Haloran, Province of West Evermark
Colrania
1979
You grew up together.
Children here among the mills where your fathers worked. Playing soldier by the gasyard wall. Dodging university students on their way to class. Going to the same movies, swimming pools, treehouses up in the woods above town. And if you knew the bribes that your parents had to pay to get your schoolbooks, if you understood that the secret police were reading the postcards you sent home from vacations - you didn't know that it could be any other way, and you didn't lose sleep. No one did. I remember. I was there.
You graduated from high school together. Got your draft notices together. Went off to training together, to the war together, to Albren. To the trenches and gas, air raids and artillery bombardments. To the tedium, and the mud, and the horror. I remember. I was there.
I did not come back. I lie, these eighteen months later, cold in that mud. Hundreds of miles from home. Far from the mills and the gasyard, the university and the movie theater, the swimming pool and our old treehouse. I remember. I remember, now, forever.
You went home. You went back to university, remembering the flies buzzing around my eyes. You became those students on their way to class, and the neighborhood kids dodged around you as they played soldier. But you know different now. You know all that you have to look forward to: dead-end jobs in an economy where only bribes let you get ahead. Romance in a country where the government reads your love letters. Family in a country where the government drafts your children, and sends them to Albren to die.
And now, you have reached the breaking point. You are too young to know how hard it is to change the world, and too desperate to care. You are ready to fight.
Revolution is coming to Colrania. This world will never be the same.
Colrania
1979
You grew up together.
Children here among the mills where your fathers worked. Playing soldier by the gasyard wall. Dodging university students on their way to class. Going to the same movies, swimming pools, treehouses up in the woods above town. And if you knew the bribes that your parents had to pay to get your schoolbooks, if you understood that the secret police were reading the postcards you sent home from vacations - you didn't know that it could be any other way, and you didn't lose sleep. No one did. I remember. I was there.
You graduated from high school together. Got your draft notices together. Went off to training together, to the war together, to Albren. To the trenches and gas, air raids and artillery bombardments. To the tedium, and the mud, and the horror. I remember. I was there.
I did not come back. I lie, these eighteen months later, cold in that mud. Hundreds of miles from home. Far from the mills and the gasyard, the university and the movie theater, the swimming pool and our old treehouse. I remember. I remember, now, forever.
You went home. You went back to university, remembering the flies buzzing around my eyes. You became those students on their way to class, and the neighborhood kids dodged around you as they played soldier. But you know different now. You know all that you have to look forward to: dead-end jobs in an economy where only bribes let you get ahead. Romance in a country where the government reads your love letters. Family in a country where the government drafts your children, and sends them to Albren to die.
And now, you have reached the breaking point. You are too young to know how hard it is to change the world, and too desperate to care. You are ready to fight.
Revolution is coming to Colrania. This world will never be the same.
Hello, folks! This is, obviously, a bit more informal than the normal Norv RP. It's based on conversations in which it became clear that folks prefer contributing to a shared worldbuilding project, as opposed to digesting thousands of words of background that I wrote. So worldbuilding is what we are going to do.
The Breaking Point is a realistic modern-tech RP set in a fictional authoritarian country (Colrania), within a fictional world, which will both be wholly created by the players. Below, you will find my preliminary outline of this world. Each category includes a few sentences setting the parameters of innovation, and then a whole bunch of prompts for players to contribute their own ideas. This will create the context within which, eventually, our characters start a revolution.
Your job is to write a paragraph or two with any relevant details, to flesh out any details - large or small - that seem plausible. You can use the preliminary questions in the outline below as a starting point. Feel free also to suggest new categories for the outline, which I may well have missed. There are no formal applications here. For big things, like Colrania's system of government, we will all have input into the final version. For small things, like local landmarks in the university town of Haloran, I'll generally accept whatever you give me sight unseen. On acceptance, your work will get included in the outline. And as the outline grows, so will our world.
