Occult Crescent speculation

[Cleretic]

Resurrecting this because the Occult Crescent is out now, and has a lot to unpack! Which I know at least for me is a reason for silence for a while; there's a lot to digest.

First of all, hitting the actual story. I'm not 100% done yet (still waiting for Calamity Bound), but here's what I've got.

So, the Occult Crescent is essentially a big weird Museum of the Fifth Astral Era, made by most-likely-Archive to preserve what they were before they blew each other up. Reasonably this probably happened after Bitoso hit Nym but before the entire place got dunked in a flood, but we don't have a clear timeline. However, there might be more to things than just Archive.

However, this does mean that we're not exactly looking at a settlement of any kind: everything was essentially constructed to illustrate what the civilizations of the 5AA were doing and capable of, using their own techniques, but we're not seeing whole groups.

As for the stuff we've learned about the 5AA so far:

So, the major discovery is another civilization: Karnak! Karnak's named after the city from FFV that had the Fire Crystal, but what we have mostly suggests that they were roughly Mesopotamian in terms of aesthetic, with turbans and ziggurats. For what it's worth, when I combine 'FFV' and 'turbans' I land on Mystic Knight, who aren't currently present anywhere in the game. They were also a magical civilization, but interestingly, Archive at least in English places Karnak outside of the 5AA's 'twelve city-states'. I wouldn't be confident about that without looking at other languages, though. The Occult Record seems to hint that Karnak worshipped Nald'thal, and more as a god of the forge than modern perceptions of 'the god of commerce'; more Hephaestus rather than Plutus.

Someone has actually suggested to me that 'the twelve city-states' might actually be a grouping more than a numbering, similar to Norse mythology's 'nine realms'; if you actually count the realms in Norse myth there's more than nine. In that case we might not actually be looking at a set-in-stone, concrete group of twelve.

As for the civilizations we already knew about, we don't get a lot of clear info, but of what we do have, Skalla's probably the biggest one: Treasure Tortoise of all sources confirms that they had 'mighty mages', but wasn't really specific beyond that. From there, I'd actually put forward that our best intel are the Phantom Jobs: so far, we have twelve.

• Knight
• Monk
• Thief
• Samurai
• Berserker
• Ranger
• Time Mage
• Chemist
• Geomancer
• Bard
• Oracle
• Cannoneer

I feel like it's probably fair to narrow Skalla's input on this down to the explicit magic jobs: Time Mage, Geomancer, Oracle, and maybe Chemist. Twelve jobs would reliably sync up to 'the twelve city-states' (if there were indeed twelve), but none of them explicitly sync up with anything we already know about the 5AA civs, so who can say.