Jul 1, 2017 10:25:47 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:25:47 GMT -7
This is a list of organizations that exist with in New Sumatra. This is not meant to be an exaustive list, nor is it meant to be a list of factions or member groups. Your character could easily be part of multiple groups, or none at all. They might even be part of a group that's not on this list, so don't be afraid to come up with your own ideas as well.
The government is divided into three branches. The legislative branch creates laws, the executive branch manages the city and the budget, and the judicial branch examines laws to make sure they're still relevant and just. From there, it's further divided based on how much influence it has over the city. At the top there's senators, the governor, and the supreme court which influence the entire city. Senators create laws that affect every district in the city, the governor manages the city's budget and the heads of each district, and the supreme court is the highest court in the land that can examine and overturn any law. Below that, the city is divided into six districts: residential, industrial, commercial, entertainment, education, and government. They have structures similar to the city level ones, except they only apply to one district instead of all of them. For example, the commercial district focuses on things like sales tax and worker treatment, with the industrial and entertainment districts focusing on similar things. The education district focuses on education standards, and making sure that the information taught is accurate and not propaganda (or is at least the correct type of propaganda), as well as research ethics. The residential district focuses on building standards and health standards. The government district handles law enforcement, taxation, and law enforcement.
Below that, everything starts to become specific functions rather than high level law making or overseeing. The larger areas, beyond the basic bureaucracy, are as follows:
Unions: Rather than being a tool for worker collaboration, in New Sumatra, unions make sure workers are treated fairly. They make sure the conditions are as good as they can reasonably be and as safe as they can reasonably be, as some jobs are dangerous by nature. They watch inflation and any changes in jobs to make sure workers are compensated fairly, using the difficulty and danger of the job (IE, how easy can they be replaced, how likely is injury or worse, how much physical and metal effort is expended) and inflation to determine that. They also act as a legal option for workers wronged by their employers.
Law Enforcement: The police handle criminal investigations and arrests. They have departments for listening to reports and complaints, investigations, forensics, and escorting important people. Crime is low, but the criminals that exist tend to be very dangerous and very organized. As a result, combat training is necessary for most officers, and being in law enforcement is considered a particularly dangerous job. The few prisons the city has are heavily guarded and are in a remote area of the government district, far away from the jungle and where most people go. On the other end, judges and legal bureaucrats to ensure people get fair trials, show up for jury duty, and pay their fines are also an integral part of the system.
City Health and Safety: This includes things like the fire department, sewer management, janitorial staff, and doctors and hospital staff. They focus on other areas of city safety, like making sure there are no fires or fire hazards or that power in the city is stable, and making sure the city stays clean and healthy. With the population density, city health is very important. Most doctors make house calls so sick people don't have to go outside, but hospitals do exist in a remote corner of the residential district for cases that require serious quarantine or equipment that can't be reasonably kept in a home or carried.
Teachers: In New Sumatra, teachers do more than teach students. Sure, getting every child up to a certain baseline of knowledge is still considered important, especially for younger children, but figuring out what those children are actually good at is considered far more important. It's ultimately their recommendations that determine what jobs those children will be assigned to when they grow up. As a result, school is more than just learning math and history, teachers also have to look at social skills, how creative they are and whether they're good at art or music, and other more subtle skills. As the children get older, they have more control over which classes they take, so it's a teacher's job to try to nudge them towards the classes they're good at and away from the ones they're bad at regardless of the child's personal interests.
With its expansion into Twilight Jungle exploration, it started offering classes to help potential jungle surveyors learn how to fight. The monsters in the jungle have some kind of resistance to explosions and bullets, so the association offers all kinds of classes ranging from how to use knives and swords, to bows, to any obscure weapon that might help people. They generally encourage people to use weapons that are less likely to hurt themselves or anyone they might be exploring with.
While the Surveying Association is more than willing to help every surveyor, and even potential surveyors, they do expect support in return. They want to be a way to collect information and they want to be able to research magic in order to further help surveyors. Any surveyor that keeps information to themselves, doesn't share resources, and just generally acts completely independently, will find the support they get from the association diminish greatly.
