Kingdom of Orpora

The Kingdom of Orpora is the great empire of Octoperson mastery and strength, and the pinnacle of aquatic power in Ekraht. They are disciplined, fierce, industrious, and carefully ordered, a rejection of the chaos of the open ocean and a statement of cosmic conquest. The surface cities bow before them, the Leviathans dare not swim against them alone, and the neighboring aquatic states tremble before their might. Their symbol, the Blue Ring of Orpora, is respected even among the callous and distant surface powers. Most aquatic or chemical weapons found in Ekraht are made here, in the dingy undersea workshops of Orporan industry. They are one extreme form of undersea statecraft, the ultimate expression of militaristic octoperson dominance that orders and exploits all other cultures and cephaperson species they can find. 
Currently, the Kingdom of Orpora is on the front lines of the apocalypse. Their monarch was slain by the Rot, and cultists of the end of the world have seized control of the capital city. The finely-tuned order of Orpora is collapsing under its own weight, and what it becomes or leaves behind will shape Northern Makal for years to come.

Structure

Orpora is an absolute monarchy built on a military bureaucracy. At the very top is the monarch, who must maintain their status through their relationships with the magister milita and the rest of the royal family. Beneath them are the Princes - siblings of the monarch who are in charge of managing the major reefs - and the three top generals, known individually as the magister militum and in whole as the magister milita. Much of society is managed by the extended military. 
The military has three branches: the Reefguard, or military police, the Blue Ring or primary military, and the Auxiliary Branch, which manages mercenaries, auxiliaries, and non-octopi divisions. The Reefguard manage most civilians matters and are led by the Princes. 
In terms of regional organization, virtually all of the kingdom is built around the main three metropoli of the region: 

• Farwater, the capital, the city of the great workshops and production, ringed by fortifications facing the vast open sea plains to the North. Closest with the surface world and most culturally in line with Orporan standards. The local palace-cathedral is famous, being a Leviathan skeleton overgrown with coral and fashioned into a monument of octoperson power.
• Longshore, a more isolated great reef contained in an atoll to the Southwest. A center of underwater agriculture that has grown to encompass many of the surrounding lesser reefs, the most populated of the metropoli. Longshore is also the most internally divided, with a strict internal caste system and deep species-tensions. Has a massive fortress known as Squidbreaker Point that is said to be un-takeable by any army surface or aquatic, which overlooks the city's mining operations (unusual for an aquatic state to have).
• Warmtide, the center of administration in the Far North. Culturally, warmtide has an emphasis on militarism and cultural cohesion over species, and might be considered the most egalitarian of the three great reefs. Includes an island of ancient human-dryad ruins that sank many centuries ago and has since become a center of warlock training and meditation.

Many hundreds of smaller reefs also exist - Orpora is very densely populated and thoroughly developed. 
Most surface-goers who work for Orpora coordinate through Farwater and the surface port nearby it - the city of Aprizada, which is largely autonomous from Orpora's laws and government.

Culture

Orpora has a culture that one might call majority-collectivist: most subjects are encouraged to identify through the state and through the collective rather than as individuals, but the upper command is radically individualist in comparison. For most octopeople, you are your reef and the reef is the state; your connection to the sacred Elem is through your reef and the work you do for it. Military labor and training is glorified over virtually all else, with the exception of invention and trade - though such pursuits are relegated to the aristocracy. 
For most squiddles and cuttlefolk, there isn't even really the reef - individuals are kept from forming close communities, but are shifted between temporary work-pods as little more than chattel slaves (for some squiddles, just outright slavery). Those not fully enslaved can apply to the military to earn their worth, but such a life is own of even greater de-personalization and exploitation, essentially semi-voluntary slavery with extra violence. 
As for the aristocracy, they are encouraged to see themselves as part of their dynasties - a curious institution in aquatic societies clearly based on humanoid practices. Aristocrats build special spawning chambers to contain their genetic material to prevent "contamination" by outside bloodlines - essentially forcing families into existence for a species with external fertilization. Eggs are then moved to containment chambers for what is a young childhood of cannibalism and infighting - first very literal infants fighting and eating each other, then a series of tests to weed out unnecessary children. The goal is typically to reduce the hundreds of eggs down to about 3 to 10 children depending upon the needs of the dynasty. These survivors are then placed under intense pressure to become ideal leaders, given thorough education in war, engineering, religion, and rhetoric. 
Surface-goers are viewed with suspicion, not the typical aquatic apathy - they are a people who lack order and purpose, whose mobility and difficulty to conquer make them essentially squiddles-but-worse. Their frightful and chaotic nature is tolerated for commercial and conquering purposes, but their influence must always be contained and domesticated by the reeflords. Even other octopeople from other cultures are potential threats, deviants and corrupted creatures in need of discipline.

