Federation of Zarazuko (Zar-ruh-Zoo-Koe)

Zarazuko is the realm of the Northern Zesheko, an isolated tropical realm unknown to most of the world. Only two of its ports are open to outsiders; its people are only allowed to leave as mercenaries, who contract through groups known as "Masked Companies" to venture into foreign lands. For centuries, the rest of the world has only known it for its mercenaries and its mystery, but to those few allowed inside, this federation is a vibrant - if troubled-  collection of kingdoms. 
The two main ports are known to outsiders as Knifepoint (aka Norima) and Ratmarsh (aka Zikoda). These are what you'll find on your typical world map, sometimes marked as two different kingdoms (as they belong to the Kingdoms of Norima and Zikoda respectively). Knifepoint is known as the military base for the Northern Zeshem fleets, and as the place the Masked Companies operate out of. It is the most accepting of foreigners, the most rowdy, and the most commercial point in all of Zarazuko. Ratmarsh, meanwhile, is much more suspicious and closed off; this is the gate to the sacred river and the ceremonial seat of the Zesheko temple here. The city also has a lot of capybaras - its namesake. 
Further in, up the river, is a city known as Nimok - the center of the world, and largest city in Zarazuko. This is the cultural capital of the realm, associated with ancient kingdoms and traditional culture, and this is where the Federation meets to make political decisions. 
Two other larger settlements lie inland: Zindomo, the Northern prism hub and largest mountain settlement in Zarazuko, and Copper Mountain, a massive mining settlement used to extract and smelt copper for export. Copper Mountain used to have another name, but that was erased when it tried to rebel a century ago - it is now a center of religious policing and labor exploitation.

Structure

The Federation of Zarazuko is run by a council of sixteen emissaries, each representing the sixteen kingdoms of the Federation. Each is ranked according to the wealth and might that their kingdom contributes to the Federation, and a higher ranked emissary holds greater legal weight. 
Equal to the emissaries are the local monarchs. Some monarchs are elected by local elites, others are hereditary, but all can legally be replaced by a majority vote of the Federal council. Each local kingdom is largely autonomous beyond that, with their own local laws and hierarchies. Some of these kingdoms are centralized; others are feudal; others are really more of clusters of towns and tribes that elect largely-powerless monarchs while doing their own thing locally.
The highest religious authority is the High Vicar - currently Vicar Lightning from Holy Zeshema.

Culture

In Zarazu culture, all travel is sacred pilgrimage. To move across the Earth is to give sacrifice and risk danger in the name of community and unity. Regular travel is a sacred duty, and everyone must work together to upkeep the roads and bridges to make that travel possible. Travel is ritualized: people visit the cities, relatives in other tribes, or other places within the kingdom, often transporting goods and news as they go. It is tradition to exchange small gifts and go through a series of ritual courtesies upon arrival, including a small sacrifice made together to the World Tree (or other divinity). The most sacred sacrificial journeys is that of the masked warrior, who ventures into the unknown not to find community but to acquire boons for their people.

Like any Zeshem-dominated land, cleanliness and purification are nation-level preoccupations. The foreign is dangerous and diseased; disease is the great killer. One must wash one's hands before and after eating, and after interacting with so much as a foreign idea. Touching in Zesheko communities is forbidden, but this gets complicated when one enters less dogmatic territory: in traditionalist communities, kissing both cheeks is a greeting and act of mutual trust and solidarity between community fellows. Zesheko priests describe this as an unclean practice, generating a lot of tension between those who care about what the Temple says versus those who care for tradition. 

Sarcasm is unpopular and often misunderstood in Zarazu, though cheeky observations and dry humor are considered excellent. Eye contact, meanwhile, is a major way of communicating status: direct eye contact is only permitted between equals, and those of lower status are supposed to lower their gaze. Lastly, writing is seen as a potential vector of pollution here: to write something is to crystallize it forever, so sensitive things (like holy hymns or deep personal feelings) must only be written indirectly or in code. 

History

The First Zarazu (? - 400 ME)

The Zarazu were some of the first humans to welcome dryads into their communities in the earliest days of the Divine Era, and the land has been a center for human-dryad solidarity and cooperation ever since. The land was difficult to build cities in - the tropics can be punishing that way for humans - but dryads found it much easier to prosper in the Zarazu jungles. Like many areas in the central tropics, the early history follows a familiar pattern: rising population density and city building, then Corpseblight and derivative fungal pandemics in the late Divine/early Modern era, and then socio-political collapse. But the Zarazu weathered the storm better than others, by a combination of luck and a tradition of medical practice - the region became known as the Clean Lands. By 200 ME, Zarazu was back to large scale production, building, and trading. The massive copper deposits in the local mountains brought humans, dryads, and prisms together and enabled the region to explode in wealth and political influence. 
Zarazu's wealth and prosperity also meant income inequality and warring princedoms. Most of these ancient polities have been lost to time, though the ancient Empire of Zarazu (205 - 391? ME) is remembered as a kind of legendary original version of Zarazu that even the current Federation connects itself back to. One monarch, Queen Sharusha ("The Hand of the World"), has become synonymous with this state as a legendary hero and magical being. This early empire brought together the religious and cultural traditions that made Zarazu identity, and local tribes and monarchs would continue to call themselves "Imperials" for centuries after the collapse of the state. 

