The way the Empire ended up getting implemented is indeed very different than the original vision Jenred (and indeed, Arcaea at large, as I will note for those unaware that embarking on the course of Empire was actually put to public debate, and Jenred stated at the time that in his not so humble assessment he thought the most likely outcome was the complete destruction of Arcaea) had.
The whole thing was actually the result of a thought experiment kicked around on IRC for a while as we discussed problems with Battlemaster (and indeed, specifically looked at the Holy Roman Empire). I posited that what Battlemaster really needed was some sort of way to have realm duels. After some discussion, it was decided that there was no mechanical way to enforce such a thing, so I tried to come up with a system (again, with a lot of help) that would result in a political situation where you could actually enforce limited wars. The idea being that, say, Coralynth could Challenge Ohnar West to a war, and then Arcaea (and everyone else) would enforce strict neutrality on everyone else (which of course would lead to all kinds of conflict regarding indirect assistance and the like).
Plus, the original plan was to have Jenred's wife Edara secede from Arcaea, form a new realm with Talex/Topenah (and at various points, Colasan), and have Jenred join that realm...Making that new realm the Imperial realm (at least until someone else won a challenge against them) and weakening Arcaea significantly.
I know both IC and OOC that there are other plans Velax has cooking, and I'm very interested to see how they work out, but I would like to posit that something like this is a decent fallback plan (grins).