OUTLINE OF COLRANIA
- Government
- Colrania is an authoritarian country. It is not so brutally tyrannical that dissent is unthinkable; there exists some space for questioning the government, so long as it is done quietly. There are lots of jokes at the expense of the leadership, but you can't make them in public. The best analogy for the level of oppression is likely the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It is a large country, with a population of about 100 million and a wide variety of ecological and climatic zones.
The Damsean Dispositive
Also known as The Machine or The Factory, the Dispositive describes the Colranian form of government. If other government forms laud themselves on their idealism, The Dispositive congratulates itself on a ceaseless pursuit of the purely pragmatic. It is a moral-neutral form of government, where there is no room for judgement or personal responsibility.
In practise, the Dispositive is a giant civil service apparatus. It consists of subdivisions and departments beyond count, all being tasked with one tiny part of the responsibilities of a functioning State. In this, it follows the writings of Hubert Damse, one of the foremost Patrionagio scholars. According to Damse, the biggest threat to society is a government which fails to keep order. During times of civil strife, civilians die and are forced to do unspeakable acts, while the government should keep its citizens safe and free in pursuit of their own morality. Paradoxically, according to Damse, in order to allow for the pursuit of moral perfection of the citizenry, the government should not subject itself to the same rules as civilians, but instead be as efficient, pragmatic, and ruthless as necessary. In his view, the government is the vessel containing society, and if society is to be liquid, the government has to be firm to contain it.
According to Damse, the idea of ‘civil strife’ is broader than mere civil war or revolution. Any unlawful or immoral act is an act of defiance against society. Any abundance of crime means the State has failed to keep order, which is an argument against its practises. Any government that allows crime to exist has failed, in the eyes of Damsean thinkers.
Two factors allow for political strife: respect for criminals (which causes ‘personal civil strife’) and coagulated power (which causes ‘political civil strife’).
1. Respect for criminals is professed by some state in the form of ‘civil rights’, which cannot be abrogated from when the subject has committed heinous acts. This is naïve, since criminals will do everything in their power to subvert these rules. It ties one hand behind your back, while you have a duty to your citizenry to use both hands. Therefore, there should not exist such a thing as criminal procedural law. A Dispositive state does not make arbitrary distinctions between civil, criminal and administrative law. They all exist with the same goal, and when the rules of the written law come to contradict that goal, they should be discarded.
2. Coagulated power means putting too large amounts of power in the hands of people further down the hierarchy. This is the greatest threat to those in charge, since most governments are destroyed by internal coups. Failed Electoral states put power in the hands of independent judges and parliamentarians, which allowed these institutions to work against the interests of the executive. In the Damsean state, no power should be allowed to coagulate in one person below the executive. There should be plenty of different departments, and these departments should have to work together in order to achieve any goal. This makes it impossible for anyone further down the chain to successfully oppose the executive.
In practice, Colrania therefore is governed by an unaccountable bureaucracy. The Bureaucrats, or Dispositives, are judge, jury and executioner, with almost unfettered power in an incredibly small sliver of state operations. Traffic cops, for example, are allowed to enter homes without warrant and search your house, but only to establish whether your double-parking was defensible. This, not so much to protect the citizens, but more to protect those above them, as no single person should be allowed to challenge the power of the executive. Whether you are allowed to appeal a decision is entirely dependent on the internal structure of a division within the central government. Some bureaus allow for written appeals, while others only allow for oral pleadings, while others do not allow appeals at all. These appeals are entirely internal, as there exists no such thing as an independent judge. How far you are allowed to appeal is also subject to internal rules. These organisations are under no obligation, however, to follow their own rules, and directors of divisions are free to discard their own rules if it is in the interest of justice and morality.
