Independent Organizations
For the Realm of Sejhat


Dwarves

The Dwarven West Orient Company (D.W.O.C.)
The D.W.O.C. is a global trading company operating under the charter of the Lowland Kingdoms. It traces its origins to the Triumvirate period some 400 years ago, where the Hero-God Ronan convinced the recently united Lowland Kingdoms to fund and organize naval expeditions across Sejhat and beyond, all across the seas of Om to lands as yet unknown.

The D.W.O.C. is a key agent in the wealth of the Lowland Kingdoms, and under the authority of the ‘Dwock’ the Lowlanders has established plantation colonies in the lands of the Orcs, the Gangsa Tana, and in the New World, where it actively trades with the foreign Wageni people. It is also a controversial organization reputed to be an agent in destabilizing regional governments, facilitating the illegal slave trade, and has even been accused of plotting mutiny against the Lowland King himself. The most mysterious controversy, however, is the fact that soon after Ronan helped charter the company the Hero-God sailed off on an expedition, during which he is believed to have perished. The few surviving sailors of the ill-fated journey were killed under strange circumstances, and some believe to this day that the D.W.O.C. killed Ronan, or that if they didn’t there are people within the organization who know what happened to the Hero-God yet choose to remain silent.

The D.W.O.C. is corporate in structure, consisting of a Commander in Chief, a Board of Directors, and the Captaincy. Given the power of the organization, internal operations resemble those of a modern state. The D.W.O.C. is nothing short of a state within a state, with over 75,000 professional troops under its direct command, most of them marines and most of those Lowland Dwarves. Four times as many are employed as sailors and merchants, and the combined fleet power of the D.W.O.C.’s armed merchants rivals that of the Lowland Navy. This protection, while sometimes counterintuitive to trade and diplomacy, is vital due to the constant threats of piracy and belligerent foreign powers. It is also no great secret that the military power of the D.W.O.C. is a utensil of the Lowland Kingdoms to build a global empire, which is currently geared towards funding the Civil War.

The University of Pennyfordd

Though there are many modern universities throughout the Lowlands and a number throughout the Highlands, Pennyfordd University is unique in that it is both one of the oldest universities in Sejhat as well as the most modern and up to date in its curriculum. It was founded shortly before the War of the Three as a public university, but during that conflict it spent much of its time as a barracks and military academy. The University regained its independence about a century later.

Key to the success of Pennyfordd University is the high degree of self-governance in the faculty. Many universities are independent from direct state control, but Pennyfordd’s colleges are independently operated even beneath the University level. While at times chaotic, the autonomy of the Deans ensures that the learning process remains energetic and competitive, concepts that are often considered subversive or even dangerous in more traditional universities.

Pennyfordd is currently most famous for its role in the development of industrial technology. The University is a convenient back door for inventors and entrepreneurs to seek copyrights and patents through the government, it has a number of ‘laboratories’ devoted entirely to the studies of alchemy, mechanics, metallurgy, agriculture, and textiles. In fact, there is an entire college devoted to the study of textiles! Also notable is the university’s College of Historical Science and its notable Archaeology program which has ruffled so many feathers in the press as of late with its radical research on prehistory.

Pennyfordd University is primarily a Public University. This is to say that its doors are open to any who can afford an education there, and thus does not exclude students based on nobility or lineage, though there are disproportionate numbers of nobles on campus. Within the last decade, the University has provided ‘grants’ and ‘scholarships’ to emergent talent and enterprising souls, giving them an opportunity to attend the university in exchange for partial patent ownership or other services. Needless to say, the attendance of increasing numbers of peasants has ruffled some feathers amongst the gentry! The steadily increasing attendance of women and their increasing demands to have separate housing constructed for their gender has also put recent strain on the otherwise composed and stable university. Curiously, the presence of the armed forces on campus is banned, and as a result the Fencible Militia only maintains a perimeter surrounding the campus grounds. Internal security is maintained independently.

The Cisalpine Street Firm
Organized crime is a reality that comes with the growth of any urban areas. ‘Place two people in a room, and one will want to rule the other’, so the adage goes. Among the illiterate working classes living in slum quarters or the newer, yet still decrepit ‘public housing projects’ of Porthmoth, a life of material wealth and local respect can be tantalizing indeed. Escaping the drudgery of factory work by playing ‘Chook’, gambling one’s hard-earned wages, drinking, and whoring all hold appeal when each sunrise brings not hope, but more despair. Behind each of these operations is likely a member of a ‘Firm’. The most notable and dangerous scourge upon the working dwarf today is that of the Cisalpine Street Firm.

