UPDATE ZERO
The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
In the 22nd century, North America is divided between an array of regional powers and lesser states. The continent is part of a grand battleground between world powers in Europe and China, who seek to spread their influence and control over some of the still-rich regions open to them. Many of the continent’s struggles are their own, however; East of the Mississippi, there is no final settled status quo following the breakup of the United States, while in the West demographic changes and state collapse have given rise to powerful criminal networks masquerading as states, fundamentalist religious movements, and radical techno socialist demarchism.
The first and most prominent regional power is the United States of America, the remnant of the federal government on the East Coast. It has fallen far from its previous heights. Decades of military dictatorship have crippled its republican institutions: the Americanist caucus leading the government has weak democratic credentials, composed of the civilian sycophants and enablers of the former regime. Supporters of the former regime, Coleists, are burrowed deep into the government and in the private sector’s Military Industrial Complex, a rough coalition of major defense contractors and militarists. Outside mainstream politics, the East Coast Progressives advocate for the country to abandon its imperialist revanchism and focus on its current territory, while the Shining Collective is a demarchist sect focused on the elimination of the self in response to the personalist authoritarianism of the Cole era.
To the east of them is the Midwest, divided into two coalitions. The southernmost is the self-conscious corporatist state Reva Aztara. Their central committee, the Social Directorate, has looked to consolidate power in recent years with the support of the Circuit Clubs, who provide it with grassroots support. Their efforts are viewed skeptically by those who benefitted the most personally from the anti-government revolution decades ago, the Great Stewards, and by the pro-Californian Andranistas. In the western edges of their territory, where settled populations have retreated in the face of climate change, reactionary nomadic groups ascribing to the Neo-Israelite philosophy fill the vacuum.
Their northern neighbors are the Articles of Confederation, better known as the Neoconfederates. A reactionary throwback to the early US political systems, the right-wing militias and smaller municipalities of the coalition are dominated by oligarchs in the major cities of Chicago and Detroit. These two urban poles compete for dominance over the confederation while suppressing constitutionalist reformers who threaten their oligarchic rulers. Their joint authority is enforced by the Marshalls, who’ve spread out a massive law enforcement and intelligence network. The entire political system is directly challenged by the Dark Green Army, a secretive sect of misanthropic environmentalists operating out of the former Canadian province of Ontario.
Emerging from the American southwest, the El Norte is dominated by the People’s Cartel, the Saints, which filled a vacuum along the US-Mexico border during repeated instances of state collapse. They’ve formed an alliance with Norteno nationalists and the ex-CIA Continuity Network to claim political power for themselves. How much it is a real state and how much it is just a shell is up for the debate: the active citizen movement would see meaningful state reform, while the remaining English-speaking population is disenfranchised and disaffected.
In the Far West, a novel experiment in political and social organization is championed by the Unified Western Autonomy. Mass, public participation in the democratic process is a step beyond anything the old United States could accomplish, albeit mediated by machine intelligence, but is prey to the same factionalism. The Malibu Consensus, the mainstream political principles that guide the autonomy, is chiefly upheld by the Pure Mind and Unified Purpose cliques but undermined from within by Transcendent Spirit, which seeks an expanded role for machine intelligences in decision-making. The People’s Republic of China is an unexpected player who see the Autonomy as the bastion of its influence in North America. The country embraced Chinese wealth long ago, to their prosperity, even if there is some disquiet. Outside the Consensus an array of smaller autonomies struggle on, some of them nascent hive minds, some small anti-capitalist groups, and others prominent personality cults around charismatic figures.
The Cascadian Federation is the last bastion of the liberal democratic values that defined the previous United States, attracting breakaways in northern California and former Canadian British Columbia to its federation. The Social Democratic Party and Republican Party swap government and opposition every election, continuing a liberal status quo enforced by the business interests in the Chamber of Commerce. Outside the revolving door of government, the Barbecue Party represents the interests of the poorer, mostly Mormon interior, who focus on social conservative ideas very distasteful in the urban metropoles. Relatively stable and prosperous compared to some of its neighbors, it nonetheless has its own nascent demarchist movement.
Finally, outside the United States, the corporate state of Aztlan has emerged out of former Mexico. Once just a dominant cartel, the new rulers have established themselves as a plutocratic upper class over the urban centers, dominating a weak underclass of civil servants and administrators. Their will is enforced by two separate organizations, the Ocelomeh and Cuahmeh, who once had a strict division of authority but now boast rival paramilitary formations, intelligence services, and hierarchies. Both groups are united to keep down the rural countryside which clings to concepts like the dignity of work and Mexican nationalism. Like in El Norte, a class of pseudo-philosophers focused on neo-indigenous ideas exists, with some influence among the middle managers of the corporations, but unlike their Norteno counterparts they are nowhere near actual political power.
Outside the regional powers of the continent, an array of breakaways and minor states cling to existence. Some of them are wealthy, many are poor. Some benefit from a degree of domestic stability but most do not. By and large they are pawns in the games of larger powers and buffeted about by forces beyond their control.
Over the 21st century, Canada has split into several parts. Economic struggle, foreign invasion, and anti-refugee populism saw secession of Quebec from the confederation in 2050, establishing its own independence. A generation later Quebec is finalizing the process to join a new, larger union: the sole non-European member of the European Union, it is a powerful bastion for Brussels’ influence on the continent.
