Lostray

Lorstray is a nation formed in and around the Ba-Adenu Forest, a vast wooded peninsula on the west coast of Falen. It is a nation without kings or governors, only elected community leaders who coordinate mutual aid and service to between settlements. Lorstray is an open-minded nation whose believe that all things in existence carry a spirit, and that care and respect for those spirits are essential for reasons both moral and material.
The people of Lorstray, calling themselves Gaians, are long ago refugees from The Eternal Commonwealth, having fled the continent-spanning empire to escape cultural and religious persecution. Traveling by boat across the Endless Sea to land on the other side of the world, the people of Lorstray have grown and flourished in the difficult but beautiful land they found themselves in. They have managed to carve safe areas in the forest to form their settlements, work through differences between their peoples, and in general operate in peace with one another. 
That, of course, does not save them from the dangers the Ba-Adenu Forest presents. The same land that has helped hide and protect them from further persecution also troubles them with a wide array of preditory animals, plants, and diseases, along with stranger things that arise out of eons lost ruins shrouded by the trees. Over the years the people of Lorstray have overcome these challenges with intuitive uses of tek, sorcery, and a willingness to cooperate and adapt to the land.
Visitors to Lorstray are likely to find a nation unlike others to be found on Aramanth, one welcoming and encouraging of those coming to visit, but also requires commitment and cooperation for those wishing to stay.

Structure

Lorstray is made up of a collection of socially-anarchist communities operating together through mutual aid and cooperation. There is no overriding authority ruling over them, only a unified set of cultural ideals and practices formed to allow for the functional support and organization of the various settlements. 
Leaders are elected at a local level and are charged primary with tasks of organizing local endeavors and communicating with other Lorstray settlements. Once a year all the elected leaders meet in Aeriathis--less a capital and more a communally agreed meeting place--to work out larger issues concerning multiple settlements or the nation as a whole. 
Despite the relative independence of the various settlements, Lorstray suffers from neither the tension of the The Karnos Republic's electoral system, nor the cultural and legal incongruity of the The Maginatrix Confederation unilaterally ruled city-states, nor from the grinding slowness of the Commonwealth's bloated beuracracy. Lorstray is flexible, agile, and unified.
The cost of all this is scope. Lorstray fields neither a large military nor have they erected any constructions or organizations or particularly grand notoriety. The focus of Lorstray society rests on its people, and the grand sacrifices and compromises required to yield such accomplishments are not ones Lorstraians are willing to make.

Culture

Lorstrayans are a nonchalant, open-minded people who value both personal freedom and mutual care for one another. Polyamory and pansexuality are the norm, though neither is enforced or overlly focused on. Outside views and beliefs are welcomed, though Lorstaians are quick to come to the aid of those they feel are being harassed or trodden upon. The Gaian faith encourages communal rituals but personal relationships with the individual spirits they commune with.

Public Agenda

Most of Lorstray's work revolves around better developing the land in which they have settled to allow for the steady and sustainable expansion throughout the Ba-Adenu Forest. Learning how to bypass or co-exist with the various threats of the forest cosumes much of the nations mental and material capital. Of the outsiders who come to Lorstray, most are adventurers, explorers, or researchers of some sort who are hired to work out or eliminate some challenge or threat posed by the great-wide forest.

Assets

While Lorstay lacks in the material wealth of other nations, they do hold considerable worth in the talents at shaping and taming the lands in which they settled. Their skills and abilities in this area are of such fame that those with the knowledge and ability take pains to recruit Lortraian spellcasters in the development and construction of new settlements.

History

The Commonwealth has never put a complete restriction on the practicing of faiths other than its state religion, Exultism, but depending on the era such things were more discouraged than others. In the late seventh millennia of the Commonwealth's existence, a group of animists calling themselves Gaians came under considerable scrutiny by the Autarch of the day. She found their spirit worship and polyamorous practices personally distasteful and labeled their faith a danger to the public and social fabric of their province.
Rather than renounce their faith and their culture, the Gaians made for a long exodus from the Commonwealth, moved by visions from the spirits they communed with to flee the continent of Gruual, for nowhere there would they be safe form the Autarch's reach.
After years of secret planning, the Gaians did indeed leave the Commonwealth by boat from the eastern tip of the continent, travelling the wide expanse of the Endless Sea until they reached the far shores of Falen, where they founded their new nation.
During the Voidgate War, the Lorstraians found their forest home to be a helpful natural defensive barrier against the flesh-warped creations the elves had forged to assist in conquering the western half of the continent. When the hobgoblin armies moved against them from the north, they fought a considerably effective guerilla war against their highly trained, but mentally broken, foes. Both Lorstraian and Dunlish scholars agree it was this continual impediment that gave the mind-locked leaders of the hobgoblin armies to forge the mental weapons they used to break free from their bondage, and it was the Lorstaian people who aided the newly freed Hobgoblins in taming the harsh desert they settled in to allow for their own survival.

Religion

Lorstrayan's practice a form of animist faith known as Gaianism. They believe that spirits suffused the world, from every animal to every stone, from every plant to every machine. The Gaians do not worship these spirits, but instead, see them as equals in a world filled with spirits in which they are no different than them. 
Gaians hold a number of communal rituals, but individual Gaians are encouraged to develop a personal relationship with the spirits they find best able to aid, guide, and educate them through their lives. It is common for temples and settlements who hold a majority Gaian population usually have a number of "Spirit Tender" machines, complex automatons the Gaians created to help care for and better appease the spirits who suffuse the world around them.

No Gods or Kings Over Us, Only Mutual Love and Compassion Between Us.

Founding Date

-895 SE

Type

Geopolitical, Tribe

Alternative Names

The Spiritlands, Land of Gaia

Demonym

Lorstraian

Government System

Anarchy

Power Structure

Federation

Currency

The Lorstayan Shin