Empire of Zerua
It is the Land of Dragons and wind-weaving Dryads, known for its great merchant fleets and densely-packed cities. It is a land of renewal- by fire, by earth, by storm, by plague, by flood, and by war. It is a land of magic, as the greatest number of Dragomanders on Halika live within its borders. It is a land of careful planning and grand cooperation.
But there are many Zeruas: rich and poor, in regions like Ibaisha or Azalek, dryad or prism. It can be easy to lose oneself in the great narrative and miss the little things: its wildly commercial and has a large urban middling class, its connected by a state-wide canal system, it has mastered the use of lobster-labor and herding like no other place on the planet. Such a large country defies easy description. The state legend wants you to see it as an ancient land of eternal renewal ruled by unstoppable sorcerer-kings; but it misses the urban community-federations, the religious tensions between old and new priesthoods, the invasive corporations and their mercenary armies, and the many petty tyrants raised by a cruel semi-meritocracy that feud endlessly with one another for power.
In short, Zerua is a prosperous, cosmopolitan, diverse, and stable empire that is discounted only those too foolish to see its potential.
Structure
The Empire of Zerua is a curious federal empire: while it reigns as a unitary state without question, it also acknowledges the kingdoms within it as valid units of authority as long as they retain legal cohesion and the same imperial family. There are eight federated kingdoms that are fully integrated into the imperial system, and two vassal-march kingdoms (Echereko and Kazaka ) in the East with some limited independence.
The Empire has several layers of bureaucracy at play. The same royal imperial family manages each component kingdom, and beneath each position is a cabinet of department-heads. While the "federal" aspect of the empire appears democratic or decentralized, it is simply set-dressing: there is only one family in charge here. Granted, that family is a bloated hierarchical institution that frequently adopts people into "cadet branches" of administration, but it is one large family-corporation-clique that runs the empire.
This is the chain of command:
- The Emperor is the supreme legislator and ruler
- The Imperial Cabinet manages the imperial budget, military, and the succession of the royal family; for any adopted member to actually assume a position of power, they must be legitimized by either the emperor or the cabinet
- The Royal Princes or Princesses manage the sub-kingdoms and run their own cadet branches of the imperial family. These are essentially Governors or Dukes
- The Royal Cabinets manages each Prince or Princesses' bureaucracy and budget
- Provincial Governors run local provinces, each based out of the largest town in the province
History
Before 370 ME, Northern Ekraht was covered in fledgling empires that fought for dominance. But from the ash and flame rose Makoi, greatest of dragon Sorcerers, who forged from the warring kingdoms a great empire. He sired a child and adopted another before leaving the imperial throne to conquer and travel in 415 (and he would die abroad in 440). Following his absence, his spouse Uruna ran the empire until 432, and his child led from 432 until they died suddenly during an expedition in 450. Civil war ensued, and the kingdoms fragmented once again. While many minor players envisioned themselves as the next Makoi, others wondered if Zerua hadn't been a flash in the pan that could never recur. In 480, Zerua suddenly got a hard reset: a massive eruption of the Akrean supervolcano cloaked the realm in ash and fire.
Rebuilding put an end to the war. In 528, war returned to the mostly-rebuilt kingdoms, and from the ensuing politics, a sly general named Mariz was able to seize power of the central kingdoms. From that seat of power, Mariz was able to restore much of the Zeruan core, except for parts of the East. The empire expanded, centralized, and redeveloped in peace until a dynastic struggle in 910 ME distracted the empire from its eruption precautions (despite signs of imminent eruption). In 913, the volcano once again blew and the empire was wiped away. Splintered states again rose from the ashes, and re-united in 930. Manar the Fox, a politician and sorcerer, rose as the central figure of this new regime.
After 913, no eruption was large enough to completely destroy the empire- but they could destabilize it. In 1198, a significant eruption and earthquake opened up an opportunity for civil war from 1198-1203, which ended in yet another dynasty. Again, significant earthquakes and minor eruptions (as well as mismanaged dragomander-smog) in the late 1400s through mid-1500s opened Zerua up for Keveket and Orisha missionaries from Maradia. These missionaries were unsuccessful but rallied enough support to attempt a coup in 1530. This led to the expulsion of all Bards and Maradians from Zerua and a period of relative xenophobia. Zerua closed itself from the world, seeking to preserve what it had and prepare for possible volcanic disruptions.
