Vice-Kingdom of Ibaisha
Ibaisha is a kingdom of vast populations and ludicrous wealth. Sprawling towns and cities weave across the massive floodplains of Ibaisha, connected by grey-water canals. The heart of Ibaisha is the Belikoi river, which is tinged black and grey by the ash and sediment that constantly flows into it from the volcano in the South.
Ibaisha is not an independent kingdom, but a province of the Empire of Zerua with its own regional laws and quirks. As one of the larger kingdoms and as the most connected kingdom to the imperial capital province of Sanari, Ibaisha is an important player in imperial politics.
For those living in Zerua, Ibaisha exemplifies many of the commercial archetypes and stereotypes of Zeruan life. Many of the biggest Zeruan corporations have major sway here, and many of the city and rural guard groups are privately operated by them. Huge banking plazas and stock exchanges dominate the three major cities of Ibaisha, and the banking is more accessible to the average citizen here than in any other kingdom. Many of the big mints are also based in Ibaisha (processing the gold and silver from the rivers and Southern valleys), producing enough coinage to enable common-person commercial engagement: in Ibaisha more than anywhere else you will find even common farmers paying for goods using official coinage.
Part of this commercialization of the kingdom is the destruction of old land grants as many farmers have been forced to sell out: many villages have been outright evicted or forced into debt bondage during poor harvests. It also means that many of the great families here are outright immune to legal prosecution from their lessers, as so much is operated by wealthy corporate cliques. But Ibaisha is not a land of soulless capital: it also has a strong history of community cooperation and co-existence that lives on in community militias and associations that are virtually mandatory in Ibaisha. Even stranger is that these associations sometimes even incorporate into their own corporate entities, comingle with criminal syndicates, or both. While there is a sharp divide between those who have and those who have not in Ibaisha, mediation and survival has taken many interesting forms.
Structure
Ibaisha is a federated kingdom of the Empire of Zerua, and as such respects the authority of the Zeruan emperor and ministers above all. However, many affairs are left to the local viceroyal government.
- The Prince of Princess leads Ibaisha directly, managing the internal policy of the kingdom and executing the will of the imperial bureaucracy.
- The Archduke/Archduchess of Etekamo is whoever is the Prince of Princess selects as their heir. It no longer is attached to land management within the kingdom. This is not a mandatory position, and can go unfilled for stretches of time.
- The Ibaishan Royal Cabinet manages the bureaucracy of Ibaisha and enacts the monarch's will. Several major bureaucrats hold great power here, the most important of which are the Court Magician (the greatest sorcerer and arcane advisors), the Secretary of Trade (who sets trade policy and exemptions), and the Treasurer (who manages the budget). Also important are the Secretary of Balance (who manages Windweaving, the Secretary of Public Health (who manages issues of plague, poison, and public immorality), the Secretary of Movement (who manages the canal system and infrastructure), the Secretary of Agriculture (who manages farming, food prices, and tax collection), the Secretary of Justice (who manages legal certification and court operation), and the Oceanlord (who manages port development and squiddle-humanoid relations).
- The Crown Priest of Ibaisha manages the religious hierarchy and holds their own court in parallel. They answer only to the monarch
- The Provincial Governors manage the local affairs of the 75 municipalities of Ibaisha.
History
Ibaisha is one of the first three places urban settlement in Ekraht, in the ancient days of the early Divine Era. It was in Ibaisha that Wimbo Aizitu's body was cremated and where his ashes were stored before their seizure by the first Zeruan empire.
Gold and Ash
At the time of the Architect's departure from the world in 0 ME, Ibaisha was the most populous and wealthy area in Ekraht. It was the first to master community lobster-chitin fertilizer, and that combined well with the rich soil to produce ludicrous amounts of food. 13 major city-states ruled the Belikoi river, each growing roughly to the size of a small kingdom. These states squabbled for territory, but those who focused on peace found greater long-term prosperity. Those peaceful kingdoms slowly saw wealthy merchants rising as their most powerful group, and these wealthy merchants were co-opted into a shared mutual elite. Over time, this became the League of Ibaisha- and the one by one the thirteen kingdoms fell into one great league. To maximize the potential of the league, several merchant-sorcerers pushed through centralizing reforms that transformed it into the Merchant Republic of Ibaisha in 210 ME.