‘Firms’ have their roots in Chook clubs, that popular sport of chicken chasing, capture, and delivery into a ‘goal’ with considerable molestation along the way. The centuries-old sport, carried into cities from the countryside, has bred fanatically loyal followings around the various urban teams. The more belligerent and pugnacious of these, the Chook Hooligans, band together to form ‘Firms’. While many Firms are ostensibly concerned with the honor and victory of their teams, these fanatics often come to blows with each other in spontaneous brawls that resemble something out of a barbaric age. Most Firms carry some of their barbarism to the general public, where they heap the threat of random violence on top of their already difficult lives by means of extortion, assault, and intimidation.

The Cisalpine Street Firm is one of hundreds, but stands above all rivals in terms of the public menace they present and their veritable army of thugs. Largely behind them are their hooligan roots, for they now are known to be involved in illegal gambling, prostitution, smuggling, and violent crime. Their members are bound together by a sense of family and community loyalty and remain fanatically loyal to the Cisalpine Street Chook Club, but can now be counted among the handful of large international organized crime outfits. Their evil seeds seem to be cast adrift by the trading empire of the Dwarves, and chapters of the Cisalpine Street Firm can now be found in the Highlands, the Gangsa Tana, the Circassid Empire, and even the Beastfolk Alliance. Full-time members of the Cisalpine Street Firm are easy to identify if one knows where to look- as a sign of toughness they are either branded or tattooed just below the nape of the neck with the symbol of a rooster.

The Brigstocke Family
‘The Brigstockes haven’t a drop of blue blood in their veins, but it seems that black blood will suffice in these wicked times’. This rather harsh assessment of the Brigstocke family may not be fair, but it goes a long way towards illustrating their controversial and transformative role in Dwarven society.

The Brigstockes are the wealthiest family in the Lowlands, and some call them a ‘dynasty’. Originally from the Midlands town of Wharton, Brigstocke fortunes rose when a neighboring city, St. Eave, burned to the ground. Gale Brigstocke owned a small iron workshop in that city and was known for his inventiveness and enterprising nature, but until St. Eave’s citizens flocked to Wharton he lacked the necessary labor to expand. With the inexpensive labor of the refugees, Brigstocke continually reinvested his profits until his ironworks became the principal industry of the city, the famous (or infamous) Wharton Manufactory.

This massive labor complex expanded further when Brigstocke bought out the city’s weaving workshops, some say at an artificially low price, and established a textile mill adjacent to his ironworks. This massive industrial complex was unlike anything ever seen in Ilfand, or even all of Sejhat, and its efficiency soon became the model for other industrial complexes throughout the Lowlands. In this important way the Brigstockes represent the industrial revolution in all its glories and villainies.

The Brigstocke name is kept under the table by the nobility, who see the family as necessary, but by no means their equals. Many of the lower classes hate the Brigstockes simply because they embody the vast changes sweeping society, most notably the forcing of the peasantry into the factories. The Brigstockes, however, command great respect among the merchant classes and the Kingdoms Government. Brigstocke factories are the engines of modernity, producing steam-power machinery, machine-woven textiles, weapons, agricultural equipment, tools, and steel beams for construction. The latest generation of the Brigstockes, Thomas Thiele Brigstocke, has further expanded into the growing industry of chemistry, once the domain of laboratory alchemists. Brigstocke bridges, locomotives, tractors, and engines have literally transformed the world.

Yet the Brigstockes are also avowed enemies of the Labor Union movement and, in the past, have directly exacerbated the condition of the peasants. Brigstocke industries pays what they deem ‘competitive’ wages, but many claim that these better wages lure oblivious peasants into unsafe factories, some of which have been described in the press as ‘horrid, labyrinthine deathtraps’. The Brigstockes are also not above hiring private militias to keep the workforce in line, and these strikebreakers are as ruthless as any common Chook Hooligan. In fact, many Brigstocke militias are comprised of former Hooligans, and while such men would never raise up arms against their communities, they are often sent to police other communities whose welfare they could care less about.

