The story of The Nine Empires is as much a story of secret plots as it is outright war. Peeling back the first layer of conflict exposes a struggle between secret societies for control over the major factions. What I am sharing today is the first post to delve specifically into the nature and activity of these underground factions, and I'm starting out strong (i.e. not very subtle on the allegory, hence my recent query), with the chaotic summoners. Speaking of which, remember when I said that the politics in this story/wargame was going to be just petty squabbles gone too far, and not some great ideological struggle? I lied.
The chaotic summoners are a mysterious cabal of intellectuals who operate primarily on the Rossberan continent. To fully understand the motives of their actions and the reason behind their name, one must first understand the history behind them.
It was in direct response to Rossberan imperialism that new societal ideas began to emerge in academia. The major coastal powers had expanded inland, gobbling up smaller, poorer, landlocked nations. The only exception was the Martial State of Taressim, which started out as a landlocked nation and moved outward. Once there were no small nations left to absorb, the nine major powers of the continent would find themselves bordering on each other. Expansion of any major power would result in war with another major power. While there were plenty of individuals willing to try this, anyone paying the slightest amount of attention to the international situation knew that the cost of such a war would be enormous. The age of imperialism, therefore, had to come to an end for the sake of peace. What would replace it, however, would be hotly debated.
Two major powers already existed on Rossbera that did not follow the imperial model: the Republic of Breace and the Democratic League of Kantossa. The former was a constitutional republic that broke away from the Arcadian Empire during one of its regular periods of internal strife, when the imperials were far too busy fighting each other to be able to do anything about a separatist movement. The latter, far older, was a mercantilist oligarchy, created as a direct result of a major power vacuum in the wake of Skhara’s collapse. Without the warrior elite, the merchant class took over the remaining city-states on Rossbera’s northeast fingers, forming a powerful trade coalition. However, the exact function of these two unusual countries remained a mystery to outsiders, most of whom considered such organisational structures to be far too risky to replicate. Furthermore, both Breace and Kantossa had expanded their borders through various means, engaging in their own forms of imperialism at the whims of a few power-hungry individuals. Therefore, when pondering what sort of political system should replace the imperial hegemony, scholars all over Rossbera flatly rejected the Breacian and Kantossi models.
Read more and let me know what you think!