Finally, these Dispositives can be anyone. There is no uniformed police in Colrania. The Dispositives are recognisable by their government-issue dark blue suits (earning them the nickname Hollys, after the blue mountain flower), but they can also wear normal civilian clothing. Their power comes from them having a certain position within government, so whether they are recognisable or not does not make a difference for a citizen’s duty to follow their orders. This has created an atmosphere of constant vigilance, where even someone asking for a cigarette can be a Holly, and not giving them one could earn you a beating or a large fine. Even within families, it is not always certain whether someone is a Holly, and what division they belong to. This means many people practice self-censorship, unless they truly trust the person they are talking to. And even then... mistakes have been made.
The diffusion of power has allowed the Dispositive to be responsible for some truly heinous acts, completely outside of the responsibility of its cogs. For example, at the start of the chain, someone might decide that, if a partisan kills a government agent, ten important people within the village it occured in should receive some kind of punishment. A second government agent might then decide, not knowing the contents of the decision of the first, that a punishment should be death. Then, a third might, unaware of the earlier decisions, report a shooting of a government agent in a village. A fourth, against ignorant, will make a list of ten important people in a village, and a fifth agent, without any power to make decisions of his own, will drag out ten people and have them shot. Nobody in this chain is personally responsible for their deaths, and the sixth agent was just following orders. It is a system built to commit horrible atrocities without making any single person guilty. - Preliminary questions:
- Who exactly runs the Dispositive state? Are there internal divisions and tensions? Was there a previous history of democratic activism? (N.B.: one of my ideas is that in this world, democracy has never been successfully tried; a bit like anarchism in our world, it's been attempted now and then, but always collapsed. So our rebels are even more idealistic and radical than they seem.)
- Within the parameters above, how bad is repression? Is there some independent media, or none at all? Are there elections at the local level, or is everything centrally controlled? Does the government surveil everyone, or just suspected troublemakers? What do our security forces look like? What is prison like?
- More broadly, how decentralized is Colrania? At the very least, it has provincial and municipal governments, with local administrators and police. But how much independence do these sub-national governments really have?
- What does education look like?
- Colrania is an authoritarian country. It is not so brutally tyrannical that dissent is unthinkable; there exists some space for questioning the government, so long as it is done quietly. There are lots of jokes at the expense of the leadership, but you can't make them in public. The best analogy for the level of oppression is likely the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It is a large country, with a population of about 100 million and a wide variety of ecological and climatic zones.
- Economy
- Colrania is, in practice, a market economy: people have money, they buy things, and exchange rather than rationing is the underlying principle of economic life. But it is massively, dysfunctionally corrupt: government regulation of economic life is intrusive and omnipresent, and only bribes can secure any kind of economic advancement. Higher education is available to everyone who has completed military service, but how much use it is - that's a different question. The standard of living is analogous to Eastern Bloc countries in the 1970s.
- At the policy level, Colrania aims for self-sufficient autarky by way of semi-capitalistic corporatism. This has created an environment ripe for nepotistic corruption; politically "reliable" businessmen and their affiliates have a dramatic leg up, and economic inequality is becoming increasingly drastic with every passing year. Privatization exists, but is heavily influenced by the state. Smaller "mom-and-pop shops" are gradually being crushed or absorbed by larger corporations, and independent labor unions have been outlawed in favor of a single, state-run union (which, in reality, acts as the economic wing of the secret police). The government has injected Dispositivist principles into every sector of civilian life, from the public education system to the industrial workplace.
- For example: Radient production in Colrania is handled by Natrak, formerly known as the National Radiant Concern before a privatization campaign a few years before the RP's date. Initially promoted as a public shareholding company, currently Natrak is chaired by businessmen close to the government. In the international stage, it is often accused of questionable market practices, like sudden stops-and-go's while Radient futures are traded on most markets.
- The Colranian Lire is the sovereign currency of Colrania. The Colranian Central Bank has a low degree of Independence. The Lire is particularly inflated through a combination of low interest rates and extensive stimulus spending to fund the war industry. Colranians are heavily encouraged to purchase state bonds for the war effort, with the promise of lucrative payouts after victory in Albren. The price of living has rose in particular as a result of the war inflation. Nonetheless, Colrania tends to approach "full employment", albeit dysfunctionally. Foreign currency is a common Grey and black market commodity, originating from tourist localities in Colrania.
