Grand Celestial Confederacy

*Not to be confused with the Old Celestial Confederacy.*

### Government Type

Oligarchy (Confederate Council), ruling by consensus with input from Diet of Notables

### Capital

None officially, though Tarim comes closest

### Worlds

* Tarim
* Witolm
* Kolong
* Celestial Palaceworlds

## Society and Technology

### Religions

* Elder Gods
* Church of Volune
* Celestial Church of the Benevolents

### Languages

* Celestial (official)
* Outremer

### Dominant Races

Human

The **Grand Celestial Confederacy** or **Grand Celestial Confederation** (GCC), known prior to 478 A.U. as the **New Celestial Confederacy** (NCC), is a major power in modern Celestial Space. It claims to be the successor state of the Old Celestial Confederacy of the Mage Imperium era.

## Overview

The Confederation takes its name from a long tradition of attempts to assert hegemonic authority over Celestial Space, dating to the original Grand Celestial Confederation (or Confederation of Princes) of five thousand years past, which claimed to maintain a harmonious and peaceful sphere across much of what is now Celestial Space. In the 6th century A.U., the GCC is one of the major regional powers of Celestial Space, generally accepted as second only to the Veiled Dominions but enabled to compete on a fairly equally footing with the Dominions by the political and economic support of the Serene Duchy of Aeldrum.

## History

The Confederation was originally the "New Celestial Confederation", a turn of phrase which enabled various politic omissions and interpretations when dealing with powers that also claimed the Confederate mantle, since abandoned by the GCC in an assertion of exclusive right to that legacy. The original Confederation was overrun and destroyed by the invasion of the psychic Naga, who vied for dominion with the Brass Cities and the Veiled Masters for millennia. While the automata of the Brass Cities were immune to the psychic terror the Naga, it was the Veiled Masters who ultimately provided the arcane weapons and occult techniques necessary for the vassals of the Naga to combat their insidious psychic power. The ensuing uprisings did not represent a total annihilation of Naga influence, which persisted for some centuries largely through the Perfect Princes, a caste of human psionics who governed on behalf of their Naga masters: but with the Naga driven from overt rulership, this new phase of political contention was less warlike and relied more on diplomacy and intrigue. In this time, polities such as the Middle Kingdom and the Kingdom of Aksai emerged whose base of power and ruling culture came from the "Celestial Center" (the majority of worlds which were far to the interior of the connections between Celestial space and other regions). These powers, though still heavily subject to foreign influence (and increasingly that of the Veiled Masters at the expense of the Naga and the Brass Cities), sought to reclaim symbols of autonomy and authority that could come from their own history, and soon developed client systems that mirrored and invoked the legacy of the Confederation.

The Celestial polities in the 6th century are those which generally claim territorial, cultural and political descent from the Celestial Confederation or one or more of its component entities. These include the Grand Celestial Confederation, Middle Kingdom and Great Aksai as the leading powers, followed by the independent principalities of Yushan, Kolong, Limei, Keshig, and the loosely aligned Triad Princes. While a vast proliferation of local languages exists, these territories are generally unified by the former administrative language of the Old Confederation, which has evolved into the Celestial trade language. The Middle Kingdom, Grand Celestial Confederation, Limei and Yushan also recognize Celestial as their official language of government, while Keshig, Aksai and Kolong use varying dialects of the Kesh language.

The modern GCC descends from rather mixed origins, and indeed the territories it controls which are most traditionally thought of as belonging to the Confederation of Princes or that historically were most able to assert themselves against Nipponese or Naga influence, are also the most recent additions to its empire, generally gained by the Second or Third Great Celestial Wars (allegations that the GCC is an Aeldman invention are neither rare nor entirely baseless). The historic core of the GCC is the Margravate of Tarim, once a "gunpowder state" of freebooters and exiles on the periphery of Celestial Space which welcomed a high proportion of migrants from Imperial Space who were barred from returning to their homes by the Nippon route. Though the world of Tarim itself was devastated by the Brass Cities during the First Coalition War, its mixed Celestial, Nipponese and Imperial (especially Aeldman and Fialta) culture bears heavily on the Confederation, especially the Confederate elite. The Outremer language, originally a creole of the Celestial trade language(s), Aeldman and Nipponese, has been standardized and while not used for official proclamations and laws of the Confederation is widely accepted as a language of daily use.

