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.
Here's the thing. From the perspective of a long lived leader, the Eresh Protectorate are a fantastic deal for offering stability and long-term growth. They're one of the longest lasting organisations, they have had no major revolutionary actions and their generally hands-off position towards their city states makes them excellent for trade and any special interests. There's an entire Eresh city that feeds the protectorate pretty much nothing but sheep products, and if your special interest is things like ancient magical books or even just medicinal sciences, you probably can do worse than saddle your existing project to this body. Looks good.
But also, the Protectorate is a fantasy organisation based around the fantasy of 'what if a country doesn't have to suck shit' and has a lot of competing factions that are, generally, holding different philosophies in a positive direction even if I don't think that say, churches are great. But okay, point is, the Protectorate has a moral high ground to look at candidate cities to tell them whether or not to fuck off. They've told Uxaion, the hypercapitalist silicon valley undead land to go fuck themselves, for example. But they also have a standard of living and maintain that by doing things like 'actually protecting people' and 'preventing revolution through abundance'. It's a magical setting, the church can make food for people, a lot of problems can be handled with a central organisation.
Which means you can't just sign up to join up because if you suck shit, they're probably going to lose your paperwork, or tell you things you need to change to make the paperwork valid. Mostly, this doesn't happen because people who know they can't fulfill the requirements and meet the trade laws of the protectorate already can't become members.
So imagine this like, Vampire, right.
Yes of course they're hot. Really hot.
And this vampire has a citadel, maybe they've even made it into a full blown city to start with. This citadel has the people in it they feed from, and art and literature and its own culture and you have a city, you have a thing and the protectorate, over there, wants cities. So easy, you say, hey, what laws do I have to follow to set them up? These are trade and safety laws, those are almost all immaterial and unimpressive to you so you can probably comply to them really easily. So you check them over and just say to someone in your parliament, go ahead and enforce them.
And they're like uh okay but what about the murder one.
What
There's a law against murder?
well I mean, this vampire thinks, we don't have to murder, we just have to drink blood. So... y'know, we just keep murders from happening. I mean murders can be illegal and we can still have people break a few laws.
Yeah but, the advisor points out, there's kinda a bit of a concern here where we're like, actual predators that eat people, maybe they might not consider us inherently trustworthy on the 'we don't do murders' front?
And thus begins the slow, steady tensioning. Because most of the time you run into a problem like this, you go: fuck that, I don't care about this Protectorate. But this Vampire thinks of this as a problem, a puzzle. Okay, hang on, then, this can be solved. We just set things up so we don't need to kill humans to feed. That's a thing we can do, it's just a matter of taking enough blood in the right time frame, and a population large enough can absorb that. And this is math, you can do math.
Well how do you keep people from being injured when you feed. Oh hang on we have a thing for this, this can just be a tax. Make it so people can pay blood for their taxes. But wait, the response is, now there's a problem where suddenly people are going to be squeezed for their taxes, this means destitution can be addressed with lifeblood, that's going to be a problem, people exchanging money for blood, because blood can be exchanged for money. So we can't allow that. We need caps, we need to regulate that, and if we need to regulate that, then we need to make sure nobody can double pay to go over their limit, okay, so, okay we have these blood drawers who take the blood, and that means we need a central reserve and control system for that, but that, that isn't hard at all, and if we set that up right, that's great, that's a job, that's a thing that we can have enduring and constantly work on, we love a project. But if we're tracking these blood drawers we need to be able to track everyone in the city, and we need to make sure they're healthy if they're contributing blood and that means...
Look it'll be easier, it'll be tidier if we give the mortals universal health care. A few clerics as blood drawers, heal people and get pure blood, no need for hunts, no need for risk, and now if we just keep the population numbers high enough then we're talking about a completely tenable situation.
Then the next step is the protectorate presenting a problem where the numbers need to be dialled in. You need to make sure nobody is incentivised to kill someone else to donate blood. Okay, so fine, we have a guard system in place. Fine, the Protectorate want that anyway. Wait, that doesn't address crime? What does? OH, okay, okay, fine, fucking, so everyone has basic income, rent is free for basic housing, and -
somewhere in all this.
This city starts to become a pretty cool place to live, if you're someone who can, culturally, handle the vibes and recognise that every three months, you're giving blood.
And then pivot across to the Protectorate. This looks sus as shit right? Like this vampire has basically started whole new systems inside their city and they're now doing everything they can, OVERCORRECTING, really, and now they're patiently building all these systems to make their city a valid Protectorate city.
Don't know.
Don't trust it.
Just, y'know, keep an eye on it.
And okay, now this vampire has the problem that they've fallen into the vampire trap of when an immortal, undying mind gets brain worms, those worms dig deep. Now, making this city good is their Special Interest Project. And that special interest project is obsessive, and has created its whole new layer of culture. Because to humans, this city is kinda gothic, has all these rad amenities, a creepy blood payment system, and the leadership is this small population of vampires that you obviously don't want to fuck with and keep themselves removed and have like their own very distinct interests that shape bits of the cities. Like one group of the vampires are into art so their section of the city has a bunch of galleries. It's interesting, it's weird, but it's also very free, very safe...
.. and from the Vampires perspective, this is a glass clock. The population must be over %, it must always reach high enough that they can always attest to Blood reserves and not run the risk of a starvation incident. New vampires arrive in the town thinking 'this is a city run by vampires' and aren't expecting to walk into what amounts to the most intensely regulated minecraft farm ever made, and where every new vampire needs to be met with a commensurate increase in the overall population and oh, you can't do that? You can't bring enough people to safely continue the city project? Then you can leave or you can convince someone else to leave or, much more likely, you can disappear when you decide you don't like how we do things here with our interlocking brainworms.
it has a sister city nearby which is probably going to be part of the protectorate. A little townlet that is still an intensely peopled trade hub as the people of the Vampire Citadel, under that one very hot Vampire, are doing EVERYTHING THEY CAN to be as CLOSE to the protectorate, to learn all the rules and stick to them.
It's a city that through sheer social pressures and response to systemic demands, has become a great place to live because if you're detached from Wealth As A High Score, the actual project is interesting in and of itself. The Protectorate are convinced it's sus because it looks too good to be true and the Vampire Monarch is obsessed with making it better because they've got the brain worm now and they have, coincidentally, become a beloved leader, blackhearted and selfish and entirely unprepared to cope with being one of the city's favourite people.
They are a shepherd. You can shear a sheep many times, but skin it only once.
And they will fight the wolves.
