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The Realm is currently the greatest political power in the whole of Creation. With its core lands on the Blessed Isle secure and nearly invulnerable to attack it has set policy for the rest of the world for almost a millennium. With the Dragon-Blooded and her legions helping enforce her will, the Scarlet Empress has been able to make everyone else do her bidding, to the point where the Realm's policies and philosophies have affected the day-to-day lives of millions of beings.

With the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress, however, this has been changing. For example, the Wyld Hunt no longer pursues Anathema with the vigor it once did, instead it is tied up in the power squabbling within the Realm as various factions work against each other, fighting for control of the Empire.

However, it should be noted, that even in this time of decline and strife, the Realm is a great force in the world and is still capable of mighty deeds and terrible action.

Organization of the Government of the Realm

There used to be a large degree of cooperation between the bureaucratic and military leadership of the Realm, but that has broken down in the five years since the disappearance of the Empress. Fortunately, she had organized her territories in the Blessed Isle and the Threshold to be defendable and productive - and the organization that made this so still exists even if its guiding force does not.

The lands of the Realm are divided into prefectures (small territories on the Blessed Isle itself) and satrapies in the Threshold. There are a small number of territories that are styled dominions because of their physical size or importance - but they function like a prefecture or satrapy in every way but size.

Geography of the Realm

The Realm is split across two geographically distinct regions which are governed in two different fashions. These regions are the Blessed Isle and parts of the Threshold.

The Blessed Isle

The full article can be found here: Blessed Isle

The Isle is the heartland of the Realm, and the Scarlet Empire has imposed a high level of discipline and control upon all aspects of life and society there, from the small gods who watch over each forest, beach and hill to how deeply a peasant genuflects to a Terrestrial Exalt riding by. Each being has a place and purpose on the Blessed Isle, and there is little room for interpretation or variation. The Scarlet Empiress was the Isle's sole lawgiver and benevolent despot - a role now nominally filled by the Regent.

Satrapies

For more information, look here: Threshold

While they can be considered a region for discussion's purpose, the Threshold territories of the Realm are in actuality a series of disparate, fractious and occasionally rebellious states which owe allegiance and pay tribute to the Realm.

These territories are called satrapies and each has its own local government and political system which is watched over and "advised" by an official from the Realm called a satrap. These individuals serve as the voice and ears of the Empress in the region, speaking her decrees and reporting on the goings on there. The fact that are normally met by obeience from the local government is not surprising because each satrap has a personal staff that usually consistes of a number of elite troops, several monks of the Immaculate Order and representatives of the Realm's secret police.

Wavecrest Archipelago

Organizations in the Realm

Life in the Realm

Although it is possible to find people who disagree with this statement, the Realm is the civilized heart of Creation. Even now, the Blessed Isle's poorest citizens enjoy a higher standard of living then most people in the world. Even though they lost cities and half of their population during the Great Contagion, the Realm retained much of the fundamental infrastructure from the First Age. (Examples of this survival can still be found today in the form of roads and highways of the First Age as well as dams, levees, polders, bridges, canals, aqueducts, manufactories, farming terraces, signal towers, tunnels and harbors of the Shogunate that are all still in use. With this foundation in place, and the cities and manses built by the Dynastic Dragon-Blooded, the modern Realm grew into a mixture of old and new.

Farming and Diet

Due to magics woven into the land of the Blessed Isle and fertility that comes from the Elemental Pole of Earth, the Realm enjoys three havests each year and its people can always find food for all required meals, even if at times there is meager substance to those meals.

Rice is the staple crop of the Realm because it is easy to produce but also labor-intensive to grow (which leaves the peasantry little time to consider rebellion as they are ever working at producing food. Additional staples are millet, barley, wheat and oats while flax, cotton and hemp serve as primary fiber crops.

Beyond these staples, diet is class based. The peasants cook in sesame oil and use vegetables (ranging from lettuce to peppers) heavily in their cooking. In the homes of well-off city dwellers meat (in the form of fish and chicken) can be found, as well as fruits and nuts (such as apples, oranges, almonds and cashews) can be found. In the wealthier households olive oil replaces sesame oil and beef suppliments (or even replaces) fish and chicken - mammoth meat is also often served at parties of the rich and powerful.