The Two Century Crisis (400- 1000)

The Zarazu states continued to expand and develop the river valleys from 400 to 800 ME; their cities grew larger, their farms grew more exhaustive. In 800 ME, a period of drought struck the Zarazu valleys - and just at the same time, the surface-level copper deposits ran out of easy-to-reach high-quality ore. States preyed on each other, and war raged across the jungles. The soil was being exhausted, combining with drought to create mass famine. Plague and blight killed many thousands. From 800 to 900 ME, the cities and towns collapsed like dominoes. Some states, especially in the South, were so stressed by this crisis that they dissolved, never to return - their palaces became scavenged ruins, their surviving peoples returned to old hill forts and sustainable hunting/gardening patterns. But the kingdoms of the North were too embedded in international trade and too well-established to just fade away. 
The Kingdoms of the North - two mostly prism, three mostly dryad - saw the end of their world and decided to preserve what they could at any cost. They invited in their selkie merchant allies and entered into terrible debt to put their centers of power on life support. They imported foreign technologies to help revive the copper trade and foreign cash crops to make more money off the river. They imported food from the March Kingdom of Kakoru. And, once the food situation was somewhat stabilized, the kingdoms imported massive numbers of Zeshem captives from the Stolen Coast - which was selkie-occupied territory that was mass-enslaving and mass-deporting entire Zeshem communities to clear the land for selkie allies. These captives were promptly enslaved and used to bribe local communities into loyalty - the tribes wouldn't go back to small-scale horticulture if they could make money throwing slaves into mines instead. It wasn't just Zeshem slaves - the entire force of the illegal Western slave trade blasted directly into Zarazu lands once the pattern of profit was made - but slaves were seen as Zeshem, as Zeshem slaves (having pre-built community ties) quickly took the top of the slave hierarchy. Incoming other slaves were brought into the religious fold by Zeshem community members, and an early form of Zesheko became the socially-accepted slave religion of the land. The original Zeshem slaves were mostly imported from 895 to 921; from 921 to 990, it was mostly other North-Larazek tribes and prisoners of war from Samvaran conflicts. 
These five kingdoms became the nucleus of the new order, once the drought ended and more stable agricultural practices were implemented in the early 1000s. Theia the Liberator and her mortal allies did their best to shut off the slave trade into Zarazuko, and pressure from The Khilaia shut down all slave imports and exports (strictly speaking, they were illegal from the start, but an active enforcement group was made in the 990s specifically for Larazek slaving). After slave imports ended, there was something of a cultural crusade to end slavery led by the Lunar Pantheon, Pratasam missionaries, and local elites who wanted to make Zarazu's international reputation better. This technically eradicated slavery by 1100, but only in a superficial and legal sense: society was left divided between the Zeshem inferiors and the Pratasa-traditional-religion superiors, and while this line was theoretically just religious, it was de-facto hereditary and was entirely about social honor and who could be forced to do what work. The reformers patted themselves on their backs about how abolished slavery was, and Zarazu's society crystallized into a sharp religious-ethnic divide. 

The Age of Flowers (1000 - 1500)

The 1000s were a century of Pratasam conversion and "Samvaranization" in Zarazuko. This was an incredibly uneven process that mostly impacted the Northern kingdoms, though attempts were made to evangelize in the South. To this end, an Alkoa training school was founded in the great city of Nimok and Northern princes were given the right to claim any who converted by their hand - essentially tying proselytizing to expansion. The more open and syncretic practices of proto-Rueka competed with the more intolerant and expansionistic Pratasam voices. Ultimately, the Pratasa traditionalists won out - the Northern princes gained too much from drawing clear lines between themselves and their Southern neighbors (and Zeshem inferiors). The Alkoa sent to evangelize also found the local traditions too unorthodox to be tolerated - Zarazu cheek kissing, associated with religious bonds and hospitality performances (tied to sacred pilgrimages) , was seen as improper and socially disruptive for incoming Pratasa missionaries. 
1000 ME to 1500 ME is known now as the Age of Flowers, or the Samvaran period. Ironically, as Pratasa spread through the region, so did Zesheko: as Southern towns and villages were converted, Zeshem religion spread as well among the poor and the socially subservient. It was more profitable to funnel people into the disgraced Zeshem labor class than to grant them rights as Pratasa peasants. Pratasa inferior status was spread to certain families, but it became more of a middle class between the two religious-ethnic categories.
In this highly stratified society, some groups worked together to protect old traditions of social mobility. Tribal mercenaries, which the princes depended upon to exert power, became the vehicle of the old priesthood. They kept the old rituals alive as military tradition, and allowed Zeshem and Pratasa to interact as equals. These mercenaries became more organized in the 1200s, especially with the mercenary coup of the city of Knifepoint (then known as Nominiz) by the famous Captain Mennahl. Mennahl turned the city into a gateway for local warriors and youths to find contracts and gold overseas, and was infamous for granting the Zeshem almost-equal rights to the Pratasa. The eccentric captain has been re-imagined as a Zeshem hero by modern histories, even if he was historically more selkie-aligned. He is also fondly remembered by the cats of the region - he was considered insane by his humanoid peers for trying to speak to cats in their own language, and for trying to give cats equal rights as royal subjects, but the cats respected him. 

