Republic of Autarscrest
| Republic of Autarscrest | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Geography | |
| Full Name | The Republic of Autarscrest |
| Pronunciation | Reh-pub-lick of Au-tah-s-cuh-re-st |
| Ruler | N/A |
| Government Style | Oligarchy-Captured Republic |
| Area | 48,450 square miles |
| Population | 12.5 million |
| Races | Primarily Humans and Ferox (particularly Avian), native Nymph groves present |
| Language | Common |
| Religion | Guild Ecclesia |
| Primary Focus | Logistics dominance through rail networks |
The Republic of Autarscrest is a major economic and military power in the Aesoxian northwest. Forged from a union of a dozen territories, the Republic’s strongest asset is by far its vast trade networks spanning much of the continent, underpinned by an exceptionally powerful and extensive railway system, facilitating commerce as much as rapid military deployment. Recent decades have seen unprecedented economic growth, but its prosperity is ever more overshadowed by stark social inequality, increasingly stratified economic classes, and the consolidation of power by a handful of immensely influential industrial conglomerates referred to as the Trusts. Their influence now permeates the highest levels of government, creating a political landscape driven by corporate interests and fierce inter-trust competition.
History
The foundations of Autarscrest as a distinct entity began in the frigid north, where a scattering of industrious city-states and frontier settlements banded together in pursuit of mutual defense and more efficient trade. Facing increasing raids from the southern Steppe tribes and competition from burgeoning nations beyond, the northern territories found common cause under a loosely federated charter. Though still lacking centralised governance, this confederation, centered in the city-state of Autarscrest itself, was the first true and coherent identity for the area. To the south, however, this unity was absent. The vast Steppe remained fragmented under the brutal rule of a now-forgotten warlord, whose hold on power relied on fear, cavalry raids, and the exploitation of local clans. Tensions escalated rapidly as border skirmishes turned into drawn-out campaigns, with the then-named Autarscrest Coalition frequently clashing against the warbands. These conflicts were costly and inconclusive, bleeding both sides dry without yielding any decisive advantage, but they set the stage for a new political order.
The stalemate finally broke with the assassination of the warlord, though whether by northern agents or his own rivals is still debated. The resulting power vacuum triggered a bloody collapse of Steppe authority. The northern coalition moved swiftly, invading not as liberators but as occupiers, driven by both fear of instability and the promise of fertile lands and trade routes. The Steppe, once defiant, became a region under martial governance. Though resistance flared in pockets, the initial campaign was declared a success, and the Steppe was absorbed - at first only in name - into the growing northern republic. In the years following occupation, integration between the Steppe and the northern territories was slow and uneasy. Cultural divides ran deep, and resentment festered beneath the surface even as the establishment of trade routes, mixed settlements, and early infrastructure projects began to stitch the disparate regions together. Autarscrest, still in its infancy, benefited immensely from the Steppe’s agricultural potential, despite tensions simmering. It was during this period that the groundwork for the Republic's economic systems and shared identity began to take form, by commerce more than creed.
Initially a loose confederation of wagon caravans and trade guilds, the precursor to the Rail Consortium formed in the Steppe border cities, facilitating long-distance trade across the rough terrain. With no formal state-level infrastructure, these merchants took it upon themselves to build and maintain trade routes, quickly becoming indispensable. As the nation’s internal economy grew more complex, this consortium evolved into a formidable institution, laying the groundwork for what would later become Autarscrest’s most powerful Trust. At this stage, the Consortium was a logistical backbone, and few realised how dominant it would become. With national governance still nascent and infrastructure rapidly expanding, a new political phenomenon took root: Bossism. Major cities, especially those along key trade routes, began to fall under the de facto control of corporate entities and trade syndicates, structured around central figures whose connections underpinned the entire network. These organizations - early versions of the Trusts - offered stability, employment, and services in exchange for obedience. Over time, municipal governments were either bought out or rendered irrelevant, as the Bosses, each of them the head of a rising corporation, assumed both economic and political power. By the mid-1600s, entire cities operated under what amounted to private law, with the line between company and government vanishing.
