so far if you're reading along at home about Cobrin'Seil, you'll have seen me invoke the term 'necrostate.' This is a description for a type of stable, present political body, ranging from a whole full-sized country as we'd recognise it today down to a stable persistent city or the like, where political power is in some way concentrated in the control of someone or someones who are dead.
These are a real thing! We in fact live in a world where there is, in fact, at least one actual political body where the ruling body in charge of it claim their power flows from the authority of someone dead. England, for example.
(That's a joke, England isn't a necrostate. Queen Prince Charles isn't dead, but he is, according to the political rules of England, chosen by God, and the head of the Anglican church, which was founded so a king could get a divorce and murder his ex wife. Weird traditions in that church.)
But no, the actual necrostate in the real world is North Korea, where the ruler of that country is, technically, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Un's grandfather. What does this mean for any real world politics? Nothing, I just like the trivia that we have in the real world an actual country that claims its ruler is dead.
Countries are silly.
Anyway, in Cobrin'Seil, there are three necrostates I've discussed in public:
- Voolfardisworth, which is a classic Westerners-ideas-of-Romanian-Transylvanian culture, a full on Castlevania-em-up land of valleys with different vampire lords each trying to cook up the best vampire hunter to send out to other, nearby vampire lords, but not too nearby, and also, hopefully, with crucial weaknesses that they can exploit when that vampire hunter comes back home to clean up. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that nobility and landed gentry fundamentally treat people like commodies.
- The Osteon, which is an industrialised Victorian style nation where instead of relying on coal and whale oil, all the mass-production technology is based on constructs made out of human bones. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that early capitalism treats people like commodities.
- Uxaion, a venture capital necrocybermagepunk city with sprawling gangs and a very cruel vision of human capital, constantly trying the Most Exciting New Thing in an attempt to exploit a constantly flowing living population. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that late capitalism treats people like commodities.
Anyway, so like, if you go by this, in Cobrin'Seil, you might look at the setting and go: Okay, so necrostates are shit. Like the least bad of them is - well I don't know, the least bad might be the Osteon or Voolfardisworth, but like, we can all agree that Uxaion is definitely the worst right?
And I think that that represents a weakness in my worldbuilding. Uxiaon was made to be an explicit jab at silicon valley culture, and the other two are part of The Horror Peninsula, the Szudetken, where I wanted to give people places to make characters who could very clearly point to the world around them and go 'I fight that.' But that isn't that I think necrostates are inherently bad, inasmuch as I don't think, in a fantasy roleplaying setting, that it's impossible to have organisational structures in general that don't suck.
So I want to make sure in Cobrin'Seil there are a few necrostates that manage to crest the lofty goal of 'not blatantly evil' and maybe even tap into the fantasy of like, what if we did have the dead around, what if there was a way that that was... not bad?
Anyway, so here are some ideas about necrostates that don't have to become inherently shit that I am thinking about jamming somewhere in the world.
- The Restless And Thoughtless Dead — What if the undead in question are more like the weather than people with selfish aims and demands? Imagine a place where the dead have 'died' and gone to their version of 'heaven' - which is to say, rolling ghost battlefields of people who love fighting smashing into each other in endless battlefields that also, coincidentally, can be treated as a sort of natural resource. Set it up right, it can be a sort of cultural moat - you don't try and go there because it's just a haunted battlefield where every day the ghosts get up and kick the shit out of each other, and then by finding a way through that Ghost Moat you get to a culture who have equilibrium on the farside of the Ghost War. In this case, they might even have ghost festivals and supplication to the dead, festivals where you can have a party with the dead and say goodbye to them and makes the process of dying together more of a social thing.
- The Good Undead Citizen — So like when I mentioned that Uxaion wasn't allowed into the Eresh Protectorate, so they shouldn't ask, what about a culture that lived in that same space but didn't have the same commitment to bastardry? What about a city state, run by a vampire, possibly even slurping blood out of people as a form of tax, that wants to join the Protectorate, and when they were told 'no, don't ask' the response was to wait patiently, and then make another, smaller city nearby that they could trade with, who could then join the Eresh Protectorate. There's something I find very funny about the idea of a vampire culture trying to find symbiosis with non-vampires in ways that are sometimes like, really fucked up? Like, 'we have N people here, they can produce X blood without anyone being seriously hurt or at risk of loss of life, so we can sustain Z vampires, and that means that any new vampire citizens have to bring a tantamount increase in population in a way that doesn't discourage more other people,' and like, the weird calculus of a sapient predator trying to be responsible and respectful, and also, how intensely sus it looks to the Eresh Protectorates.
- Mournful Honesty — What about a place where the dead go to a place and hang out there? like a lake of the dead, or an underworld ala ancient greek myth? A place where you can go and consult the dead and where the dead want you to move on, because dwelling on the past is, to them, dwelling on their death, and their absence. What if the dead want you to move on because only by changing the world can they see a future?
- The King Eternal — This is just the germ of an idea but I love the idea of a necrostate which ahs an undead ruler they keep electing into their position, quite possibly because they all like the fact they can complain about it.
- Just Some Good Old Fashioned Pagan Shit — Ghost Princes! Horned King! A land of the dead where you hold court because then you can get witnesses to their own murders to attest to things! I dunno, something small and less structured than a city.
