Here's my heavily WIP nation sheet. [hider=The Lazarene Union] Name: The Lazarene Union of Texas officially, but typically just the Lazarene Union to reflect its universalizing nature. [hider=Flag (N/A)] [/hider] [hider= Territory (picture or description) and Geography (WIP)]Settlements radiating south, east, and west from the Texas Hill Country.[/hider] [hider=History (WIP)]While the strange nation of Tekiasu began to grow in north Texas, the southern and central stretches of the state endured a long period of suffering. Slavery and tyranny had ruled the land for nearly a century. Petty barons, perhaps once called raiders, had defeated the last coalition of free settlements in 2137. Freedom was becoming a distant memory. Then, in 2200, the prophet Isiah Hernandez received a vision from the Archangel Gabriel and led a holy uprising against the slavers. He spread his teachings through a small pamphlet called the Lazarene Writ, a simple text fitting to the wasteland. Its new commandments among others made freedom and equality holy, stated that God had many faces, and offered a cookbook for a slave uprising. Beginning in San Marcos, the fires of religious revival and slave uprisings radiated outwards across the Hill Country, the South Texas Plains, and into the Big Bend Country. In response, the slaver barons sent an army of mercenaries and slave soldiers descended upon San Marcos, hoping to cut the head off the snake. At the Battle of Five Mile Dam in 2201, a smaller rebel force defying orders from the Prophet to retreat to San Marcos cost the massive slaver army dearly, but was overwhelmed. In an upset, the Prophet routed the remainder of the force in the subsequent Battle of San Marcos. Bloody battles would rage in Austin, San Antonio, San Angelo, but once the rebels had shown they could defeat the slavers in open battle the revolt became a revolution. After much of the heartlands were subdued, the Prophet himself led a march to the gulf, as the power of the vile slave traders were strongest there and the slave revolts in those regions had been defeated. A ramshackle, yet zealous, force set forth, made up of rebellious militia, country men, escaped slaves, and a cohort of Desert Rangers eager to leave Fort Bliss and strike a blow against the tyranny that had surrounded them for so long. The battles along the gulf coast were bloody, but in the end the rebels captured every major port settlement from Corpus Christi to Matagorda. The Prophet, already an older man, was weakened by a wound taken during the battle. He returned to San Marcos, where he began consolidating the revolution into a nation. It would be called the Lazarene Union, as it would be a union of settlements and regions that had heard his holy word, rose up against their overlords, and joined with him. He established the government of the Lazarene Union, which would be defined by the Congress of Ministers, led by an executive Eminent Minister, the Lazarene Church, and the Holy Tribunal, an equivalent to the Supreme Court. There was no separation of church and state, for the Prophet imagined a corporate society, where the state and faith were one body and American values such as freedom, justice, and equality were made sacred. It was at this time the Prophet also wrote the Lazarene Book, a collection of his texts and writings that expanded upon the Lazarene Writ. Around this time, the Lazarene Constitution also enshrined the nation’s legal process. The Prophet naturally took the place of Eminent Minister until he passed on from the world in 2217. The ensuing decades have been of consolidation, periodic wars with raider factions, and expansion as the Union moved from a ragtag coalition of settlements to a nation in its own right. By the 2290’s, the Union has consolidated its federalism and created states within itself. Periods of intense zealotry have come and gone, but the Lazarene Book and Lazarene Constitution aspired to be living documents, flexible to each generation’s interpretation of God’s creation. “The spirit of 2200” is still alive and well. Woe to the invader who challenges it. [/hider] [hider=Population]~500,000[/hider] [hider=Notable People (N/A)] [/hider] [hider=Military (N/A)] [/hider] [hider=Economy (N/A)] [/hider] [hider=Culture and Technology (N/A)] [/hider] [hider=Religion (WIP)] Some Aspects of the Lazarene Christian Faith: The name “Lazarene” is a reference to the raising of Lazarus from the dead in the bible, Jesus’s last miracle. Isaiah believed it was his purpose to echo this act on a grand scale; a revival of the faith, a revival of American ideals, and a revival of the Wasteland from the morass of moral decay and hardship. But he was under no illusions of the damage to the faith wrought by the Great War. If there was a God, why had he failed to stop humanity’s doom? Cynicism or phony superstitions were more often than not the rule of the Wasteland. In response to the climate around him, Isaiah came to advocate certain beliefs about the nature of the world: He focused on the sacredness of creation, asserting that the Earth and all its bounty were God’s gift to man, the instruments of man’s success and happiness.This was why God chose not to intervene so rigorously; this was why science was to be trusted in: God was in the life saving penicillin; God worked through the moral liberator of the Union. Thus, it was truly up to man to make use of God's creation to its fullest extent. It was truly up to man to be the master of his domain. The calamities that befell America and humanity as a whole in the 21st century became a cautionary tale for what happens when men let others become their masters beyond a healthy extent, when man let his ideals be compromised and injustice rule the land. That had been the state of Pre-War America and had led to the nuclear apocalypse. In waging the Great War, man had destroyed God’s creation rather than master it, creating a man made Flood. The lessons of this fable reflect the values the Prophet believed in wished to spread, and which he believed would find a receptive audience in Texas. Individualism and disobedience against the government was to be celebrated. The Lazarene Church in Practice: [/hider] [/hider]