The Labor Unions
In no small terms, the Labor Union movement is the law of nature at work. For over a century the power of industrialists has risen without obstacle, but for any successful species nature soon provides an enemy, a ‘check’ to limit its propagation. Labor Unions are such a ‘check’. They are organizations of workers within a factory or even an entire industry that attempt to negotiate better wages, benefits, and working conditions in the companies they work for. This is a polite and euphemistic way of saying that the Labor Unions are throngs of somewhat justifiably angry factory workers that have banded together to squeeze benefits out of industrialists, often in familiar, thuggish fashion.

The ‘mother’ of the Labor Union movement is Eleri Bowen, a textile worker who lost her two daughters in separate accidents at the same mill and was compensated for neither. Her response a decade ago was inspirational, peaceful, and admirable, and she was able to rally the women of the workforce to abandon their looms and spinning machines in order to force the owners to act. After a strikebreakers ‘siege’ on the workers, the image of peaceful women starving themselves in the name of justice struck a chord with the press and before long the mill ownership gave in. Bowen’s Maidens became a sort of vanguard in the name of the labor movement, but the peaceful origins of the cause would quickly become clouded with blood and corruption.

For a time, industrialists underestimated the repercussions of the Labor Union movement and what it represented. They chose to break strikes with violence, and the tactics appeared to function, but now many factory workers impatient for change have turned to thuggish tactics to have their way. Assassinations of foremen, industrialists, and strikebreakers are on the rise. The now infamous Pennyfordd Riots that resulted in thousands of deaths began as a labor dispute over wage cuts. In the context of the Civil War, the vagaries of the Labor Wars are largely kicked under the table and ignored, yet a keen observer will note that as long as the two sides continue on the same belligerent, opposing paths they will collide cataclysmically unless something is done soon.

The Bean Sidhe

The Bean Sidhe (Ban-Shee)are the modern-day reincarnations of the ancient, defunct order of Dwarven warrior women who fought nobly during the War of the Three. However, far from being knights of foot clad in armor and wielding glaives, the modern day Bean Sidhe are distinctively non-militant, advocating social change rather than military uprising. Their mission is simple: Every Dwarven woman must gain the right to vote, the right to divorce, and the right to work.

A byproduct of industry has been the gradual transition of Dwarven women away from humble domestic chores toward factory labor, public service, and even the field of medicine as primary caregivers! The newfound financial freedom of many women, and not simply in the industrialized Lowlands, fosters a growing chorus singing for change and, that most galvanizing rallying cry, ’freedom’!

Early on during the industrialization foremen and factory owners saw the potential of Dwarven women as affordable and dutiful labor, both in metalworking and in the textile industries. What may have eluded the industrialists at first was the ramification of their decision- soon women everywhere would have an income, and thus a need to dispose of it. When it became clear that women had few places to spend the money to improve their lives, the fight for change began.

The climate of the Civil War and the severe manpower shortages it incurs give considerable leverage to the Bean Sidhe’s claims, and there is a curious sense of united cause between the Highlander and Lowlander chapters. Some regard the Bean Sidhe as an unwelcome distraction, and a few have even branded them traitors for distracting the people from the war effort and engaging in dialogue with the enemy. Others, and not simply women, feel that their cause has been deferred long enough and that the excuses that have long held Dwarven women back no longer hold water.

The Republic of Never

The Republic of Never is a curious oxymoron. First, it is not a Republic. Second, it continues to exist long after its leadership ever intended it to. Third, it is a common enemy of both the Highland Clans and the Lowland Kingdoms, yet consists of citizens from both. In summary, the Republic of Never is named such because all seem to agree that it never should have existed, yet it does.

The Republic of Never is roughly 150 square miles of rolling hill country with its capitol, Treslaig, firmly in the middle. It is a nation populated by deserters and detractors from the Civil War, and by all accounts it is growing. It currently has no formally recognized head of state, no diplomatic envoy, and no ministries. Its only resemblance to a modern state is its surprisingly developed military and logistics system. In summary, the Republic of Never is a tiny, hugely militarized rogue state.

This understandably is among the chief concerns of both warring factions. Not only does the Republic of Never defy the authority of the Highland Tonn and the Lowland High King, but it also sits directly in between key invasion routes to either nation and continues to attract deserters by the thousands. Living conditions within the Republic are reported to be austere, but functional, and the fact that its citizens have all taken a vow never to serve under arms again is deceptive—they are not pacifists and regularly fight against Lowland and Highland forces, rooting out and brutally killing any spies the two factions send. To the Republic’s credit, the numerous forces tied up containing the rogue state mean that for now, open battle between the Highlander and Lowlander armies has been minimal.