Rossily

Rossily!  The Merchant's Paradise!  Isle of a Thousand Faces!  A land where cultures from across the sky come together!  A strange place where rulers are chosen by a vote open to all, regardless of social station!  Don't you love the sounds of commerce?


Unlike Megama and Yurand, Rossily has no definite founders.  Due to its wide drift and convenient placement, such that it comes near to many smaller islands over the course of its cycle, Rossily was perhaps always destined to be a trading hub. Originally, merchants would bring their wares for trade with other merchants who used the isle as a convenient meeting place, and go home once the season for their goods was done.  Over time, villages sprouted up to support those merchants, and still more merchants came to make profit by trading to the villagers.  Over time, these villages developed into sprawling, oft-ramshackle metropolises, with a vibrant blend of cultures and strong ties to the Rillman clan-ships and the nearby islands, including Megama and Yurand.

Banner: The banner of Rossily is nine golden stars in a circle on a black field.  It rarely sees use in battle, as Rossily proper seldom has cause to mobilize an army of its own.

The largest and most important city in rossily is the capital of Helice, the City of Coin.  Known for its smooth streets and round, black, coin-shaped cobbles, the metropolis of Helice covers a stretch of Rossily's northwest coastline, making it a convenient Goldenmorn stop for Yurandish and Megamai vessels.  Rossily has other important ports, of course, but this one is by far the largest.  Helice is divided into several districts, and the manors of many of Rossily's most important merchant-princes are situated on the outlying islands.  It is divided up into many districts, some upscale, such as the Temple District and the Council District, and some considerably more...rough, such as the Forge District or the Great Fish Market.  The guilds keep their headquarters in their own districts.

GOVERNMENT: Rossily is perhaps utterly unique in that its rulers, the nine members of the Council, are chosen by the populace.  Exactly five hundred and one votes are publicly sold or auctioned off every five years to anyone who can afford them, and the competition to buy votes is very, very stiff in most years.  These votes have an actual, physical form.  Each is a large, masterfully-made tablet the size of a sheet of paper and twice as thick as a grown man's thumb, of gold and platinum encrusted with gems, emblazoned with a number between one and five hundred and one.  Every one of the votes is unique, its intricate carvings as well as the type, number, and placement of the gems setting each apart from the other five hundred.  This isn't simply a testament to Rossily's wealth, but also makes forgeries far more expensive and painful to produce, enough that simply buying a vote should be cheaper, since one turns in one's vote by casting it.  Voting is not anonymous.  Both when you buy and when you cast a vote, your name is recorded.  This both helps to prevent fraud and makes it simpler for the vote to be retrieved if a voter fails to turn it in by the final day.  A common practice is to immediately cast a vote when you buy it, as a show of public and unquestioning support, but it is also frequent for a voter to hold onto his vote, and let the applicants come to him.  Interfering with an election on Rossily is considered a very serious crime with the sort of consequences one would expect of an island ruled by rich merchants.  Depending on the circumstances, the most merciful punishment is total seizure of land and assets followed by a public flogging and exile, and a far more common outcome is for the offender to simply vanish.  Once the votes have been tallied, the nine candidates with the highest plurality become (or remain!) Councilmen, and the candidate with the highest plurality becomes Speaker, the nominal head of the Council, who still only has a single vote on Council decisions yet serves as its public voice.  If, for some reason, there are fewer than nine candidates, the existing Councilmen (incidentally, Councilman is a gender-neutral term) who had the most votes during their election but was not reelected retains their position.  Emergency elections are called in the event of a Councilman's death, with a mere fifty votes, the bidding on these is considerably more fast-paced and expensive, because the makeup of the current council is already known, it's easier to scheme.

Perpetual Voters: Some rare family lines, for deeds of extreme heroism, have a "Perpetual Vote".  Rather than possessing a vote during the election, they actually own their vote, and thus automatically can cast it in each election, be recorded, and take their vote home with them once the election is finished.  The descendants of Mallow the Great and Sextus Carlo are two of the few families to have such an arrangement.

