I'm going to go out on a limb here and say something that's undoubtably going to prove to be unpopular: The military aspect of the Hallifax-Gaudiguch conflict does not make sense for either party to engage in.

Both Hallifax and Gaudiguch are fully aware of the fact that the last time Gaudiguch and Hallifax went to war the end result was the complete annihilation of their respective armies, a 100% fatality rate amoung their respective citizens, the complete draining of their respective nexii, the destruction of their entire civilizations and the removal of the smouldering ruins of the same from TIME ITSELF for over three centuries. The two projects are not as bad as nuclear weapons, they're worse. Using Paradox and Crucible at eachother is not only stupidly reckless from an IC prespective, but ordering on insanity. You would literally have to be crazy to want to go ahead with it knowing all that, racism against the other side and ideological conflicts aside.

That said, there are a number of legitimate ideological conflicts that could be explored without it making it abundently obvious that you have a death wish of some kind for doing it:

-Gaudiguch is a city based on a tiny number of axiomatic laws, ie. Kant while Hallifax as an exhaustive legislative process. Hallifax putting up a critique of the One Law as a basis of soceity and Gaudiguch defending it, while Gaudiguch lampoons Hallifax's governmental articles can and should be a common enough thing to happen.

-The Institute and the Illuminati have two very distinct theories of what the right thing to do with knowledge is, and this is not explored at all, a topic which I have previously posted my laments about. The Institute is in favour of experimental knowledge, verification and, above all, publishing knowledge for the benefit of soceity. The Illuminati, on the other hand, are a Pythagorean cult that wants to carefully consider what sort of knowledge they wish to share, in order to insure that knowledge that is dangerous to the Illuminati, Gaudiguch or to the individual learning it does not escape into the wild. (for an interesting article on the latter idea, go here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p0/to_spread_science_keep_it_secret/ )

-Gaudiguch is readily accepting of the mystical and magical. They accept the proposition that an Enlightened Master can turn someone into a rabbit by convincing them they are a rabbit as probably being true. They also see no reason to consider the fact that they have a giant lizard with butterfly wings defending the city as weird, nor question the notion that pyromancers can create black fire that burns with coldness. Hallifax, on the other hand, would (or at least should) not accept that sort of craziness and demand that an investigation be carried out to figure out how exactly the giant butterfly dragon works and what's going on with the cold black fire burning in defiance of natural law. Currently the Institute basically ignores the more "supernatural" elements of Lusternia in favour of deriding it as "unscientific" and therefore unworthy of consideration, let alone investigation. This is a shame.

-The Illuminati and the Institute are both experts on natural philosophy, but as it stands the Institute does not want to hear from the Illuminati about their discoveries and does not want to share information about their own. Cross-organizational experimentation is basically non-existant, and the differences between the scientific procedures and safety precautions ("Why are you wearing gloves and a gas mask?" "Why are you drawing a nonagram in the sand?" used by both sides could easily be an RP opertunity.

-The differences between the Pyromancer's treatment of the Seven Sacred Pyres and the Five Sacred Flames, and the Aeromancers completely ignoring the Air Lords is also a point of what should be a lot of ideological contention. The Pyromancers should be, during times of peace with Hallifax, condescendingly offering to help the Aeromancers build their own sacred clouds on Air, while the Aeromancers shake their heads at the supersitious Pyromancers and their nutty bonfire obsession.

-Hallifax uses slaves and technology where Gaudiguch breeds animals. There could easily be semi-frequent competions where Gaudiguch trys to breed a giant chicken that's better at flying than Hallifax's flying machine, or Hallifax attempts to construct a logic crystal that can outsmart Gaudiguch's smartest homunculus.

Just remember, nobody thought war would happen again after the Great War, either.

The WWI did not have nuclear bombs. WWII did. There has not yet been a WWIII and there likely will not be one for the forseeable future. There's a reason for that.

Order vs Chaos, pursuit of truth vs pursuit of enlightenment, secrets vs science, "Art" vs drug-induced reverie, refinement/refrain vs hedonism/indulgence, revelry vs dignity, desert vs clouds, wisdom vs bureaucracy, dreams vs duty, the self vs the collective, endless revolution vs state-sponsored surveillance, cold vs warm, rigidly defined castes vs rampant outbursts of opinion, passion vs discipline.

Even without getting into the historical "they tried to kill us and destroy our nexus", there are so many grounds for dispute and rivalry. Some of these are a bit flaky and minor of course. What I find interesting about them though is that I as a player can rationalise both sides without pushing myself into my character's mind and just accepting them. Both sides of issues like hedonism/moderation and government/anarchy are quite accessible, and that's the type of thing that lends to great and passionate IC debates.