The Merchant Republic prospered and rapidly expanded, only to find itself in competition with nine other superpowers that had done the same. From 290 to 370, the great wars of the North tore the land apart. Ibaisha's wealth and power rocketed it the greatest of the three great powers by 350- but its oligarchic, bureaucratic nature made it sluggish and factionalized. Individual merchant-lords had been given total control over their conquered lands, and these warlords were increasingly powerful than the republic itself. One of these warlords joined forces with a warlord of the second-greatest power (Karema), and declared independence from the Republic. The strain was enough to collapse the republic into civil war, and the great sorcerer-warlord Makoi was able to tear his way to the top. Seizing Ibaisha and bringing Karema to heel, Makoi founded the great Zeruan empire in 370 with Ibaisha as his center of power.
But Zerua fell in fire and ash. From the wreckage, a new regime clawed its way to the top- but Ibaisha's closeness to the volcano had left it particularly damaged. The new emperor moved the capital to his home province of Sanari, which had fared far better and risen to challenge the other great heartland kingdoms in prosperity despite its small size. Sanari would remain the seat of Zeruan power for much of the rest of the empire's history, with Ibaisha playing second-fiddle. Efforts were made by the Ibaishan leadership to secure the imperial title again following the 913 eruption and imperial collapse, but Ibaisha was once again hit far harder than the other kingdoms and failed.
Toxic Storms, Banking, and the Windwaker Rebellion
While denied the imperial court and heavily impacted by the eruptions, Ibaisha continued to be prosperous and powerful economically. The late 1000s and 1100s in particular saw Ibaisha become the sorcery-capital of the empire. The arrival of Fire Termites from the West had allowed for far larger numbers of dragomanders to be raised in captivity and a massive demand for dragon sorcery rose across the empire that the fledgling termite-keepers could not keep up with. South Ibaisha's sulfuric hotsprings became the empire-wide testing ground and dragomander hatchery for nobles unable to finagle the dangerous and expensive new termite colonies. But while Ibaisha doubled down on the number of windweavers it needed to train, windweavers cannot be produced as quickly as dragomanders (and have limited numbers). To make matters worse, other kingdoms and foreign powers were largely failing to keep up with their windweaver counts- and the dragomander smog problem began. The supervolcano became truly uninhabitable for non-Prisms (remaining so to this day) and poison began to seep into the kingdom. This surge in sorcery and poison-storms saw an economic boom, a rise in dissent against the empire, and a mass adoption of popular wind-cult mysticism. These wind-cults were not empire-friendly in their politics and their persecution forced them underground as a criminal network. Meanwhile, rising wealth of the sorcerous elite led to the foundation of massive banking and stock-exchange institutions (that may have, ironically, been used to launder money and fund the criminal network).
When the eruptions began again in 1198, Ibaisha was one of several kingdoms to enter revolt against the emperor. The wind-cults and corporations came together in support of Tarnasha the Windwaker, a war-windweaver who claimed to be Makoi reincarnated, as empress. Tarnasha's revolt was brutally suppressed by the emperor himself, riding the god-dragon Kemegi. The rebels continued without her until 1204, but the spirit of rebellion died in the flames of the great dragon and Ibaisha was brought to heel once again. Those cultists who were willing to support the new emperor were given a great cathedral in the West where they remained popular, but the rest of Ibaisha rejected them as traitors and mixed their banned reverence of Tarnasha with other forms of religion instead.
The Circle of Circles
While the new dynasty slowed (and at times, stopped) the poison-storms, more eruptions and earthquakes were on their way to put Ibaishan institutions to the test. The period of seismic and volcanic activity of 1480 to 1570 hit Ibaisha terribly hard once again. Distracted with outside threats and instability, the empire and its institutions focused on containing the smog but otherwise left Ibaisha to its own devices. The earthquakes and ensuing fires and plagues killed millions, but led to a great movement of solidarity. Barakar, a common human laborer that had moved from city to city working for the crown, rallied the common people of Ibaisha. Beginning in Etekamo , he organized neighborhoods to rebuild and protect themselves from bandits. The already-strong neighborhood communities of Etekamo became a network known as The Circle of Circles (as each group was called a Circle or "Darzir") or the Big Family (or "Davamegi"). Barakar's Circles not only rebuilt the city, quarantined districts, and fought fires, but it also served as a way to incorporate gamblers, peddlers, criminals, and migrant laborers into the community (making the streets safer and providing those people with food and lodging). The Empire was uncertain what to do about the Circles, but the guild-corporations recognized their potential and provided their backing and protection. With guild money and influence, Barakar was able to spread the circles throughout the cities of Ibaisha. This network survived after his death in 1565, though loosely disorganized in structure. Neither Baraker nor the Circles were ever able to effectively spread into the countryside (nor did they ever seem to care to).