Rossily and Rights: "On Rossily, nobility does not exist."  While spoken frequently as a curse after losing a dynamic Haggle roll, it is also literally true.  Rossily's laws are designed to benefit tradesmen and merchants, rather than taking social status into account.  It all works out nicely, as far as the Rossilians are concerned, it attracts talented individuals who don't want to be screwed over by some blueblooded thug thinking he can pay for your work 'at his convenience'.  The right to conduct honest business is considered a keystone of the Rossilian Way, and interfering with it is almost as dangerous as interfering with an election.  It's a fine way to commit suicide, if being beaten to death and thrown off the island by a gang of guild thugs with leather-wrapped clubs is your sort of thing.  Obviously, it still happens now and then, but when a guild isn't doing it itself, and finds out, the best thing to do is for the offender to flee Rossily as quickly as he can and never return.

Rossily and the Adanians: Rossily is one of the few islands where one can reliably expect to see an Ada-steel blade during a visit.  There are many Adanians on Rossily, enough that full-blooded Adanian patriarchs have served as Councilmen and even Speakers in the past.  Ada is to the south of Rossily (but doesn't that put Yurand farther from Ada than Ada is from Megama?  So why do some Yurandish nobles have Adanian swords, which are unknown on Megama? Simple, the Yurandish value what Ada has to offer more than the Megamai do, swords and terror bird cavalry being considerably more appreciated by the martial nobles of Yurand than by the sorcerous nobles of Megama)

Rossily and the Rillmen: Rillmen have docked at Rossily as long as Rossily has had ports, and Rossily has more than any other island to do with them.  Although there are fewer Rillmen permanently on Rossily than Adanians, there is an almost constant presence of Rillmen Clan-ships, and every few years the Rillmen have a great Meet on Onyx Shore, a stretch of black, sandy coastline with a small, outlying island granted in perpetuity to the Rillmen for their help in slaying the Pirate King Ey'yo.  The one time Rillmen have abandoned Rossily entire was during the short-lived reign of "God-King" Habbad the Eternal, who used Flame Dancer hearts in a rite to keep himself perpetually young.

Rossily and Contracts: An unusual peculiarity of Rossilian merchants is a profound hatred for contract-breakers.  If two Rossilian merchants have agreed to do a thing, and signed to it, it is done.  Wealthy men can and have thrown away their entire fortunes in fulfilling a contract.  This leads to what seems like an unusual level of trust between Rossilian merchants, their employees, and their clients.  A guilded merchant will happily pay in advance, will happily trust captains with valuable merchandise, because of the punishment for failing to keep a contract.  They call it Embargo.  First, a complaint is lodged with the guild involved.  If the complaint is deemed to be legitimate, it is passed on to the other guilds.  And then every single Rossilian merchant stops trading with the offender, and stops trading with anyone who knowingly trades with the offender.  No one will take their money, no one will buy from them, and no one will hire them.  No one will give them anything, either, save for bread, water, or dead poultry (traditionally already killed, but not plucked), this is both an insult and a merciful gesture.  A famous Rossilian play has a scene where a young entrepreneur returns home with his sunship full of treasures from far-off islands to find that he has been unjustly Embargoed, and finds out when his archrival contemptuously throws a bowl of water, a crust of bread, and a dead pigeon at his feet.

