Dar'Asmad

The **Empire of Dar'Asmad** (or **Asmadi Empire**) is a regional power within Outer Conduit Space, whose frontier intersects with regions of Aeldman, Shantine, and Fialta colonization.

## Government and Organization

Dar'Asmad understands itself as an empire but might be more recognizable to the great powers of the cosmos as a confederacy at the heart of a network of tributary states. The "Asmadi Worlds" form the core of the empire: while ethnic Asmadis man the garrisons and bureaucracy of the empire, it is on these nine central worlds that the population at large is majority Asmadi (with the non-Asmadis consisting principally of merchants, diplomats or slaves).

Beyond this core, the extent of the Empire of Dar'Asmad is a matter of definition. The maximum extent, favored by the Emperor in his copious formal titles, amounts to some one hundred and fifty worlds (the Emperor officially recognizes only fifty worlds as *not* being within his domain – Asmadi maps have not been updated to include the rest of the cosmos). Various distinctions divide and overlap this dominion: fifty or so worlds have a local administration that is controlled mostly or fully by Imperial appointment. On seventy worlds, a significant share of landholdings belong to offworld Asmadi landlords or their recent descendants. A little over a hundred worlds host an Asmadi garrison. Forty worlds swear fealty to the Emperor through a local ruler and contribute auxiliaries to the Asmadi legions.

Great matters are made of whether a world pays tax or tribute to the Emperor, whether its inhabitants are subjects or beneficiaries of the Emperor, what coinage it may mint: on and on the administrative distinctions proliferate, and the twin functions of the Imperial bureaucracy are to keep track of these vast and sometimes conflicting distinctions and to ensure the timely fulfillment of any obligation that turns to favor the Emperor.

A rat's nest of trade concessions and navigation rights divide the empire into various commercial corridors: hereditary privileges demarcated in wars of centuries past mean that to bring goods from one world to its nearest cosmographic neighbor may only be legally feasible by routing through an entirely different ley line. Even cartography is a matter of jurisprudence: in the name of harmony among the Emperor's many subjects, beneficiaries, dependencies (etc.), local rulers are forbidden to own certain maps or have them prepared. "True" cosmography is suppressed in favor of displaying the legally proscribed routes as the only possibility. It has thus far been impossible for any outside power to ascertain the actual dimensions of the Empire, a feat of counterintelligence roundly credited to the imperial bureaucracy.

Indeed, while the bureaucracy of Dar'Asmad might excite derision from foreign adventurers as disorganized and dysfunctional, it is anything but. Its purpose is to bind the empire tightly, to make local affairs fully dependent on events at the Imperial court, and to serve as a reminder that the Emperor and his agents alone have the power or capacity to resolve disputes and ensure a fair functioning of the universe. This function, the bureaucracy executes superbly, and an imperial official is often clerk, lawyer and diplomat rolled into one.

## Society and Culture

The Asmadi Emperor rules from the palace-city of Disseri, the cosmopolitan capital of the empire. Before the rude awakening of Dar'Asmad to the existence of distant foreign powers with terrifying ships, the Asmadis could view Disseri as the heart of the universe without irony or dissonance -- a place where the power of the Emperor drew any and all notables from the known corners of creation. Disseri is a splendid and rich city of ten million, filled with the cultural exports of its far-flung dominions, which Asmadis consume as their just reward for keeping the cosmos at peace.

In the early days of contact between Dar'Asmad and the great powers of Imperial Space, Disseri was abuzz not with the threat of foreign empires but with the "marvelous sorceries" that filtered from the frontier: commentators assumed that the metal boxes on handles that could spit fire were the result of a lifetime's work by a keen magician and could be added without apprehension to the store of wonders that were the Emperor's due.

Though a far cry from the industrial might of the great powers, Dar'Asmad does have its own feats of engineering. The store of alchemical knowledge means that Dar'Asmad may yet find itself able to rapidly adopt many of the technologies of the wider cosmos, if it can overcome the cultural blow.

Without etheric drive, the lanes are patrolled by spectacular ships with golden sails, bedecked with cauldrons into which alchemists pour the reagents to produce beams of searing, melting light. Alchemy also extends the lives of the "Honored" Asmadi nobility, giving them not only long life but a long youth: old age in the Empire is crippling and swift. Men and women in their prime at ninety five are ruined and feeble at a hundred. The uncertain reaction of the body to the different life-elongating elixirs means that live expectancy is highly variable: the same course might sustain a person for eighty years, or a hundred and twenty (though alchemists will insist that their gift, or the quality of their patients, makes all the difference). Hence, many Asmadis spend their later years in paranoid preoccupation with the warning signs that their life journey is about to veer into decrepitude.

## Notes

1. ↑ A Valdosian sensing something familiar in the administration of Dar'Asmad may soon be disappointed to learn that the Asmadis do not count the Lord of Contracts among their favored gods. Asmadi jurisprudence rests on a complex philosophy of interpretation around intent and context; the literalist chicanery for which Valdosians are famous would be rejected by the Asmadis as unrefined, ahistorical and indeed barbarous. The much newer "Filikian" philosophy of the semi-independent nation of Valdosia, that clear and simple contracts with ruthless enforcement can make a just and orderly society, would be met with similar contempt.