[hider=Astralus Anarkia] [center] [h2][b][color=Gold]Astralus Anarkia[/color][/b][/h2] PLACEHOLDER FOR FLAG [color=Gold]Government Form[/color]: Unusually progressive for a Gaian nation due to the unique circumstances of its existence as a wildly cosmopolitan nation founded by intellectuals, Astralus is, in a word, anarchist. There is no government with overriding authority, but rather a group of the highly educated making decisions by vote and consensus, sharing power among themselves - even the 'military' is in effect a fully voluntary military, officers elected by vote. [color=Goldenrod]Demographics[/color]: All inhabitants of Astralus, virtually without fail, have been permanently touched by their environment. Faint glows and unusual eye, hair, and skin colours are the most typical changes, but far from the only ones. Some fire mages end up spewing flame with their breath, for example, while those who manipulate souls often end up emotionally cold and physically lifeless. Potentiates are those most heavily changed by the plane, known as the "Font" to locals, so consumed by the energy of magics that they lose physical form entirely. Many such people simply dissipate into nothingness, but some are so strong of will as to maintain sapient, though rarely human form as beings of raw magical energy. The most notable feature of Astralus is, in essence, the high diversity of its population, and its willingness to accept - and teach - nearly anyone, given the absence of visibly negative intentions. 16% Elves 4% Dwarves 15% Humans 15% Sentient constructs 30% Mixed 18% Various other ancestries, including handfuls of summoned creatures 2% Potentiates [color=Gold]Population[/color]: Roughly 1.25 million citizens, plus large numbers of summoned entities and golems. --- [/center] [color=Goldenrod]Plane Description[/color]: The Font - the plane inhabited by Illuminatus in the floating city of Astralus - is an immensely potent source of power for mages. Floating islands dot the skies, waterfalls literally infused with life falling from them from seemingly nonexistent sources, streaming down into the landscape below. Mountains walk, crushing stampeding herds of effervescent chimera beneath their towering bulk when they settle. Screeching bird-things knock their prey unconscious with bursts of sonic energy, only to be laid low themselves by spell-spitting serpents arcing through the clouds. In other places, desolate plains of broken rock and magical radiation dominate the landscape, where even gravity seems to oscillate into inscrutable, nonsensical patterns. In yet more, roiling spirits of magma do battle with living waterspouts. In essence, the Font is many things at once, but there is one constant: it is a place of wild extremes, fueled by magic and the extreme lengths to which life goes to survive in it. What exactly made it this way is unknown to the mages of Astralus, and they are unsure they will ever know. It could be a world so devastated by a war between mages as to be uninhabitable, some natural focus point of arcane power shaped by the dreaming minds of mortals or the spellwork of Gaia's mages, or even simply a random occurrence with no cause at all. What the mages of Astralus have done, however, is stabilize the realm around the rift, accommodating their mobile city. The enormous stone steps surrounding their rift, and the towering statues around it, are in reality a complicated network of arcane defenses designed to protect the city from incursions. Each statue is a dormant golem, each glowing lamp post an emitter of one spellwork or another, nearly plant a soldier ready to be animated by the organization's chloromancers. This is only true of the areas surrounding the rift, however, for even the mages of Astralus cannot fully control the Font, nor have they saught sapient natives of the realm for fear that doing so may cause their destruction. [color=goldenrod]History[/color]: Long ago, Astralus was nothing like it is today. Centuries in the past, even before the supposed death of Gaia, it was no country. It was the domain of a cabal of powerful archmages, its people their slaves and pet projects, kept in their chains by spellwork, constructs, and an army of well-paid mercenaries that recaptured or killed anyone that escaped, nearly regardless of where they fled to. Overseers, the favoured collaborators of these mage-lords, directed the slaves, themselves accompanied by powerful magics and bodyguards of their own. For eons, the people that would become Astralus suffered under the Yoke of the Mage-Lords. By the time of Gaia, freedom was a memory so distant many of its people had simply forgotten that it was a possibility in the first place, their perceptions so warped and twisted by their torment and the strict information control of the Mage-Lords. When the death of Gaia came, the Mage-Lords took their slaves with them. Thousands