic?

(Fun fact: Children and Hunting were removed from this screen in the iOS version because A Sharp realized very few people ever used them. Take that as you will.)