Soviet Tawatinsuyu, Diabloliberalism, and Tocquevillian Genocidaires: an Arcadian Gazeteer

[Matthias W]

These are all from the notes I'm sending my players for our upcoming campaign, which is set in Arcadia, Gorlarion's faux-Americas. Maybe they're of interest to someone else, maybe not, I have no idea! Presumably will be expanded on as players riff on and explore things.

New Cheliax is the assumed default location, which is why it's detailed a little more.

New Cheliax:

Formerly Varnland, an Ulfar colony, New Cheliax is the primary foothold of the devil-worshipping empire of Cheliax in Arcadia, and divided between four main groups: the Tlecaxanas, who ruled most of the land originally, and who now live primarily as serfs (for most of them, this isn’t vastly different than before the conquest); the Tulita [nb - yes, the Razor Coast Tulita, I think the region fits well in this setting], also original the area, but traditionally a seafaring rather than agricultural people; the Ulfar, its first Avistani conquerers; and the Chelish, who are currently in charge. Through their for-profit chartered government, the East Arcadia Company, the latter are interested in serious capitalist development: expanding the reach of state structures, laying down public works, concentrating slaves into latifunda to export cash crops and rare minerals, ending economically irrational abuses of the Tlecaxana majority, and so on. The Ulfar, by contrast, largely settled with the intent of achieving unlimited personal freedom, with each head of household ruling some homestead absolutely, answerable neither to slaves and family nor to any government. Many of the former Tlexcala ruling classes (nobles, priests, various forms of bureaucrats) are interested in regaining some manner of privilege by signing onto the Chelish state-building project, while others are plotting to rally the masses along nationalist lines against the foreign conquerors. The Tulita live along the southern Razor Coast, which was never very developed, and still maintain a degree of independence, though their whaling and fishing have been heavily disrupted, and many have fallen victim to slaving.

New Cheliax is mostly hot and wet; its big population centers – Canorus, Port Shaw, and Anchor’s End - as well as the center of Chelish wealth and power, are on its Western seaboard. Large sections of the interior were heavily irrigated, deforested and populated in Tlecaxana days, but decades of war and conquest (the League of Four, Ulfar, and then Chelish) have reversed these achievements, with the former canals no longer navigable, the jungles taking back their ancient claim, and former great metropolises inhabited only by bandit lords, the dead (whether of the traditional or ambulatory kind,) and gods know what. The EAC is currently dispersing funds to reclaim these, both for their inherent economic potential and because rebels are using them as a base of operations.

New Cheliax is where I’m assuming we’ll start.

The Tlecaxana

There never was a Tlecaxana Empire as such; only a large area settled and developed by a network of city-states united (and occasionally divided) by trade, religion, and (mostly) similar social structure. Most cities were aristocratic republics, with the dominant ideology prescribing a class of helots working the outlying land, a class of sorcerous-blooded warriors enjoying a franchise (used to vote for a noble subset), and a class of priests producing high culture and staffing permanent bureaucracies. However, this caste system was loose and informal, with people moving between groups not infrequently as well as additional categories not fitting into the normative three-fold distinction – personal slaves, peripatetic merchants, people (working, fighting, administering) but not socially in the “correct” caste, ritually untouchable people, and a growing group of urban laborers. And although in theory the helots were bound to cities, in practice particular warrior-nobilary families had and could trade rights to their produce (although these rights could not usually be sold to those outside the city.)

At the time of the Ulfar invasion, a group called the League of Four (after the four cities constituting the core of the alliance) was attempting to unite the Tlecaxanas in to a true empire; led by the dread archmage Tatlanco and her puppet kings, the League won quick military victories along with universal enmity by allying itself with the powers of the Abyss. When the Ulfar came with magics previously unknown to Arcadia, they found ready allies against the demon state, and rapidly established control.

The boundaries between the Tlecaxana and Tulita are mostly politics and economics: the Tlecaxana never developed very advanced naval technology, and so found policing the archipelago along the Razor Coast difficult, and so for centuries, helots fleeing for the southern coast would join the Tulita, while captured Tulita would be enserfed as Tlecaxana helots.

Pretty much everyone is aware of the potential parallels between the demon-worshipping wizard-queen Tatlanco and the devil-worshipping sorcerer-queen Abrogail. Depending on one’s opinions of the League and of Cheliax, these can be played up or down.

The Ulfar

The Ulfar came with no serf caste of their own – for them, every adult was a warrior, and they lived off the work of foreigners. Although there were nobles among the Ulfar, these were acknowledged primi inter pares who were particularly successful at collecting booty or adjudicating disputes and established patronage networks on that basis – no one was bound to their jarl except by money and personal affection, which successful ones managed to get a lot of.

