Interesting Tangent
A great deal of the primary war that consumes Enteria throughout the many loops is inspired by World War 1. You can see that in how artillery (which was a much bigger killer than machine guns) figures prominently in attacks. Spell carts with shield engines take the place of early tanks, while remote whisper spells take the place of phone lines. Airships take the place of planes, while trenches take the place of... actually, no change there. Trenches are the eternal, irreplaceable technology of planet-based warfare.
Another part of WW1, though, was the development and deployment of mass propaganda and the creation of a war fever that reached incredible heights. Explaining to a population that the enemy is evil barbarians and that your forces are fighting for some higher cause isn't new, but WW1 saw advancements in how to effectively do that. A great deal of my thinking on that in this series comes from To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion by Hochschild, which I only vaguely remember because I read it at least a decade ago, but parts of it have stuck in my brain. In short, going along with the war became very easy; opposing it became like trying to push back the ocean. I tried to reproduce the same phenomenon in Enteria, thinking about what forces would be pushing for a war, and what it would take to actually stop it. How does one stop the power of a nation state when that state has decided war is in its best interest?
Another bit of inspiration, though, came from The Histories by Tacitus; when I was reading it, I was struck by how prominently conspiracies figured in shifting power and proclaiming new emperors and the complexities of events. Quite fun to imagine how a time traveler might have been able to manipulate things.
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