Pre-BombNES IV: A New Hope

Shadow,

I checked in on #Nes. But yeah, checking here too.
 
They'll all come crawling back >: |
 
Haiti is here, hoping to do better than OTL.
 
No. Courland requires a very professional application, with references.
 
Well I've decided since Mandarin never developed in TTL and because the Nan Song heartlands are in the far south that 'Chinese' now has 8 tones thanks to extensive borrowings from Yue. I hope CD has nightmares now. :3
 
I protest Shadow's list because I did check in.
 
Huang Maozi - The Huang Lama is the head of the Huang Maozi (Yellow Hats), a form popular in Xitsang. The Huang Lama's position is hereditary with the successor being the young child relative at the time of the passing. The current Huang Lama is the thirteenth such head of the Huang Maozi. The Huang Maozi are so named for the yellow hats they favor. The Huang Maozi is appointed with the approval of the Nan Yarlung and the Nan Song. The Emperor is said to be fond of the music that the Huang Maozi prayer wheels make. The Huang Maozi operate a large number of monasteries in the Yarlung realm but are not permitted to move among the Mongols for fear of annoying the Black Hats who have captured the hearts of many of the Mongol people. The Black and Yellow Hates sufficed to say are grave foes.

Gyatso Allaho - The Gyatso Allaho are followers of the God Allaho and His Prophet Gyatso who was formerly a Huang Maozi. The Gyatso Allaho are said to be mortal foes of the Muslims who make up much of the Emperor's armies. For this reason, the Gyatso Allaho are prohibited from proselyting. The Gyatso are said to fuse aspects of the Muslim and Buddhist faiths and who have a great focus on spiritual matters and a great fondness for idle monks and wandering holy men who spend a great deal of time in idle introspection and the moving of prayer wheels. The Gyatso Allaho are very prevalent among the Hei Yang but fortunately this idle plague has not yet spread into the Emperor's lands to much.
 
Burgundian National Statistics

Linguistics:

30% Burgundian (Low German)
45% Flemish (Dutch)
15% Reichsdeutsch (High German)
5% Wallonian French
5% Other (Frisian, Yiddish, Romani, etc.)

Burgundian is a constructed language based on Low German dialects common in Bremen with a significant number of Flemish loan words. The aim of Burgundian was to create a mutually intelligible dialect for both the Flemings and Germans of the nation and thereby foster nationalism rather than particularism. It is most widely spoken around the capital Utrecht and Oldenburg.

Political Parties in the Bourgsraad:

Rittersbund – 45%
Vrijslander – 30%
Ietsismen – 15%
Unaffiliated/Small Parties – 10%

Rittersbund

The Rittersbund is the dominant faction in Burgundian governance. It represents an alliance of the nation's vested political and commercial interests and is strongest among the nobility and upper middle class, but unlike most typical royal-affiliated parties it hews to a much more liberal direction than Europe at large, with significant factions interested in native rights, women's suffrage, and other forms of social modernism. Has a popular youth wing on university campuses.

The Rittersbund was once an organization of its own, a council of nobles (increasingly Rhenish and Lower Burgundian exiles following the French depredations) that periodically pressed the Princes of Burgundy into humanist reforms throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. At the creation of the Bourgsraad in 1704, they simply joined the assembly en masse and became its dominant party.

The Rittersbund's greatest accomplishments include the enaction of compulsory public education, a declaration of religious non-intervention from the monarchy, and the institution of Burgundian as a national language. The Rittersbund has also fostered a tradition of aristocrat-intellectuals that have contributed to many of Europe's scientific and philosophical discoveries, and it is tightly tied to the great medieval universities.

On foreign affairs, the Bund is an advocate in principle of “German liberation,” though in practice it remains unwilling to upset the international order to do so and tries its best to maintain detente with France, gaining the ire of the Vrijlander party. On domestic affairs, they favor moderate industrial tariffs, focusing on exporting industrial goods to Britain and Germany while relying on the Bartican and Ostindien agricultural concerns to satisfy domestic demand for sugar, coffee and tea while locking foreign competitors out of the market. Though many members favor free trade, they maintain the tariffs mostly to keep Vrijlanders out of power.

Vrijlander

Vrijlanders are for the most part Flemish and draw their support from the large industrial cities of Amsterdam and Antwerp. They are aggressively nationalistic, socially conservative and tend towards the xenophobic in their rhetoric. Vrijlander membership is mostly composed of factory workers and guild-union members, and are an officially Localist party, with large popular rallies typically followed by religious services by charismatic preachers.

They oppose the tolerance doctrines and are in favor of heavy restrictions on the Catholic Churches. (Some more extreme members even wish to place a confiscatory tax on Jewish wealth.) Vrijlanders also have a strong alliance with the Bartican ruling class. There are radical elements within the Vrijlander party that wish to abolish the nobility and have a council of guild-unions advise the monarch directly, but this is not in the mainstream at present.

Though the Rittersbund supports tariffs to a certain extent, albeit moderating them to placate British demands, Vrijlanders wishes to raise them much higher to create a truly “national economy”. Vrijlanders are in favor of Burgundian irredentism to a much higher extent than the Rittersbund, and are in favor of immediately withdrawing support from the German Union in order to build a Greater Burgundy. They are violently-anti French and some of its members have been arrested for harassing French expatriates or Wallonians.

They are viewed with alarm by the German mercantile elite in Utrecht and Bremen, which heavily fears the Vrijslanders and criticizes their positions as irrational and chaotic. The growth of the power of guild-unionism and the threat it poses to the continued accumulation of capital is much more likely to be the source of their fear.

Ietsismen

This is the colloquial name for the loose alliance of representatives in Frisia, Wallonia, and the rural countryside who vote en bloc but have no official party leadership. They hold very few strong ideological positions in common, but rather have aligned to form a balance of power between the Vrijlanders and the Rittersbund, and use that for leverage.

The Ietsismen are almost exclusively focused on extracting concessions and investments from the monarchy, particularly subsidies to support domestic agriculture which has lately suffered due to foreign competition. They generally vote with the Rittersbund in return for an assurance that a certain portion of the budget will be diverted to their districts each year.

In large part the Ietsismen are derided for not believing in anything and being the living embodiment of amoral corruption in the kingdom, but they keep getting re-elected due to the effectiveness of the patronage system and the inability of the Rittersbund to secure a full majority in Bourgsraad.
 
Thlayli is an optimist.

EDIT: Actually so am I (at least vis-a-vis this game).
 
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