The Age of Reckoning (1500 - 1760)

The late 1400s into 1500s were another rough time for Zarazuko. Earthquakes, a massive tsunami, an outbreak of Apex warlocks, a particularly brutal series of wars, bad crop years, and an invasion from the interior prism tribes all smashed into the region during this time. While each crisis was small enough to not be too remarkable on its own, they synergized together to create a host of new problems and a sudden population decline. The old order struggled to maintain legitimacy. In 1505 a Zeshem priest known as Redemption emerged as a charismatic leader among the lower classes. While Redemption was initially dismissed as unimportant, he became an enemy of every state after it was revealed that he had somehow stolen the secrets of druidcraft and was training his own Zeshem druid-priesthood to compete with the Pratasa. Redemption was hunted and killed in 1539. According to folklore, he returned as a ghost to take off his mask and reveal that he was the Zeshem prophet, Norinar, all along, but there is no evidence that this happened. What is for certain is that Redemptions' druids survived him and took many disciples of their own. When the 1600s finally arrived, the disasters were over but society was ready for a reckoning: the Zeshem and the Pratasa each had their druids and were gathering allies under their banners. 
The 1600s were a century of war. The Pratasa Zarazu had the money and the foreign connections; the Zeshem had the manpower. At first, the Pratasa won handily - but the Zeshem slowly won over and then converted the prisms, who controlled access to the copper mines. Things began to turn around in the 1670s. And once the Hunters of Norinar - Zeshem military intelligence and elite assassins from the Zeshem homelands - joined the Zeshem side, hope not just for religious tolerance but absolute victory emerged. In the early 1700s the Zarazu Zeshem temple formally organized into a grand alliance and hierarchy, and coordinated a massive military campaign to remove the Samvaran elites. Though "remove" might not be fully accurate; many Pratasa elites just converted and quietly switched sides once it looked like the Zeshem would win. Some Pratasa priests were even granted Zeshem status if they remained behind and helped train more druids. It was assimilation and unification under the guise of total destruction - though some Pratasa communities certainly were exiled or slaughtered to give the story some credence. In 1730, the first Zeshem Kingdom of Zarazuko was made - and in 1760, it was formally recognized as the sole ruler of the region. 

Modern History

From 1760 to 1902, the Zeshem kingdom of Zarazuko ruled the land. This kingdom was unstable at best, and its Zeshem religion was nothing like that of the other Zeshem kingdoms - it was as much indigenous spirituality and Pratasam as it was Zesheko. Old Pratasa communities remained, traditional religious groups remained, and Ruekan groups had even crept into the middle of things during the wars. The new kingdom moved its policy like a pendulum between tolerance and persecution, and it was rocked by frequent rebellions and palace coups. An attempt by a group of selkies to coup the government in 1810 unleashed a particularly nasty wave of xenophobia and civil war. 
In 1902, a local rebellion managed to take over the prism city of Kidezidomo - the richest mountain city - and seceded from Zarazuko. An alliance of other groups joined their rebellion, and the kingdom entered a massive civil war. The foreign-Zeshem royal government did their best to assert absolute control - this was their moment for centralization - but failed to defeat the alliance. Kidezidomo was purged of cultural dissent and many Pratasa communities across the kingdom were slaughtered, though. The war ended in 1910, and the priests mediated a new government that would be less intrusive: the Federation that we see today. 
While many outsiders saw the Federation as an opportunity to open the country, the last century has seen much of the opposite: the coastal regions have withdrawn completely from foreign trade and implemented sharp anti-foreign measures, and have pressured border tribes to draw sharper lines between themselves and the rest of the world. There is more internal fluidity and tolerance now, but it seems to come at the cost of openness to the outside world.

Demography and Population

3,500,000 humanoids live in Zarazuko. The demographics split roughly 75% Dryad, 10% are Half-dryad, 10% Human, and 5% prism.