History

The First Order of West Makal

As much as Orpora styles itself as an ancient institution, it was only founded about a century ago. The reefs that make up Orpora have a long history, of course, but they spent most of history existing as small self-contained polities that only interacted with the outside world through soft power. The reefs focused internally on building themselves up, negotiating trade deals, and pitting various squiddle tribes against one another, and the centuries blended together. Every so often, bursts of novel new institutions would form and then quickly collapse and fade from memory entirely. Only technologies and designs really were able to stand the test of time during this period.
In the 1500s ME, a new wave of technology and social change arrived that changed all of that: the arrival of the Followers of Elemeer. Elemeer missionaries and travelers had arrived for roughly two centuries prior from Sonev to the West, but had never made much of a lasting impact. But, in 1511 ME, a large group of squiddles and migratory Octopeople (quite the rarity) arrived at the Reef of Warmtide in Deluja and ended up settling in to claim a corner of the reef for themselves. These Sonevan faithful brought waves of social change with them, with their insistence on records and social structures and organized religion. The Oligarchs of Warmtide attempted to exile these foreigners into the Deep, but the Followers were able to navigate the great shelf all the way to Makal. They arrived in Farwater in 1513. And instead of allowing themselves to be exiled, they began building allies with Farwater's warrior class and ultimately launched a coup of the reef in 1516.
Ultimately, this Elemeer revolution spread outwards of Farwater into the surrounding reefs - both back to Deluja and across Western Makal. This Makalan Elemeer was deeply tied to the warrior classes of these reefs - it made little attempt to convert the squiddles, the surface-goers, or even the lesser reefs. The established order was a military one more than a priestly one, dedicated to using the new to bring stability to the old. The reefs of the East had their own reaction to this with their reef republics, the West crystallized into traditionalist religious military orders.