While the Circles helped urban Ibaisha rebuild and revitalize quickly, they also seeded the next wave of internal conflict. The closing of Zerua in 1530 had deeply hurt the merchant corporations, and Ibaisha fell on harder times as the trade closure dragged on. Poor residents turned more and more to the circles, which served as mediating organizations. Dangerously, the circles also began coordinating labor- shutting down parts of the city entirely in response to wage decreases. As Zerua's great corporations had always funded imperial expansion and spending projects, the sudden dual hits to corporate profits from closed borders and mass organized labor sent shudders through the empire. There was fear of this behavior spreading to other provinces, and the circles were blamed on Maradian interference. The full force of the empire came down on Ibaisha's Circle of Circles from 1590 to 1620, forcibly reducing them only into "Darzi" or little circles that served only their local communities. To further break apart the Circle's threat, the empire began taking loans from Ibaisha's banks to fund massive public spending projects that sought to bring in the rural poor- who felt disenfranchised and left out by the exclusively urban circles. While many of these rural communities ended up picking up the "little circle" system of community organization, the ploy was successful and the Circle of Circles was driven completely underground. For some time, it continued as an urban resistance group but ultimately was forced into criminal enterprises to stay alive. It now exists as a crime syndicate that operates through local Darzis. While this crushing of the Circle was a loss for the poor of Ibaisha, it also meant that the right to form and maintain Darzi community groups was enshrined in law as a natural right of sorts (within Ibaisha, at least- other regional elites were deeply afraid of this system). It also led to major imperial investment in rebuilding the countryside, to keep the rural population loyal.
Open the Country, Stop Having It Be Closed
The loans taken by the Zeruan government gave the banking corporations serious governmental authority and began an age of corporate dominance in the imperial court. While the imperial family staunchly refused to open the country again, a coup in 1690 allowed that sweet sweet trade money to return to Ibaisha's cities. The new federated kingdoms system also gave Ibaisha greater regional autonomy, allowing it to fully adopt a commercial way of life. The Ibaishan Darzi was embraced by the local government as a marker of Ibaishan identity, as was the classical Ibaishan lobster hat (which was mandatory for any government servant until 1970). This has spilled into a strange sort of regional patriotism and nativism at times (such as the anti-foreign riots of 1846), and eventually became attached to religion: when the empire adopted the Kamada religion in 1885, Ibaisha flew into religious fervor. Controversially, this has made common rural integration of Tarnasha as a divine figure more visible, though the local authorities have largely tolerated it as "excessive fervor" in their Ibaishan pride.Demography and Population
20,000,000 humanoids live in Ibaisha. They are primarily clustered around the rivers and coasts, though there is dense settlement across the Northern floodplains.
30% of the population are hybrids of some kind, 31% are Dryads, 31% are Humans, 7% are Prisms, and 1% are other races.
800,000 cats live here, unincorporated into the state and largely unrecognized as sentient outside of academics. No cat-state has occurred in Ibaishan history, and all cats there are part of small clan communities. As of the 2010s, a large cat federation in the East has formed to defend their territory from the Scourge: a form of militaristic and authoritarian cat government and living found in Northeasterm Ekraht that has begun to spread West.
Territories
Ibaisha is one of the larger Zeruan subsidiary kingdoms, bordered in the West by the Ormen mountains (beyond which lies Azalek), in the East by the Iziren mountains (beyond which lies Iziko). To the North lies the massive Orokar bay (and the island kingdom of Sanari). To the south lies the valleys of Akrea, beyond which is only the supervolcano itself.
Ibaisha has 304 miles of coastline and the floodplains are 314 miles North-South. It is centered around the massive ash-filled Belikoi River, which extends from both the West and the Southern Akrean valleys. It is 533 miles long North-South, with an extra 240 miles of Western river.
South of the floodplains are the two smoggy volcano-valleys. These semi-forested valleys are home to massive hotsprings infested with thousands of Dragomanders. Many noble estates, Windweaver outposts, Prism mining communities, and isolated farming villages lie in these valleys.
