The Rat Lands
From Axalon RPG
The Rat Lands
Created by Riboflavin
- Capital City: Illfordshire
- Official Language: None, psychic.
Contents |
Government
The Mind Rats excel beyond most species in evaluating talent, and are wholly practical in terms of means. The Guiding Council chooses the mode of government and selects leaders that most fit the situation of the nation. Their selections are tweaked constantly, and the nation has been known to swing from near anarchy to unified military discipline in a matter of days if the circumstances (such as outside attack) warrant. More typically the Rat Lands have a mix of communalism in some sectors and libertarianism in others, with a powerful but restrained central government looking over and making strong actions in areas of national need. The Guiding Council itself is watched closely by the population at large, and from time to time its membership is changed via general consensus, but in most cases once a rat is selected to the Council he or she will serve for life.
A hierarchy among rats is determined by ritual combat, but this is only used for mating and dividing spoils.
State Religion
The Rats are infinitely curious creatures about everything except, oddly enough, matters of philosophy. There are some who study the structure and ideas of religions, but only to better understand a realm of the humanoid mind that frankly perplexes them. By and large though, when a slave is captured the parts of their mind dealing with religion are the first to get wiped. As a whole, file under Agnostic.
Geography
Mind Rats originally evolved in an isolated valley in the Westwall mountains. The Westwalls are the main coastal range (guess which coast) of the Eastern continent of Yntropos. They are typified by sharp, narrow ridges seperating wide rocky valleys, and are bordered by the sea on the west and the Wall, an almost impassable 20,000 foot ridge, on the east. The Rat heartland is a wet, cool grassland, similar to Scotland, but the Rat Lands encompass most of the Westwall range, which has a similar range of climates to the west coast of North America, though alas much poorer soil and so lacks great forests or wide swaths of prime farmland.
The expansion of the Rat Lands, which took place mostly between 300-1000 years ago, was fueled by raids on the human trading and fishing cities that dotted the coast. Except for the one main port of Duskmoor, those cities are now deserted, and the coastline and first coastal ridge, which rises almost immediately out of the sea, is now primarily a bulwark against the Pemen Order and other attackers. There would be little to no resistence in establishing a beachhead, and indeed little sign of any inhabitants until you tried to march your army through one of the mountain passes, right into a massive ambush.
The countryside of the Rat Lands, even the fertile areas, is sparsely populated. Most Mind Rats prefer city life. Illfordshire, originally a large village at best, now has a population of eight million. The mountainous countryside serves mostly for grazing land for vast herds of mind controlled livestock, a buffer against invasion and a honeypot for naive settlers. Rat Rangers roam the mountains, looking out for outsiders and exploring nature. Many Rangers actually prefer to control animals rather than humans, have some semblence of nature worship, and are regarded by city rats as a strange but necessary sect of weirdos.
Population
The Mind Rats are small, burrowing rodents with large heads and white, brown or black fur. If it weren't for the long claws or eerie glowing eyes they might be considered cute. Isolate one of them and it isn't much smarter than your average mouse. Just keep it more than six feet away from your head at all times, or else you'll become its slave. Mind Rats essentially annex the cerebral cortex of other animals as their own. Once they came into contact with humans, evolution rapidly improved these abilities. Most of the population can control two sentient animals at once, some three or more. They can rapidly transfer knowledge and skills between the beings they control, an ability that is at the foundation of their society and confers their greatest advantage over other civilizations.
Big ideas and things that cannot be verbalized are communicated by swapping slaves and mind reading. For more mundane messages, and communicating with outsiders, the rats talk through their slaves. Mind Rats do understand that most people have, you know, a bit of a hangup about being enslaved and so are respectful of the mental privacy of outsiders they mean to have good terms with. War and compelling interests can override this, though, and since few outsiders understand these interests the good word of a Mind Rat is generally taken very lightly.