In 1690, the closed period ended. The existing emperor was assassinated by their bodyguards, and a Paladin of Wimbo named Loken the Fearless led their sacred band into the palace to seize control of the empire. Loken was popular with the Lunar Pantheon and used a combination of Wimbo, Emesh, Hiku, Orchid, and Jade cultists to seize control of the military- but which god would he serve? Wimbo asked him to avoid promising the empire to any of them, and so he handed the empire to the Half Prism Kareman administrator Eram 'Silvertouch'. Eram and Loken shared much of their power, with Eram managing administration and Loken managing the military. Together, they conquered the long-lost Eastern kingdoms and revitalized the legal code of Zerua. The empire was on the rise for the first time in a long while- it was truly reunified to First-Era standards in 1730 and economically prosperous. The empire was remade as a federation of kingdoms led by the same Eramzir family- forged from the mutual adoption of Lokem and Eram.
After re-uniting the North, Lokem and Eram began pivoting towards the removal of the growing Maradian influence around them. Across the North, Maradian colonies were destroyed if they refused to submit to Ekratan rule. But one kingdom was beyond colonial outpost level: Esedeta, which had converted to a foreign religion and begun producing Empty constructs on a massive scale. But Esedeta had frequent domestic problems from its importation of such an alien model of governance, and such choppy politics were vulnerable to Zeruan interference. Loken was able to turn an Esedetan tax revolt into an all-out civil war in 1731, which dragged on with Zeruan funding into the 1790s. As Zerua rebounded in influence, money, and power, it tried to trip and destroy Esedeta a second time by funding rebels from 1830 to 1850. This time, though, Esedeta fought back with a concentrated missionary and interference campaign of its own. The Esedetan and Zeruan civil conflict spilled into one another, and community violence erupted across the West. This chaos and panic reached its height after a secret society of Nafenan cultist-bards that had been using mind-control as a lobbying tactic was revealed in 1845. This unleashed a wave of xenophobia and Maradia-panic yet again, but this time Zerua did not turn inwards. Instead, it began searching for other ways to create "spiritual immunity" and to reduce corruption. It began yet another legal reform campaign in the 1850s and ultimately adopted the Kamada religion in 1885. Since then, there has been a cultural-religious revolution of evangelism and community building (as well as a little persecution here and there). But, as Zerua has grown rich and powerful through its growing trade relationships with the greater world, so has neighboring Esedeta. Since the 1970s, Esedeta has stabilized and begun a spree of imperial conquest- leading to brutal wars of prestige in 1984 and 1991. Neither gained much from the wars, but both have licked their wounds and are ready to go at it again. This time, though, both sides seem to be taking it more seriously. The buildup has been far larger, and it has been joined by a brutal shadow war of trade embargoes and assassinations. What comes next won't be pleasant. And the volcano has always had the worst timing...
Demography and Population
Greater Zerua (which includes the semi-integrated kingdoms of Echereko and Kazaka ) has 150,000,000 humanoids. This number rises even higher including Zerua's many tributaries. Imperial Zerua or "true Zerua", which includes only the directly administered kingdoms of Ibaisha, Sanari, Iziko, Karema, Basaya, Adiz, Azalek, and Arasha, contains 130,000,000 humanoids. Imperial Zerua will be the primary focus below.
Of the 130,000,000, 35% are Dryads, 35% are humans, 15% are hybrids of some kind, 13% are Prisms, 1% are Pearl Pangolins, and 1% are other.
70% of the population is rural or lives in small towns; 30% live in the river-sprawls and cities. 8% of the population are members of the upper-class cliques (a mixture of old nobility, major merchants, and sorcerers). The 30% middling class is impressively large and contains clerks, artisans, and lesser merchants. The remaining 62% are low-income farmers, miners, lumber-workers, lobster shepherds, fishermen, or urban laborers.
