Magipunk:Organizations

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Power in Atathorn is held primarily by the Alliances, secondarily by the old government, and tertiarily by crime figures. Here, we discuss each of the major organizations in Atathorn.

Alliances

Before the introduction of Passion into human society transformed the economy, wealth and power resided in the hands of the Nobility, the origin of this wealth and power being real estate. A very small middle class of tradesmen existed, and trade guilds protected their prerogatives from Nobles. The balance of power was fairly stable, as the tradesmen never had sufficient sway to steal power from the Nobility, and the Nobles didn't like to dirty their hands with trade.

Passion upset that balance of power. With Passion, it became possible to manufacture, transport, and sell goods in volumes that were thousands of times that of the previous status quo. Money poured into the hands of the first tradsemen to harness industrial magic, and the very creation of the magic-rich economy created demands that had not previously existed, and thus rewarded those tradesmen who could meet those demands. The Nobles abruptly found that they were no longer dealing with a small class of humble tradesmen, but business tycoons able to buy and sell them a hundred times over. The Nobles did what any threatened government would do: they tried to legislate the tradesmen back down into their place.

The tradesmen, having had a taste of power, didn't back down. Instead, they bought influence in the government to protect their wealth -- there were always Nobles who needed money enough to compromise their class loyalty, and soon the tradesmen who were the richest were also Nobles themselves.

All of this happened over the course of less than two generations. Most tradesmen, and most Nobles, couldn't adapt. The innovators were able to buy out other businesses, force other Noble families into marriage alliances. The most powerful tradesmen ended up controlling guilds, and becoming Nobles. Their political economic empires became known as Alliances (as, to the common people, they were alliances between tradesmen and Nobility).

The Alliances are the dominant forces in the modern age. They largely control the government, and they utterly control the economy. Only the smallest, least consequential businesses can survive being more-or-less independent of the Alliances (they aren't worth the time). If an independent grows succesful, the Alliances will either buy him out, force him out of business, or even physically attack him.

The Glassmaker's Alliance

General

The preeminent economic and political force in Atathorn is the Glassmaker's Alliance. Though the Royal Family rivals it in pure wealth and political influence, and the Roget Alliance has nearly as many agents and distribution channels, in the sum of its parts if not any individual one, the Glassmaker's Alliance is unmatched. Shrewdly managed and not afraid to innovate during the formative years of the modern age, the Glassmakers now struggle to remain on top of the pile. As the current dominant group, they are a force fighting to prevent change of all kinds.

The Glassmaker's Alliance is the child of Mek Scarsen, who, some fifty years ago, was a tradesman dealing mainly in glass products as Passion was coming into common use in Atathorn. Scarsen was an early innovator in using magic to speed his various business practices, and he quickly realized its potential to shake up the old order of things. He had been living a comfortable life for years (one of the very few non-Nobles who was moderately wealthy in the old order) on the proceeds of his glass business, and he saw that threatened. Scarsen's biggest fear was that someone using magic could create a business that would rival his own in a matter of a few days by shortcutting past all of the skilled aspects of work. His solution to this problem was to use the large profits he was reaping from his own magical business enhancements to vertically integrate his business – he figured that nobody could undercut him in the glassmaking business if he controlled all of the major businesses which wanted glass, and could lock them into buying only from him.

Scarsen was already a powerful figure in the old Glassmaker's Guild, and as he grew in wealth and power, he drew the other glassmakers in the city closer to him, or drove them out of business. Before long, he was the Glassmaker's Guildmaster, and he used the Guild basically as a front for doing his own business.

Though glassmaking is a fairly dedicated industry, Scarsen quickly found himself in the center of the city when he became the not-so-silent partner of several of the city's biggest cartwrights. Cartwrights were some of the biggest buyers of glass in the city, as the carriages that nobles preferred to travel in usually featured glass windows. But once Scarsen was into the cartwrights, he realized that they dealt with everyone, from the lowest farmer yokels to the most powerful peers in the city – everyone needed carts for various sorts of hauling. Scarsen simply followed his strategy of integration where it took him, with characteristic attention to detail and ruthless supression of any competition. And he found, somewhat to his own surprise, that eventually all of the businesses in Atathorn dealt with each other through some chain of transactions.

