Culture Focus: Gallina

[virgil]

Gallina: Shadows of Smoke & Alleys

Lay of the Land
The fjords are angled and crowded to the banks of the river with agricultural terraces. The sky is pregnant with smog from industry and have a glow even at night from the lights below. To the casual visitor not a single acre is untouched by civilization.
The noncasual visitor will find the snowy peaks of the land the closest thing to virgin territory, but they will not visit long, as the storms and snowfall is nearly continuous.

Major Cities
Kuyam is also known as the Nine Ways City, its megalithic roadways spiraling out like spokes in a wheel across the known world. This metropolis, spiraling upward as much as it sprawls outward, dominates everyone's view of the nation. Even the aqueous miners of Ayinaa & bureaucratic distributors of Itanik, both sizable cities in their own right, consider themselves as Kuyamics living abroad. Of course, if they didn't, their economic ventures take an inexplicable nose-dive and few wish to tally themselves before the Writ.
After millennium under the rule of the All-Father, the cumulative architectural accomplishments make the three metropoli of Gallina megalithic, and continue to grow to accommodate the influx. Even the ruins of Azdas have yet to be dented from the company using it as a quarry.
A fraction of the size of the three main cities is the military farm Azdawa, where the unique ironroot is grown for use in paper mill for printing money, as is the byproduct used in the classified recipe for high explosives.

Economics
Originally the capital of the All-Father, Gallina is first and foremost a trade economy. While its banking system isn't as advanced as that found in Aikoh, it makes up for it in size, which gives it a particular resilience to economic shakeups.

Law & Order
To be a citizen is to be a civil servant, and vice versa. After the Long Holiday, the vast majority of government employees work in a manner not unlike the USA's National Guard. To the common citizen, the budgetary control office (the Writ) is the most feared branch of the government. Criminal enterprise apes the general structure of the public sector, except for the Solar Bear Gang, which is a dangerous drug-trafficking gang that continues to follow the indigenous religion that supposedly predates the arrival of the All-Father.

Government
A republic that is run as a corporation for its standard operations, the Board of Directors being the only elected positions. In the founding document that remains enforced, no elf of greater than 1/16 purity is permitted to hold position in the Board of Directors or as head of any department, and so heritage records going back four generations to prove this claim are required.

[Laertes]

I'm intrigued by the blend of totalitarian command economy and corporate state you've got going on. Historically most corporate states tend towards either miserable poverty (Cuba), mass immigration (Netherlands) or being merely the nerve centre of a huge trading empire with burly muscles (Venice.) I look forward to seeing this developed.

Also, is the creation of little vignette cultures intended to be a private project, or can anyone play? If the latter, I might write up several.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Also, is the creation of little vignette cultures intended to be a private project, or can anyone play? If the latter, I might write up several.

If you do a forum search for Culture Focus, you will find many threads by different posters, and lots of them are really good.

[virgil]

I'm personally coming up with half a dozen of these for a personal campaign project, independent of the other Culture Focus series. Obviously, if you wish to incorporate stuff into making something you think is cool, I will not stand in your way.