Territories
Zerua has over 3000 miles of coastline, which extends nearly 400 miles inland to the Akrean volcanic mountains. Five major rivers run through Zerua's heartlands, including the two great ash rivers (which run grey with nutrients and volcanic minerals).
The majority of Zerua is subtropical floodplains, a mixture of dense forest and rolling swampland. Patches of plains are more arid and flat, though they are arable and richly green, regularly enriched by the wet summer rains and ensuing minor floods. In the east, five massive lakes collect ash and sediment. Their black waters are notoriously bitter to the taste but great for crops and fish.
Four small mountain ranges run through Zerua, and have traditionally acted as the boundary lines between the sub-kingdoms.
The capital province of Zerua is a large island to the center-North of the empire: Sanari. Sanari sits 29 miles off the coast, though the passage between it and mainland Zerua is filled with tiny islands. Sanari is 127 miles long and 58 miles across, and is dotted with lakes and hills.
The Orokar bay to the South of Sanari is a small sea unto itself, 57 by 110 miles of shallow continental shelf full of small, lush islands. Ash-water currents creep out from the rivers to the South, and obscure parts of the great aquatic civilization of Squiddles below.
Military
Zerua is not a cutting-edge military power, but it is hardly something to be trifled with. Its dragon sorcerers are matched only by distant Calazen, and its huge population can form massive armies if the empire if given time to train them. Its soldiering reserves, which serve as a sort of dumping pit for criminals and misfits, are enough to match most armies in the field. Given a few years to prepare proper armies, Zerua can field massive formations of spear and archer levies.
The spears and arrows of Zeruan peasant levies are formidable, but their primarily purpose is to form an unstoppable moving wall to tie down enemy forces and control the battlefield. Its the specialists of Zerua that are intended to actually destroy the enemy. These are composed of several main parts: sorcerers, artillery, and windweavers. The coordination, strategy, and balance of these three are seen as the ultimate expression of imperial harmony and power.
The artillery division of Zerua is unlike anywhere else: while Zerua has cannons, they lack the battlefield-dominating field cannon of Suneka and prefer to build truly massive siege-breaker cannon paired with classical trebuchet instead. Zerua has had gunpowder the longest of any area, but often lacked reliable access to iron and steel. So instead of cannons, they have perfected the rocket as artillery. The arrival of Fire Termite oil in the 800s revolutionized rocketeering for both art and lethality. Zeruan military rocket come in two main varieties: incendiary and smoke. Incendiary rockets include small canisters of fire termite oil, which are flung across enemy lines when the rocket detonates. This flings not only the canister's shrapnel, but a rain of liquid fire over enemy lines. Smoke rockets are much less complex, essentially producing as much smoke over enemy lines as possible. Sometimes, these smoke rockets are mixed with Octoperson Mustard Gas ingredients to create noxious poison gas, though that is less common. Rocketeering may be less efficient than projectile gunpowder weapons, but the amount of high-quality gunpowder available from volcanic minerals makes that less important to Zeruan engineers.
Once the barrage begins, sorcerers dive into action. Their job is rapid response and line breaking, and Zeruan sorcerers are some of the best in the business. The "Dragonlancers" of Zerua are famously lethal and professional as sorcerous elite cavalry and charioteers. These elite mounted dragon sorcerers are backed up by battalions of less-elite mounted infantry sorcerers, who ride along the line and dismount to form spell-batteries to bombard an area from behind the spearwall.
All of this strategy is made possible by one side having wind-dominance, which is won by windweavers. These wind-dryads work together to bend the wind around the battlefield to their will. The typical maneuver is to create strong winds pushing air down on and around the enemy. This blocks a number of enemy projectiles and pushes the battlefield's smoke and fire into the enemy army. As the draconic sorcery and incendiary rockets very purposefully create collateral fires, the wind will only intensify and spread these growing wildfire into enemy lines. The fire and smoke reduces visibility and creates a demoralizing terror storm. This terror storm will ideally blunt enemy charges and maximize the moral damage of spell-barrages. In essence, the windweavers turn the firepower of the army into a deadly and terrifying pressure-cooker to break the enemy's will to fight. The spearwall can then constrict around the enemy and contain them within said pressure cooker until they break and flee.
