The Walled City-State of Catage

The city sits on the south-eastern coast of the continent it occupies, nestled among a huge expanse of forest which it harvested for building and trade. It would have made for a convenient stop for seafarers from the Kingdoms of Law. Surviving histories and oral tradition mark it as one of a multitude of kingdoms, tribal holdings, and territories that traded, squabbled, and migrated across the land to the north. Catage cemented itself as a particularly stable and enviable power in part through its gargantuan walls, which encompass such a vast area that in those days nearly all the citizenry could retreat within during times of conflict and continue living a reasonably stable life of agricultural prosperity. Details on ancient neighbors are sparse, but scholars make much of fragmentary records of “River Dwellers” who seemed to migrate along or through nearby waterways.

About a millennium ago, by scholarly estimation, a great plague struck the continent. Catage did as it usually did, and closed the great gates to its walls. They were lucky and the plague was largely excluded from the city-state. The lands outside, however, were so devastated that they became thought of as cursed (how Catage ultimately knew this is debated, the most accepted idea being expeditions sent by sea to scout the coastlines and waterways). The gates to the wall were not re-opened, and the city-state began building inwards and upwards, farmlands and woodlands and neighborhoods crowding together at the feet of the palaces of the royal Lavalle-Fontaine families.

Public servants of the dynasty worked hard at creating a self-contained world. A centuries-long malaise set in. Movements in opposition to the royals conspired away within, were discovered, crushed, reformed, restructured. Space grew scarcer, the forests started to shrink, the palaces and parks closed their own walls within the wall.

Only a little over a century ago there was a significant effort by the Lavalle-Fontaines to reestablish long-lost island holdings of the kingdom, which lead to contact with the outside world: the now industrialized peninsula of Riccamino, seemingly the only other plague survivor on the continent on a scale worth Catage’s consideration, having outstripped them in technological achievement over the years of solitude; and the distant Kingdoms of Law, in a state of some turmoil at interior struggles but happy to make a political project of bringing a new member under their hegemonic wing. The Lavalle-Fontaines set about failing to endear themselves to either of these groups, seeming hopelessly primitive to the Riccaminans and philosophically backwards to the Kingdoms of Law. Neither could they find allies in the dissidents of either land — guerrilla communist and anarchist forces fighting Lawful hegemony hardly love a king, and the upstart Occult-Futurist faction of Riccamino cared little except to regard the wall itself as an object worth scrutiny under better stewardship.

The new influx of people, ideas, and trade empowered and inflamed a broad swathe of anti-royalist revolutionaries in Catage. Conspirators arose among a network of repressed religious movements, anarchist seditionists, and a new class of propertied industrialist profiting from the newfound trade. Brutal fighting broke out, and eventually both the Kingdoms of Law and their internal communist opposition sent troops to assist in the overthrow of the royals. The fighting ended about 50 years ago, with the Janissary Corp of the Kingdoms of Law enforcing the creation of a new Humanist-Industrialist headed government. The revolutionaries not aligned with the Law either fell back on their long held strategies of secretive conspiracy or were arrested alongside royalist holdouts for failing to assist in the re-stabilization of the new national project.

The new leadership and their ideology of Merchant-Industrialist Humanism last to the present, as the city-state turns more to manufacturing industry with technologies imported from Riccamino. Unwilling to publicly execute the dissidents they have limited space to imprison (such was the way of the royalists after all, and they must hold themselves to better standards than that), they have done what was once unthinkable and opened the gates of the walls, sending forth exiles to rehabilitate themselves by learning to live in cooperation among the long-abandoned wilds. Surely those who survive with their fellow prisoners will prove themselves fit to return to a civilized life, and those who are undesirable will perish of mistakes made under their own power.

All mentions of time in this document are wrong or lies.