The invention of steam rail changed everything. The Consortium, already the Republic’s dominant land logistics network, seized upon the new technology with stunning foresight. With heavy financial backing from Sovereign Financial Group, ARC constructed the first trans-national lines at great cost, buying up land rights and labor in bulk. Though these early ventures operated at a loss, the now renamed ARC had gambled on the future - and won. Their network soon became indispensable, not just domestically but across Aesox. Nations that once competed now paid ARC for the privilege of moving goods through their rail lines, and with each new line laid, ARC cemented its hold on the Republic. ARC’s success did not go unnoticed. Other proto-Trusts, seeing the vast fortunes being made, pivoted to mirror their model of lossy market domination and sudden price hikes. Blackstone Extraction began expanding into mining contracts and territory control. Threnix Heavy Industries scaled up its machinery and arms production to match the demands of the expanding rail and military sectors. Sovereign Financial poured money into every corner of the economy, tying the nation together through loans and debt. The rise of the Trusts was no longer informal, but systemic. The Republic’s economic foundations had been irrevocably fused with the ambitions of private industry.
Decades after its military conquest, the Steppe was formally integrated into the Republic through a Senate restructure. Sold to the public as a gesture of unity and representation, the restructure in reality served to increase the Trusts' reach. New districts were created, gerrymandered to favor Trust influence, and the Steppe’s indigenous voice was buried beneath layers of bureaucracy. Still, the integration brought infrastructure and trade to many previously neglected areas, softening some opposition. The Republic’s borders now matched its economic reach, but as Autarscrest’s Trusts grew in wealth and boldness, friction with neighbouring Alpenstadt intensified. The Trusts imposed increasingly heavy tariffs on imported luxury goods, which came almost entirely from Alpenstadt, while monopolizing export routes through the Republic’s rail hubs and ports. Alpenstadt, dependent on these corridors, found itself economically throttled. Diplomatic relations soured, and while outright war was avoided, a deep mistrust settled in. The Trusts framed the issue as protecting domestic markets; others saw it as an economic stranglehold executed with ruthless precision.
A major shift in Autarscrest’s legal framework came when the Trusts were granted corporate personhood. In theory, this allowed companies to own property, sign contracts, and engage in politics as entities; in practice, it made them unassailable. With legal rights equal to citizens and vastly more resources, the Trusts began maneuvering for even deeper control. The idea that corporations could hold Senate seats went from hypothetical to plausible - and then to inevitable. This was the moment Autarscrest ceased to be a republic in all but name. In the decades following personhood, the Trusts refined their grip through bureaucratic trickery. Employment contracts - already labyrinthine and mandatory - began to include clauses that quietly transferred a worker’s voting rights to the employer. Few read the fine print. Even fewer dared protest. Before long, the Trusts wielded millions of votes indirectly. Senate sessions increasingly reflected corporate agendas, not citizen needs. Public discourse stagnated, as more and more of the nation accepted the illusion of democracy in exchange for bread, shelter, and routine. The final nail came in the form of a single Senate vote. Proposed under the guise of streamlining governance, the bill to allow Trusts to directly hold Senate seats passed by a margin of one. In a single election cycle, the Trusts activated the voting clauses buried in contracts across the nation. Their influence, once indirect, became total. Ninety-five percent of the Senate now sat beneath Trust banners. The Republic still flew its flag, still held its rituals; but its helm now lay firmly in the hands of profit-driven oligarchs.
Geography
Autarscrest occupies a vast expanse of northwestern Aesox, its borders carved by both geography and industrial reach. To the north, it shares a frosty frontier with the alpine cities of Alpenstadt - an increasingly tense neighbor hemmed in by both tariffs and terrain. This northern borderland is a bleak sweep of snowy plains and wind-swept taiga, sparsely populated save for hardened logging crews, scattered mining outposts, and the occasional ARC rail camp braving the cold. Blizzards are frequent, and whole rail lines have been known to disappear beneath the snowdrifts for days at a time.
Moving southward, the climate softens into the Viridian Belt: a broad central swathe of thick forest that stretches nearly the full width of the Republic. The Belt is a patchwork of ancient woodlands and logging scars, punctuated by trust-built company towns, sawmills, and smoggy rail depots. Crisscrossed by steam-powered rail and kept in check by constant exploitation, the forest is steadily shrinking beneath Blackstone's appetite for raw materials. Here, one can find pockets of untouched forest - a haunt for nymphs, old shrines, and vanishing folklore - but such places are dwindling by the year. Further south still lie the Great Steppes, Autarscrest’s agricultural heartland and the primary dominion of the Bainisle Agritech Combine. These golden plains stretch toward the southern borders with Keldwike and Holzweald, rolling on with an almost featureless monotony. Dominated by the resilient, state-backed monoculture of rockwheat, the Steppe’s soil is hard, dry, and wind-battered. Once fiercely independent, the region has been gradually consumed by industrial farming, its history of clan autonomy erased beneath fields of waving grain and the endless drone of harvesting engines.