Separated from the mainland by Quebec’s secession, the maritime provinces have organized their own Atlantic Union. Closely dependent on the United States for financial and security assistance the Atlanticist leadership succeeded in preserving some independence. Failed experiments in economic protectionism were phased out for a new economic model that established the Maritimes as a financial center and tax haven, attracting foreign capital flows to a relatively stable western state outside the European financial system.
Canada itself, stripped of Quebec and the Maritimes, struggling the loss of British Columbia in a peaceful secession to Cascadia and the loss of southern Ontario to a not-so-peaceful invasion by right-wing militias, has reformed itself into a fragile confederation in the Great Plains. But the center of the country is drifting inexorably north, to the unfrozen Arctic where settlement and investment is picking up and disrupting that same fragile political structure.
In the former continental United States, outside the major post-Federal powers, the Southern Union is a would-be, a has-been, a never-gonna. Its secession from Washington, after the government’s military power was exhausted in the Midwest, kicked off a generation of interethnic warfare between pro- and anti-government militias that broke the back of the nascent state. Peace came only with the humiliation of foreign intervention, as Balkan peacekeepers from the European Union man a demilitarized zone between segregated parts of a country that is now effectively divided into two.
In the West, the State of Lincoln is a union of several post-American states committed to principles of minimal government. It has become a haven for utopian technophiles looking for a more
conservative futurist vision than demarchism, but the weak government has also struggled to contain the same Neo-Israelites that trouble its eastern neighbor.
The Republic of the Rockies is an ambitious name for an even smaller nation, nominally the former state of Colorado but in practice a city-state centered on Denver. Its key role as a commercial hub and savvy leadership have kept it independent, albeit dominated by powerful business magnates.
It is bordered by the Mormon State of Deseret, which has come under the control of Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. The burdens of government, and time, have moderated their positions over the century and given rise to a new generation of militants who advocate an ambitious campaign to forcibly convert both the living and the dead across the American West.
The collapse of the United States dramatically changed the situation for the native American tribes marginalized by the English-speaking majority, but nowhere else more than in Sequoyah, the former state of Oklahoma, where those tribes had enough contiguous territory and population to establish their own independent state following the collapse of the Southwest Union.
The Mexican breakaway of Pacifica is, like El Norte and Aztlan, a cartel state powerful enough to achieve international recognition. Unlike them however it has not been able to forge a national identity or effective government. The cartel leadership mimics the functions of a government from their fortified complexes, but the region is largely a lawless wasteland where their authority is contested by newer, more ruthless criminal groups.
Central America has become a series of failed states as the majority of the population fled to escape climate change, including the nominal governments that now exist in exile. What remains is the domain of gangs and warlords, without recognition or much in the way of governance, ruling over small villages.
Yucatan is a different story, here indigenous leaders have created an ecosocialist state distinctly different from the morass that is Central America.
Panama’s importance in international trade means it was not allowed to degenerate into warlordism, at the price of its freedom. A Chinese-backed provisional government, enforced at the barrel of a gun, maintains control over the canal.
The Caribbean, ravaged by super storms and rising sea levels, was easy prey for major international corporations that wished a legal haven from the chaos of America or the stifling regulatory states in China and Europe. The Caribbean Council is an international institution that these corporations use to manage the indentured native populations on the islands from the strongholds of their floating cities and rigs.
The exception to this trend is Cuba, which contested corporate control of the Caribbean as a bastion of nationalist power. It’s an important military, economic, and political power in the region but the strain of their attempted hegemony was too much for it to bear. Today, the ruling Communist Party is engaged in an armed struggle with a former leader, Marco Zayata, that continues to ravage the island and put Cuban ambitions to bed.
Colombia has maintained some semblance of government but is rapidly on the way to its own state failure. The government and military are both culprits of a systematic looting of the country, funneling as much wealth as possible abroad. The liberal opposition protests but are just as complicit in the state of the country and unwilling to put their own necks on the line to preserve it.
Venezuela, meanwhile, has gone through state failure and re-emerged. Rejecting centuries of European colonialism, but embracing the trappings of Californian demarchism, the new government is a chaotic mess working to rebuild the country from next to nothing.
NOTES
Stats here
I'm going to set 5/20/2023 Midnight EST as the deadline for orders for Turn 1.
Since it's fun, I'm putting in a lore request. I'll provide a small bonus to whichever player(s) provide the best flag, or other national symbol, for their nation or faction.
For turn one, players have one major action that they can use. Players also have a minor action that they can take in a controlled quest, but as no one controls a quest that isn’t on the table. Using your major action, select an appropriate proficiency and either engage with an existing quest or create a new one to influence the continent. You can use proficiencies you don't have a bonus for, you just don't get a bonus. Completed quests can create trends in existing quests.
Please send orders via CFC PM or by updating a Google Word document that you share with me. Don't post publicly in the thread.
Keep track of the factions you, and others, need to deal with. Make sure the factions supporting your government (confidence 4 or 5) are stronger than factions opposed (confidence 1 or 2). Factions are aware of actions you take and respond appropriately.