Industry

Most manufacturing in the Realm is in the form of cottage industry. For example, a village (or a group of villages sharing out the parts of the job) might make flax into linen thread, linen thread into cloth and then cloth into clothing.

Industries of fame from the Realm include the "cottager ceramics" (these ceramics are famous for their simple lines and delicate colors in hues of blue, red and green) which is more highly valued in the Threshold than it is in the realm even and fabrics of cotton and linen that have thread counts high enough to be suitable for the highest nobility elsewhere in Creation. It is the simplicity of these products that enhances their appeal; the status suggested by plain clothes made in the Realm is greater than the status suggested by Threshold silks or armor, for example. Higher classed industries (like silk production) has more formal manufacturing processes and can even have tight governmental control (sch as factories that produce weapons and armor).

Social Class in the Realm

Among mortal humans in the Realm, there are five social ranks that are totally separate from the convoluted levels used by the Dragon-Blooded to differentiate Dynasts of major lines from minor ones have numerous nuances and gradations among themselves that contrast a Dynast of a major line from a Dynast of a minor line and that divide Dynasts from outcastes. Mortals in the Realm play these games of rank on a more limited scale as their shorter lives permit.

Patricians

At the top of mortal society in the Realm are the various patricians and their families. The patricians typically fill officies in the ministries that are considered too menial for Dragon-Bloods to fill. The highest ranking members of this class tend to become prefects and assistant sub-ministers in the Thousand Scales; in the Legions they rarely rise above the rank of winglord and in the Navy patrician captains can be found but few, if any, mortal commodores, fleet captains or admirals.

Patricians are nobles because they are descendants of Exalts of the Scarlet Dynasty, although some are children of outcaste Exalts who were rewarded with the rank due to their parent's exceptional service. Occasionally a child of a patrician family will exalt; when this occurs the child is adopted by one of the Great Houses, usually the one the patrician family is currently allied to (if there is one).

The estates of the patrician families are never as large as those of the Great Houses, but they do amass large incomes and usually are as prominent in their prefectures as the Dragon-Blooded are in Creation as a whole.

Citizens

The citizen class is the next step down the social ladder from patricians. It is a broad class covering everything from artists and artisans to merchants and traders and sailors and carters to clerks and low-ranking bureaucrats. Most live in one of the large towns or cities in the Realm and they are a "middle class" level to society, wealthy enough to pay their bills and live in reasonable comfort, but not enough to enjoy affluence. They are also the middle ground in production, as they take the product of the peasantry and craft it into the delights of the patricians. They are, however, barely visible to the Dragon-Blooded even though they are the largest pool of recruits for the Legions, the Navy, the bureaucracy and the Immaculate Order.

Peasantry

The peasantry forms the foundation of the social structure of the Realm and outnumbers the classes above them by tens of thousands to one. With the fact that thirty generations has passed since the formation of the Realm by the Empress and more than three times that many since the Usurpation the peasants of the Realm literally cannot imagine a world without the Dragon-Blooded ruling over them.

The peasantry of the Realm is kept in a state of helplessness, enforced by the social mores and laws of the land. For example they are fobidden to own weapons and their schooling is limited to a watered down version of the Immaculate Philosophy.

Slaves

Slaves are purchased by and tributed to the Realm in huge numbers. However, it is illegal to privately own slaves - instead they officially belong to the Realm itself, the Empress or one of the Great Houses. Despite this, it is quite normal for Dragon-Bloods to have long-term possession of individual slaves (or even whole work gangs). Slaves are even occasionally "loaned" or "gifted" to a patrician house for projects needing cheep labor. The control over the use of and ownership of slaves is nominally in place to protect the slaves from abuse by dangerously ignorant peasant owners, but a secondary intention - that of preventing large scale slave revolts by keeping slaves in small groups with trusted overseerers - is rarely discussed.

