(04-16-2014, 05:54 AM)JFrombaugh Wrote: 1. So for purposes of RPing, would it be acceptable for a Player Character Scholar to be more or less just your typical healer? Could they still be an Adventurer and/or work for the Scions rather than the Maelstrom/Yellowjackets?
Undoubtedly. Since Scholars don't technically exist anymore, they would not be bound in any way to service Limsa unless your character made that commmitment. A huge part of the Scholar quest is going around and healing people. Your character would be free to travel to and maybe make a home in any of the city-states. I think so long as there's some connection to Nym in Miranda's past, no one will question your art.
(04-16-2014, 05:54 AM)JFrombaugh Wrote: 4. The war Nym partook in involved magical warfare, which is partly why it was so amazing that its army of Marauders with no magical training managed to hold their own. Do you think it's possible that many of the "would-be conquerers" Nym repelled were actually WHMs and BLMs from the days before those magics were banned?
Well, the way I see it, there would be nothing more terrifying to a mage than a mad-man with an axe charging at them wearing heavy armor.
As for Nym's contemporaries, it is believed that the nations of Nym and Amdapor were the 5th Astral Era equivalents to the modern day Limsa and Gridania.
We know that Nym possessed marauder legions led by arcanimian tacticians called Scholars and their faeries. And we know that Amdapor was a nation of White Mages. It's never expressed, but given the time period, we can either assign Black Magic to the Thanalan 5AE civilization or handwave the art as a commonplace magic practiced throughout Eorzea. Both are plausible. If the former, we can assume that Amdapor and the nation that built Qarn (who are actually very close neighbors geographically) were in a near constant state of war. Whether or not Nym was engulfed in this power struggle between magicks, I can't say.
(04-16-2014, 05:54 AM)JFrombaugh Wrote: 5. In one of the quests it's confirmed that Scholars took on the role of doctors during times of peace. To me this suggests that most of them were probably very friendly and peaceful folks, because if they were warmongers, wouldn't their activities during peacetime involve coming up with battle plans to invade neighboring city states and expand Nym as a whole?
Hehe, I wouldn't describe all doctors as friendly or peaceful people. I'd say such qualities, as well as warmongering, are qualities best used to describe an individual and can't really be attributed to an entire profession of people. There were probably quite a few bad eggs who would like nothing more than to invade other nations.
Considering the lack of actual historical data on the 5AE nations, it's hard to make these kinds of calls. Nym could have very well tried to invade other nations or wiped other civilizations off the map and we're just not aware of it.
I can't really answer Q2 or Q3. Both insights seem plausible to me. I think these are just some things you need to decide for your character or for your story. If this is even relevant to your character or are you just being curious? They are good questions though, but unfortunately not ones that can really be answered by anything but opinion. Although, after this thread and the last one about Miranda, I'm quite excited to see how she turns out! She sounds like she's going to be an interesting character.