## Religion

The GCC also has a mixture of faiths, with the longest traditions of worship revering Volune the Lawgiver, a popular deity throughout Celestial Space and a common source of legitimacy for would-be state builders. The greater cross-pollination of cultures between Imperial and Celestial Space with the commerce and stability of the GCC has not been without tensions in this respect, as Celestial versions of powerful Imperial churches have fought to preserve their identity. The Celestial Church of the Benevolents, for instance, gives its worship to Kirva, Idolmar, Volune, and (defunct) Adalna as a sort of divine tetrarchy, to the disdain of the jealous Kirvan Churches of Imperial Space (and especially the Shantine Imperial Church). This syncretic attitude has prevented religious domination of Celestial life without resorting to the paranoia of the Veiled Dominions, but this pluralism in turn provides few tools for combating enthusiastic missionaries seeking to "correct" local faiths whose very fluidity makes it difficult to define them carefully enough for them to be defended by state action. The Confederation is also inescapably a power courting the goodwill of foreign empires, and has often found itself prepared to make concessions on cultural or religious matters (or better, to facilitate efforts to culturally influence neighboring, weaker powers) for economic and diplomatic support: the appearance of religious indifference itself is a diplomatic lever in the Confederation's relationship with its most important patron, Aeldrum.

## Government

The political leadership of the Confederation consists of the Confederate Council, which acts on the advice and recognizance of the Diet of Notables, a large and self-defining body of hereditary princes, powerful merchants and others whose assent to the laws and acts of the Confederate government are deemed important to the good order of the Confederation: the rolls of the diet are expanded by consensus, the result in-practice being a substantial amount of horse-trading for preferred candidates of different factions to accede. The Confederate Council has certain fixed seats, such as the Admiralty, but can otherwise fluctuate substantially in size and composition to reflect the varying factions of the Diet. Executive power resides in the Council, which typically elects from among its members a designated chair for specific missions or mandate areas, who has broad autonomy to act but must then report to the Council for review and petition for specific resources. To-date, this rule by consensus has succeeded and proven a flexible method for expanding the political establishment to accommodate new territorial additions. However, the Confederation has yet to face a substantial domestic test of its institutions, or indeed a foreign crisis about which the Council has been irreconcilably divided.

The GCC's consensus-driven politics have averted disaster perhaps most of all because pretensions to central management of local affairs are extremely limited: the liberty of local political systems, whether aristocratic, theocratic or even democratic, to administer themselves is held especially sacred, and the role of the GCC is generally accepted to be in providing for the common defense and offering the necessary conditions for peaceful internal commerce. The paramount protection offered by the Confederation to its citizens is in internal travel: whatever the laws of their homeworld, internal migrants have recourse to Confederate courts in dealing with disputes with the authorities of other worlds they may visit. The result is a de-facto system of rights and liberties for those with the influence and resources to travel and call upon Confederate institutions, while leaving local powers more or less to their own devices insofar as the legal condition of their resident subjects. One salutary effect of this system has been significant outmigration from undesirable domestic political and economic conditions to more prosperous or liberal arrangements.

The Confederation undoubtedly asserts a gentler overlordship than the Veiled Dominions, while promising greater technological and economic assistance for the development of new inductees than powers such as the Middle Kingdom can hope to offer. The result is a generous and inclusive political order, but without the tools to uproot deep-seated injustices or corruption at the local level, which is able to give swift but ultimately shallow responses to threats, while requiring much greater efforts of coordination to arrange deeper changes. Whether this polity can or will ever wish to survive on its own strength rather than the guarantee of a foreign backer is an open and significant question.