Autumn Court

The Autumn Court is led by the Uvaran Archdruid and the Council of Six - a group of six high priests who serve as the primary power holders in the Court. While the Archdruid can make executive decisions and issue powerful edicts, the Council's full consensus is required for any significant changes in doctrine or policy.    Beneath this, the Court is divided into:

• High Priests, veteran druids and clerics from whom the Council of Six are drawn; often serve as judges and handle the appointment and regulation of Rosgen 
• Autumn Clergy, established and respected members of the Autumn bureaucracy and clergy
• Autumn Orderlies, priests who are well-established as priests but are lower on the ranks of the Court itself
• Autumn Acolytes, lower-level bureaucrats and priests of the Court, who do most of the grunt work 
• Autumn Initiates, more entry level Acolytes

Within these ranks, there are a number of sub-departments within the Court that a person may be assigned to. These are called "Chambers", and the lines between them can be porous depending on position and rank. 

• The Chamber of Justice, which handles the judicial courts and investigations
• The Chamber of Devotion, which handles clerical appointments - who is a priest where - and staffing
• The Chamber of Glory, which handles Honors, noble moral advisement, and charitable efforts
• The Chamber of Wisdom, which handles magic, ritual questions, and spiritual interface with either local spirits or the Lunar Pantheon 
• The Chamber of Dedication, which handles Questing and monastic administration
• The Chamber of Temperance, which handles record keeping and budgeting

Each Chamber has a different member of the Council of Six overseeing it, and a different monumental building in the Court structure itself.    Archdruid Hodrik DevHauzen is the old archdruid of Hain. He is a man of piety, who lives an ascetic and disciplined life even in his age; he is also, unsurprisingly, a stressed out and exhausted man often described behind closed doors as "Old Haggard Hodrik". Hodrik is an intense spiritualist, popular among orthodox theologians and deviant mystics alike. He is disillusioned with the material world - and, not so quietly disillusioned with the priesthood as well. Hodrik is a skilled druid whose reign has been one of general efficiency.   Hodrik has had his fair share of problems, though. For one, his ascetic tendencies have rocked quite a few boats in the clergy and made him a number of enemies. To add to that, he has not been quite about his disdain for nobles he does not feel live up to Hainish standards of moral behavior, making him even more enemies. And, while Hodrik is generally competent with administration, he inherited a severe staffing problem from the prior archdruid that has caused priest shortages and corruption problems that Hodrik has had to work overtime to try and solve. And not all of these problems have been solved - the archives and clerical centers of research have been allowed to fall into disarray, for example. And his constant political battles has normalized a culture of backstabbing and open political skirmishing throughout the upper priesthood.   While Hodrik is a fine enough archdruid, many in the upper clergy are starting to get ready for the next election once he dies. Whether this will be a messy, partisan affair or a clean transition is yet to be seen.

There is much to this history, but this shall be brief.    The Autumn Court was established by the Starlit Assembly of 1201, a grand convention of early Uvaran priests and monks to organize their religion into a uniform and mutually supportive body. This early Autumn Court had little power and material authority, and was weak even within Hain; it was more of a moral and symbolic force than anything. It was after the Fourth Scouring, in the 1440s and 1450s, that the Autumn Court truly began to expand as a vehicle for rebuilding a shattered and war-torn continent. These temporary measures crystallized into permanent shifts in a series of major religious reforms issued in 1480 by the Archdruid Wilgen Greatwolf. The bureaucracy was built, though still was mostly relegated to Hain and was, for many decades, more focused on policing moral behavior than actually managing personnel and projecting power.   As Hain rose as a serious regional power from 1480 to 1690, so did the Autumn Court. It was a slow expansion of clerical domains, but eventually the Court was able to project power into Uvaran communities in Hain's rival empire, the Empire of Kizen. Hainish nobles and foreign warlords fought back, of course; nobles tried to use their own monastic orders to centralize religious power around themselves, while the Kivish sought to make their own Uvaran puppet-church. Organized religious institutions were still a foreign concept in Stildane, and thre Autumn Court was not welcome in most political circles. It was the Fifth Scouring (1690 - 1750), another apocalyptic war, that enabled the Autumn Court to ascend to its current position as international religious authority. Hain had become a hereditary, semi-centralized monarchy during the war, led by King Volstr DevHauzen and then his son Sandor DevHauzen from 1750 to 1800. The DevHauzens, desperate to try and tie the decentralized feudal kingdom into a more unified and effective state, leaned on the Autumn Court as a bureaucratic arm of the royal government. The Autumn Court blossomed and expanded significantly. Archdruid Ginshka Dezuren (r. 1775 to 1797) was the original royal collaborator and architect of the modern Autumn Court bureaucracy, who embraced this vision of the Autumn Court as a fundamental connective force in Hainish politic unification. But Ginshka's successor, Archdruid Gollara Hugelma, was skeptical of the program and unwilling to defend the monarch from scandal. Archdruid Gollara led the Autumn Court away from royal control - while keeping the expanded personnel and role that her predecessor had embraced.   The autonomous Autumn Court was still a deeply Hainish institution, and continued to be dragged into royal intrigue. In 1838, the Archdruid launched a smear campaign against the royal family and sought to position the Court in a superior position - only to be assassinated in 1841. Kings and princes would continue to try and interfere with the upper politics of the Court - House Savadan was caught bribing and cajoling High Priests to rig the Archdruidic election in 2000 ME.    While the Court may face constant interference from secular leaders, it has continued to embed itself further into secular politics as well. Over the 1900s, the Autumn Court has solidified its position as the supreme judiciary body; the Chamber of Justice not only handles moral law, but influences even supposedly secular Hainish courts and legal processes.