(04-16-2014, 11:29 AM)Sounsyy Wrote:The quest text for the Sunken Temple of Qarn calls Belah'dia a Sixth Astral Era civilization, so it probably wouldn't have been a neighbor to Amdapor. We really don't know much about the political landscape of the Fifth Astral Era--maybe because they kept blowing each other up or destroying themselves.(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, Amdapor, and Belah'dia were the 5th Astral Era equivalents to the modern day Limsa, Gridania, and Ul'dah.
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 Belah'dia or handwave the art as a commonplace magic practiced throughout Eorzea. Both are plausible. If the former, we can assume that Amdapor and Belah'dia (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.
It's not at all unlikely that the ones attempting to conquer Nym were White Mages at least (Thaumaturges and Black Mages both also being possibilities), if the conquerors were from Aldernard. However, all the resources I've found about the Sixth Era denote their decadence and hubris, but not much in the way of warlike tendencies. I could be wrong, though.
Finally, if I recall correctly, the Scholar quests suggested that the thing that made Nym's armies the most terrifying and formidable to their enemies was the fact that, on top of being an army of mad men with axes and armor, they were also shielded with magic that both absorbed damage and healed them.