upon thousands died in the transition, both due to the abuses of their masters and the chaotic nature of the Font. Magically-charged beasts devastated the slaves and the resources of their masters, slaughtering them en masse where the random portal storms around their entryway didn't, often swallowing up the unprepared or spitting out demons and devils. The Mage-Lords pressed them forward, thought, until they found a site suitable for settlement - a massive, raised plateau upon which the less tolerable devastation was less common, outting their power magics to work and their hordes of slaves to hard labor to complete their great works. The loss of Gaia, they realized, may have been a blessing - with the raw power of the font at their disposal, was there anything they couldn't accomplish? Great edifices, of course, were erected to their glory, as were powerful defenses, but the deaths continued. More slaves died. Overseers and lieutenants, increasingly difficult to replace, were picked off by the utter Chaos of the realm, which adamantly refused to bend to the will of the Mage-Lords despite all their efforts. No matter what they did, breaking the Font was utterly impossible, and in the face of their constant failures, dissent slowly began to grow, the facade of unstoppable oppression slowly but surely crumbling. Few saw it, much less lived to tell of it, but if their supposedly perfect masters grew frustrated and angry at mere beasts, could they really be called perfect? If they tried, failed, tried, and failed again to put a stop to the portal storms that routinely say their most favoured servants destroyed or mutated beyond belief, could they really be called infallible, especially when they routinely threw childish tantrums in frustration at their continued failures? Despite all the efforts of the magelords, it was impossible to completely crack down on the spread of rumours, especially when nearly everyone they were being hidden from bore witness. Dissent swelled as more and more people realized that their masters *could* be defied; that they chains might not be truly unbreakable, and there was little the Mage-Lords could do outside of slaughtering them all. Their own delusions, however, allowed them to believe that they were too perfect to fail, and so revolutionary sentiment continued to grow until it finally reached a breaking point. Two hundred years ago, in an act of largely spontaneous defiance, the slaves rose up. The precise trigger for the general uprising is hotly debated, but something all Astralan scholars agree on is that it spiraled out of control in a matter of days, news spreading quickly thanks to the use of telepathic messaging. Thousands upon thousands were slaughtered by the masters in the death throes of their evil empire, but the sheer weight of the many overwhelmed them, with each of the mages cut off from their magic and beaten to death by the enraged mobs of the oppressed. And then, suddenly, it was over. With the fallen masters dead, there was nothing and no-one to command their armies of constructs, and so the people of what would become Astralus set about building a new civilization from one starting principle: never again could such hierarchies of power as those that allowed them to be enslaved be allowed to exist within their nation. For this reason, Astralus has established a robust tradition of extensive education, ranging from the mundanity of politics to the arcane sciences, which it maintains to this day, and which was instrumental in its rapid rebuilding and construction of a large defensive force to protect against the wildlife and continuous portal storms where conflict with the nature of the font couldn’t be avoided. In general, though, in stark contrast to their masters, the people of free Astralus avoided disturbing the world around them wherever possible, going so far as to construct a floating city with their magics, flying high above the land below. In the years since, Astralus has focused primarily on further developing its civil infrastructure, and maintaining its defenses, for fear that the Font might spawn something terrible they cannot harness, or, worse, that the portal to Gaia might open and greet them with something that destroys their new home. [color=gold]Culture and Society[/color]: Despite the fact that it’s been completely isolated from contact with other civilizations for five centuries, Astralus maintains an extremely diverse culture, to the point that the largest demographic unit aside from Elves consists of citizens of mixed ancestry, in many cases including ancestries otherwise wouldn't be able to interbreed if not for the intervention of a society of largely skilled mages. Such inter-ancestral reproduction is widely accepted, and even intellectually encouraged in some causes. The culture of Astralus, in essence, is dominated by the belief that diversity