While many of them are too afraid to go into the jungle themselves, others the Magical Fanclub as the main reason they ventured into the jungle. Some people consider how much they glamorize magic dangerous and want it to be shut down. Others consider it completely harmless, if not a little silly and creepy. Some people with magic even go see the members in person to show off their abilities because they enjoy feeling like celebrities.
Special
Once a week members (actual members, not supporters) of the Magical Fanclub can PM Kitten4u and receive a yes or no answer to whether a specific character has magic.
They consider themselves a civilized group of people despite their violent actions. They're polite and will rarely go after anyone, and when they do they have a good reason (according to them). The higher ups tend to be suave and charismatic, though the people working at the lower levels tend more towards being thuggish goons. The group's been run by one family for generations, though with how long the family has been around, many of the relatives don't have the same last name. There are actually several different branches of the family running around now, so there are several different last names, and the group is quite large. It's difficult for anyone not in the family to break into the higher ranks, but it is possible if they're particularly skilled at something or happen to get lucky and marry in (the two often go hand in hand).
With in the last couple of decades, all currency was digitized and is closely monitored by the government. This has made it difficult for the mafia to function, as donating to a suspicious group or labeling a transaction 'assassination request' will draw unwanted attention. Instead, they started running several overpriced luxury stores as a front for their real business. It's made them difficult to track, as they do get legitimate customers who are truly only interested in overpriced luxury products. The rest only buy them to pay for other services, but it's impossible to tell the difference without some serious digging.
Because they think the world is in trouble, their actions are quite extreme. They think all pollution of any kind needs to stop and that everyone should return to living a simple, natural lifestyle. As a result, they try to sabotage all technology and industrial power. Sometimes this is just putting some gunk in the gears so nothing works, or cutting some wires so it'd be difficult to repair something, and sometimes it's as extreme as blowing up entire buildings or targeting politicians that try to change or allow things they think are for the worse. The government classifies them as a terrorist group because of this.
Even though some of their actions are very noticeable (even if some are extremely subtle and the government isn't even 100% sure if Flourish is behind it or not), the members are very good at hiding themselves and not being noticed. They're an underground group that meets in the jungle, so they've been notoriously difficult to track down. As a result, most of them can use magic themselves, which has made the industrial areas and the powerplants in the wasteland a little bit safer.
They don't keep their research to themselves either. One of the members must also be skilled with computers because their research shows up on random existing websites whenever it's completed, or they've hit a wall and want to release it to the world so that maybe it can be continued by someone else. Finding detailed information on the experiments they do is often disturbing. While they don't go into excessive, gory detail the nature of the research means that they do have to describe disturbing things in order to properly describe their steps so the experiment can be replicated.
Their interests right now seem to be focused on magic, its origins, and the effects of the wasteland, though everyone has their own pet projects. Some of them don't quite fit into that.
Special
Gnosis has access to a hidden member group and a hidden board. PM Kitten4u for access. Your character must be a member (not a supporter) of Gnosis to get access.
Most of them are harmless. They're loud and annoying and make a point of protesting in inappropriate places and sometimes deface government property. However, there are some that make a point of going after the people they think are evil that the government refuses to punish. The most common targets are criminals that can use magic, especially if they're surveyors. The government often goes easy on them so they can continue to gather resources, and these people are very unhappy with that. Sometimes the target is simply hurt, sometimes their house is ransacked, sometimes their family is targeted, and other times the target is simply killed. Even though most of the group doesn't do these things, the other members rarely complain. It's their job to correct injustice after all, even if that means the the judge, jury, and executioner.
The name itself is a little tongue and cheek, chosen by the members because of how people treat them like they're going to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Considering that's the point of the group's existence, it seemed appropriate.
They banded together to investigate odd happenings and potential criminal activity further. Sometimes it was just following someone a little longer instead of calling the police, baiting them by looking vulnerable or trying to buy something illegal, or even infiltrating their groups by pretending to be a member. It's rare for them to do anything illegal, beyond pretending like they might do something illegal to either bait out criminal activity or join their groups, but it does happen occasionally. Most of the time Melati Putih works with the police and lets them handle what happens to the criminals once they've been found out, believing that anything more would be inefficient and hypocritical. They're trying to stop criminal activity, not become criminals themselves after all. Thus, those that do take the law into their own hands and go after the criminals themselves are denounced and often kicked out of the group entirely.