There are three divisions that slaves are sorted into in the Realm. The most populous are work gangs, which can number as high as 10,000, that work on any number of civil-work projects (i.e. stone quarrying, road repair, land reclamation or harbor dredging). Each prefecture in the Realm has its own slave gang and many ministries have gangs of their own - even some of the Legions have slave gangs associated with them for various projects. These hard working slaves live harsh lives and tend to have a limited lifespan (for example mine slaves and those assigned to road crews tend to only have an average span of two years after duty assignment). These slaves are usually purchased in lots of a thousand, and due to the ease of replacement death is the most common form of punishment among them. In order to discourage rebellion a ratio of an overseer for ever twenty-five slaves in the Blessed Isle or for every ten in the Threshold is maintained whenever possible.

The second category is formed of specialty slaves of various sorts. They are often spoils of war or entered slavery to pay off familial debts, they have skills from their previous lives that make them more desirable and allowed them to avoid assignment to the work gangs. Their skills may range from literacy or knowledge of the handling of finances to weapons training or artisan skills of some sort. Of these, slaves with skill at dancing, musical talent, especially capable sex toys and some kinds of artisans are the most expensive to acquire and rarely leave their owner. They are acquired singly or in small groups and are often able to work their way into their owner's good graces, allowing them to survive to old age.

The final category of slaves are domestic slaves, those that perform duties to help maintain the households of the Great Houses. Typically purchased in lots of ten to a hundred, these slaves are cooks, cleaners, launderers, gardeners and body servants in the homes of Dragon-Bloods and patricians. Many are bound by sorcerous means to make it impossible for them to betray the secrets they are exposed to daily and all are broken in one way or another, so that they - and everyone else around - know that they pose no threat to anyone in the household.

The Disenfranchised

Even the slaves have people below them in the social scheme of things. These people are the disenfranchised and there are many of them, particularly as the laws of the Realm rarely differentiate between mortals, particularly for those below patrician in social status. It is unfortunately quite easy for an entire village to be disenfranchised because a single member of the village was discovered breaking the law.

Those who have been disenfranchised are turned out of their homes and are exiled from their prefecture. It is not illegal to abuse or kill these people and they cannot take up residency in a new location until they pay a residency pledge fee of four koku - a price too high for most who have been disenfranchised to pay, forcing them to a life of wandering as they look for a place with a shortage of workers, because the fee is occasionally waved in such situations.

Since the disappearance of the Empress there are many more disenfranchised on the roads of the Realm than in times past. The Great Houses and their patrician allies have been causing villages and towns to be uprooted so that they could acquire land to expand their estates or to create no-man's-lands between the estates of rival Houses.

Military Might

In addition to having the Dragon-Blooded Host, the Realm also has more First Age technology and weapons at its disposal than any other political body in Creation.

Military Forces

House Units (military forces controlled and directly commanded by the Great Houses)
The Imperial Legions
The Imperial Navy
The War Manses
Warstriders (see below)
Flying Machines (see below)

Military Resources

The Thousand Correct Actions

One of the tools that helped create the Realm's military might in the past is the famous book The Thousand Correct Actions of the Upright Soldier. Senior officers would carry the complete manual while junior ranks carry heavily abridged versions. Since the disappearance of the Empress the book has fallen into disrepute much to the chagrin of older Outcastes and even some Dynastic officers.

The Imperial Manse

The full article on this can be found here: The Imperial Manse

The Imperial Manse is the centerpiece of the Imperial Palace and is at the center of a large garden. Physically it is a huge, squat building decorated with orichalcum and marble, it possess a single door that is a slab of black jade. Inside this impressive building are controls that unify all the war manses of the Blessed Isle's Imperial Defense Grid as if they were a single weapon. It was the The Imperial Manse that gave the Scarlet Empress the power to drive off the horde of Fair Folk invading Creation.

First Age War Machines

War Striders

They are rarely used, but the Realm also has a collection of walking war machines called war striders. They are constructed of metal and jade and attack by shooting fire from their nostrils, hurling stones with their hands, or shooting lances of light from their horns or eyes. These machines require an Exalted individual to operate them.

Flying Machines

The realm has a number of First Age flying craft which the Realm uses to control the skies over the Blessed Isle and some parts of the Threshold. Some of these machines have wings like birds, bats or insects and can shoot streams of blasting fire at their enemies.

Sea Going Vessels

The Realm also has great paddle-wheeled warships, invincible dreadnoughts whose energy weapons can defeat any number of modern wooden-hulled vessels and can operate smoothly on the calmest day.

Creation Et All/Realm