- Preliminary questions:
- How good is the social safety net? Do poor people risk starvation? Is health care a market product or a government program?
- How much of the economy is directly tied to the public sector? How big is the administrative state? How does corruption operate within it?
- How much is Colrania beginning to de-industrialize?
- Is there a black market? A grey market? Organized crime? What is illegal in Colrania, and who makes money on it anyway? How? Why?
- History
- This is a very open book. The war with Albren has been going on for at least a decade, and the current regime has been in power for at least 30-40 years. Beyond that, you should go wild, since history is a necessary component of every other part of the outline. This is mostly just a place to turn that brainstorming into a unified timeline.
- Colrania and Albren both began as expansionist empires that conquered their neighbors; this gave rise to Colrania's ethnic diversity. In 1905, a massive supervolcano eruption on the far side of the globe plunged both countries into a mini-Ice Age that lasted twenty years, causing crop failures, famine, and anarchy. The Dispositive emerged as a response to this chaos in the mid-1940s and has governed Colrania ever since. The Laborite government in Albren emerged for similar reasons.
- Shortly thereafter, tensions between the two new regimes about ideology and contested border areas that neither had controlled since 1905 boiled over, beginning a war of attrition that continues to this day.
- Preliminary questions:
- How old is Colrania? What were its defining historical events? How did it expand to occupy the ethnically diverse territory that it governs today? Is its rivalry with Albren old or new?
- How did its current regime come to power? What are the main historical events that our characters and their parents would remember from the last half-century? How did those events change their lives?
- Demographics and Religions
- Colrania is highly ethnically diverse, home to a plethora of different peoples, religions, and cultures. Since Haloran is a prominent university town, and used to be a manufacturing center, all of these groups are represented there. Ethnic groups and religious traditions should be mutually influencing, but other than building on each other's ideas, you are free to come up with anything you want. Colrania is, however, bad at ethnic pluralism: for whatever reason, ethnic hostility is strong within the country.
- Preliminary questions:
- What is the dominant ethnic group in Colrania? Is there one? What does it look like?
- Does your ethnic group have a particular homeland in Colrania? What is it called, and what is it like? What are the distinctive cultural features and traditions of your group? What is its history with Colrania's other peoples? What is its position in modern Colrania?
- Is your religion ethnically specific, or universalizing? What are its principal doctrines and rituals? How is it regarded by other faiths; has it inspired or been inspired by any of them? What is its status in modern Colrania?
- Why don't our ethnic groups get along? How does that affect daily life in Colrania? How segregated is society, broadly speaking?
- Technology
- Technology in Colrania is roughly equivalent to the 1960s-1980s. Different fields may be at different levels of advancement within that period; a few may be markedly more or less advanced. But there is no Internet - we are well shy of the information age. Also, for later plot reasons, there is no nuclear power or nuclear weapons. Other than that, it is up to you to decide what exactly you want Colrania's technological development to look like.
- Radient is a fossil fuel found in both Albren and Colrania. It has much higher fuel efficiency than regular oil, pushing military supply chains to prioritize it. Extraction often takes place through massive drill-pumps boring into the ground to Pierce known reserves of Radient. It is a sludgy, golden liquid. Work conditions in Radient plants are often sketchy. There's also a suggested link about Radient-powered factories and equipment creating noxious exhalations. Some research, often undertalked, links it to cancerous pathologies even when inert. Radient has an unmistakable earthy scent, best savoured while filling up vehicles at the gas station.
- Preliminary questions:
- How advanced are various normal household goods? Do most people have washing machines? Microwaves? Are TVs or radios more common?
- Is there a Colranian space agency? Are we firmly in the jet age, or are prop planes still common? Are electric musical instruments common?