I think where a big part of the problem comes from is Gaudiguch. Gaudi is, or for a long time WAS, so mired in spectacularly pointless internal disputes, contestations, etc that they weren't directing anything outwards. The release of the Illuminati was their chance to attract and galvanise a bunch of compelling players, but those players instead drifted away. You can have the best basis for existing ever, but if you don't have the players, nothing comes of it.

I also hang some of this on Gaudiguch being designed with such a heavy emphasis on the drink/drug culture, which attracted a laaarge number of people who enjoy roleplaying being super wasted and not a lot else, leading to the vox pops drowning out the leadership.

Absolutely not. The Institute doesn't care one whit about philosophy. Psychology, maybe, but not philosophy. That's the Aeromancers you should be thinking of, with our emphasis on clear thought, and the five schools of philosphy.

Other than that, you make some excellent points. There are a lot of sources of potential tension, but nothing to enforce, "We hate you, always and forever."

Edit: Except the bit about Paradox/Crucible. That's a none issue. Our mobs tell us that its been modified since the last time, so that won't happen again. I can only assume you guys have something similar. Since both sides have used it now, it's obvious that there's no problem with them.

Natural philosophy refers to the study of the natural world and how it worked before modern science. It's not 'philosophy' in the sense you're thinking of.

I would agree that the Institute is heavy on the natural philosophy department.

Where is that in the other orgs, though?

I can see how you might think that, but as I understand it, their natural science department is pretty small. People would rather mess with time.

@Everiine You don't see that with Light/Taint at least? I can see how Serenwilde could justify having a neutral stance at the very least regarding the Wyrd, and Glomdoring doesn't really care about ideologies, as long as they can use it for their own ends. But the Light is most certainly vehemently opposed to the Taint. That doesn't mean they can't justify working together, but it will still be very strained. I was around during Hai'Gloh, I remember how that was. Even though we were working together against the forests, we were by no means allies. There were still open hostilies and trade bans in place. Magnagorans were only allowed in the city under very limited circumstances. It was understood to be a very temporary thing, that would fall apart the moment the forests stopped working together.

Oh, there's quite a few people who like the natural sciences, if for no other reason than it lets them play that "look at me, I'm so callous, I like to dissect baby seals!" card.

I think Shamarah hit the nail on the head. There are great differences, but they point more in a direction of ideological and philosophical conflicts than constant military conflicts. They do not themselves justify war directly; and the strain of finding justifications to choose, time and again, warfare, as the means of expressing the differences, is hard to sustain.

Did not know Iytha was a lesswrong reader

There are some parallels between Gaudiguch and the Aeromancers that I know at least a few people have picked up on ICly...and I love it when they do! I'm a huge nerd for situations where two things that seem radically different are very similar, just seen through a different lens.

It would be a lie to say it wasn't somewhat intentional. Really, it started out when we had philosophy dropped onto us as our ideal, but we still had no direction. Why are we philosophers? What are we trying to do? I struggled with it, feeling like it was purposeless and I was never going to get into it, when I decided we need a goal. And to me, that goal should be the perfection of thought (sound like "enlightenment" to anyone?), obtaining a clear mind through philosophy, art, and science, and understanding the different ways they make you look at the world, to expand one's potential for considering life, etc etc.

The idea hasn't completely permeated throughout the Aeromancers yet, but if you ask Phoebus to talk about it she'll give a whole big schpiel on how important it is to think about things from all sorts of angles. Philosophical discussions tend to get into challenging one's perceptions of reality, but unlike paradigmatics, we don't seek to change reality- we seek to redefine it to ourselves in the many truthful ways it can be defined. Understanding that there is not always One Correct Answer to every question, and that finding the truth doesn't necessarily mean scientifically dissecting every inch of the world scientifically, are important qualities for an Aeromancer.

I love my guild. <3

One aspect of the conflict is the racial hate. Lucidians are weak against fire, which the dracnari produce and love. They both fight over whose race actually produced Tzaraziko. And that tidbit in the histories about the how "cold bastards those lucidians are".

I actually love the Cold War parallel between Halliax/Gaudiguch and US/USSR. There's conflicting ideology, mutually assured destruction and rapid advancement in the face of conflict.

My ideal situation of Hallifax vs Gaudiguch conflict would be non-confrontational. Think of the space race between US and USSR, of ideological and philosophical 'war' and of huge discussion in which both sides claim that they won the debate.