The Squiddle Divide

While the Octopeople had their social revolutions, the squiddles to the far South learned Elemeer through conquest: the 1500s and 1600s were the age of the Karnashan Squiddles, invaders from the far Southwest who carried their own decentralized idea of Elemeer. The Karnashans were druids from distant Ibith who were anything but disconnected from the broader world; they conquered other squiddles and claimed territory to better control surface and aquatic trade routes, and their administration was based around finding a balance between traditional nomadism and trade control.
While the Karnashans and the New Makalan Order were theoretically the same Elemeer philosophy and ideal of trying to make a more interconnected and permanent aquatic society, their differences in perspective and culture put them at odds. The reefs bickered and fought, as did the Karnashan splinter groups, but both sides formed together to fight out some of their differences in a series of brutal wars in the late 1600s. The Karnashans occupied the Southmost reefs, but the Orporans ultimately defeated their army and shattered their government with newly minted long-ranged underwater weapons. Even fragmented, the Karnashan squiddles proved difficult to force from the Southwest - their druidic magic and more flexible social structures gave them an edge, and the long-range bolters and artillery of the octopeople were still quite expensive and finnicky. 
The main effect of the Karnashan wars weren't occupations or victories or defeats, but an articulation of the cultural divide between West Makal, East Makal (which refused to join their defense), and the Zeruan kelp forests. West Makal was left with the Longshore Pact - an agreement that should any West Makalan reef come under attack by an outside force, all of them would swim to their defense. It was also left with an old problem that was made all the more extreme - the divide between West Makal's sedentary octopeople and the rural squiddles. Squiddles were viewed with suspicion, and were increasingly tied to specific grazing routes and plots of ocean floor. Squiddles who disobeyed were enslaved, and the only way a non-Octoperson could socially advance was through military service. Southwest Makal was half in this world, half dragged outside of it, and would be a center of conflict for nearly a century.
It would be the Elemeer priesthood of the Southwest that charted out their own identity. The Southernmost reef, that of Moonbay, became a meeting place for priests of all stripes and, as a neutral space, began storing the holy artifacts and records of the North Karnashans. Moonbay created its own Elemeer code, a mixture of both Karnashan and proto-Orporan interpretations, and became home to a group of aquatic paladins known as the Ghostring. When the richer and more prosperous reef of Greenwater (a similarly Karnashan-occupied reef to the North) backed Moonbay with its full resources and might, they were able to forge their own middle-alliance. The Northwest accepted this alliance as a necessary buffer state while they turned on the disloyal and deviant Northeast, and the Karnashan conflicts died down. Over time, the Karnashans dissipated entirely, leaving much of the kelp plains of Zerua a sea of unorganized tribes. 

The Alashan Crisis

The 1800s were a turning point for aquatic society. For the first half of the century, the West-Makal Octopeople mostly focused on consolidation and expansion. They put down squiddle slave revolts, fought the republics to the East, and fought one another for dominance. The largest of these was the Eba Domain, a dynasty that controlled the Farwater reef and, in a possible imitation of the Karnashans, focused on expanding North to control the trade route to Izekra. They managed to conquer the major reef of Warmtide in the North in 1829, and they set about subjugating and culturally imperializing their new subjects with a ruthlessness rarely seen in Izekran aqua-polities. By 1850, the process was complete - Warmtide was made into a second, more socially stratified version of Farwater, ready to expand the Eba's influence into Izekra proper. The Izekran reefs and squiddles put their brutal systems to the test, and the logistics ultimately proved too great an obstacle. In 1860, Warmtide split from Farwater and the Eba entered a civil war that essentially erased their empire. 
Just as the dominant power of the Northwest fell, a new threat rose from the South: the Alasha Federation. The Alasha were Zeruan squiddles who had perfected a combination of local traditions, Karnashan innovations, and surface-world ideas to create a massive oligarchy that united the tribes and consolidated their surplus into great "Swimming cities" - mobile cities that allowed the squiddles to maintain their ways of life while also specializing and organizing in more sophisticated ways. The Alashans also perfected mass production of pearls, oysters, and other aquatic goods for surface world sale - and to better leverage that economic power for surface-world goods, they founded their own surface-world corporation known as the Alasha Federate Corporation (or AFC). The Alasha embraced their surface connections, but in a less hostile way than the piratical Karnashans; they guarded the surface trade routes, fought off invasive Merfolk, and brought order to the seas. And they received great boons of metal, magical teaching, and luxury goods in exchange. To innovate quickly off of these new resources, the Alashans turned to the Moonbay-Greenwater alliance, the syncretic Octopeople who would be willing to study and perfect these arts in exchange for guarantees of independence. The Northwestern Alliance saw this as a threat, and swam to raze Greenwater and drive the squiddles from their reefs. 
While the Alliance initially met success thanks to their superior military technology, the Alashans were able to grind them down with superior logistics and mobility. And when the octopeople began to hit that logistical slump, the Alashans came in with bribes and soft power influence to divide the reefs and play on their pre-existing rivalries. The Alashans were able to make local allies, buy mercenaries, and even purchase weaponry for themselves - and the tables swiftly turned. It was only attacks in other parts of their sprawling Federation that prevented them from taking the North in 1870. Instead, they took Greenwater and Moonbay for themselves and settled for having allied reefs to act as weapons suppliers. 
For 30 years, the threat of Alashan conquest hung over the Northwestern alliance. The local rulers were humiliated and delegitimized by their failure to unify and conquer. The Alliance had died, and many within the reefs began to look to the hated Northeast for a better and more sustainable model of social organization. These East-looking rebels worked alongside squiddle slaves to besiege the Northern reefs, and one by one the North fell. Except for Farwater - where it all began - and its cultural child, the distant reef of Warmtide. The rebels there were crushed, and a child of the officer that won that battle would go on to revive the systems of domination that had defined the North for centuries. 