To the east lies the muskeg, a cold, bog-ridden hinterland bordering the Kingdom of Holzweald. The terrain here is treacherous and uneven, riddled with peat bogs, sinkholes, and stagnant pools. Sovereign Financial Group has slowly moved in, drawn not by the land’s meager natural yield, but by its isolation - perfect for discreet archives, high-security vault complexes, and isolation-minded retreats for executives and rogue Senators alike. Most avoid the muskeg altogether, citing its bone-deep damp and the occasional appearance of the Great Bog Snapper as sufficient deterrents. Autarscrest’s western frontier borders the sea, its jagged coastline sculpted by wind and salt. The northwestern shore houses the primary ports and shipping lanes governed by the Argosy Trade Syndicate. These cold waters form a critical trade artery for the Republic’s exports and a staging ground for diplomatic reach beyond Aesox. The bay itself becomes a cradle for the stoneback whales each spring, as the enormous, rock-skinned leviathans return to calf - an awe-inspiring sight that never fails to halt production for a few moments at least.
More than anything else, however, it is Autarscrest’s infrastructure that defines its geography. A staggering web of railroads - laid, maintained, and owned entirely by the ARC - binds city to city, trust to trust, region to region. These steel arteries stretch over plains and rivers, tunnel through mountains, and ride raised tracks across swamp and frost alike. Wherever they go, they carry commerce, control, and the pulse of the Republic’s iron heart. Urbanization clings tightly to these rail lines. The nation’s population is densest around junctions, ports, and industrial strongholds, with cities that rise like concrete forests from the earth. Their skylines are dominated by corporate towers and plumes of factory smoke, the air thick with steam and soot. Outside these hubs, the land becomes more rural and utilitarian, a patchwork of extraction sites, farmland, and transport spurs. While nature still claims much of the terrain, it does so warily, and always at risk of being surveyed, bought, and reshaped by the Trusts.
Flora
The most iconic - and ubiquitous - plant of the Republic is rockwheat. Indigenous to the southern Steppe, this coarse, golden grain is remarkable for its resilience. With a fibrous outer husk that defies the gnawing of locusts and an ability to thrive in nutrient-poor soil, rockwheat was once a marginal crop, considered too difficult to mill and cultivate. That changed with the rise of the Bainisle Agritech Combine, who industrialized its production and bred hardier, faster-growing strains that could be husked processed easier. Today, rockwheat fields stretch as far as the eye can see across the Steppe, forming a monoculture so pervasive it has all but eliminated local plant diversity. The grain is used for everything from daily bread to protein slurries, and its tough husks are compressed into fuel briquettes - a vital energy source in regions without easy access to coal or oil. Its dominance is seen as both a miracle of agricultural innovation and an ongoing ecological catastrophe.
Marking the southern cliffs that edge the Steppe are groves of aspens, their pale bark and shimmering leaves casting silver light in the dawn and dusk. These trees mark a natural boundary, growing along the broken escarpments before giving way to the darker and denser forests of the Viridian Belt. In spring, they form striking contrasts with the golden fields below. Local superstition once held that the groves were waystations for wandering spirits - though today, many have been cleared for BAC watchtowers or windbreaks, disrupting the old landscape. In the heart of the Republic, the Belt teems with heavy evergreens, the backbone of the national timber trade. Towering pines, blackfirs, and oil-oaks dominate this dark and misty woodland, their shadows broken only by logging clearings and the glare of arc lamps from Blackstone work camps. These forests still support a rich understory of mosses, fungi, and rare flowering herbs, but day by day they grow rarer. Select groves, still entirely untouched by the axe, are protected only by their inaccessibility or by leverage from local Nymph enclaves, who have increasingly resisted Blackstone’s advances with sabotage, protests, and rising violence.
Other flora of note includes the red-laced thistle, a wiry and mildly toxic plant common along railway embankments, whose presence often marks poor soil and disrupted ecosystems; and the wirevine, an invasive creeper accidentally introduced from Leydenmark. Though ornamental in its native habitat, in Autarscrest it tangles around infrastructure and chokes out native underbrush, earning the ire of engineers and botanists alike. In truth, while Autarscrest boasts an impressive range of plant life on paper, much of it now lives under siege. The Trusts rarely value biodiversity except when it aligns with profit, an attitude reflected in how the landscape is treated. What flora persists does so by adaptation, corporate cultivation, or sheer stubbornness, much like the people who live among it.