- Military and the War
- The Colranian Ministry of Defense oversees most military matters, and the primary agency for national defense and military power projection is the Armed Forces of Colrania. The AFC is supplied with troops, male and female, primarily by way of conscription, although a quarter of the military is composed of a standing corps of volunteers and re-enlisted conscripts. Operational competency varies from unit to unit. Compounding factors include the long-standing taxation of war, rampant corruption throughout the ranks, the over-centralization of authority and direction in operations, and disorganized and overlapping chains of command. Some of these mechanisms are the work of the powers that be within the regime; designed with the intent to keep the military from being organized enough to stage a coup, but not so disorganized that they couldn't fulfill the national will. Officers' commissions are gained by promotion from the ranks, purchased with bribes, or earned through attendance at a military academy - but in all cases are contingent upon political reliability.
- Colranian National Army - The primary fighting arm of the AFC, the largest in terms of manpower and equipment, and the oldest branch of service. The CNA is a fairly modernized army, with dozens of divisional-strength units of combined-arms unit (infantry, armor, artillery, etc). Three-quarters of the Army is composed of conscripts and reservists, who are organized into their units based on provincial and municipal residence. Such units are of varying competence, due to the nature of the long-running war. Volunteers are recognized as having political reliability, and often find themselves placed in designated "Guards" units, to denote an elite status. Guards units are primarily classified as mechanized infantry, although several battalions of paratroopers and commandos exist within their ranks. Most soldiers are reasonably equipped, although supply is a serious issue.
- Colranian Air Force - The aerial warfare branch of the AFC, and the second-largest of the services. The force boasts several wings of fighters, bombers, support aircraft, and helicopters, usually in support of Army operations. Older airframes, cannibalized and modified over the years, plague the Air Force. The pilot corps of the CAF is exclusively made up of officers. Enlisted personnel, primarily in the maintenance and technical fields, are generally loyal to the regime, due to the benefits that come with learning technical skills. Guards Paratrooper units are attached to the CAF, and the force maintains a brigade element of base security troops.
- Colranian Navy - The maritime fighting force of the CAF, and the smallest of the branches. The Navy is seen as the most tragic of the branches, its admirals still drunk with the promise of a massive re-armament and modernization, long since passed due to the dragging-on of active hostilities. Three battleships, dated from forty years prior, remain in the two fleets of the Navy, along with a number of cruisers and destroyers. While boasting many combat vessels, the Navy sorely lacks in supporting ships, such as minelayers and hospital ships. The Submariner Corps is comprised of forty submarines, although only fifteen of the aged hulks are operational. Subs are commonly employed for reconnaissance and commerce raiding. Shortcomings in force projection are somewhat buoyed by private merchant enterprise. Sailors are generally well-trained and versed in their assigned ratings, but discontent is growing.
- Patriotic Home Guard - Operating alongside the CAF are paramilitary units of hardline regime loyalists, who operate on the orders of civilian officials as opposed to military officers. The largest of the paramilitary groups is the Patriotic Home Guard, a militia numbering in at twenty-thousand and divided among the major cities into "garrisons." Members are armed and equipped by private initiative, either through their own means or with the help of a benefactor. Home Guard troops primarily conduct interior security operations, often in support of the police. It is also in the purview of the Home Guard to often act as a "press gang," forcibly impressing recruits into the CAF. Security agents are quick to utilize the Home Guard for mass round-ups of dissidents. Home Guard commanders are notoriously corrupt, and are known to engage in various criminal activities.
- Colranian Dispositive Guard - This is the elite regime guard, and protective force for Colranian elites. Two divisions of the Dispositive Guard exist - both comprised of mechanized infantry and armor. Soldiers are often handpicked from the "Guards" units of the Army, or are noticed in high school for their notable demonstrations of blind loyalty to the state.