In many ways, Scarsen pioneered the principles of the Alliances. His model of vertical integration of every related form of business was much copied by other entrepeneurs of the time. When Alamar Roget, the Duke of Etersbruh put his hand to it as well, Scarsen became aware of the need for political as well as economic clout. By that time, his Glassmaker's Guild was enormously wealthy, and he was able to buy several impoverished Noble families' influences without ceding much, if any, control. Scarsen eventually wed a woman much younger than himself and became, approximately twenty years ago, the Baron of Telomay.

In present-day Atathorn, the Glassmaker's Alliance is an omnipresent fact of city life. It has several insignia, from the Barony of Telomay's coat of arms (an upside-down red rose on a field of yellow) to the old Glassmaker's Guild symbol (a representation of a stained-glass boar) to the miller's windmill. But its employees are always referred to by the common people as Glassmakers, and its yellow-tabarded guards are instantly recognized by everyone in the city. The Glassmaker's Alliance is strongest in the areas of raw materials production and transportation – if you need to move any significant amount of material, you'll almost certainly end up dealing with the Glassmakers.

Baron Scarsen is still alive, though he's in his dotage, now in his mid-90's, and does not take an active role in the business. The Alliance is now principally controlled by Scarsen's son, Sir Edam Scarsen, and Jinn Brooksmill, who married into one of the carter families that maintained a powerful position in the Alliance when Scarsen entered into the transportation business. Of the two, Jinn is the more capable – Edam, while competent, lacks his father's raw brilliance. Jinn is still subordinate to Edam, a fact which irks him to no end, and he is the force in the Glassmaker's Alliance most likely to enter into some risky gamble in order to increase both his own and the Alliance's prestige.

The Glassmakers have a ponderous bureaucracy, and there are many opportunities for a middle-level executive to have personal projects and engage in fief-building, often at the expense of others within the Alliance. It is entirely possible for two different sides of the same conflict to ultimately owe their loyalty (and their funding) to different parts of the Glassmakers. Jinn Brooksmill hates this costly in-fighting, and is constantly working to root it out, while Edam Scarsen tends to put his own energy towards expansion through the acquisition model his father pioneered.

Gold Guards

The Glassmaker's Alliance's security forces wear a distinctive yellow tabard, and are referred to by the general populace as the Gold Guards or, derisively, the yellow-bellies.

The the eponymous tabards of the Gold Guards are embroidered with a low powered protective spell (obsolesence varies from 1 to 3 – older tabards are retired), and the guards use a particular, and slightly odd, magically enhanced club. The club, which is about three feet long and fairly slim, has two long grooves on opposite sides in which slats can be inserted. These wooden slats hold the actual two spells that the clubs use – one spell designed to stun/put to sleep the victim of a hit from the club, the other designed to kill. The theory of these clubs was that the modular spells would allow the Gold Guards to flexibly respond to threats, while keeping costs down, as if one spell became dangerously obsolete, the other need not be replaced at the same time. In actual fact, the cheaply-made wooden clubs often fail to hold the slats properly, and having one slat fly entirely off the club is a not uncommon result of using the clubs in combat. The spells for the stunning and injuring similarly vary from obsolesence 1 to 3, and they are frequently of different obsolesence ratings from each other.