Fauna
Autarscrest’s wildlife has had to adapt under the dual pressures of industrial expansion and ecological manipulation. Some creatures have become pests, others mascots, a few even tools of corporate branding or scientific interest. Despite the spread of rail lines, logging camps, and endless rockwheat fields, a surprising number of native species endure, though many now exist only in diminished or altered forms. The most infamous among them are the Steppe Locusts, ravenous insects that once plagued the southern territories in swarms so vast they could blot out the sun. Numbering in the millions, these locusts devoured anything green in their path, including early settlements’ food stores and building materials. Their presence made consistent agriculture nearly impossible until the introduction of rockwheat, whose woody husks proved too tough for their mandibles. With the Steppe now a virtual monoculture of that grain, the locusts have been pushed to the margins, their once-feared swarms reduced to seasonal nuisances. Still, their legacy remains in the design of the airtight granaries, anti-swarm measures on Steppe trains, and the cultural anxiety of those south of the Belt.
In stark contrast stands the Jackalope, a gentle, antlered rabbit native to the region and now widespread across both rural and urban areas. The Autarscrest jackalope is a docile creature, domesticated in some regions as a companion animal or pest control agent. Their antlers - lightweight and hollow - are used ornamentally, and jackalope motifs are common in children’s books and working-class neighborhood signage, symbolizing humility, endurance, and whimsy. Some Trusts use stylized jackalopes in marketing to signal “community focus,” particularly the BAC and ARC, though critics call it a hollow gesture. Far to the north, beneath the icy waters of the coastal shelf, lurks the Icemaw - a sea creature of legend and rare, deadly fact. Long and eel-like with a blunt, ridged head adapted for breaking through sea ice, the Icemaw is a hazard primarily to ships navigating the winter routes to northern ports. While attacks are rare, they are devastating when they occur: stories of shattered hulls and vanished crews have cemented the Icemaw’s place in nautical superstition. Some shipping companies - especially the Argosy Trade Syndicate - have adapted their hull designs or route schedules in response.
Lurking in the cold boglands of the eastern muskeg is the Great Bog Snapper, a monstrous turtle the size of a river barge. With a mossy, lichen-covered shell and a temperament as sluggish as the wetlands it inhabits, the Snapper is largely a solitary creature. It poses little direct threat to humans unless disturbed, but legends of wagons and small river craft simply vanishing into its maw persist. On the southern windswept plains, one may hear the distant fluting song of the Steppe Whistler, a native bird with a beak riddled with natural holes that produce musical tones when wind passes through. These birds do not vocalize as much as they play the air around them, and their eerie, melodic “whistling” has become emblematic of Steppe life. The Bainisle Agritech Combine has used the bird in its insignia for decades, portraying itself as both a steward and conqueror of the Steppe. The bird’s survival is a happy accident - rockwheat fields offer little in the way of food, but the birds have adapted to subsist on the few native insects that remain. And lastly, every spring, the Stonebacks arrive in the western bay. These enormous marine mammals, whale-like in shape but with rocky, barnacle-encrusted hides, return to calve before venturing again into the deep ocean. Their migrations are a highlight for coastal towns, and Trusts like ARC and ATS sometimes sponsor festivals around their appearance, turning the event into a commercial bonanza. Scientifically, they’re poorly understood, as few ships can safely approach them, and even fewer have successfully tracked them past the bay. Their backs, often mistaken for jagged reefs or islets from a distance, are a navigational hazard, though some local pilots claim the whales have a sense for ships and rarely cause harm unless provoked.
Government and Ruling System
While Autarscrest claims to be a representative democracy, its government is in practice a finely-tuned machine of corporate oligarchy. The Republic’s constitution technically upholds the rights of its citizens to vote and elect representatives to the Senate, the central legislative body. However, decades of legal manipulation, backdoor lobbying, and economic coercion have ensured that the overwhelming majority of seats are held directly by the great Trusts, corporate entities granted full legal personhood. In the current arrangement, Trusts control 95% of Senate seats, with the remaining 5% held by nominally independent representatives - though nearly all of them are bought and sold through strategic investments, hiring agreements, or outright bribes. Employment contracts across most of the Republic include hidden clauses that cede voting rights to the employer Trust. If a citizen refuses to sign, they are ineligible for employment - and thus, in a society utterly dependent on Trust-controlled industry, condemned to poverty and starvation.
