PmWiki | Madlands / NewState

The New State is governed more or less like a centralized post-feudal nation-state; there is an aristocracy, in part hereditary and in part self-selected by buying a title, which elects a Chairman (or Chairwoman, like the current one), who rules for five years. Her face is known because it's on New State coins and paper money -- the latter being useless in the Madlands, the former being accepted at metal value -- but that's all that is known of her on this side of the Mountain Wall, to the point that she is sometimes painted as a giantess, or as a literal chair-woman hybrid, or as a living computer even greater than the Ordinator (much to the Ordinator's beeping annoyance within its realm). New State citizens living in the colony around the fortress add to this mystery by invariably agreeing with whatever notion, mundane or fancy, that their interlocutor has. They are also vague about the size of the New State past the Wall; surely it's not possible that it consists of many millions of individuals... right?

New State colonists in the Madlands settlement, which they called Lighthouse, are actually handpicked by the central government; the colony is a mix of military base and Potemkin village. The name Lighthouse isn't a boast; there is a large beacon on top of the fortress protecting the tunnel, high enough that many of the little Madland realms have no choice but to see it if they look West.

What the New State calls "humans", as opposed to "humanoids" (hulks, constructs, mutants, monsterfolk, etc.), constitute approximately two thirds of the Madlands' overall population. Humans are welcome in the New State territory; humanoids are not, in the sense that they will be allowed in for business, but not to settle or study. Supposedly, the population of the New State is uniformly human.

The New State has been bankrolling "resistance cells" in Madlands nations that have a blatantly non-human leadership; for example, part of its strategy to conquer the Western Trade Baronies and secure a foothold around the mountain fortress was to give favorable deals to human barons to the detriment of humanoid barons.

The New Staters need the natural resources. On the other hand, they've more or less declared war on the abnormal. So, they organize Mongol-style hunts to eradicate "animaloids" from territories they control. What can be eaten is eaten, what cannot be eaten is burned.

On the other hand, New Staters send out naturalists to catalogue various creatures and determine if they are animals or animaloids -- for example, dinosaurs are considered natural creatures and spared, and there's even been an attempt to capture some and bring them through the Mountain Wall tunnels into the heartlands.

Their scouts found passes through the Mountain Wall into the Seamstress' domain. Then, their chain gangs dug and blasted through them.

All the rulers in what New Staters call the Madlands have a gimmick. The New State did not. Their "gimmick" was organization and logistics. They didn't have plasma blasters or trained horned swarms or clockwork legionaries or anything like that.

They had people, horses, pikes, relatively primitive firearms. But they had a LOT of them. They didn't scavenge; they smelted. No pre-fall tech allowed, ever, nothing to depend on that they couldn't replace. They coordinated by crystal radio, heliograph, and messenger. They had no theme or modus operandi: they bribed, or fought, or sieged, according to whatever worked.

And it was working. The Seamstress saw the New State conquer land around the tunnel exit; they run most of the desert moto-raiders out of gas, beat back the Tungsten Knights by sheer numbers of raw recruits thrown at the armored titans, they traded at a loss until they could buy out 51% of the Western Guild Baronies and voted themselves an annexation. Quickly, too quickly, the New State established a roughly semi-circular realm of their own, with the Mountain Wall tunnel at its center, and a mighty stone fortress built into the living rock.

And then, exactly three years to the day of the tunnel's opening, their rapid expansion ceased, and they switched strategies.

Much like the Seamstress, the New State offers logistical and military aid to this or that petty tyrant, not even bothering to hide their ultimate purpose -- to bully them into an unequal alliance.

Perhaps telling of a fundamental shift in power, is that the people of the Madlands have begun using this word to refer to themselves and their land.

The New State has a water problem -- all the farms and homes he saw have all sort of water-saving and water-collecting measures. The prevailing winds make it so that the Madlands are on the Mountain Wall's wet side. On the dry side, large norias collect river water and lift it, then Roman-style canals irrigate the countryside with great precision. The problem is that the New State has tapped its water resources to its fullest, to the point that none of its rivers make it to their natural estuaries anymore. Agricultural yield is significantly lower than it is on the wet side, and rain is scarce. In short, the New State sees the Madlands as ultimately unjustly favored by the climate, and wants to drink its fill.

The New State's political stability depends on each generation doing a little better than the last, but increasing population makes this uncertain and there's only so much that increasing efficiency can do. The water table cannot be allowed to drop; the New State understands the lessons of the Fall and won't exploit its resources unsustainably. Other people's resources, however...

In the New State, elections are mostly a formality, with the successor effectively decided in advance by back-room politics. In this case though, there is actual competition. A pressure group wants to resume rapid expansion into the Madlands, towards the nearest lake, with a plan to build a pipeline; a different pressure group has pushed for importing wet goods such as rice and fish and exporting dry goods such as okra; yet another one wants to dig artesian wells and qanats in the new territory; and so on.

The current Chairwoman's place in New State history is secure, for it was she who masterminded the Mountain Wall tunnel after 4 failed attempts.

There is also the problem of a small but growing number of people who want to move to the Madlands attracted by fanciful tales of derring-do, less-fanciful tales of rich soil and abundant rain. Emigration to the Lighthouse colony has been tightly controlled to ensure its status as a Potemkin village and military base, but that too cannot be maintained forever. Allowing emigration would lessen the pressure to find new water sources, but it would also eventually bring dangerous ideas back into the New State, even if one-way emigration was decreed, since it couldn't be enforced 100%.

The New State policy of not ever depending on pre-fall relics, whether they be magical or technological, isn't a case of cultural bigotry; there is a historical reason for it. Such relics are unreliable; they cannot be reproduced or even maintained for constant use (or require exceptional individuals to do so, which must then be appeased, or even allowed to become an overclass). The New State is the result of a six-way war between various local realms, and the one that prevailed, narrowly, was the one that didn't rely on pre-apocalypse crutches. New technologies are only allowed in the wild after the Institute of Inquest has ensured that they can be maintained and replicated with reasonably common resources. The main innovation in the last generation was breechloading rifles and pistols, made possible by piezoelectric powder igniters which in turn were made possible by the discovery of a large quartz mine; this generation's great innovation so far has been the crystal radio set, allowing for cheap one-way communication from generals to sargeants, from head offices to markets, and so on (Radio had been rediscovered for a while, but depended on rare metals for thermionic valve production, and was thus limited in use; now that simple receivers are available, broadcast radio is making its first steps).

If there are other nations beyond the Mountain Wall, the New State does not discuss them -- they claim sovreignty from the Wall to a western ocean that is slightly less polluted but no less undrinkable than the Sea of Tears. (I havent' decided if there should be or not, honestly).

The population of the New State is in the millions, and that's no boast; ironically, few of the Madlands people believe it, thinking that someone must have snuck in an extra zero at the end. In that sense, the New State tends to apply subtle propaganda, while Madland rulers are used to making outlandish, bombastic proclamations and accepting that people will apply a fudge factor to them in their heads. That the New State is (mostly) telling the truth about its population and military might would be a sincere surprise to most Madlanders; on the contrary, New State intelligence aren't sure to know what to make of Madland boasts -- if a ruler claims to own sixteen death rays, and scouts have seen two, it's possible to a New Stater that there are 14 more in storage because that's what THEY would do.

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