Hasmala

From RocksfallWiki

Hasmala, formally the Reverend Republic of Hasmala, is a country located between Omba to the south and Basai to the north. It was once the agricultural heartland of the Omban Empire and it remains the major producer of cereal grains and beer. The great noble lineages, naturally, exercise some local authority, especially in the older, western (coastal) part of the country. However, the military and agricultural strength of Hasmala is protected by the Hand of the Dead, who provide much of the country's agricultural labour and fighting strength through creating and controlling bubun, giving the Hand enormous power over the political system. Its population is around 1,400,000 with around an additional 200,000 bubun at any time.

Hasmala is formally a republic led by a Governor and a dozen-odd councillors. However, these are selected not by the people or even by the nobles themselves, but by the high priests of the major temples in the area. Throughout the country, temple priests are selected on the basis of merit, with some preference for those of aristocratic birth, but the current High Priest of the Hand (known as the Heart) was in fact the child of corpseborn parents. Because the governorship can be revoked at any time, the Governor is largely a puppet and must exercise extreme caution in making decisions that would upset the clergy. Competition for political positions is fierce and deeply corrupt, but tempered by the fear of the priests. The symbiotic relationship between the Hand and the nobility is constantly tested but mutually beneficial and so has persisted for centuries.

Prior to the advent of the Corps, Hasmala was an agrarian chiefly society of speakers of a dialect of Old Omban and, later, Ombesh. As the Omban monarchy expanded, various chiefs allied themselves with the kings, leading to a century of relative chaos between various autonomous lordlings. By the final decades of the monarchy, most of what is now western Hasmala had been relatively subdued. After the death and Epiphany of the Hasmalan soldier Zunuga, the country became one of the earliest regions to adopt the Corps. By the Treaty of Lekhi in 47 IE, Hasmala was effectively given over to the control of the Hand, reporting only to the Emperor and bypassing traditional noble privileges entirely. By this time, Hasmala had so many bubun that it was able to coopt the loyalty of the common populace, who grew comfortable. After the end of the Empire in 338 IE, Hasmala became an independent country which, despite occasional grumblings from the local nobility, has remained essentially under theocratic control since.

Hasmala has extremely strict and swift justice for the lower classes, with the death penalty employed to restock the labour pool. The Hand ‘rents’ out bubun in various agricultural regions to the local nobility, exercising managerial control over the ‘workers’ while leaving the land management to non-clergy. Recently it has been raiding Omba and Basai, as well as areas to the east, and was one of Sharai’s allies in the Bone War.