At the center of this corporate constellation sits the Autarscrest Rail Consortium (ARC), the oldest and most foundational of the Trusts. It controls the Republic’s arteries: the railways. ARC’s rail lines do not merely connect cities, but define them. Every supply chain, troop movement, and intercity communication passes along ARC’s tracks. This logistical monopoly allows the Consortium to act as a kingmaker, determining which other Trusts succeed or fail through preferential contracts and freight prioritization. Politically, ARC is conservative in temperament, valuing order, predictability, and efficiency over aggression or idealism. It is perhaps the only Trust with an institutional memory long enough to care about the Republic’s legacy, though this often translates to a desire for stability, not justice. Its headquarters in the capital tower over the Senate itself, a visual reminder that without ARC, the Republic quite literally cannot move.
Controlling the land beneath the rails, Blackstone Extraction & Refinement (BER) is the industrial juggernaut of Autarscrest, carving raw material from the Viridian Belt and southern cliffs to feed the nation’s smelters, furnaces, and foundries. BER is aggressive, expansionist, and utterly utilitarian in its outlook. Its operations rely on generational contracts: families bind themselves into long-term labor agreements, often spanning three or more generations, in exchange for a one-time upfront payment. This tactic has made BER’s workforce both brutally overworked and heartbreakingly trapped. In the Senate, BER aligns itself with whoever ensures access to new territory and looser environmental controls. Its ruthless push into protected forest regions has brought it into conflict with indigenous groups, local Nymph enclaves, and even other Trusts - yet it is rarely stopped. It wields its Senate share like a sledgehammer, smashing through opposition when the political cost is deemed acceptable.
Threnix Heavy Industries (THI) provides the muscle of the Republic - both metaphorically and literally. Specializing in arms, engines, and heavy machinery, THI is the go-to manufacturer for everything from rail engines to war machines. While ARC may dominate transport and BER controls the raw input, THI owns the process of turning those materials into tools of industry and war. Its factories ring the northern mountain range, spewing smoke into the snowy skies while churning out gears, boilers, and barrels at an unrelenting pace. THI invests heavily in research and development, but also in industrial espionage; patents often “change hands” with suspicious timing. The Trust is openly ideological in its belief in industrial supremacy and progress through steel. It frequently clashes with ARC over freight costs and shipping priorities, but the two maintain a begrudging symbiosis. Politically, THI advocates for military readiness and greater state subsidies for industrial expansion, usually aligning with BER on resource acquisition and infrastructure bills.
In the shadows behind every land grab and rail expansion stands the Sovereign Financial Group (SFG) - the banker of the Republic. With the smallest workforce of any Trust, SFG exerts disproportionate control through its mastery of capital. It underwrites rail expansions, bankrolls mining ventures, and insures airship fleets. The Trust’s true strength lies not in votes or weapons, but in debt. Entire towns, companies, and sometimes even other Trusts owe their continued operation to SFG’s credit lines. While its public face is one of conservatism and fiscal discipline, Sovereign is utterly merciless in practice. It holds sway over several independent Senate seats, purchased indirectly through shell companies and complex investment webs. SFG prefers legislation that preserves economic “stability” - which conveniently translates to laws that enshrine its position as the ultimate arbiter of financial viability. Most citizen savings accounts are held through subsidiaries of SFG, allowing them to shape market behaviors at a national scale with a mere whisper of a change in interest rate.
Feeding the nation, quite literally, is the domain of the Bainisle Agritech Combine (BAC), which governs the fertile but ecologically devastated Steppe. It engineered the proliferation of rockwheat, a miracle grain resistant to locust swarms, and now controls nearly every stage of food production from field to fork. The Combine proudly markets itself as the provider of sustenance to the Republic’s great cities and labor camps - though in truth, it treats food like any other commodity, maximizing profit through monoculture, alchemical fertilizers, and vertical integration. BAC and BER frequently clash over land use, especially in contested southern territories, though they are known to strike temporary alliances when the goal is ousting local resistance or renegotiating borders. BAC’s Senate representatives are among the most vocal proponents of “sustainability,” by which they mean subsidies, tax breaks, and protectionist tariffs. The Trust enjoys a cleaner public image than its peers, largely because it markets directly to the people - bread, after all, has a face everyone recognizes.