is its greatest strength, in the same way that a mage who studies only one 'school' of magic will be left helpless by someone who understands his weaknesses without his comrades to back him up. This attitude extends to nearly all facets of society, especially the intellectual, hence Astralus's both wide and deep understanding of many methods of practicing magic. Even in the home, Astralus is diverse, with family dynamics ranging from the highly traditional to the unusually diverse, and societal roles being constantly shifting, never static things. Citizens are allowed and encouraged to develop themselves in a wide variety of different ways, with few restrictions outside of proscription of violence among citizens. Typical ideas of tradition and gender roles, even, have practically vanished from the wider zeitgeist, and while their magic is used to construct civilization, schooling emphasizes striving to work with the world around them rather than aggressively imposing their will upon a reality that fights back. There are disagreements, however, but they rarely come to blows, and the relatively fresh memories of brutal civil violence among mages - and the tyranny of an unchecked state - keep them relatively in check, not to mention thew extremely high levels of education in the population. [center] --- [/center] [color=goldenrod]Governance and Politics[/color]: Astralus’s government, if it can even be called that, is extremely limited, built on the principle of providing a platform for Astralus’s people to express their concerts and aid each other. There is no monarch, or even a leader to speak of - only an assembly where people meet to discuss the ever-changing needs of the vast city’s people. Occasionally, however, people are chosen, usually by vote, to direct research in various fields. Theoretically, the same could be done to represent them in foreign affairs, but such an eventuality has yet to occur. [color=gold]Technology and Magic[/color]: As one might expect for a nation of scholars and mages, Astralus's understanding of both magic and technology are highly advanced, even if their population is too small to deploy either on an enormous scale. Most every facet of life is dominated by either, or often a combination of the two - stoved are 'fueled' by sentient flames that draw upon the natural magical energy around them, airships are held aloft by arcane engines and conjured air currents, and transport across the city is frequently accomplished by runed teleportation magic rather than actual movement between two points. Even the grand city itself is sometimes carried into the sky by massive networks of telekinesis runes, shielded by translucent, one-way walls of energetic magic, flying golems, and arrays of spell-cannons. This is not to say that their understanding of either field is complete, nor even 'better' than every other possible civilization. Each technology is geared toward one specific purpose, after all: the flourishing of the city, and nothing more. If nothing else, Astralus completely lacks the will or knowhow to sustain a continent-spanning empire. Perhaps their most valuable knowledge, however, at least to their survival, is their experience in directing and working with the flows of magic rather than dominating them entirely. In a duel between spellcasters, after all, few skills are more valuable than the ones which allow you to unwind a foe's spells like thread or potentially even consume their magic like a hearty meal and repurpose it for your own use. [color=goldenrod]Military Overview[/color]: Although its standing army is relatively small, even tiny, simply due to the difficulty Astralus has in producing new soldiers, it is capable of otherwise wondrous feats of shock and awe due to the outsized number of mages protecting the city. In terms of offensive capability, they are best suited to ambush and surgical strike (thanks to the fact that a large number of their sentient officers are essentially highly mobile artillery pieces) in which their ability to teleport whole units into advantageous positions and their potential for rapid destruction can be best utilized, or in advisory roles to states with the material might to mobilize a truly large army. The voluntary nature of its 'military', likewise, promotes battlefield innovation, and lacks the ability to conduct extended campaigns, even if they did have the manpower and logistical support for it. Perhaps their most valuable tool, however, is their ability to use spells to turn the environment against the enemy and cripple their logistics, whether it involves spoiling large stocks of food or conjuring powerful storms. Golems make up most of the 'infantry', also, usually led by highly capable battlemages serving in a similar role to officers, elected by their comrades rather than in the traditional manners of promotion and aristocratic titles. [/hider]