The Gold Guards actually constitute the single largest police/military body in Atathorn, a fact of which the paranoid old guard of the Glassmakers' Alliance is painfully aware. As such, supervision of the Gold Guard is fairly tight. The Alliance forbids the Gold Guards from collecting or using their own weaponry or other sorcery on-duty, so a Gold Guard encountered by the PC's is actually likely to use his club and tabard. Gold Guards are issued two power tokens at all times (a testiment to the incredible wealth of the Glassmakers), but accounting for those power tokens is tight – if a Guardsman thinks he can get away with using just his physical abilities in a situation, he probably will, as it's a huge headache to explain the discharge of a power token to the Glassmakers' suspicious accountants.

Gold Guards are decently paid, but almost universally despised in Atathorn, as the Glassmakers use them to squeeze the city tight. As such, most Gold Guards have a chip on their shoulder and something to prove, being used to the scorn of most of their peers. As such, brutality by the Gold Guard is unfortunately commonplace, particularly "forgetting" to use the lower-power settings on their clubs and going straight to the kill setting.

The Roget Alliance

General

If Mek Scarsen created the concept of an Alliance as an integration of trade guilds and craftsmen -- the Alliance as an economic institution, in other words -- then Duke Alamar Roget is responsible for the Alliance as a fusion of political and economic power. The Roget Alliance, while lacking the sheer wealth and economic power of the Glassmakers Alliance, has absorbed within it an incredible amount of the political sway of the old Nobility.

Duke Roget of Etersbruh saw what the Glassmakers were doing more than three decades ago, and recognized it as the wave of the future. Determined that his family would remain at the top of the social order even in these rapidly changing times, Roget quickly decided to construct his own proto-Alliance, not as a means of enriching tradesmen, but of tying them to his family's power. The Roget Alliance emerged as the first major group to manage to stand up to the Glassmakers Alliance in the economic arena.

Roget's vision of tradesmen controlled by Nobles did not remain pure, as the Nobles found it increasingly necessary to defer to the better business sense of their tradesman vassals in order to compete with the Glassmakers, especially once the Glassmakers started essentially buying up political power, and were thus able to block Roget and his lackeys from regulating them out of existance. In the end, while the Glassmakers began as tradesmen with pretentions of real power, and the Rogets began as nobles protecting their political power from tradesmen, both have grown towards each other, and now the two Alliances are more similar than they are different.

The Roget Alliance is a bit more hierarchical and blue-blooded than the Glassmaker's Alliance, and is most heavily concentrated in the manufacturing sectors of the economy -- the most plentiful and cheapest worked goods are sold under the auspices of the Roget Alliance's striking eagle embelem.

Today, Alamar Roget has officially retired from active leadership of the Alliance, but in practice, he is still the most powerful figure behind the scenes. The titular head of the Alliance is Deran Lauriel, a Count of impressive pedigree, but no particular intelligence and weak will. Lauriel frequently turns to Roget for "advice," and Roget in turn relies heavily on his neice, Baroness Jallion Nerie, and Sir Kevam Cartson, who are themselves powerful officers in the Alliance. Roget has long since given up on his goal of protecting the privileges of the Nobility, and is now concerned almost solely with increasing the power of his own family and of his Alliance. Kevam and Jallion are both ambitious sorts in competition with each other to take Lauriel's place as the chief officer of the Alliance.

The Roget Eagles

The Roget Alliance employs a large body of men to protect their assets and enforce their interests. These guards wear the striking eagle emblem of the Roget Alliance, and are called by the common pople the Roget Eagles, simply the Eagles, or (never to their faces) the Pigeons.

Until only five years ago, the Eagles wore conventional boiled-leather breastplates, a startling anachronism in the face of modern weaponry which made such armor useless, and both these armors and the more formal metal breastplates that officers sometimes wore are still gathering dust in large warehouses, occaisionally brought out for formal purposes. However, Eagles in the line of duty now wear wide sashes, color-coded to their rank, that have protective spells on them of fairly modern design (almost all are obsolescence 2 -- the Roget Alliance likes to replace their gear in single huge generations, in contrast to almost everyone else's practice). Eagles are also issued solid wooden truncheons with stun spells inscribed on them (also obsolescence 2), which are much better thought of by most knowledgeable people than the Gold Guard-style slat-clubs, even though they lack a kill setting. In cases of emergency, the Eagles have small stores of spears with kill enchantments on them, meant to be handed out when there's a particular need, but the stores are rarely dipped into, and there don't exist enough such spears to supply more than 10% of the Eagles in any case.