Where BAC feeds and BER digs, the Argosy Trade Syndicate (ATS) ensures the goods reach the world. The most outward-facing of the Trusts, ATS controls Autarscrest’s merchant shipping, including coastal and riverine routes that the ARC’s rail empire cannot reach. The Syndicate dominates the ports, customs houses, and free-trade zones, especially along the northern coastline. Unlike most Trusts, which maintain a strictly internal focus, ATS regularly entangles itself in foreign policy, lobbying for open trade routes, favorable tariffs, and - more recently - military retaliation for seized ships or closed ports. It is a vocal critic of Galudon’s recent embargoes and one of the few remaining Trusts to maintain amicable relations with Alpenstadt. Though it holds the smallest Senate margin of the major six, it punches above its weight by forming strategic voting coalitions, especially with THI and BAC, whose goods it transports. ATS markets itself as the lifeblood of free trade, even as it strangles independent exporters with licensing fees and dock quotas.
Society and Culture
Autarscrest is a nation defined by disparity - one foot in a glimmering future of mechanized marvels, the other sunk deep into soot and desperation. Society is rigidly stratified, carved into classes by economic function and proximity to Trust power. For the elite, life is gilded and unassailable; for the vast underclass, it is a ceaseless grind masked by slogans of merit and progress. At the pinnacle stands the Trust aristocracy: executives, senior engineers, high-yield investors, and strategic partners. Their lives are a spectacle of curated opulence - company owned intra-city monorails, domed gardens suspended over factories, clothes threaded with gold filament, and private shows in marble amphitheatres. They live in skyline enclaves and secured quarters with private transport links that never touch the grime of street level. The Trust elite are not merely wealthy; they are semi-divine in their cultural role, the “Enlightened Few” celebrated in propaganda as the engines of national prosperity. Statues, newspapers, and classroom primers immortalize their names as visionaries and saviors.
Beneath them lies the managerial and skilled technical class, a narrow rung with some mobility. These are inventors, supervisors, logisticians, and favored contractors - individuals given just enough privilege to believe they might one day rise higher, and thus serve as a bulwark against unrest. Many aspire to join the ranks of the elite, though few ever do. Their neighborhoods are cleaner, their children educated in Trust academies, and their loyalty closely monitored. The working majority, however, comprises miners, machinists, factory hands, rail crews, farmers, cleaners, loaders, and domestic staff. They live in dense, crumbling districts of red brick and black smoke, often built directly into or around the industrial complexes that employ them. In many regions, workers live in Trust-owned company towns, where their wages are paid in scrip redeemable only at Trust-run stores, and their homes are leased on contracts tied to continued employment. This dependency is reinforced through systems of generational labor contracts, particularly prevalent under BER and BAC, which bind entire families to the same employer across multiple lifetimes in exchange for initial signing bonuses. Despite the harshness of life, Trusts cultivate a mythos of opportunity, broadcasting grand expositions of new inventions, lottery-style promotions for laborers to “rise through innovation,” and frequent paeans to industrial heroes who “forged greatness from sweat.” These events serve as a pressure valve - distractions from the reality that true social mobility is nearly nonexistent.
Culturally, Autarscrest is a nation obsessed with spectacle. In the cities, public plazas host mechanical competitions, automaton theatre troupes, and civic parades of cavalry. The working class gathers in pubs and music halls for loud, raucous entertainment - brass bands, improvisational gear-folk songs, union plays veiled in metaphor to avoid censorship. Underground gambling dens thrive beneath every rail hub. For the elite, culture is quieter but no less extravagant: rooftop orchestras, sculpture gardens, poetry readings in sky lounges, and feasts illuminated by glittering chandeliers. Fashion is equally stratified. The upper classes embrace elaborate, baroque styles blending gilded embellishments with tailored elegance. The working class, in sharp contrast, favors thick soot-resistant garb: reinforced boots, leather aprons, cotton undershirts dyed in industrial greys and browns. Helmets, goggles, and protective gloves are as much symbols of identity as necessity.
Architecture in Autarscrest paints this same dichotomy in stone and steel. In major cities, Trust towers pierce the sky - massive structures of brass and polished stone adorned with glowing sigils and roaring chimneys. These edifices often double as offices, temples, and homes for the upper echelons, rising directly above the squat, smoke-choked warrens where their workers live. Company housing spreads in concentric rings from rail hubs, haphazard and unplanned, pressed together by the pressures of population and profit in pursuit of minimising travel. Despite the rigid control of daily life, undercurrents of resistance and identity persist. Local festivals - nominally “sanctioned cultural observations” - often hide the remnants of pre-Trust heritage. Steppe communities still whistle in mimicry of their local fauna, songs encoded with warnings and history. In the Belt, forest-dwellers gather in secret to perform old rites in hollowed-out trees. Among the slums, graffiti, spoken-word performances, and smuggled literature keep alive the dream of a society not shackled to the engine. Autarscrest society moves forward relentlessly - but for many, it is not progress they see in the smokestacks, but a machine that feeds on people as much as coal.