When this warrior nation took over, they split into two groups – the new nobility (with their retainers) and the independents. The new nobility, consisting mostly of the most successful jarls, married into noble Tlecaxana families, blending Ulfar and Tlecaxana methods of rule and economic extraction, sometimes very awkwardly; those who stayed as their retainers merged to some extent with the native warrior class. The independents cashed out, collecting grants in land and slaves from their jarls, and set themselves up as petty freeholders. Between this conquest and the Chelaxians’, a number of additional Ulfar came from Avistan to settle along the independents’ lines, but other than this, there was very little economic or demographic development. Accepting the analogy of farming folk as hives of honey, the land’s new masters were bears, not beekeepers, and spent most of the surplus they got feuding with one another. They also consolidated their rule, and further hobbled the economy and effective governance, with extensive purges of the clerical caste, aided by ambitious young priests looking for openings and a population that was rightly terrified of demonolatry.

The Chelish

The area was then ripe for conquest again, and Cheliax, with its large, professional, and well-outfitted military, was in just the position to do so. Early on, it established several port towns and chartered the East Arcadia Company as a monopolist over trade with the coast, but as Company agents came into better knowledge of the mainland’s potential, Crown and Company came to the conclusion that they needed to expand from the sphere of exchange to the sphere of production and establish effective control over the interior. The strategy is:
• Establish a state which is strong and competent enough to prevent pointless violence, protect property rights from ordinary and social banditry as well as coastal piracy, and enforce contracts (the last of which being, after all, an important obligation in the Asmodean religion)
• Transition from an economy based on slave-catching and the consumption of an agricultural surplus by nonproductive warriors and priests to one oriented towards the export of mithril, chocolate, cocaine, and tobacco
• Reform the complex set of rights and obligations that prevails, especially in agriculture, into salable property rights that are simple enough to adjudicate; convert helots, serfs, and free peasants either into free (but landless) agricultural laborers or chattel slaves
• Restore and expand on the physical infrastructure of the Tlecaxana period, as noted above
• Recruit adequate labor to these tasks, whether by breaking down traditional prejudices about what work is “honorable” for any particular person (Ulfar warrior, Tlecaxana priest, whatever) or by importing skilled and/or cheap labor (free, indentured, or slave) from the Old World

All of these projects are in full swing – already achieving results, though far from completed. The colony has transformed from slave-exporting to slave-importing, plantations are springing up, and the Company has no serious attempts to challenge its military dominance near major roads and rivers (though the zone where it has accurate information is much smaller.) The coastal cities are booming, flush with money and men in search of it. The newcomers are regarded as “Chelish” by Tlecaxana, Ulfar, and each other, regardless of their actual country of origin, and they share a common outlook: materialistic, ready to take on risks, practical.

It is the Company, not the Crown, that calls the shots throughout the Colony on a daily basis, although if the government of Cheliax decided that the Company was acting contrary to its interests, that would rapidly change. The East Arcadia Company is a genuine joint-stock company acting as a state, with power to make and enforce law anywhere on Arcadia it can make that effective; its trading monopoly is backed by the Chelish merchant marine; and a very sizable proportion of the coastal population is directly indentured to it. Most of the Company is owned by noble and merchant houses in the metropole, but there is substantial creole investment as well, and well-to-do colonists generally expect each other to be shareholders as a sign of commitment to it; “shareholder meetings” are frequently the New Chelish form of local government.

Thrunic Free State:

The other foothold of Chelish power in the New World, the Abrogailic Free State is not a colony of Cheliax itself but a personal possession of its monarch, Abrogail II Thrune. Queen Abrogail operates her jungle claim strictly as a charitable and missionary venture; rumors that it’s simply a giant killing field where men and women are rounded up and sacrificed to archdevils to fuel some secret project of the sorcerer-queen are entirely groundless. What could possibly have suggested that???

The TFS is to the west of New Cheliax.

New Andoran:

Andoran colonists, like their counterparts in Avistan, believe in democracy and freedom. The colony has very little in the way of central government, and is certainly not taking any orders from Andoran itself, but local government is very strong indeed – citizens take active part in vigorous, raucous town hall meetings where they demand accountability and the highest of standards from anyone in a position of responsibility (usually chosen by lot, although sometimes by election.)

Just as in politics, in economics too the Andoran colonists believe in a strong combination of self-sufficiency with egalitarianism, with every family provided enough land to take care of their own needs and maybe sell a little extra at the market, or capital enough to run a small trade – the thought of being dependent upon a government, or a private employer, is odious to them. For that reason, too, slavery, serfdom, and every kind of personal dependency other than that of children to parents (and even there, children can get away with a lot) is vigorously uprooted. Men and women are equal; and if you preface your name with a noble title you’ll get laughed at, if not run out of town. The New Andorans tend to despise privileges and luxuries, taking pride in being hard farmers rather than soft city slaves, but are otherwise a fun-loving lot: they appreciate earthy humor, blasphemous jokes, public dances, and a good stiff drink.

If you ask a New Andoran how they keep this society, to which they are so strongly attached, they’ll say it depends on two key factors:
• A continuing supply of available land (and New Andorans, whose working folk are probably healthier and better-fed than those anywhere else, have a lot of children,)
• A population who loves liberty over luxury and will do anything to protect it (and New Andorans do not regard other cultures as liberty-loving)

The Andorans, then, wage a constant war of expansion. They take no prisoners: that would simply be an incentive to create a new class of slaves, after all, as in so many conquests in history. Instead, they simply wipe out whomever lacks the good sense to flee. Since life without liberty is worse than death, and no one other than they are free, they like to claim (whether sincerely or cynically) that this is a favor.