Territories

Zarazuko is 420 miles North-South and almost 200 miles West-East. The region is essentially a series of tropical river valleys surrounding the Great Zarazuma river. The terrain is mostly jungle, with some rainforest around the equatorial belt and some tropical savannah in places. Hills and mountains mark the edges of Zarazu territory, but it is important to emphasize that this is not a hard border in any way; there are many places that are only ambiguously Zarazu. The mountains grow larger and more difficult to navigate further inland, making the lines a little clearer.

Military

Every member of the Federation has their own local military. Most of these are feudal warbands that combine small groups of elite garrisons from sedentary towns with levies, particularly levies from the surrounding tribes. This provides a one-two punch of skilled light infantry with better equipped heavy infantry or light cavalry. These local militaries coordinate under the federal government when major threats arise, but are cheap to finance during peacetime. Zarazu warriors prefer saw-toothed swords and metal claw gauntlets (intended to strengthen a dryad's existing claws and make them more dangerous in a fight). 
Bolstering these reactionary levies are veterans from the Masked Companies, local mercenary companies that do work in Western Samvara and Larazel.

Religion

The Zarazu follow the Zesheko religion from South Larazel, but with a substantial local spin. Most of the structure of the priesthood is still the same, but the beliefs are somewhat different and the duties of the priesthood are modified. 
The most obvious initial difference is that the Zarazu consider magic - especially magic that can heal such as druid magic - a sign of divine investiture. Priests are much more focused on druidic training and rely more on auxiliary staff to get paperwork done - reducing the bureaucratic power of the clergy but increasing its magical potential and social legitimacy. The next obvious difference is doctrinal: rather than focus on the Great Mother Rivers under the God Alima, the Zarazu focus on a single Great Mother Zarazma and on the World Tree Natisa as the day-to-day deities. And, of course, the rituals that accompany this local worship are rather different from traditional Southern Zeshem religion. 
There is a lot of overlap between Zarazu-Zesheko and traditional Zarazu religion, but the two are not entirely the same. Zarazu tradition tends to revolve around the World Tree, Natisa, and transforming the world into a garden by feeding Natisa love and dutiful sacrifice; Zar-Zesh religion casts Natisa as a sick and fragile Goddess who is kept pure and safe only by the Masked One, and who must be nourished with the blood of the wicked. Zesheko refuses to acknowledge that there is a legitimate traditional religion, only Zeshem people who persist in practicing unclean ritual. 
Along with Zesheko and traditional practice, there is also a sizable Ruekan community, which has absorbed the remnants of all of the old Pratasa groups here. The Ruekans are looked upon with deep suspicion and are under substantial pressure to convert, but they unsurprisingly have dug in their heels to resist. 
As for religious policy and law, every local kingdom is allowed to set their own laws. The coastal kingdoms, terrified of religious infiltration and foreign influence, have the strictest laws against foreign religious practice. These kingdoms are also the most dogmatically Zeshem: they invite in foreign clerics, practice foreign Zeshem ritual, and sneer at their fellow Zarazu for practicing the old ways. The interior kingdoms, which have much more relaxed trading relationships with their immediate neighbors and have more suspicion of the foreign Zeshem clergy, prefer to harbor the Ruekans and traditionalists. This tension between the interior and coastal kingdoms has created a minor legal dispute, where the interior kingdoms support the Ruekan's rights to trade and send convoys back to their religious superiors, while the coastal kingdoms want to specifically block them from doing that as long as trade is stopped.

Foreign Relations

Zarazuko is an extremely isolationist country that only maintains close relationships with its immediate neighbors and with Holy Zeshema. There have been efforts by the March Kingdom of Kakoru to establish better relations, but these efforts have been materializing results very slowly thusfar.

Agriculture & Industry

Zarazu is a mixture between farming, mining, and horticulture. Wet rice is a common crop, as is growing starfruit and other tropical produce. Some cash crops are tentatively grown to be sold through Zeshem merchants - mostly rubber and coffee. Mining is a huge thing here, especially copper: Zarazuko is one of the top copper producing regions in the West.

Trade & Transport

Trade is almost entirely done through one of two avenues: The Masked Companies, or support fleets from Holy Zeshema. The Masked Companies are mercenary groups that often do trade work along the way as they fight abroad. The support fleets, meanwhile, take larger shipments of copper and cash crops back to Zeshema to be sold to international markets - a pretty rough system to say the least.

"Pure Makes Pure"

Founding Date

1911

Type

Political, Federation

Alternative Names

Zarazuvara

Demonym

Zarazu/Zarazuan

Government System

Oligarchy

Power Structure

Federation

Economic System

Mixed economy

Currency

Ekedian Gold Suns, Silver Moons, and Copper Bats

Major Exports

Lumber, copper, rubber, coffee

Major Imports

Steel, tar, textiles

Official State Religion

Zesheko

Location

Larazel