Orpora Rises

That child was an Octoperson by the name of Orpor - a military aristocrat by birth, raised in an extreme reactionary environment that took the old culture to its local and inhumane extremes. His parents, the reactionaries who ran the reefguard, forced him to fight his siblings for dominance - and according to legend, he devoured their flesh to make their strength his own. This childhood violence was interspersed with intense love, affection, and care by his parents, who doted on him and fed his love for knowledge of other places when they weren't making him undergo baby's first murder trauma. He became everything they could have dreamed of and more: a warrior, an inventor, a scholar, a mastermind of empire with no room for mercy and an endless hunger for more. 
Under Orpor, the reefguard and the military finished their fusion that had begun under orpor's parents. And, at the tender age of 5, Orpor led the military in seizing the reef of Farwater for themselves - and at the age of 7, had cut down all other pretenders to crown himself the restored monarch of a new dynasty. He restored some of the symbols of the old prestigious Eba dynasty, mixed in with nostalgic symbols of the old Alliance - he was a master of creating new things disguised as restorations of the old. He immediately set to reconquer the reef of Warmtide and re-establish Farwater's dominance over the trade route to Izekra. This time, though, the focus would be on stabilizing that trade route rather than expanding the Izekran holdings - Izekra's reefs were poor and expensive to take compared to the highly populated and unstable neighbors surrounding Farwater. By age 10, Orpor had conquered much of the Northern rim. In half of his short life, he had fulfilled his parent's greatest ambitions. 
In 1903, Orpor was faced with a choice: go South and risk facing Alasha, who was already extending tendrils of influence into his empire, or go East and focus on the rich republics. While most expected him to go East, he instead decided to face the old enemy of Farwater - the squiddles in their own kingdom. Restoring the old regimes of slavery and exploitation, Orpor's war machine entered overdrive. He constructed great workshops that produced new weapons on a larger scale. He smashed Southward in a great invasion, bringing all of the Western reefs under his yolk and invading the old neutral space of Greenwater. Alasha responded with an invasion of their own, and the two titans clashed at Moonbay. For eight years they fought - a war that, for aquatic peoples, is almost half a lifetime. The Eastern republics joined in, war spawned from war, and all of Makal and South Izekra entered a fevered pitch of total war. 
Old and exhausted, Orpor called a conference to decide Makal's borders once and for all at the reef of Moonbay - at the city of the Gods, they would decide with words what could not be decided with spears or bolters. Orpora gained the border reefs as a vassal, gained a little land in the East, and gained total authority over their own waters. Orpor's final war may seem wasteful, but to him it was exactly what he had envisioned: a massive war to end all wars that could provide the propaganda and social reorganization necessary to centralize everything under a new state structure. The martial law dictatorship that had dominated the North could now scour the local cultures and create a static social order that left little room for individuality - only the glory of the state. Orpor even got to make his new state appear reasonable and peaceful in the resulting peace. He died in 1917, and he instructed his heirs to bring order to the surface world next. 