Military
Formally designated the Free Legion of Autarscrest, the army is overwhelmingly professional and heavily mechanized. Infantry units are equipped with cheap, standardized THI-manufactured rifles, while armored brigades deploy rolling trains of armored wagons bristling with light cannons. The elite “Iron Cohorts”, while formerly a tight-knit cavalry force, have recently taken to employing highly experimental steam-driven assault walkers to punch through fortifications, rough copies of Galudonian designs. Though officered by nominal state appointees, virtually every regiment’s supply, pay, and maintenance are funded and managed by ARC and THI, who rotate in their own corporate officers to oversee efficiency. Rapid redeployment is made possible by dedicated military lines on the ARC network, allowing a fully mobilized division to traverse the Republic in under forty-eight hours, and almost anywhere in Aesox within two weeks.
Rather than maintaining a classical blue-water navy, Autarscrest relies on its heavily armed merchant marine as the backbone of maritime defense. Argosy-chartered freighters and liners are fitted with retractable artillery turrets, reinforced hull plating, and anti-torpedo nets. Convoy routes are protected by mobile turret barges - steam-powered flatboats bristling with guns - and escorted by hybrid gun-ram ships that can skewer smaller attackers. In the rare cases of state-sponsored naval engagements, these merchant vessels are temporarily commissioned into the “Reserve Nautical Corps,” with officers drawn from ATS’s own maritime captains. Their doctrine emphasizes deterrence: by turning every cargo vessel into a warship, Autarscrest makes piracy and trade interference prohibitively costly.
Autarscrest’s skies, meanwhile, are partitioned in an uneasy détente between the Republic’s airship squadrons and those of the Avian Trade Federation. The Republic operates a modest but technologically advanced fleet of rigid-envelope airships built by THI and maintained by SFG-funded depots. These vessels carry reconnaissance teams, small first-response infantry platoons, and occasionally concussion bombs to deploy against strategic targets. While the Republic has not aggressively pursued commercial air freight, preferring to preserve rail dominance, its military dirigibles are fitted with modular cargo bays for emergency logistical support at suitably exorbitant prices. Routine patrols monitor borders, enforce no-fly zones over sensitive Trust installations, and project power along contested frontiers. The Avian Trade Federation’s blimps, in contrast, handle commercial transport and are left largely unmolested save for heavy mutual charges that largely break even, forming an unspoken agreement that keeps commerce aloft uninterrupted.
Supplementing the official military are each of the Trusts’ own private armies and local militias. BER’s brigades maintain order in the Viridian Belt when tensions rise, equipped with riot control equipment and penal battalions. BAC fields the Steppe Guard, mounted units on horses that patrol the golden fields and guard seed convoys. THI employs discreet ghost companies, mercenary detachments used for industrial espionage and asset protection. SFG’s shadowy intelligence forces operate as an internal security service, focusing on counter-insurgency, sabotage prevention, and high-value asset recovery, often blending its agents into civilian staff. ATS runs the Harbor Watch, a transnational coast guard safeguarding shipping lanes and enforcing embargoes. In aggregate, these forces blur the line between civilian policing and military action, ensuring Trust interests are defended by every available means, and the Republic’s official forces scarce see deployment.
Religion
Religion in Autarscrest is an omnipresent and hollowed-out institution. The state formally guarantees freedom of worship, but in practice, all major religious institutions have been subsumed into - or brokered into dependency with - the Trusts. What remains of spiritual life in the Republic exists either as ornamental pageantry or underground fervor. Faith, like everything else in Autarscrest, is measured in dividends, votes, and output. The dominant religious structure is the Guild Ecclesia, a sprawling, polytheistic bureaucratic body originally formed to mediate between conflicting worker sects during the early industrial expansion. Over time, it evolved - or, perhaps, was engineered - into a state-sanctioned fusion of theology and workplace morale, subsuming numerous folk pantheons into its doctrine. The Ecclesia preaches a doctrine of Divine Industry, where gods embody different facets of productive labor: Velmara, the goddess of the Loom and Orderly Process; Threnix, the forgemaster of sacred combustion; Issel, the Quiet Accountant, who weighs both books and souls. Worship is conducted through workplace rituals, recitations of hymns, and public observances carefully timed to major economic milestones. The Ecclesia receives direct funding from all six Trusts, and offers "efficiency blessings" to sanctioned operations. Despite its all-encompassing visibility, the Ecclesia is not universally loved. Many workers attend only out of obligation or to avoid penalty under “attitudinal compliance” clauses in their contracts. Some Trusts now offer performance bonuses tied to religious participation metrics, with attendance monitoring in Ecclesial halls. For many, the faith feels as hollow as the bells that ring from smokestack chapels.