Culture/History
Mind Rats were initially solitary burrowing rodents that by some means, evolutionary or magical, picked up a mind control ability that could be used on other species. They mainly used it for simple survival-- get this animal to bring food to their nest, get that one to defend their territory and fight for dominance against rivals for mating. Then humans started a city on their lands. These humans were not only better than any other animal at serving the Rats' basic survival needs, but introduced them to communication, civilization and technology. The rats flocked to the human city of Illfordshire, increased their population rapidly and, of course, were hunted down as a plague by the uncorrupted humans. This merely served to speed evolution. The most psychicly gifted, the best manipulators, and those best able to co-opt humanity's methods as their own survived, and Illfordshire was overrun. Still, their young society was very immature. Slaves would commonly have gunfights over what rat got to have sex with what other rat. So, humanity did them another favor and sent an army to wipe them out. It was a fierce fight, one of the formative stories of Mind Rat lore, but in the end the rats did what they always do-- co-opted their enemies and learned their methods. What was once a plague was now a small, well armed nation.
Today, the Rat Lands are paradoxically both a realm of human enslavement and one of the leading sources of technological and magical innovation on Lith. The free trading of mind slaves, rapid havesting and transferring of new ideas and abilities from and between slaves, and the Mind Rats' insatiable appetite for self improvement at all costs and without prejudice towards any one type of magic or technology have made them the world's foremost inventors.
However, its pretty hard for some governments to get over that one war where the rats enslaved an entire major city just to use as cannon fodder. Or the way their covert operatives try to skim off the geniuses of each nation to serve the Mind Rats. And the whole mind slave angle is a pretty tough sell to begin with. So, they're pretty much feared and loathed by most humans and a good share of other species, too.
Economy
Built around the slave trade. Slaves even form the basis of their currency. Each slave is scouted and evaluated extensively, assigned a set of values, and then can be traded on the open market. A relatively flat income distrubution is ensured because rats can only control 1-4 (typically two) slaves at a time, and there are great benefits to changing slaves often and learning new things and new perspectives from them, so hoarding extra slaves doesn't always make sense. In times of war and stress, a stricter allocation system is put into place to try and match the most ideal slaves to masters, as the society quickly switches to a regimented, militarized mode.
Though slaves are treated as objects and currency, emotional bonds do develop, both master-slave and slave-slave, which are accounted for in trades. Slaves can be reserved off the market, assigned different values to different buyers, traded only as a family unit, time shared, traded in futures, borrowed and lended against. In the past 50 years the entire system has been virtualized through computers, resulting in faster trades, more permutations of trading schemes, and some separation between the computer market and realworld one, sort of like what you have in the bank is different from the cash in your pocket.
The end result is an economy that is extremely difficult for foreign traders and investors to penetrate. Traders pretty much have to result to barter, and even that is tough to get down to a straightforward exchange. Investors.. well you try explaining to your stockholders why your company owns 325.42 slaves, hm?
Mind Rats place a high value on knowledge, and so the academic and R&D sectors of their economy are the largest. They are shrewd inventors and are skilled beyond most any nation at integrating different types of Lithian magic and technology. Unfortunately they have a smallish manufacturing capacity and their economy is mostly closed to the outside world, in large part due to having closed borders with most of their neighbors.
The rat population, and therefore the slave population it demands, is currently growing beyond the capacity of the Rat Lands to supply it with food, energy and goods. Their cultural and economic dynamics, perhaps counterintuitively for a slaveholding society, make assembly line production very unappealing. Basically, fastening widgets all day bores the slave, and this bores the rat, and rats hate being bored more than just about anything. This is exerting strong pressure to either expand their holdings (a tack that has sometimes been counterproductive in the long run) or open up more trade with the outside world.
A longstanding, somewhat informal form of international trade is indentured servitude. A Lithian will agree to become a Mind Rat slave for a specified period of time in return for some good, service, or most often piece of information. Traditionally done in an underground 'deal with the devil' sort of way, the practice has grown in legitimacy as the Mind Rats, despite being regarded generally as totally untrustworthy, have been impeccable in holding up their side of these deals, and ex-slaves consistently report that it really isn't that bad. Several "four year degree in six months" programs have been started by Illfordshire's top universities.
Rats Lab (get it?) has recently demonstrated a portable, highly efficient, all schools, reversable magic to electricity converter. If you don't know what that means, suffice it to say that it's one of those things engineers have been banging their heads against the wall on for decades, and it has every capitalist foaming at the mouth. The Rats are expected to demand a high price and significant security assurances before selling a single one to anyone.
Advancement in Major Fields
- Magic- High, I'll give it an 8/10. Energy put into wide dissemenation of the magical arts among slaves (the rats themselves have no magical talent except mind control), novel uses of magic and combinations with other technology. Cannons that use lenses and other means to extend the range and precision of offensive nuke spells are a staple of the military. All magic schools practiced, except anything ESP-related, which is strictly banned in order to preserve the Rats' advantage over their slaves.