The Government
Like most civilizations, New Sumatra is not an anarchy. It has governance, and because the world only has one city, it is effectively a world government. Their goal is to keep the city running smoothly and to keep the citizens safe and happy.The government is divided into three branches. The legislative branch creates laws, the executive branch manages the city and the budget, and the judicial branch examines laws to make sure they're still relevant and just. From there, it's further divided based on how much influence it has over the city. At the top there's senators, the governor, and the supreme court which influence the entire city. Senators create laws that affect every district in the city, the governor manages the city's budget and the heads of each district, and the supreme court is the highest court in the land that can examine and overturn any law. Below that, the city is divided into six districts: residential, industrial, commercial, entertainment, education, and government. They have structures similar to the city level ones, except they only apply to one district instead of all of them. For example, the commercial district focuses on things like sales tax and worker treatment, with the industrial and entertainment districts focusing on similar things. The education district focuses on education standards, and making sure that the information taught is accurate and not propaganda (or is at least the correct type of propaganda), as well as research ethics. The residential district focuses on building standards and health standards. The government district handles law enforcement, taxation, and law enforcement.
Below that, everything starts to become specific functions rather than high level law making or overseeing. The larger areas, beyond the basic bureaucracy, are as follows:
Unions: Rather than being a tool for worker collaboration, in New Sumatra, unions make sure workers are treated fairly. They make sure the conditions are as good as they can reasonably be and as safe as they can reasonably be, as some jobs are dangerous by nature. They watch inflation and any changes in jobs to make sure workers are compensated fairly, using the difficulty and danger of the job (IE, how easy can they be replaced, how likely is injury or worse, how much physical and metal effort is expended) and inflation to determine that. They also act as a legal option for workers wronged by their employers.
Law Enforcement: The police handle criminal investigations and arrests. They have departments for listening to reports and complaints, investigations, forensics, and escorting important people. Crime is low, but the criminals that exist tend to be very dangerous and very organized. As a result, combat training is necessary for most officers, and being in law enforcement is considered a particularly dangerous job. The few prisons the city has are heavily guarded and are in a remote area of the government district, far away from the jungle and where most people go. On the other end, judges and legal bureaucrats to ensure people get fair trials, show up for jury duty, and pay their fines are also an integral part of the system.
City Health and Safety: This includes things like the fire department, sewer management, janitorial staff, and doctors and hospital staff. They focus on other areas of city safety, like making sure there are no fires or fire hazards or that power in the city is stable, and making sure the city stays clean and healthy. With the population density, city health is very important. Most doctors make house calls so sick people don't have to go outside, but hospitals do exist in a remote corner of the residential district for cases that require serious quarantine or equipment that can't be reasonably kept in a home or carried.
Teachers: In New Sumatra, teachers do more than teach students. Sure, getting every child up to a certain baseline of knowledge is still considered important, especially for younger children, but figuring out what those children are actually good at is considered far more important. It's ultimately their recommendations that determine what jobs those children will be assigned to when they grow up. As a result, school is more than just learning math and history, teachers also have to look at social skills, how creative they are and whether they're good at art or music, and other more subtle skills. As the children get older, they have more control over which classes they take, so it's a teacher's job to try to nudge them towards the classes they're good at and away from the ones they're bad at regardless of the child's personal interests.
Surveying Association
The Surveying Association formed before magic came into the world as a way to manage exploration into the wasteland. It let those explorers get the resources they needed for their expeditions and gave them a place to report what they found so that knowledge could be collected and analyzed more easily. Once magic became a factor, they started helping those that explored Twilight Jungle as well. The Surveying Association is considered a surveyors greatest ally, and they do their best to make sure they get the support they need, and even fight for legislation that might help them. In a sense, it acts like a union for surveyors.With its expansion into Twilight Jungle exploration, it started offering classes to help potential jungle surveyors learn how to fight. The monsters in the jungle have some kind of resistance to explosions and bullets, so the association offers all kinds of classes ranging from how to use knives and swords, to bows, to any obscure weapon that might help people. They generally encourage people to use weapons that are less likely to hurt themselves or anyone they might be exploring with.