The Orporan Golden Age and Fall

From 1917 to 2000, Orpora focused on internal matters for the most part. The heirs of Orpor found the empire to be exhausted and unstable, despite the veneer of total control. The surface world would not be easy to subjugate. So, rather than invade it in an impossible war, they used small skirmishes with surface kingdoms as propaganda points and instead extracted tribute. Orpora installed "advisors" in surface states to project soft power and focused their attention on trade stability instead. Outside of one large conflict with the Greater Makal Company in 1973, Orpora has kept their fights small and their marketing big. The exceptions to this are Leviathan hunts - in 1920, 1960, and 1990, the Orporan military has foughr Leviathans for control of the Izekran water-pass and won. These have been Orpora's finest moments, victories over the very seas themselves. They have also led to the creation of surface military auxiliaries, who have proved invaluable in fighting Leviathans and their servants. 
The 2000s have seen a decline, though: the military in all its size, grew restless, and intrigue within the officer corps threatened the government's power. Orporan wars have increased in size and decreased in profits. The need to distract officers with wars abroad has led to poor diplomatic decisions, and the kingdom has suffered as a result. 
This structure all fell like a house of cards in 2017, when Queen Ungala personally led a Leviathan hunt against a creature too vast and too deadly: the Eater of Worlds, a leviathan of immense size and power cloaked in plague. Ungala and her officers had gambled that the incoming Leviathan could be easily dispatched without mobilizing the entire country, and if they had been facing an ordinary leviathan they would have been right - but what they found was nothing short of the end of the world made flesh. Ungala retreated after their first defeat as she realized the magnitude of the threat, but it was too late: her army was infected with a plague to end all plagues, and a number of survivors emerged as warlocks of the end. The warlocks ambushed her and killed her, and led the officers in a revolt against the monarchy. The army returned to Farwater and threatened to infect it with plague if they did not surrender to the officers. The heir, Ungala's son Kalo, allowed them into Farwater and surrendered the crown. The officers and cultists promptly turned on each other, but with crown prince Kalo joining and supporting the cult they were able to win. Now Farwater is under the control of the doomsday cult, which has consolidated itself into a proper organization. The other reefs immediately rebelled of course, but now plague runs wild. The cult awaits their master, who they believe will arrive with an army to support them, as the reefs pile up with the bodies of the infected. 
What happens next is for the Architects - and for adventurers like you - to find out.

Demography and Population

Orpora directly rules over millions of cephapeople. Almost half of them are Octopeople, and the majority of the rest are Squiddles.
Much of the population is concentrated into the three great reefs, though hundreds of smaller reefs also support large populations.

Military

The Orporan military has three parts: the military police known as the Reefguard, the standing army known as the Blue Ring, and the auxiliary divisions. The Reefguard are trained more for civilian uprisings or slave revolts than formal conflicts - they specialize in small squad tactics using bolters (underwater crossbows minus the reliance on water-vulnerable bows) and short swords. 
The auxiliary divisions are a tangle of scouts, skirmishers, mercenaries, and light troops - expendable, mobile, lightly armed and armored with javelins, spears, and short swords. The most skilled and proven of these are promoted to elite auxiliaries, which gain access to proper weaponry and heightened social status; so while some auxiliaries flee easily and have little loyalty to the regime, others are downright zealous in proving themselves. 
The Blue Ring is where the true power of Orpora lies. It is a standing army, professional and disciplined and detached from any local allegiances. The Blue Ring as a symbolic rank implies elite power and status, invoking both the blue blood of their slain aquatic enemies (cephapeople having blue blood) and the power of the blue ring octopus, a legendarily venomous non-sentient octopus that the Blue Ring farms for toxin for their weapons. The Blue Ring is home to many aristocratic officers, but offers promotions into the nobility for any effective recruits. It is entirely octopeople and relies on octopeople weapons: mass bolters and grand bolters (undersea ballistae) mounted on Crabcows, along with many other war machines constructed by octoperson mad science and chemical weapons. The Blue Ring is in many ways synonymous with the crown's power, and their symbol is the kingdom's symbol.

