Naldonia
Naldonia is a darkened land of machined soldiers, poison spewing manufactories, and strange experiments let loose out of interest or neglect. It's ruler, Zanathane, has extended his life over two centuries and proclaimes himself the inheritor to both the Eternal Commonwealth and the seat of the Emerald Pope. Both claims are perhaps laughable on their face, but considering he has outlived two Popes and three Autarchs, is a point his faithful puts in his favor.
Much of Naldonia subsists on slave labor and the resources produced by various forms of researched tek. Despite the considerable resources available in this regard, the common people of Naldonia live a meager, oppressed existence. The Ruling Houses keep militias of augmented soldiers altered to enhance their brutality and ensure their loyalty. Many keep stranger things for their own protection, or have become things strange to the point that protection is no longer needed.
Naldonia fights a near-constant war with the Commonwealth, who, perhaps rightly, sees it as the threat that it is. For over a century both sides commit their soldiers to battlefields that are fetid with the corpses of decades past and that rarely move more than a mile in either direction. The stalemate is facilitated by the fact that one side has a near unlimited source of soldiers, and the other willingly turns its soldiers into monsters to stave off its own destruction.
Naldonia is feared and reviled across most of Aramanth, though those lacking scruples but containing knowledge and power can quite easily find knowledge and tek unseen in the rest of the world. Only the Maginatrix rivals them in expertise, though perhaps none can rival them in ambition or guile.
Structure
All power flows down from Zanathane, the nation's undying ruler and god. But he shares his considerable power with a cadre of Ruling Families who joined him in his journey of transcending his own humanity, no matter the cost to morality and sanity. Each House maintains its own army and develops them, and their populace, to better further the aims of their god-king. Each house is unwavering in their faith and support of Zanathane, though among one another there is a constant, and often violent, struggle for position in the hierarchy.
Culture
What culture existed in Naldonia before Zanathane's rise has been ground away by the harsh rule of the Ruling Houses, the physical and social engineering Zanathane's teachings, and the side effects of the nation's research and industrial development. For those outside the noble families, most rights have been stripped away and life is seen as a commodity to consume towards the research and extraction of tek and its surrounding lore.
Public Agenda
Zanathane believes himself a god and seeks to further actualize this truth through continual argumentation and mutation of himself and his people further and further away from something that could be considered human.
Assets
Considerable caches of cyphers, relics, and iron flesh, as well as research on mutations and ways to induce them. The Ruling Families all have hoards of material wealth, though the use of money was discarded when the Emerald Pope excommunicated the nation as a whole. Trade is done between families with Tek, slaves, and research.
History
Naldonia was once a well-integrated province of the Eternal Commonwealth. Events during the Voidgate War, however, left the region weakened. Many of its men and women had been drafted for soldiers. Much of its food and resources were requisitioned for the war effort. When the war ended, the province was left a shadow of its former self, a shadow that, much like the rest of the empire, slowly darkened with time.
By the time the Autarch of that age appointed Zanathane Ioetzen as governer to the region, many of the communities there were struggling just to survive. Zanathane was skilled and charismatic, an Exult Priest with several high-risk ruins expeditions under his belt. He brought the province back from the brink of disaster in a few short years.
It was at this time, as Zanathane began to gather an increasing cult of fame around him, that things began to change. He began to consolidate favor with the most powerful families and institutions within Naldonia's communities. He conducted several personal expeditions into ruins without the direction or guidance of the church. Suspicious grew from both the Autarch and the Emerald pope, but time and distance meant they were not able to act in time to stop his ultimate insurrection.
What first began as a sudden takeover of the province, with loyal groups in the cities and communities seizing power in the name of their charismatic leader, began to slowly change as the war with the Commonwealth loyalists drug on. Unable to match their numbers, Zanathane instead turned to dangerous forms of experimental forms of iron flesh that augmented his soldiers into vicious and deadly warriors. Slowly, the forces of the Commonwealth were pushed back or killed, and soon Zanathane had his own nation to rule.
It would be several more decades before the steady shift in the nature of the new nation was noticeable. Continual war with the Commonwealth necessitated continual augmentation of his people to ensure they could stand up to the increasing pressure put upon them. The need for loyalty and admiration led Zanathane to take on interpretations of Exult doctrine that were questionable at best, and outright twistings of the tenants at worst. And always did his hunger grow for more knowledge, more experimentation, more power.
When a century had passed and Zanathane showing no signs of declining health, it became clear that he had done something to himself to extend his lifespan. This would be confirmed when a few short years later he publically denounced Exultism, claiming himself the reborn form of the Conciliator, the earthly avatar of the Exultist over-deity. It would be the beginning of a slow descent for the nation as he began to preach his new message of earthly immortality and the transcendence of fleshly bonds. By now most Naldonian forces were as much machine as flesh, and those who caught site of the increasingly powerful oligarchs saw similar changes in them as well. Bodily flesh has increasingly seen as simply one more kind of material, and the bodies containing it merely units to be processed and accounted for. Peasants, soldiers, artisens, all are merely pieces of property for the use of the ruling families, to direct, alter, and deconstruct at their whim.
The Commonwealth made no attempt to slow their war with the fallen nation and is one of the few things the Emerald Pope wholly agrees with the ruling Autarch with consistently as the decades grew increasingly contentious. This constant pressure has precluded Naldonia's greater spread, as even with augmented soldiers they are vastly outnumbered by the Commonwealth legions. For over a century the stalemate has lasted, and with each year the ruling class of Naldonia, led ever onward by Zanathane's teachings, grow more and more estranged from their own humanity. And even now these new meta-humans discuss alternate plans through which they can achieve the supremacy they believe their new forms grant them.
Religion
The state religion is Thanism, which states that the current and undying ruler of Naldonia is the physical embodiment of the Conciliator, one of the Exultist's holy trinity and the one who is to restore order and peace to a chaotic world. Anyone who is not of the faithful, or is not human, is a heathen or beyond notice beyond their use as a slave or a test subject. That said, in truth the only true adherents of Thanism are the Ruling Houses houses who seek to follow Zanathane in his transcendence of human mortality and moral limits.
While the Exultist Church allows for considerable tolerance of other religions, this blasphemy was far over the line. Both the Exultist Church and the cult of Thanism actively plan each other's destruction and believe the other must be destroyed for the good of all. Unfortunately who falls under "all" differs highly between the two faiths.
Long Live the New Flesh
Founding Date
225 FE
Type
Geopolitical, State
Capital
Alternative Names
Land of the Machine King
Demonym
Naldonian
Leader
Leader Title
Government System
Oligarchy
Power Structure
Unitary state
Economic System
Barter system
Currency
None
Official State Religion
Neighboring Nations
Comments