The Eagles are generally considered the best trained of the regular police forces in the city, the legacy of various Noble generals and actual war-men who were tapped to create the guard. An Eagle on patrol is equipped with one fully charged power token, and the men are not as loathe to use them as are Gold Guards, as they tend to be both cooler under pressure, and have commanders who are understanding about legitimate uses of the tokens. Veteran Eagles will often supplement their duty-issue sashes and clubs with innocuous secondary weapons, defenses, or utility magic, but Alliance policy prevents them from carrying obvious non-standard gear.

Like all Alliance guards, the Eagles are reviled by the common people of the city that they must draw their ranks from. As such, the ranks of the Eagles are rife with social misfits, bullies, and sadists -- if better trained ones than the Gold Guards could boast -- and brutality and corruption is endemic across their ranks.

The Spinners Alliance

General

Unlike the Glassmakers Alliance and the Roget Alliance, the Spinners were not founded in Atathorn. Rather, they come from the more southern province of Bessia, a largely rural region famed for its textile production. The provincial capitol of Bessia, Erdestern, lagged only slightly behind Atathorn in changing to adapt to the modern age.

Some forty years ago, a merchant whose trade was bringing fabric from Bessia to Atathorn saw the changes that the Glassmakers and the Rogets were making in Atathorn, and copied that template back in his home province. A less sophisticated environment allowed the fledgling Spinners Alliance to survive initial misteps, and it rapidly grew to become the dominant force in Bessia. Now it has turned its organizational attention to the huge markets of Atathorn, and the great city's ports (Bessia is land-locked), and it has turned its massive resources to establishing a foothold in Atathorn.

The Spinners Alliance are very much the newcomers to Atathorn. Only in the last decade have they had significant interests in the city, and both the Roget Alliance and the Glassmakers Alliance are fighting the Spinners tooth and nail to keep them out. However, thus far, the Spinners have accomplished fitful growth, to the point where even Atathorn's native two Alliances have to grudgingly agree that the Spinners are here to stay. Still, they have less than half the market share that the Glassmakers do.

The Spinners are controlled by a complex, shifting oligarchy back in Bessia, but in Atathorn, the entire organization is under the ruthless control of one man: Sir Zustin Estman. Estman is the son of a tradesman-cum-baron back in Bessia, and is himself primarily a businessman. He's a workaholic who inspires devotion from his subordinates, and he has thus far prevented significant infighting among the Spinners. Estman's downfall is that he tries to take too much work for himself, and whenever he doesn't pay personal attention to a portion of the Spinners' business, it tends to founder, as he's not good at finding competent subordinates and allowing them to work in their own ways.

The Spinners are concentrated in the soft-goods businesses, and both lower and upper classes alike often buy groceries and clothing exclusively from the Spinners. The symbol of the Spinners is a spider on a web of multi-colored thread.

The Spiders

The small guard force maintained by the Spinners are mostly used to guard caravans and stores, as the Spinners don't have large factories in Atathorn proper. The Spiders, named for the Spinners insignia, enjoy a reputation of being mildly less brutal than the other Alliance guard forces, but also of being clueless yokels from out in the sticks. This reputation was better-earned a few years back -- recently, the Spiders have been recruiting more heavily from within Atathorn, with the result of becoming more like the Gold Guard or the Eagles.

The Spiders use a blue tabard enchanted with high-quality (Obsolesence 1 or 2) protective spells and, in the city, clubs with low-quality (Obsolesence 3-4) stun spells. On the road guarding caravans, still a significant part of the Spiders duty, they tend to use un-enchanted crossbows, and those are available for duty in the city which warrants it. Spiders carry a single power token each, and are given reasonable leeway for using them.

