The Empire

The Great Dynasty of the Roan is an absolute monarchy dominating a small section of the galaxy, in that they had a head start and then went and wiped out everyone else who could possibly compete with them. In the incomparable emptiness of space, the Ten Thousand Worlds are not very large. By the standards of most of the galaxy's civilizations, however, they are vast.

Government

Officially, the Great Dynasty is an autocratic state where all power flows from the Sovereign, who is directly responsible for the appointment of everyone from circuit governors on down to local dogcatchers. In practice, the government is handled by the Secretariat, which might very well be the universe's largest bureaucracy even in its decadence.

The Empire beyond Rudan, the center of the Middle Kingdom, is divided into various circuits which can vary from one or two worlds all the way up to ten or fifteen. These circuits are overseen by Viceroys, who are appointed by the Secretariat to serve ten-year terms and act as final court of appeals.

Circuits are divided into provinces, which can be anywhere from one city to entire worlds. These provinces are overseen by Governors, who are also appointed by the Secretariat to serve five-year terms. Provinces are then divided into districts, which are overseen by Judges (who may end up serving multiple four-year terms), and then into prefectures, which are overseen by Magistrates.

Traditionally Magistrates may serve in no single post for longer than three years at a time, and would be relocated within a province until they returned home and then became available for promotion, the origin of the circuit.

There are also the federal worlds of the Inner Sphere, which don't matter, which is exactly how they like it.

Economy[size]

It would not be accurate to describe the Great Dynasty as an Autarky. The word was never intended to describe a country which spanned an entire world, let alone one that spans thousands. It is more closely a series of autarkies, all loosely linked in a wide-spanning luxury and creative goods trade but otherwise indifferent to each other and even more indifferent to the galaxy beyond, which has little to offer and less worth the effort of obtaining.

[size=125]Taxation

The Secretariat pursues no policy of income taxing, either graduated or otherwise. All taxes are either poll taxes, land taxes, or sales taxes, and no one's collected the poll taxes in centuries. This might be regressive, but no one in the Treasury cares.

Technology

The Middle Kingdom is inextricable from its dependence on the great planetary Crystal networks, which power literally everything by drawing energy from the planetary core and then passing it through to so-called broadcast towers. This process fills the air of Roanian worlds with a slight ozone tang if you're not used to it, but to Roanians it's the smell of home.

On most world, the average standard of living closely tracks in broad strokes towards a comfortable upper middle-class existence in late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western Europe, with most advanced technology the preserve of those rich enough to afford what are ultimately just differing degrees of comfort.

Population Composition

The Secretariat last successfully performed a full population census a thousand years ago, and even as they were doing it they knew it was immediately out of date. As far as the Secretariat's official numbers go there are a trillion adults (defined as being in possession of a corvee/levee card, and thus having come of age and requested or received such) within the Inner and Middle Spheres.

Unless a family registers for the rice dole or a travel permit, however, there are no real efforts to keep track of people. People are busy doing people things, the Secretariat thinks. Best to let them get on with it.

Demographics

The population at the time of the census was approximately 60% 'Core', a number which includes Nmmr and the primary species of the Empire (also usually called Roanian) on Rudan, a few Inner Sphere Worlds, and most Middle Sphere worlds, 30% 'Colonial', a number which includes Nmmr and the primary species of the Empire on other Inner Sphere Worlds, the remaining Middle Sphere Worlds, and all Outer Sphere Worlds, and 10% 'Subject Races', which included populations of species not considered integrated at the time of the census, most of which have subsequently been labeled as pacified. Or exterminated. Either/or. In one case, both!

Culture

Roanians of all species tend towards the conservative in a political and economic sense. They have a good thing going, why rock the boat? They tend to be broad-minded and tolerant of others, provided everyone is with the program. Whose program? Their program, of course.

The Secretariat has no interest in policing the morals of the population, except when those morals are counter-productive to harmony. Harmony being defined as 'willingness to pay taxes and not causes problems we need to clean up'. Pay your taxes, don't make waves, and stay in your lane, and you can have a good time in Roania.

But the nail that sticks up too high gets hammered down. If it's lucky.

Women's Rights

Following the abolition of concubinage three dynasties ago, the position of women in the Middle Kingdom has gradually climbed. There are at present no legal disabilities attached to the status of women, with the abolition of the ban on women serving in combat roles in the military having taken place last year. Despite the presence of a vocal minority that seeks to roll back the clock to women not being legal persons at all, official Secretariat policy is now and probably will always be that female subjects are fully the equal of male subjects in every particular.