- Industrial Technology- High understanding but low capacity for mass production and few energy resources (though vast mineral resources). Craftsman based rather than factory based, capable of creating exquisite machines, particularly in terms of metalworking, but one at a time. Small antigrav generators are the one thing churned out in large quantity, and are used in a variety of personal antigrav units for rats, hand crafted vehicles, extensive public transport, and a small fleet of massive airships. Overall industrial tech would be roughly early-1800s if not for the enhancement of...
- Computer/Electronic Technology- Somewhere around 2100, pretty much as advanced as any ther civilization out there. Mostly focus on small devices of convienience, light robotics and control systems. They do have a number of electronics factories that specialize in quickly retooling to bust out a zillion of whatever the latest fad gizmo is. Lack any sort of 'internet' technology though, as the nature of their mind control renders it unnecessary.
- Agriculture- Rats have a low tolerance for the daily grind of farming, even with humans doing all the actual work. As with assembly line production, they just get bored too quickly. However, Mind Rats do have a long tradition, with origins before they even encountered humans, as the best livestock herders in the world. The reason should be obvious. Problem is, this isn't nearly as efficient as farming crops, and their internal estimates are that they will have food shortages within a few decades.
- Healthcare- 2006 level in preventative medicine, 1920s in emergency treatment. Administered on a pure cost/benefit basis to slaves. Little specific research into care for the rats themselves for the same reasons they don't allow humans to have ESP.
Military
Designers of some of the world's most advanced military hardware, both magical and technological (usually both), but have limited internal manufacturing capacity. Most of what they do have is geared towards design and prototyping. In a protracted conflict they can commandeer an enemy's manufacturing facilities and use them to churn out their superior designs, but even with all their rapid manipulation and ingeniuity this tactic can take months to years to pay off.
As mentioned above, the Rat Lands have little in the way of a standing army, but the nation can mobilize for full scale war within days, and against local threats in as little as minutes. In addition to conventional military might, their real skills are in infiltrating and co-opting the enemy.
Though the rats have no great desire for expansion, a growing population puts constant pressure on them to do so. It does not help that some of their neighbors openly hate them. They have not launched a first strike in four generations, but they have annexed territory in response to attacks. Their national security stance is not unlike that of a typical rat-- highly paranoid, a mere nuisance if left alone, but dangerous and unpredictable if backed into a corner.
Relations
Hostility, fear, loathing and ignorance greets the Mind Rats from most nations. Very little is known by the outside world about their internal affairs. Little is known even about the Rats' technological and magical advancements, except that their government has started boasting about them lately. Speculation is that the Rats are warily looking to open up trade channels.
Specific National Relations
Nation creators, feel free to comment or even outright edit if you have an objection or idea.
- The Pemen Order - The Order has had an adversarial relationship with the Rats almost as far as either nation's history goes back, ever since the Rat Lands consumed the port cities and fishing villages on Yntropos' western shore. Three major wars and countless minor skirmishes have been fought between them. Pemen ships patrol unopposed within five miles of the Rat Land coast, as the Rats, disliking large bodies of water, have practically no navy. However, any ship or plane that gets any closer is liable to be shot by a mountaintop magic cannon.
- Shanters - The Shanters have a similar old historical animosity with the Rats, and there are still a few common sea-shanties about the dangers of sailing near the Rat Lands, but a slow but increasing trickle of intrepid Captains have sailed into Westmoor port over the past century. Dangerous for a naive crew, but very profitable if you can get on good terms with the Rats. Those portable PDA gizmos they make have a sale price per crate like you would not believe, and the cost is usually simply transporting a few rats overseas. What the rats do once they get there, the Shanters know better than to ask. It can be assumed the Rats put some pressure on the Shanter captains that sail in to trade in slaves, but whether any of them oblige is currently unknown (hey, it ain't my nation, kay?).
- Kyoz-Asgi World Power - No prior contact, though ships from other nations have harboured in the Lands and sold a number of curious items with the monogram KA.
- Dispaterland - Friendly, with a small and very secret trade of high-level magic and skilled magicians, in return for the services of a few rats that lend their expertise to, er, 'supervising' the citizenry.