Violent conflict, on the other hand, can be easily explained in just four words: 'They did it first.' And by both sides too, because memory is always selective.

And the trill are friends with both of them, but they're the lucidians' girlfriend, so things kind of get tense sometimes.

You might be missing the scope of the argument, actually. Philosophical discussions can not only challenge one's perceptions of reality, but whether or not an independent reality even actually exists at all. You seem to be assuming that it does and that Hallifax and Gaudiguch simply view that reality differently, which may not be the case.

Nah, I'm not saying they're exactly the same, just that there are some parallels.

In many ways, WWI was actually the worse conflict. In fact, if it wasn't for the genocide during WWII (of which there was quite a lot going on in WWI as well) and the fact that the US was attacked directly, I'm not so sure everyone would collectively remember WWII as the worst. To put it in perspective, let's look at the statistics:



And this is only soldiers. I can't find any verifiable data for the amount of people killed in the United Kingdom, but a common saying is that "Everyone in the UK alive today has at least one ancestor who died in the Great War". Whether this is true, I can't say, but it certainly comes close. Aside from the soldiers, civillian casualties during WWI were absolutely staggering, in between starvation, blokkades, and a collection of infectious diseases. The high estimate of casualties during WWI is 65,000,000 people killed. While the highest total estimate for WWII is higher (72,000,000), I think to put the fact that we haven't had a WWIII down to the fact that there were nuclear bombs is a wild and unsupportable statement.

Now, there is a point to all this yabbering. After all, the Great War wasn't started to eradicate the taint, nor to save the world, it was started because Das Kaiserlich Deutsches Reich had such a fancy army standing around that they felt like trying out. It was supposed to be a quick conflict with a few exchanges of territory. The chain-reaction of protection pacts then caused half the world to suddenly be involved (mostly because Germany decided to take a short-cut through Belgium, which then turned out to have an all-but forgotten protection pact with the United Kingdom, it's quite interesting really). During WWI, there was a complete breakdown of communications, which caused the war to go on long past the point where anyone was interested in fighting.

In summary, Hallifax and Gaudiguch is probably the most realistic conflict out there: it's an ongoing war sparked by an escalating situation build upon generations of mutual dislike and misunderstanding. There's ups and downs, but neither organisation is going to back down at this point.

Can we have a like button?

On the subject of seekrit parallels:

Iytha brought up that the Institute and the Illuminati have very different ways of working with and releasing information; the Institute tends to publish it for public consumption (even if it subtly adjusts the reading level so it's not exactly public, per se) while the Illuminati tends to keep it for its own use. Simplification, yes, but! The Institute actually secretly does do a bit of the keeping of the information for its own use, or at least for Hallifax's own use. That's what we've got a classification system for, even if it's mostly 'let me BS a classification level that sounds cool enough for this.' So there are a lot more similarities than either would like to admit, which is what makes it fun.

I understand that the political differences between the two would cause "enmity" but as others have said they are rather minor things that do not really cause bloodlust for the other. The fact that Hallifax likes things orderly and works by a communist type system and that Gaudiguch enjoys being frivolous and works by a more democratic (if at times anarchic) system, doesn’t seem like such a grand reason for the two to be mortal enemies and anathema to the other. If anything, it seems they would more just ignore the other.

I also agree that Mag/Celest and Seren/Glom have more theological and religious reasons which make them to be enemies and rivals, and if we have learnt anything in our history it is that religious disputes are the most reckless and bloodthirsty and never resolve themselves peacefully if at all. Considering political disputes, they are not as overly large and have as much meaning (and even then, Gaudiguch and Hallifax don’t exactly seem to despise each other's political systems, just simply don’t favor them). I am the type that favors more theological and religious issues between orgs, for I feel it more promotes a sort of core basis for the two to always be challenging one another.

To those that brought up the Projects Paradox and Crucible, these were simply two elements placed in the game to try and promote the idea that Hallifax and Gaudiguch are rivals, yet in the end it does not exactly clarify the reason for their to be rivalries to begin with, which was the main point for this discussion. I also still remain on the point that I have -no- idea exactly how Vortex is against/anathema to Continuum and how/why the fleshpots hate the spheres and spheres hate the fleshpots. You can see this with Celestia and Nil, as they are pretty much polar opposites in every way and their endeavors (bring souls to the light vs consuming/corrupting souls). Same with Seren and Glom, Moon is about nurturing and helping nature grow forth in its natural state, while Night is about enslaving nature and binding it to her Wyrd ways (or some such). I believe this to also be an important reason why rivalry is rather vague between the two.