Pact Council
The worlds of the Golarion system, united into a single entity
Government
The Pact is not a single system-wide government, but rather an association of independent worlds bound by treaty to work together and acknowledge each other’s sovereignty. Though its powers technically extend only to the facilitation of trade between worlds, interplanetary law enforcement, and mutual defense, over the last several centuries the government has gradually broadened the scope of its authority.The Pact - sometimes formally called the Absalom Pact - was first proposed in response to the increased Veskarium aggression threatening the whole system. Recognizing that there was no way any individual world could stand against the combined might of the Veskarium, a coalition of officials from Absalom Station, Castrovel, and Verces proposed the new arrangement, based in large part on the system that underpinned Verces' Ring of Nations as an effective one-world government.
To the coalition’s surprise, the first world to sign on to its new plan was not logical Aballon or pacifist Bretheda, but the long-mistrusted undead planet of Eox. With the military might of the Bone Sages on its side and the churches of Abadar and Church of Iomedae wielding their financial and religious power to promote the campaign, the coalition quickly gained strength, and in just a few years the entire system came under the protection of the new government.
As a confederation of independent states, the Pact generally endeavours to afford its component worlds as much autonomy as possible. Aside from enforcing a brief list of universal rights granted to all sentient creatures and a somewhat longer list for Pact World citizens, the government largely leaves judicial and legislative matters to the local governments of individual worlds, as long as they don’t infringe on the authority of other planets. The Pact's primary enforcers, the Stewards, are as much diplomats as they are police, doing their best to solve issues with soft power and maintain the system’s fragile balance. The Absalom Pact is also very specific about the limits of its authority - in addition to honouring the sovereignty of its constituent governments, the Pact claims no jurisdiction over worlds beyond its solar system unless they are colonies that have requested and won official protectorate status.
Government decisions within the Pact are made by the Pact Council, which is housed in the vast senatorial building on Absalom Station called the Plenara. Every Pact World is represented on the council, each with a number of delegates proportional to its sentient population. While many matters are decided by direct vote in the council, deadlocks and issues of particular importance go to the Directorate, a leadership council whose five voting members are elected by and from the wider Pact Council every 2 years. No world can have more than one representative in the Directorate, yet the fact that this places many system-wide decisions in the hands of just five worlds means that the Plenara is a constant hotbed of politicking and alliance building, as individual worlds use their power and influence to ensure their interests are represented by the Directorate.
A sixth, nonvoting member of the Directorate, the Director-General of the Stewards, is chosen independently by the Stewards and has no set term limit, serving only to advise the other Directors and carry out the Council's decisions.
Not every planet in the system is a full member of the Pact. Moons are generally seen as part of their parent planet’s jurisdiction, save for those like Arkanen that have successfully lobbied for independent representation. Some worlds with limited civilization, such as Aucturn, Liavara, and the sun, are categorized as protectorates; while such worlds are not granted full autonomy or voting rights, their representatives are allowed to speak at Council meetings. Despite being a collection of many tiny worlds, The Diaspora has banded together as a single voting bloc, and in recent years a single vessel - the Kasatha worldship Idari - achieved Pact World status, with many new colonies beyond the solar system hoping to follow suit. While religious and corporate organizations have no direct voice in the council’s decisions, their constant presence via lobbyists and advisors ensures that their interests are represented as well.
Magic & Technology
Pre-Gap records show that once upon a time, most of the worlds in the system relied on magic almost exclusively for complex and difficult tasks. Today, while magic remains a respected vocation and a means of accomplishing great deeds, technology often provides more practical, economical solutions to the same problems. Why spend years of dedicated study to cast a spell that creates light when you can buy a flashlight for a few credits? Why pay a battlemage to throw bolts of lightning at your enemies when the same funds could outfit a whole squad of soldiers with laser rifles? This is not to say that technology has replaced magic. Rather, the two have evolved together, with inventors blending magic and technology, and corporations choosing whichever tool is cheapest and most effective for a given job. As a result, most technology involves at least a little magic, in either its functioning or its manufacture, and it’s not uncommon to see technological items bearing blatantly magical upgrades. This blending, however, means that technology incorporating minimal amounts of magic has work-arounds to remain functional even when targeted by dispelling effects - in rules terms, this means that unless an item is specifically called out as magical or a hybrid of both magic and technology, it’s considered immune to all antimagical effects. Similarly, the prevalence of minor magic in technology doesn’t prevent nonmagical classes like mechanics from working effectively on such items, so long as they don’t have extensive magical modifications.Whereas in the ancient past, Magic in the Pact Worlds was broken into many different traditions, today Magic is seen as a single group of physically impossible phenomena, regardless of where it comes from or how it’s manipulated. Traditional distinctions like “arcane” and “divine” Magic have long since been abandoned, and while different casters may access Magic through very different means, from high-tech reality hacking to the study of occult items or the channeling of divine power, all are simply different means of accomplishing the same goals.