Rossily and the Postal Service: One of Rossily's national treasures is its Hall of Voices, a massive palace residing on its own islet off of Rossily's main isle.  Notable for the shard of rock it occupies being three times as deep as any of its neighbours, of a size to possess its own wharves, even private piers extending from the Hall itself.  This edifice of white stone and bronze-capped minarets is full of tasteful statuary, open amphiteatres, and fantastic paintings.  The real treasure, however, is its value as a triumph of the Rossilian Way.  The Rossilian Postal Service began with a simple board, with a sign, posting the name of a captain, Sextus Carlo, a ship, Mirella's Smile, and an offer to carry messages from Rossily to Megama.  The island that was to become the center of the Rossilian Postal System was, at the time, a sub-section of moorage off of the main island, used predominantly by merchants in silks and luxury items.  Much to the then-underworked captain's surprise, he was overwhelmed by requests to take letters from silk merchants on Rossily to their factors on Megama with his next voyage.  He worked out a system of prices based on the time of the year and the conditions, and posted them publicly, along with a guarantee to return any money paid for an unsuccessfully delivered message.  The tout business has always existed on Rossily and Megama, and hiring local couriers turned out to work very well.  Captain Carlo built a side business to go along with his usual cargo-hauling, hiring on permanent workers whose only job was to carry messages to their intended recipients, and ensuring his new employees understood that failure would not be tolerated.  Discarding or tampering with a letter was punishable by having both kneecaps smashed into powder with a cudgel.  Upon receipt of a message, a customer would be asked to sign or make their mark, occasionally under some pressure.  Competitors sprang up like mushrooms, many delivering to places he did not, and slowly but surely he intimidated, bought out, or outright hired on the vast majority of them.  Operations expanded, more ships were hired or commissioned, and permanent offices were built on the sub-island and on the docks of Megama, a third opening up a few years later on Rossily itself, and a few years after that a fourth office was built on Yurand.  Sextus Carlo had always dreamed of building something bigger than a single captain and his cargo ship, and the demand for reliable communication between the islands was far, far larger than he had anticipated.  He meticulously managed the structure of his enterprise, planning for offices to be built in "every damned port in the world worth sailing to".  After fifteen years of this of this, Sextus Carlo had a virtual monopoly on inter-island message delivery, and had built an immense personal fortune.  He had an outlet in every major port on Rossily, and agents in every market.  The Council was forced to act.  They came to him, and, in true Rossilian spirit, proposed that he become a Councilman.  He accepted, and served ably, gaining a reputation for somewhat coarse good humor, surprising charisma, and remarkable ingenuity when it came to finding ways to make money.  He was reelected twice before being elected Speaker, a position he was continually reelected to for six terms before he retired late in life.  He bought the island he had began his business on, and built a sprawling, majestic headquarters, commissioning famous architects and artists to work on it.  It was during his final term that, as he announced his intention to retire, he gave a gift to the Rossilian people.  He donated his business, complete with the Hall of Voices, to Rossily, appointing a Postmaster General and moving to one of his countryside villas, to spend the rest of his life with his third wife and his eighteen children.  Postal Service ships can be noted by their unpainted wood and white sails, flying the design of a scroll crossed with a baton (the baton originally being Carlo's cudgel), white on black.  Different models of sunship are available, although prices vary based on speed and the strength of the vessel, some of them being legitimate warships in their own right.


MILITARY: The greatest strength of Rossily relies in its sheer wealth and influence.  Rossily would rather be selling arms and mercenaries to both sides than engaging in military adventures themselves.  The best-known military forces of Rossily are the mercenaries, who have a perpetual contract to defend Rossily if it comes under threat.  This perpetual contract is considered to override lesser contracts.

Unlike Yurand and Megama, Rossily has been conquered before.  Three times, actually.  Twice by Magot, once by the Cult of Habbad the Eternal.  In all three cases, the Rossilians have bowed their heads, dissolved the Council, hid the votes, and quietly accepted their new governors, occupiers, taxes, and in one case God-King.  Everyone becomes Rossilian eventually.  The occupying soldiers took Rossilian wives and went native, the governors were corrupted by bribes from Rossilian merchants, even from former Councilmen, the mage-priests developed a taste for Rossilian wine and Rossilian luxuries, and in time things took their natural course.  Magot overreached itself both times and was eventually forced to withdraw its claims, while Habbad the Eternal's massive, flying cathedral-fortress inexplicably vanished while he was hunting for Rillmen to sacrifice in the arcane ritual that kept the flame replacing his heart kindled.

Mercenaries: Much of any Rossilian military expedition is conducted via mercenaries.  Mercenaries have no guild beyond their own company, and their talents and uniforms can vary wildly.  Noted mercenary bands include the Rose Knights, the White Falcons, the Bronze Brotherhood, and Gilber's Reapers.

Postal Workers: The Rossilian Postal Service is a serious business, and they hire serious people to ensure sensitive messages arrive safely.  They wear wide-brimmed kettle helms with a chainmail coif and a hinged, grill-barred facemask.  Below that, they wear a white brigandine over a maille hauberk, with the black flag of the Postal Service over their hearts.  They typically carry rounded targes and use heavy, axelike swords such as the falcion, but also favor the crossbow.

Civil Guard: The state-run Civil Guard is mostly a peacekeeping force.  Its men wear open-faced, pot-shaped steel halfhelms, with a spray of black plumes, but seldom have armor beyond hardened leather or padded linen.  Their weapons boil down to hardwood truncheons and short, broad swords, but officers frequently have better armor and weapons.

The Speaker's Own: An ancient tradition, the Speaker's Own are the personal fighting forces of the Council.  Small in numbers, but quite skilled, they wear full suits of gilded, elaborately engraved plate harness, and fight on foot with heavy, bladed polearms and crossbows.