New Andoran is mostly cleared temperate forest and to the north of New Cheliax.

Welenia Confederacy:

The Welenia were once the most renowned (and enthusiastic) makers of war in Arcadia – until they, or at least several important factions among them, got tired of it. Since then, they’ve adopted a number of institutions to keep themselves largely pacific – institutions that have served them incredibly poorly in a time of potential conquest. More hawkish elements among them will likely soon have their day.

Like their New Andoran enemies, the Welenia are decentralized and democratic – so democratic, in fact, that the dead can vote (through the interpretation of Welenia’s powerful necromancers.) Unlike the Andorans, they are not individualists, and extended kinship networks are of prime political, social, and economic importance. Traditionally, women were regarded as having authority in times of peace as men in war; with the “permanent peace,” most power in practice is in the hands of older women, who, with the system of matrilocal exogamy in place, sit in the most dense positions within the kinship networks that govern their society, and well-placed women monopolize the ranks of the necromantic cult as well. Welenia understandings of gender are fairly strict, but as a safety valve at least allow people to choose their own gender upon entering adulthood. Though free, this decision is final – once accepting the rights and obligations of manhood or womanhood, there is no reneging them.

Also unlike the Andorans, they have a form of slavery, called pawning. In former days, a clan would revenge a murder by killing a member of the offending clan; now, the blood debt is repayed by a relative of the murderer joining the new family as replacement. In theory, they take the place of the deceased with all their rights, with only such restrictions are as deemed necessary to ensure that they perform the functions necessary to act as a naturalized clan member. In practice, they are frequently socially isolated and resented. In addition, the existence of a growing market for slaves in New Cheliax means that clans are increasingly incentivized to declare pawns in violation of their duties and hence salable.

The Welenia Confederacy is dominated by temperate forests and is to the northwest of New Cheliax.

Tuquchuyani Republic:

Long ago, almost all of southern Arcadia was dominated by the Syrinx or Tuquyani – wicked owl people who, through the help of great magics, the peaceful resolution of internal conflicts, and the absolute enslavement of every people they met, created one of the most sophisticated imperial cultures the world has ever known. Then they were overthrown. The revolutionaries ditched the racial domination, while keeping the planned economy and bureaucratic apparatus, and have struggled with mixed success to hold onto the high culture.

The Tuquchuyani metaphor for their basic social contract is the “marble pavilion” – literally, a structure with no ceiling but a solid floor (as long as you don’t wander off, in which case there may be a steep drop.) In exchange for absolute obedience to her government in all things – her profession, her residence, the ideas she is exposed to, and, of course, her laying down her life in the Republic’s defense when necessary – a citizen is promised “the marble floor” (she will never be homeless, or hungry, or excluded from participation in ordinary social life) and “the open sky” (the ability to ascend as high in the bureaucracy, or other institutions of special competence, as her drive and abilities permit.) Citizens are raised in crèches by professional childrearers, and while they fall in love as fully as anyone else, there is no marriage, and couples know they can be broken apart by contrary assignments – the prospect of families and kinship networks tend to be seen as proto-racist threats to meritocracy and state unity. In practice, some of the more important bureaus and institutions have emerged as independent power bases, especially the magical academies, but so far they are able to cooperate well enough in practice.

So unlike the Andorans in terms of government power and ethnic inclusion, the Tuquchuyani are similar in their fundamental (if very different) egalitarianism – and in their conviction that their way of life is worth expanding by bloodshed if necessary. Various factions within the state apparatus are divided on whether to pursue trade or war with New Cheliax, with the stalemate currently settled on a compromise position of autarky. The doves argue that the Republic would be in a poor position to make a military confrontation, and might even be conquered itself if it is not willing to reorient its economy towards the production of cash crops for Avistani consumption (probably through New Chelish middlemen,) and are sending out feelers into the colonial business community about arrangements for mutual benefit. The hawks sense that the former Tlecaxeca hinterland is ripe for better governance and are sending out scouts there, as well as to various places in order to lessen the technology gap between themselves and the colonists. Promising contacts have already been made with the communist state of Bachuan in Tian Xia, which possesses advanced alchemical knowledge and is mostly ideologically sympatico, except on the crucial matter of religion (the Tuquchuyani being extremely pious.)

The Tuquchuyani Republic is largely tropical highlands and is to the south and southwest of New Cheliax.

Tuquyani Empire:

The Tuquyani Empire has seen better days. Although their great flying cities were impregnable to the rebels, the Syrinx could not maintain their population, much less culture, in the absence of their slaves. Today, the mostly-abandoned owl metropoles float above Arcadia in their old patterns, still bursting with scholarly as well as more base treasures, but their former inhabitants have been reduced to barbarism or pushed out by stronger, feral things. Only a small rump state remains in the far south.