Beneath the surface, however, far older and - to the established powers - more dangerous belief systems survive. In abandoned mines, among nomad camps, and within the forbidden greenbelt remnants of the southern forests, fringe cults and outlaw mystics worship ancient powers said to sleep beneath the Republic whose breathing shapes the tides of conflict. The Trusts label these sects as nothing more than isolated lunatics, but their persistence has only grown. Rumours swirl that entire mining crews have defected to these cults. BER and ARC have both waged shadow wars to extinguish these groups, but no one has yet found the source of their texts - books bound in copperplate and printed with ink that doesn’t fade. Equally defiant, though less arcane, are the Ash Monks of the Outer Steppe - an ascetic order descended from early anti-industrial communes. They reject Trust doctrine entirely, preserving oral histories and practicing silent resistance through agriculture, handcraft, and song. Though officially ignored, BAC views them as a nuisance; their teachings have inspired several crop-worker rebellions in the past decade. The Monks worship the Breath of the Sky - a divine force tied to cycles of renewal and decay, in direct contrast to the endless growth preached by the Ecclesia. Lastly, there is the Unspoken Church, with no formalised name. Spread by whispers, this semi-mythical network is said to meet in defunct switching stations and flooded temples, and to consist of scattered followers and priests of the many faiths quashed by the Ecclesia. Their only shared belief is that the Trusts are abominations - that no divine order could allow the commodification of breath, of sleep, of soul. No central dogma exists; instead, its adherents believe that every act of sabotage is a prayer. ARC treats them as a considerable internal threat, though most Trusts publicly deny they exist at all.
Notable Locations
- The City of Autarscrest: Eponymous heart of the Republic, nestled in the Veridian Bowl, and known as much for the three ostentatious headquarter towers of the ARC that dominate the skyline as the sprawling Senate building in their shadow. The capital of Autarscrest, and one of the wealthiest cities in Aesox, as well as home to ARC.
- Central Exchange: The largest and most complex railway hub in Aesox, located below the Concordance's streets. The convergence point of almost every logistical network on Aesox, the Central Exchange is a city-within-a-city, constantly bustling with passenger traffic, freight loading, and the ever-present grime and steam of countless locomotives. Just about every company of note across the Aesoxian mainland - and many beyond - has offices and distribution centers within.
- The Viridian Belt: The vast and forested central band of Autarscrest, the Belt is heavily exploited. Dotted with logging camps, company towns, and rail lines returning to Concordance. Pockets of older, less touched wilderness still exist, but in recent years they've become increasingly scarce as the Blackstone trust continues aggressively carving out swathes of woodland, much to the rising anger of the local Nymphs.
- The Great Steppe: In the southern corner of the Republic’s territories, the Steppe is a range of golden fields packed with native wheats. Plagued yearly by swarms of locusts, the Steppe is a near-total monoculture. Only hardy rockwheat grows - yet it grows in staggering abundance, inured from the locusts by its hardened, woody husk. While its careful cultivation and dispersal into the wild is the Combine’s largest feat, it’s led to the wipeout of most Steppe-native plants, and even the locust plagues have steadily thinned into a mere passing concern.
Trivia
- The vote to allow corporations to serve on the Senate was the narrowest in the history of the Republic, passing by a margin of one following a days-long tie. Thirty years on, that single vote remains mired in suspicion.
- The Republic suffers from extreme market capture. Eighty percent of all products for sale are estimated to be under Trust umbrellas.
- Anti-Trust movements are increasingly widespread, and the Senate has recently authorised a significant crackdown, citing domestic stability concerns. Some have fled, while others redouble their efforts.
- While the isle along the southwestern coast is technically Autarscrest territory, it remains off most official maps, having only recently been officially ceded by Alpenstadt. The local population remains low, and insists on its independence from either nation, having been tossed between them on several occasions and even briefly overseen by Keldwike.
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