Communication
Communication in the Pact Worlds falls into three categories: planetary, system-wide, and unlimited. Although some powerful governments and religious organisations occasionally make use of expensive and dangerous supernatural communications, such as employing angels and devils as messengers, most residents of the Pact Worlds are restricted to the use of technology for their long-range communications.Unlike planetary comm units, system-wide and unlimited-range communicators are far too large to be portable, so they are usually integrated into starships or similarly sized facilities. Individuals without their own units can usually pay to send messages on rented ones. Receiving a message on a system-wide or unlimited-range unit requires an active Drift beacon transponder, which causes the receiver to broadcast identification and location data. Thus many criminal enterprises maintain virtual mail drops or black-market relays, trade in counterfeit transponders, or simply turn off their transponders and run dark. These transponders are standard on all starships and function as a primary means of ship identification.
Planetary
Personal comm units are common, inexpensive devices that are capable of communicating with each other on a single planet or between starships orbiting a given world. Small enough to be carried in a pocket, they can easily be integrated into almost all armour or clothing. While the units are powerful enough to transmit anywhere on a planet, they can be halted by targeted electromagnetic jamming or blocked by certain materials or methods. Encryption issues also make it impossible to use comm units to directly control machines, such as drones and starships. While some individuals link their comm units to operate as private, always-on radio channels, most contact each other by entering publicly registered names or private identification codes.System-wide
Due to the vast distances involved, interplanetary communication involves significant time delays, resulting in something closer to correspondence than conversation. The current best technology uses Triune's network of Drift beacons - while bouncing the signal between them often mysteriously shortens the time delay beyond what would normally be possible with physics, it also randomizes the delay.Unlimited
Like interplanetary communication, interstellar communication relies on Drift beacons. Messages transmitted this way remain a fundamentally epistolary form, since they take the same amount of travel time as simply jumping to the recipient with a starship - days or weeks. Thus, courier ships and ambassadorial missions still remain popular for negotiations and time-sensitive information. As with Drift travel itself, while there’s theoretically no maximum range for this form of communication, no one has ever received a return signal from beyond the edge of the galaxy.Information Networks
Planets vary wildly in their levels of telecommunications and integration, but each Pact World has at least a rudimentary version of an infosphere: a worldwide network of digitized information. Due to the necessity of transmitting information physically, these infospheres are largely unconnected, and neighbouring worlds may share core information but diverge wildly on lesser issues that haven’t been worth the effort of synchronizing. While these infospheres are often similar to Earth’s Internet, holding nearly limitless amounts of economic and cultural ephemera, all major Pact Worlds ports host basic encyclopedia-like data sets that ships can download to aid passengers in research when not in direct contact with an infosphere.Daily Life & Culture
The Pact Worlds are by their very nature a mishmash of cultures with different values and traditions, making it difficult to identify overarching traits. Still, a few things can be said about the “typical” Pact Worlds resident.While a few places within the system - most notably parts of Verces and Aballon - come close to achieving a post-scarcity economy, most Pact Worlders have no choice but to work for a living. Capitalism looms large in both personal and planetary exchanges (kept that way in part by the influence of the Church of Abadar), and the rich inevitably dominate the poor, who in turn do their best to become rich. Quality of life for those at the economic bottom varies dramatically - on Absalom Station, the government makes sure no sentient being goes hungry, but harsh worlds like Apostae see no problem with economic bondage that’s slavery in all but name.
Socially, most Pact Worlds residents tend to be live-and-let-live types - anything else is difficult to maintain when your government and even your neighborhood might contain a dozen different races from 50 different cultures. Prejudice tends to be reserved for the most familiar and the most foreign - people police those similar to them and fear the incomprehensibly alien - yet most folks realize that trying to impose their own values on others often ends up driving away valuable opportunities. As the old saying goes, it’s best to let aliens be aliens - and hopefully customers. This means that even individuals who don’t fit well into the cultures in which they’re born can often easily find acceptance by changing location, contributing to the constant churn and migration of people across the system. Yet even within primarily monocultural settlements, simple exposure to the vast array of different races and ways of life just beyond the horizon has tended to make residents less cognizant of minor differences like ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. Who cares about the skin color or marriage arrangements of the neighbours in the apartment beneath you when your upstairs neighbours are giant sentient jellyfish that form new aggregate entities every time you ask them to turn down their cetacean-pop dance mixes?