While the Surveying Association is more than willing to help every surveyor, and even potential surveyors, they do expect support in return. They want to be a way to collect information and they want to be able to research magic in order to further help surveyors. Any surveyor that keeps information to themselves, doesn't share resources, and just generally acts completely independently, will find the support they get from the association diminish greatly.
Magical Fanclub
Started about a year ago by a teenage girl, the Magical Fanclub is an internet forum and blog that talks about magic and people with magic. Granted, it goes beyond 'talk' and more towards fawning and hero worship. Many of them are too afraid to go into Twilight Jungle to try to get magic themselves, but they're still fascinated with it. For the people in the Magical Fanclub, this goes beyond fascination and more towards something outright creepy. They take pictures of people with magic, and sometimes even people they only suspect to have magic and are prone to trying to follow them around to try to learn more about them, and maybe steal something they've used. The majority of the users are young, between the ages of 12 and 16, but there are some adult members as well.While many of them are too afraid to go into the jungle themselves, others the Magical Fanclub as the main reason they ventured into the jungle. Some people consider how much they glamorize magic dangerous and want it to be shut down. Others consider it completely harmless, if not a little silly and creepy. Some people with magic even go see the members in person to show off their abilities because they enjoy feeling like celebrities.
Special
Once a week members (actual members, not supporters) of the Magical Fanclub can PM Kitten4u and receive a yes or no answer to whether a specific character has magic.
New Sumatran Mafia
To the people on the outside, the mafia is a horribly violent and dangerous group that deals in illegal goods and services. To the people inside, it's nothing but a family business that's been run by the same family for generations. They just happen to deal in goods and services that no one else does and that certain groups would prefer if they didn't. If there wasn't a demand for illegal drugs, or weapons, or having someone conveniently disappear then they wouldn't have any business anyway. It's all very simple, they're simply providing a valuable service that no one else is willing to. The fact that they have no competitors a coincidence. Just ignore the amount of effort they put into stamping out competitors. Their competitors are breaking the law, so it's only polite that they turn them into the police right? That's what any civilized person would do. That the relatives of certain politicians happen to disappear for a short while when new legislation that would inconvenience the mafia is proposed is an unfortunate coincidence.They consider themselves a civilized group of people despite their violent actions. They're polite and will rarely go after anyone, and when they do they have a good reason (according to them). The higher ups tend to be suave and charismatic, though the people working at the lower levels tend more towards being thuggish goons. The group's been run by one family for generations, though with how long the family has been around, many of the relatives don't have the same last name. There are actually several different branches of the family running around now, so there are several different last names, and the group is quite large. It's difficult for anyone not in the family to break into the higher ranks, but it is possible if they're particularly skilled at something or happen to get lucky and marry in (the two often go hand in hand).
With in the last couple of decades, all currency was digitized and is closely monitored by the government. This has made it difficult for the mafia to function, as donating to a suspicious group or labeling a transaction 'assassination request' will draw unwanted attention. Instead, they started running several overpriced luxury stores as a front for their real business. It's made them difficult to track, as they do get legitimate customers who are truly only interested in overpriced luxury products. The rest only buy them to pay for other services, but it's impossible to tell the difference without some serious digging.
Leading to Obtain a Vivid Eternity
Also known as LOVE, they started as a small group of people that wanted to clean up the park and fix some of the uneven paint on the benches. Since then, they started organizing to expand their efforts to other parts of the city. Now they have a reasonably large following and even their own website. They spend their time beautifying the town, whether it be helping to clean up areas that are a bit dirty, or painting murals on some drab walls, or even baking cookies for people working dangerous jobs or odd hours. They only want to make the city a better place and to make people happy. They get the proper permissions for their activities, so none of it is illegal or would qualify as graffiti.Flourish
Born from a desire to save the world from its lifeless state and return it to (presumably) how it was before the wasteland formed, Flourish is a group of environmentalists that takes their beliefs beyond environmental regulation and research. They believe that the emergence of magic is nature trying to protect itself from a civilization bent on killing it, implying that it's not only in danger, but it's trying to fight back. Thus, it's on those that can fight to help nature save itself and stop the world from ending completely.Because they think the world is in trouble, their actions are quite extreme. They think all pollution of any kind needs to stop and that everyone should return to living a simple, natural lifestyle. As a result, they try to sabotage all technology and industrial power. Sometimes this is just putting some gunk in the gears so nothing works, or cutting some wires so it'd be difficult to repair something, and sometimes it's as extreme as blowing up entire buildings or targeting politicians that try to change or allow things they think are for the worse. The government classifies them as a terrorist group because of this.