Religion

Orpora is Elemeer, though the religion plays out differently here than in most places. Self actualization and spiritual power are invested in the elites rather than the common people, and the dogma of Elemeer is portrayed in a way that focuses worship around state service. The priesthood are mostly aristocrats who dabble in magic and invention. Wisdom is grounded in practicality; spiritual power is considered useless if not in service to society and the crown. Given this very pragmatic approach to religion, the crown has little problems with other religious ideas mingling about as long as they are useful or harmless at least.

Foreign Relations

Orpora is an empire of blood and bronze, true, but it is also an empire of words and diplomats. Orpora is hungry for vassals and buffer states, which have proven incredibly useful for insulating their unsustainable empire in the past. Alliances are not the focus here, as allies are but future rivals. Tributaries are as close as Orpora can really get.
The largest aquatic vassal (and the most profitable) is easily the Kingdom of Olowor, a buffer state to the South of Orpora that is the traditional neutral ground between all of the aquatic powers. Olowor's two major reefs, Greenwater and Moonbay, have a significant Orporan presence and are closely guarded jewels of the greater empire. The second significant aquatic vassal is the Open Water League to the East, a group of petty reefs that act as a super decentralized merchant republic. A small kingdom, the kingdom of Dwelet, acts as Orpora's buffer and tributary to the Northwest.
Orpora also has a large number of small surface tributaries, which provide copper, smelting services, trade partners, and luxury good providers. Tributaries also provide leviathan-hunter levies in times of need, though this has only been used once and has little infrastructure in place. 23 of these tributaries are coastal city states; the other 48 are informal coastal groups that are able to avoid paying significant tribute thanks to their small size and mobility. Of these tributaries, one is the closest thing Orpora has to a traditional ally: Aprizada, a city state right next to Farwater, and Farwater's traditional trading partner. Aprizada is a plutocratic oligarchy traditionally run by five major families, though one family (the Zurazir) is currently dominant over the others. 
Orpora's closest rival has been the Republic of Amaset to the East, which has long funded slave revolts and dissent in Orporan waters. The Federation of Alasha to the Far South is not far behind as Orpora's closest military rival. 
To the Northeast are the Merkeeper reefs - hyper-isolationist octopeople and squiddles who frequently raid Orporan waters and resist Izekran expansion of the empire. The Merkeepers are a curious bunch whose true names are unknown, and who are famous for their psuedo-domestication of the vicious Merfolk. Campaigns against the Merkeepers escalated in the early 2000s and proved both expensive and largely fruitless.

Agriculture & Industry

The sea floor of Orpora is divided into lots by the bureaucracy, to be used for greatest efficiency. Kelp forestry, mining, crabcow ranching, and shellfish farming make up the vast majority of the seaspace, worked by either low-class Octopeople or enserfed or enslaved squiddles. The lesser reefs produce minor goods, but act more as administrative centers than self-sufficient towns. Local nobles also manage fish farming operations: essentially, schools of fish are corralled into sections of sea, and are blocked from escaping greater Orpora by tactical placement of military or civilian operations. They are kept from the weaker boundaries of Orpora by fish shepherds, who scare the fish away and set up large nets to catch any that insist on escape.
Most production is concentrated in the nine great reefs, especially the three metropoli. Massive workshops assemble tools, weapons, garments, and other goods for sale or use.

Trade & Transport

Aristocratic dynasties have exclusive access to merchant life here, but outside merchants also dabble in the major metropoli.

Strength is the State; Survival is Obedience

Founding Date

1899 ME

Type

Geopolitical, Kingdom

Demonym

Orporan

Government System

Monarchy, Absolute

Power Structure

Feudal state

Currency

Zeruan Gold Dragons and Silver Storms; Cowry shells instead of copper

Official State Religion

The Followers of Elemeer

Location

Makal

Controlled Territories

• Farwater Reef
• Longshore Reef
• Warmtide Reef

Related Plots

• Reef Madness