- Colranian National Army - The primary fighting arm of the AFC, the largest in terms of manpower and equipment, and the oldest branch of service. The CNA is a fairly modernized army, with dozens of divisional-strength units of combined-arms unit (infantry, armor, artillery, etc). Three-quarters of the Army is composed of conscripts and reservists, who are organized into their units based on provincial and municipal residence. Such units are of varying competence, due to the nature of the long-running war. Volunteers are recognized as having political reliability, and often find themselves placed in designated "Guards" units, to denote an elite status. Guards units are primarily classified as mechanized infantry, although several battalions of paratroopers and commandos exist within their ranks. Most soldiers are reasonably equipped, although supply is a serious issue.
- Albren is a Stalinist far-left state organized along Laborist principles. Despite its claims of proletarian equality, it is mostly dominated by the majority Albra ethnic group. The conflict is based on longstanding animosity, national pride, ideological disputes, and competition for radiant-rich border companies.
- Preliminary questions:
- What is the military's role in politics? Does the regime control it? Does it control the regime? Or is the situation more complicated? Are there political officers of some kind? How does the authoritarianism of the regime impact the military's structure and effectiveness? What is its role in maintaining authoritarian rule?
- What is the Albrish military like?
- Do we have any other neighbors? What are they like? What is Colrania's relationship with them?
- The Colranian Ministry of Defense oversees most military matters, and the primary agency for national defense and military power projection is the Armed Forces of Colrania. The AFC is supplied with troops, male and female, primarily by way of conscription, although a quarter of the military is composed of a standing corps of volunteers and re-enlisted conscripts. Operational competency varies from unit to unit. Compounding factors include the long-standing taxation of war, rampant corruption throughout the ranks, the over-centralization of authority and direction in operations, and disorganized and overlapping chains of command. Some of these mechanisms are the work of the powers that be within the regime; designed with the intent to keep the military from being organized enough to stage a coup, but not so disorganized that they couldn't fulfill the national will. Officers' commissions are gained by promotion from the ranks, purchased with bribes, or earned through attendance at a military academy - but in all cases are contingent upon political reliability.
- Mass Culture and Consumer Goods
- This section of the outline is for those small details that make a setting feel genuinely lived-in. It's less about ancient cultural traditions, and more about what your character's favorite soda is.
- Preliminary questions:
- What is music like? How big a cultural role does it play? How much is it like our music in this era? (Is there disco? There should be disco.)
- What is food like? How different is it in different ethnic groups? Is there fast food? What do poor college students in their early twenties eat?
- Perhaps more importantly, what do they drink? What does recreational drug use look like? How much of it is legal? Is there a Colranian nightlife scene? What are the general culture's sexual mores? How do they apply to queer folks?
- What is literature like? How about radio? TV? Movies? Sports? Are athletes or movie stars a big deal? Does Colrania have any pop-culture icons?
- Haloran and West Evermark
- Haloran will be the primary setting of the RP, at least at first. It is a town of about 80,000 in the province of West Evermark. It is one of Colrania's major university towns, and also used to be an important manufacturing center, though its factories have now started to close. The combined attraction of the university and the factory jobs mean that Haloran is highly ethnically diverse: a microcosm of Colrania. All of the player characters grew up here.
- Haloran is in a beautiful wooded valley.
- Preliminary questions:
- What does this town feel like? Are there local festivals? Landmarks? Famous local businesses?
- Who runs this town? This question interacts with national politics, but is not defined by it. Are there major local political leaders? Police officials? Military leaders? Religious or cultural leaders? Is there a famous athlete or musician from Haloran? Who has the ear of the public?
- What is the role of the university? What are town-gown relations like?
- How does Haloran handle its diversity? What are ethnic relations like? Is there a majority group? A plurality? Who thinks the town is "theirs," and why? Is there residential segregation? Has there been past unrest?
- What did the local factories do? Why are they closing? Was there any kind of organized labor here? How is the town changing, and why?
- What is crime like in Haloran? How organized is it? What motivates it? Who runs it?
- What is the larger province of West Evermark like? Are there other cities here? What is the landscape like? The climate? Who lives here? Why is it called West Evermark, besides the fact that Norv ran out of creative juice?