Even though some of their actions are very noticeable (even if some are extremely subtle and the government isn't even 100% sure if Flourish is behind it or not), the members are very good at hiding themselves and not being noticed. They're an underground group that meets in the jungle, so they've been notoriously difficult to track down. As a result, most of them can use magic themselves, which has made the industrial areas and the powerplants in the wasteland a little bit safer.
Gnosis
In New Sumatra, there are very strict ethics codes around science to ensure that no one's hurt in the experiments. Some scientists were not happy with these rules and went underground to conduct their own research free of such restrictions. They don't get any funding or resources, but they manage to get by without them, likely through stealing lab equipment and kidnapping. While some of the disappearances in the city are blamed on people wandering into Twilight Jungle, the mafia, or Flourish, it's suspected that most of them are taken by Gnosis for their research.They don't keep their research to themselves either. One of the members must also be skilled with computers because their research shows up on random existing websites whenever it's completed, or they've hit a wall and want to release it to the world so that maybe it can be continued by someone else. Finding detailed information on the experiments they do is often disturbing. While they don't go into excessive, gory detail the nature of the research means that they do have to describe disturbing things in order to properly describe their steps so the experiment can be replicated.
Their interests right now seem to be focused on magic, its origins, and the effects of the wasteland, though everyone has their own pet projects. Some of them don't quite fit into that.
Special
Gnosis has access to a hidden member group and a hidden board. PM Kitten4u for access. Your character must be a member (not a supporter) of Gnosis to get access.
Apocalypse
First and foremost, Apocalypse believes that there should be no government and that the people are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Government is inherently corrupt, and favors some people over others. It lets some people get away with breaking the law, and makes up laws to punish those they want to. The members disagree on many things, but those are the main tenants of the group that they can all agree on.Most of them are harmless. They're loud and annoying and make a point of protesting in inappropriate places and sometimes deface government property. However, there are some that make a point of going after the people they think are evil that the government refuses to punish. The most common targets are criminals that can use magic, especially if they're surveyors. The government often goes easy on them so they can continue to gather resources, and these people are very unhappy with that. Sometimes the target is simply hurt, sometimes their house is ransacked, sometimes their family is targeted, and other times the target is simply killed. Even though most of the group doesn't do these things, the other members rarely complain. It's their job to correct injustice after all, even if that means the the judge, jury, and executioner.
The name itself is a little tongue and cheek, chosen by the members because of how people treat them like they're going to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Considering that's the point of the group's existence, it seemed appropriate.
Melati Putih
Decades ago, the government started a neighborhood watch program. Everyone lives near everyone else, so encouraging citizens to watch for suspicious activity and to work with the police worked out well. Crime went down, and the government figured that'd be the end of it, happy that their new initiative helped. A group of people took it a step further.They banded together to investigate odd happenings and potential criminal activity further. Sometimes it was just following someone a little longer instead of calling the police, baiting them by looking vulnerable or trying to buy something illegal, or even infiltrating their groups by pretending to be a member. It's rare for them to do anything illegal, beyond pretending like they might do something illegal to either bait out criminal activity or join their groups, but it does happen occasionally. Most of the time Melati Putih works with the police and lets them handle what happens to the criminals once they've been found out, believing that anything more would be inefficient and hypocritical. They're trying to stop criminal activity, not become criminals themselves after all. Thus, those that do take the law into their own hands and go after the criminals themselves are denounced and often kicked out of the group entirely.