The pressure-cooker barrage tactic is a mainstay of Zeruan warfare. In civil wars, it has even served as a symbolic demonstration of mastery of both windweaving and sorcery as a kind of legitimizer for the victorious side. That said, there are some exceptions to the formula of spear-archer-sorcery-artillery-wind. For example, there are Zerua's expert charioteers, often drawn from the prestigious sporting chariot-racers that are so popular in Zeruan cities. There are the Moonguard: Pangolins, often trained in small-squad tactics with bardic support. There are even the rumored and possibly-fake Daredevil Warriors: pangolins and Haltia that ride rocket-propelled kite-wings over the enemy lines to either lob incendiary bombs or soar down to take out enemy windweavers.
Religion
Zerua is emphatically Kamadan, and the last century of Zerua's religious history has been one of religious renaissance. Ever since the prophet's death in 1910, Kamadan priests and scholars have debated and argued. Their debate has spilled over into a patchwork of highly variant religious practices that often change from city to city. Communities have eagerly embraced Kamada as a way to uplift their status and conditions, and many temples of traditional sects have been converted into Kamadan temple-schools (often with the old priests joining the new religious hierarchy).
In some places, local religion has been less compatible with this religious order. Those sects and cults have either remained community centers in parallel to new state-funded Kamadan temples, or they have been attacked and driven out by mobs of Kamadan zealots. The exiled priests or monks then wander from province to province, often facing persecution and going underground in response. These wandering mystics have become a trope in popular culture over the past century, and are seen as everything from mysterious magical strangers, to spooky bearers of forbidden lore, to crazed deviant cultists.
Kamada may not technically have religious law or enforce their religion on un-believers, but proselytizing missionaries of other faiths are often driven out by priest-led mobs and city guards regardless of legality. Temple attendance is not legally mandatory for all residents, but enforced attendance can be used as a corrective measure by local officials if a community is seen as particularly poor, immoral, or dangerous. Trade ports often have their own "merchant temples" which include priests and shrines to foreign religions for outside traders.
Many of Kamada's taboos predate the religion here and are enforced by cultural law: no pork, no cow milk, corpses are cremated and never buried.
Foreign Relations
Zerua draws on the ancient conquests of Makoi to lay claim to all the world in theory. In practice, it is mostly concerned with ruling the Northern half of Ekraht and simply drawing tribute and influencing the rest.
The tribute system of Zerua is not entirely parasitic: those who pay tribute to the Empire are brought under its protection, and any who do not also pay tribute who attack a tributary state will be attacked by the Empire in return. For vulnerable states menaced by other imperial fledglings, this can actually be a win. For those whose primary threat is Zerua itself, tribute is nothing but domineering bullying and protection racketeering. But few will speak out against the Empire, for its power is vast.
The Empire of Esedeta in the West finds Zerua's meddling particularly annoying. Esedeta refuses to pay tribute, and stands alone as a religious and political rival to Zerua's influence. While the two powers are slow to militarize (as war is not popular in Ekraht), they do periodically slam into one another over scraps of territory and tributary independence.
Not all of Zerua's foreign policy is warmonger domineering. It also coordinates the Windweavers of Ekraht internationally, to keep the balance of Dragomanders and Windweaving in check.
Agriculture & Industry
The heart of Zerua is agriculture. The warm, humid climate makes rice, maize, yams, and squash particularly good crops that can be grown near-year-round. But where Zerua excels is its implementation of Giant Lobsters into the agricultural day-to-day. Lobster shepherds are a common form of agriculture and communities keep freshwater giant lobsters in common ponds. During the flooding season, villages will shepherd their lobsters in large numbers across the land. Lobster-farming is a way to allow the land to flood and regain its nutrients for the next crop cycle; lobster chitin is also an excellent form of fertilizer, and is often ground up into a mulch by villagers at the end of the wet season to be mixed into the soil. Lobster herding is the one form of animal-management taught to dryad farmers as well as humans, as their use for sale, for pulling farm equipment, and for chitin-mulch is great enough that it is essentially a mandatory staple of rural life. Lobster-herding carries into the urban sprawl, where the rivers periodically fill with lobster-herds of various neighborhoods and the dock-areas are often full of lobsters and their herders (who famously walk on wooden stilts to avoid soaking in the fetid waters). Chickens, goats, and fish also supplement human and hybrid diets.
