|||
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.