Minor Alliances

There are several other Alliances, mostly of origin outside Atathorn, that also operate in Atathorn, albeit at a level an order of magnitude smaller than the big three. Eventually, brief descriptions of these secondary Alliances should go here.

The Government

Though the governance of the entire kingdom rests in Atathorn, that government has been made largely ineffective by the Alliances. Before the modern era, the government was a feudal model -- that is, the balance of power was between a rich King and his close family and friends, and poorer but more numerous and, in aggregate, more militarily powerful minor lords.

The entire concept of an Alliance was to wed the newfound wealth of the merchants with the governmental power of the minor lords, and they did this quite effectively. Now, most of the old government model is subverted towards Alliance goals, and the only bulwark of power left is the Royal Family. However, they're out of touch with the modern world, and, while rich, generally not very effective.

Still, the government wields a fair amount of power, mostly in areas where it doesn't compete with Alliance interests.

The Royal Family

Here we'll put a description of the current king and his extended family. Someday. Not today.

The Royal Guard

The Royal Guard are the personal bodyguards of the Royal Family. They guard the Royal Palace and occaisionally do police-work around events that the Royal Family attends.

(More later.)

The City Watch

The beleagured civil police force of Atathorn finds itself, in the modern day, only the third largest police force in Atathorn -- both the Gold Guards and the Roget Eagles are larger in manpower, and the Spiders aren't much smaller. Further, all three Alliance guard forces are far better funded than the City Watch. In an era of shrinking government budgets, the Watch has to choose their battles.

The most important thing to understand about the Watch is their mandate: they keep the peace. That's all. Notably, they do not "solve crimes." Their purpose is not to track down criminals or identify suspects; rather, they are charged with keeping the streets from becoming warrens of crime. If a crime happens in view of a Watchman, they'll tend to give chase. If a crime notably disturbs the public peace (like a brutal murder or a fight in the streets), they'll ask around and post pictures of the suspects. But if your home is burgled, or your child kidnapped, and you go to the Watch, they'll simply tell you that they don't have the budget, expertise, or manpower to track down the culprit and bring him to justice.

In the modern day, even this moderate goal of keeping the peace is beyond the Watch. They've withdrawn all but the most token patrols from areas that are heavily patrolled by the Alliance guards, and similarly they keep out of the worst areas of the Slums. The Watch restricts itself mainly to Uptown (which is a low-crime area to begin with, and the patrols there are primarily a political manuever), and the more sedate areas of the Slums and Dockside, where they can make a real difference.

The Watch is not so much corrupt as it is absolutely open about being buyable. The wages earned by officers of the Watch are tiny in comparison to what Alliance guards earn, and it's not just expected but frankly necessary for the Watch to earn additional moneys on the side by taking bribes. Ironically, though, for all the corruption that the Watch displays, they're somewhat better liked by the people than the Alliance guards, who are less open to bribery, but more inclined towards random brutality. That's not to say that the members of the Watch are angels, and there have certainly been many cases of the Watch abusing their powers, ranging from bullying to outright attacks, but the very ineffectiveness of the Watch tends to reduce some of the tensions between it and the common people.

Officers of the Watch are technically given spears and tabards, both with magical spells on them, but they're so ridiculously obsolete (Obsolesence 4-6) that most Watchmen don't bother to use them or, in the case of the heavy spears, even carry them. The Watch follows a policy of looking the other way when a Watchman relieves a criminal of any armor or weapons that that criminal may be carrying, so in actual fact, most Watchmen have far more useful equipment in various non-standard configurations. The Watch being poor as it is, the men aren't reliably issued power tokens at all -- they have to individually request them from extremely limited stores, and so most Watchmen are extremely stingy with actually activating their gear.

Crime

Criminals are the third major powerbase in Atathorn, but that's a topic for another day.

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