[archaeolept]

I'm not going to invest much in Magic besides evocation, so I'll make it as hard as possible for everybody else.

heh, your dominion won't really affect any of the other nation's researchers, as everyone has their own scales. Drain-3 is murder.

i'd knock a couple points of productivity -you can manage. just build another castle fairly quickly.

put heat to 3 - there's normal seasonal variability, and putting to 3 will only mildly affect you, while helping to push your heat dominion in your border provinces.

maybe misfortune to 2, just for the points, since your order 3 is reducing the number of random events.

growth to 0 - machaka doesn't especially need the growth scale.

Magic to something reasonable like 1

dominion 8 - a few temples and your dominion will get up there anyways.

this should give you a couple hundred points to use in order to give your pretender a bit of magic (though the worm has expensive paths). I'd suggest giving him Air, since machaka doesn't get air magic normally. as well, your wyrm will become a mass of afflictions from taking out indies, so giving it mistform and mirror image will help quite a bit. Say air 4 .

also, you'll want to give him a ring of fire resist/burning pearl in order to protect your wyrm from the harsh effects on fatigue of the machakan heat dominion.