Foreigners

For thousands of years, the Roanian attitude towards foreigners was to conquer them. No debate, no discussion, no trade. First contact was hostile contact. First contact consisted of soldiers landing on the lawn and informing everyone that they were in charge now and if anyone had a problem with it they would be shot until the lesson was learned.

Several hundred years ago, that policy came to an end because there were, it seemed, no foreigners within reach to conquer. The job was done. Everyone was happy, except for the conquered aliens, and no one cared about them. The Huangdi proclaimed that this was the perfect moment, there was a nice parade, and everyone moved on to more interesting things like poetry and decorative flower arrangements.

A hundred years after his death, the first contact with another advanced empire took place. Traders from Menelmacar made contact with a Roanian world and tried to trade, then took it badly when the local government panicked and tried to have them all killed. What followed was a very brief war which ended when the Menelmacari blockaded Rudan, and the then-Huangdi killed his wife, his children, most of his siblings, and then himself. His successor, a brother who had stepped away to get a drink of water and thus missed the massacre, was grabbed by the surviving Secretariat, hastily proclaimed Huangdi, and then underwent a few hours of groveling at the feet of a Menelmacari captain who was recorded in Roanian histories only as 'The Westerner', a name which led to the general use of the term as a name for all Sol-Sphere empires and persons.

Since then, much of the Middle Kingdom remains in a semi-traumatized state where the presence of even the friendliest of foreigners provokes a thin rictus-grin and a thousand mile stare. Foreigners just... should not exist. And if they're going to exist, they should not exist here. This has its ultimate expression in the so-called Closed Party, which believes that the appropriate way to handle foreigners is to heavily arm and then kill them all and then close the door and then cover their ears and eyes and hum very loudly.

Fortunately, the Open Party dominates both the Secretariat and the Imperial Household, with most of the latter having foreign blood and most of the former relying on foreign contacts to try to counteract the damage done... well, by foreign contact.

Foreign Treaties

The urge to govern is very strong in the blood of the Secretariat, and the Huangdi remains the self-proclaimed ruler of the Galaxy. It's not enough to say you're something, however. You need to act like it. The Secretariat, when forced to confront reality, saw a galaxy both in chaos and far too large and strong to conquer. They set about trying to fix this, playing a major role in establishing the Martian Treaty System.

They might not be able to conquer the galaxy, after all, but they can make it worthy of Heaven. Or try.

It's a work in progress.

Military

The Huangdi's military is a conventional modern force. The Shenqin Huangdi made it his mission to revitalize and restore a military still punch-drunk, and largely succeeded in restoring both pride and capabilities to a level that can stand equal to anyone stupid enough to try to invade. Unfortunately, while it may well be one of the strongest conventional forces in the modern galaxy it has proven unable to sustain its arcane technology on the offensive without foreign support and has no real response to the elite military forces of the Sol-Sphere despite occasional lip-service to the principle.

The Banners are what the Banners want to be, and not even the Huangdi has the power to change that.

Domestic Politics

The Dragon Throne is sacrosanct. And at this point the Great Roan have run the show for millennia, longer than any other dynasty or regime. They're not going anywhere. Not without something going very wrong. Even the crisis of the foreign invasion didn't lead to an attempt at overthrow. The only attempt at establishing a new dynasty in recent memory was an embarrassing failure that ended with the government finding a young An heir and proclaiming her Roania's first reigning Empress, then brushing the whole thing under the rug. Officially, her reign began with the death of her father, and the reign of the usurpers is gradually being erased from history.

But the government of the Empire itself is crumbling at the edges. Posts go unfilled, positions left empty, qualified candidates at a premium. Even as Roania itself has opened up, much of its traditional infrastructure has collapsed into a few gates strongly held by partisans of defeated internal factions who make everything harder than it needs to be. While the Huangdi could, of course, brush this aside, the past two Sovereigns upon the Dragon Throne (Ten Thousand Years to the Lord of Ten Thousand Years) have taken the perhaps justifiable attitude that divine intervention causes more problems than it solves.

The Empire will survive. This is what it does. But it will probably never thrive again. Its destiny may simply be to endure, a footnote in the histories of other more vibrant regimes. Or it might collapse, its weapons and knowhow falling into the hands of others as more vital civilizations carve themselves from its corpse. Or it might be taken over by a militaristic junta making use of a weak Huangdi to try to pursue a policy of expelling barbarians and military conquest while marching forward in strangely familiar stride.

Or nothing.

The future is coming. But that's the thing about the future. It's always coming.