The intensely fertile ash-and-chitin fed land produces a lot of spare farmland for cash crops. Landholding elites often accept village rents in the form of cash-crop work, or hire estate-managers to work the cash crops with low-wage rural laborers. Both produce a steady stream of sugar, cinnamon, cotton, flax, hemp, cannabis, tea, fruit, and cocoa for domestic use and export. Large estate farms of Fire Termites also produce fire termite oil and dragon-feed. In the mountains, silk-factories produce silk for weaving.
Aside from farming, there are also large lumberyards, mines, breweries, and river-side chemical distillation plants. These plants are basically workshops for gathering chemicals from the rivers- sulfur, minerals, and even gold. These then go on to mix much of these into bleach, gunpowder, boat sealants, and other alchemical wonders.
Towns and cities process the estate-grown flax, cotton, and silk into textiles and parchment. Lumber is treated and built into boats and tools; large smelters process what ore is extracted and mint coins. Windweavers are trained and organized in the cities, where they channel empire-wide wind currents. They are also deployed to the volcanic frontier during times of crisis. Zerua, lastly, has a strong history of finance. Banks and stock companies have existed here for centuries, with early forms dating back to the ancient merchant republic of Ibaisha.
Trade & Transport
The trade policies of Zerua are a tangled nest of city, kingdom, and imperial laws and regulations managed by the elite merchant cliques that hold power. The sorcerous nobility, merchant-landowners, and elite bureaucrats all are part of the same circles.
The only way to profitably move or trade large quantities of trade goods are through exemptions and preferences. These exemptions are often hard to get and require connections, and so are beyond the reach of most individuals. They can, however, apply to families and companies as a whole, making family and corporation the two avenues into profitable trade.
For this reason, Guilds in Zerua operate in corporate form to allow for their guild-masters to easily and effectively sell their products. Major urban guilds have long since bought out their region's town guild corporations and centralized into regional guild-monopoly-corporations. These mix and intermingle both with each other and with the large merchant-families.
Adoption and disowning of children is an integral part of power-holding in Zerua dating back to the Divine Era. Massive extended families with multiple task-based regional cadet branches and sometimes with smaller adopted clans contained within dominate trade. These families' adoption of local talent and abandonment of failed children forms a kind of meritocracy of its own. The imperial family sometimes breaks the larger of these families into new families, but they have to get quite large to reach that point.
Education
Education of the average citizen is primarily undertaken by Kamadan temple-schools. Middling class residents can also access exclusive guild-corporate schools. Rich families have their own private academies as well.
Infrastructure
Zerua's roads and cities are managed on a kingdom-level rather than an imperial level. But what the empire has invested heavily in, and what has grown as the greatest industry in construction, is a sprawling system of canals and aqueducts. Travel by boat is far more common than land travel, and these canals and water-systems are multi-purpose. They divert dangerous flood runoff, irrigate crops, provide communal spaces for lobster-herding, allow for boat-traffic, and can help divert rainwater into storage for the drier months.
"All of Heaven, All of Earth"
Maps
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Zerua
Zerua, its tributaries, and its surrounding aquatic tributary kingdoms
Founding Date
1690
Type
Geopolitical, Empire
Alternative Names
Empire of Ekraht, Empire of Airkot, Grand Airkot, the Eramzir Empire
Demonym
Zeruan
Head of State
Government System
Monarchy, Absolute
Power Structure
Federation
Currency
Zeruan Gold Dragons, Silver Storms, Copper Serpents
Major Exports
Lumber, Food, Paper/flax, Bleach, Precious Metals, Dragomanders, Gunpowder, Sugar
Major Imports
Kilusha, Spices, Salt, Stone, Furs, Wool,
Judicial Body
The Imperial Courts
Official State Religion
Subsidiary Organizations
Location
Official Languages
Controlled Territories
Neighboring Nations
Notable Members
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