Arts and entertainment are constantly changing in the Pact Worlds, with fads disappearing as quickly as they arise. At the moment, gritty Akitonian shumka beats and Absalom eyebite rock are becoming popular in many rougher venues, while upscale nightclubs play delicate Vercite ether-ballads or Aballonian-produced euphonics - music designed by advanced computing to directly stimulate aural pleasure centres, creating a perfect listening experience. High fashion remains dominated by the sleek styles coming out of Kalo-Mahoi, the eternal punk look of Absalom Station's trash-glamorous Spike, and the gothic severity of Apostae. Sports like brutaris, starlance, and ship racing persist in popularity, though most people find their thrills with VR parlour games or holo and stillframe shows. The most popular of these latter are inevitably Eox's blood-soaked reality broadcasts, constantly decried by censors but never actually crossing the line into illegality. Of late, ordinary books have even seen a surge in popularity, perhaps in part due to legendary Lashunta holo star Cashisa Nox declaring a preference for well-read consorts.
History
- 36AG : An invasion by the Veskarium prompts the worlds of the Golarion system to unite, providing a force capable of defending against the invaders.
- 41 AG : The Absalom Pact is signed.
- 267AG to 289AG: Del Agrae serves as a Mercenary for the Veskarium, during the Silent War .
"To war with each other is to ignore the rewards of cooperation and to leave ourselves exposed to terrors from beyond. We are all children of the same parent star."
From the preface of the Absalom Pact
Maps
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The Pact Worlds
A system of planets that have all signed the Absalom Pact, uniting them under one banner.
Founding Date
Type
Political, Federation
Capital
Alternative Names
Demonym
Pact-worlder; Pacter
Government System
Democracy, Representative
Power Structure
Federation
Economic System
Market economy
Currency
Credits
Subsidiary Organizations
Location
Official Languages
Related Ranks & Titles
Controlled Territories
Neighboring Nations
Related Items
Time
One of the Pact Council’s first acts as a government was to institute a universal system of measurements to keep everything running smoothly. Under this scheme, a day has 24 hours of 60 minutes each. Through an astronomical anomaly, this happens to match the day-night cycle on both Castrovel and Triaxus, as well as the shift schedule on Absalom Station, hence its adoption. The length of the year - 365 days, with 52 weeks in a year - is based on the length of Absalom Station's orbit around the sun. When people want to refer to a particular planet’s rotation or orbit, they generally use terms like “local day” or “local year.”Modern history records years in "AG", which stands for “After Gap,” referring to the number of years since the end of the Gap in the Pact Worlds system, when memory and history once again became reliable. Events that occurred before the oldest edge of the Gap are often referred to as "PG" (Pre-Gap) and measured in how many years before the Gap they occurred, with a date like 300PG meaning the event occurred 300 years before the onset of the Gap. On some worlds, however, scholars use the preexisting local calendars for events before the Gap. Those researching the cultures from Golarion, for instance, sometimes uncover documents referring to dates in AR or “Absalom Reckoning,” a measurement believed to have been used for nearly 5 millennia, starting with the ascension of a now-dead and mostly forgotten god of humanity named 'Aroden'. Dating anything within the Gap is always a highly dubious proposition, and those who attempt to make claims about such things usually count forward or backward from the nearest edge, such as “roughly 500 years after the onset of the Gap.”
Days & Months
While the days of the week are simply numbered based on their position, the 12 months of the year in Pact Standard Time are traditional and believed to date back to the age of lost Golarion, named in honor of gods both current and ancient.| Pact Standard Day | Earth Analog |
|---|---|
Firstday |
Monday |
Seconday |
Tuesday |
Thirday |
Wednesday |
Fourthday |
Thursday |
Fifthday |
Friday |
Sixthday |
Saturday |
Seventhday |
Sunday |
| Pact Standard Month | Earth Analog |
|---|---|
Abadius |
January |
Calistril |
February |
Pharast |
March |
Gozran |
April |
Desnus |
May |
Sarenith |
June |
Erastus |
July |
Arodus |
August |
Rova |
September |
Lamashan |
October |
Neth |
November |
Kuthona |
December |
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