It's illegal for a mortal to look a Dragon-Blooded in the eye. "I'm not mortal, I'm an Anathema!" is probably not the best defense against this charge.
Thorns doesn't have long-term incarceration or other expensive punishments. Violations are fines, torture (e.g., beating), or death. Many crimes result in the punishment of an entire family.
There are three currency systems: silver, backed by the Guild, and jade coin and jade scrip, backed by the Realm. The ruling family endorses the latter. Jade is too precious to be dealt with by most people: a peasant family's entire annual income is about two jade obols (coins the size of a quarter). Jade scrip is paper or copper currency denominated in tiny fractions of an obol.
Socially, it's an insult to pay a Dragon-Blooded in anything but jade, the state doesn't accept silver for payment of taxes, it's borderline illegal for a mortal to posess jade coinage, and the Guild will happily take anything for payment but does charge small conversion fees on anything but its own coinage.
It's illegal in the Realm for mortals to be literate without a savant's license.
Dragon-Blooded take their Daiklaves to dinner and to bed: it's an honored companion, and therefore an insult to attempt to disarm a Dragon Blooded. Armor is a bit more of a sign that you're going to start something, but mostly OK.
A single Jade Daiklave costs about as much as a trireme, its entire crew, and provisions for a year. These are major military hardware. Smuggling Daiklaves is like smuggling Abrams tanks. Smuggling anything larger --- like a Warstrider --- is like trying to smuggle an aircraft carrier. Much easier, obviously, but about the same in the eyes of the law and society. Dragon-Blooded basically get to do what they want with military hardware.
Demons, similarly, are regarded as major military equipment of the other side. So demon summoning isn't just smuggling nukes. It's smuggling surplus Russian nukes with "Glory be to Allah" scribbled on the side into Boston. No, it isn't legal anywhere civilized. Even the Dragon-Blooded have to register as sorcerers with the Empress, and are responsible for any damage from the demons they summon.
The language "Old Realm" is the fantastically complicated and technically precise language of, well, the Old Realm. It is written into reality at a very fundamental level --- most demons and spirits understand it, even if not technically sentient. Its vocabulary is about the size of English. Almost nobody speaks it. A few hundred genius savants can read it well, and a few thousand sorcerer-technicians can read "This side towards enemy. Do not eat." or "Unleaded fuel only." Unless you're a God or something even weirder, this is not your native language.
Low Realm is a debased langauge very distantly descended from Old Realm. It's actually about a dozen different languages, more or less akin to Cantonese, Schezuan, etc. Its vocabulary is smaller overall, and much much smaller in technical areas (sorcery, engineering, architecture, mathematics). This is the native language of most people on the Blessed Isle.
High Realm is a semi-synthetic regularized dialect of that debased language. Think "Mandarin." There are formal pronunciation and spelling guides for about 3000 words, which combined with "The Empress' Tongue" (that is, however the Big Gal pronounces things) are the language of the Court and the Bureaucracy. Thorns, being a good little subjugated province, also uses High Realm for administrative matters. This is not anybody's native language.
Rivertongue is another debased language, distantly descended from Old Realm. Just like Low Realm, only it's the family common in the Scavenger Lands, around Nexus, Great Forks, Lookshy, Sijan, and, yes, Thorns. This is probably the native language of most PCs.
Flametongue, Watertongue, Airtongue / Icetongue, and Woodtongue / Leaftongue also exist, and are the language families of the four cardinal directions. There may be other more rare languages --- ask me if you have a high enough Linguistics that you think you might have heard of them.
I need to write and doodle some on the ExpectedCourseOfTheWar and on IntegratingLexiconBackgroundWithGame. Players may wish to avoid that text to avoid metagaming problems. Alternately, they may wish to jump in and use that to contribute to the storyline of game.
Most (probably not Iselsi, maybe not Nellens) of the GreatHouse s of the Empire have... byblows, cadet branches, related families, marriages they wish they didn't make. But they're not about to let valuable resources go to waste. So each GreatHouse puts these people aside and takes its name back, and the ultimate descendants of these unwanted people who won't be let go is a TailHouse. For example, HouseSugata is a TailHouse of HouseTepet.
Clearly, I need to put together a TimeLine
Children of the Dynasty attend a primary school for the first decade of their lives, and a secondary school for the next. DragonBlooded Dynasts attend one of four SecondarySchools.