Worldbuilding and Failed Industrial Revolutions · 7:24am Jan 8th, 2017
But first, totallynotabrony's version of dreamwalker Cherie., getting ready to pounce on Woona or da Captain 
So, my back-brain insists on doing the worldbuilding equivalent of book-keeping and stamp-collecting instead of letting me get on with, you know, plot. Namely, it's time to talk about Rime, and why they're not doing anything more with all of that iron and steel and other ores pouring into that great city from the fringes of the northlands. Rime has all the elements to be a new London.
But she won't be.
Tambelon looks like a progressive wonderland of governance from the limited view-point of a demi-anarchist mercenary doctor like Sawbones, because all he can see is the laissez faire, but it's what he can't see that's going to make all the difference. And those beautiful Roads that he loves so much are merely the most visible signs of the ways in which the Bride's empire is set up to fail. Military roads are impressive, and thrilling marvels of construction, but the way they're funded - or not funded - and their opportunity costs and displacement of more efficient and economic forms of transportation is badly distorting the development of the country.
Rime's got all the elements to start laying down rail, and knitting together her back-country into a single unified economic market. But she's not doing it. The Imperial government thinks solely of Roads, and insofar as there's any sort of independent private economic community, they're focused on canals. Not grand, sprawling canals - except for the limited project which is the Rime-Rima Canal that's kept the Imperial Field Army active and immobile on the lower Rima for a decade and a half - but little industrial canals within Rime, and a few tendrils extending out into individual latifundia in the immediate vicinity of the great city itself.
Because the legal system of Tambelon is still exclusively feudal, and medieval, and inflexible. There are no limited-liability instruments, no corporations, no corporation law, no joint stock or other ways to share and control risk. And the Bride's debt structuring looks more like that of the Habsburgs than that of Hanoverian England.
If the main OCs of In the Company of Night were voiced, what would they sound like?
4427817 Sawbones *wants* to sound like Sack, who is basically voiced by Dennis Haysbert. But he actually sounds like Alan Alda with a slight accent. Feufollet sounds kinda like a very young Frankee Potenta.
Cherie... hard to say, but I think maybe Marie Nonnenmacher?