Religion
Ibaisha is fervently Kamada, particularly in the interior of the country. The coast is slightly more religiously diverse, but remains fairly thoroughly Kamadan.
The Crown Priest of Ibaisha holds court in The Great Cathedral of the North Wind at Aydena, rather than in capital of Etekamo. Aydena has long been held as the capital of religion and philosophy in Ibaisha, and the cathedral built in 1220 for imperial wind cultists was rebuilt in glory and splendor after the 1570 earthquake. While once a site of scorn and disdain, the cathedral has become a symbol of knowledge and mystical power since the 1575 renovation and Aydena has created a reputation for itself as a city of priests and libraries. When Kamada was adopted in 1885, the Aizusha cult there largely was rolled into the new priesthood, though some of the fringe mystics refused and reside now reside in exile in the South.
Ibaisha is home to the Academic school of Kamada, which believes that the most worshipful activity possible is knowledge. As the Crown Priest is a major advocate for this school, Kamadan temples take a much more educational bent than most.
There are some local adaptations of the religious structure that are unique to Ibaisha. Doctrinally, there is the matter of the fourth life of Makoi- which is traditionally seen here as the rebel-turned-folk-hero Tarnasha. Kamadan official doctrine teaches that the only lives of Makoi are those who rebuilt the empire after major eruptions of the supervolcano (Emperors Manar and Mariz). This deviation from doctrine is tolerated here, but not officially accepted. Organizationally, Ibaisha's community organizations or "Darzi" are a unique obstacle and resource to temple management. Practically, the Darzi are the most effective way of organizing temple attendance and supporting the temples resource-wise and for the most part the Crown Priest has done this. But this has also given the Darzi an uncomfortable amount of power over temples in Ibaisha, and oftentimes it is the Darzi who decide where temples should be built, how they should be run, and which initiate should be promoted to the priesthood. While uncomfortable for the rich upper priesthood, allowing this has led to significant community engagement and reduce temple costs.
Trade & Transport
The great banking plazas and stock exchanges of Etekamo, Iberok, and Aydena are the first things many Zeruans think of when they think of Ibaisha. The B&G Company, the Aludarzir Corporation, and the Iskariba Family Company basically hold a shared monopoly on finance here, and are super-giants of Zeruan business. Their subsidiaries are entrenched everywhere from mercenary groups to shipping to sugar crops. Generally speaking, B&G manages chemical plants, sorcery components, alchemy, and currency minting; Aludarzir is the biggest in shipping, sugar, and spice trading; and the Iskariba company is heavily intertangled with mercenaries, rocketeering, and the Windweaver Imperial Corporation.
Their immense power over the Ibaishan government has also allowed them to experiment here like nowhere else: they have started to actually open rural banks and offer loans to middling class Ibaishans. When it comes to the adoption of physical currency by everyday Ibaishans, you can thank these three companies. The 'unholy trinity''s debt collectors have become heavily integrated into tax collection and state policing, and are now inseparable from the state at a certain level.
But don't think that it is just those three companies- there are many middling-to-large corporations that are closely tied to the government and sorcerer-cliques here. Many of these are guild-corporations, though several major trading companies also exist.
A curious example of the Ibaishan corporate world is the Big-Little-Circle-Group/Adarzimegi (lets call it the BLCG). The BLCG is the only legal association of community organization and protection groups known as 'Darzi'. Darzi are normally banned from forming associations, but they also are allowed to invest or coordinate with outside groups (and this technically counts as a group that works with Darzi, rather than an association of Darzi as verified in a 1860 court case). The Darzi, which both rely on regulate gambling groups and peddlers, are legally enshrined as having special legal privileges in those fields. BLCG utilizes those privileges to make large casinos and entertainment complexes for wealthy sorcerers- but since it relies on Darzis to operate, it actually acts as something of a community advocate at times. BLCG is also possibly a money laundering front for the Circle, but it is important here as an example of how fluid these corporations can be and how imperfect elite power is- it isn't a cyberpunk dystopia just yet.
"Ours is Black and Gold"
Founding Date
1700
Type
Geopolitical, Vicekingdom
Capital
Demonym
Ibaishan
Head of State
Power Structure
Unitary state
Official State Religion
Parent Organization
Controlled Territories
Neighboring Nations
Notable Members
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