Kamak

(adj: Kamaki)

History

• The heavy mining nation is both settings, with Gunstar being off they're able to afford sky mantis grids and more automatons than Vanilla, also the most vulnerable to attack.
• In Vanilla, found a plethora of magical materials (as well as other rarities) and built a ton of Alchemicals. They actually took over the government, but then they fell to pieces due to infighting (and Adamant). The government now lets the cities function independently, though they have trouble working together now.

Culture

• Alchemicals: “Kamak’s incredible wealth of magical materials has allowed it to Exalt a large number of Alchemicals, despite the fact that it is the second smallest of the Eight Nations. This abundance of Champions is a point of civic pride for Kamak but has led to some difficulties. Because they exist well out of proportion to the rest of the population, some residents of Kamak have become accustomed to the presence of the Chosen and neglect to always show them proper deference. This more casual attitude suits some Alchemicals, particularly those interested in pursuing personal relationships with the mortals around them. More traditional and orthodox Exalts are often offended, however, and two such have defected to other nations in the last century.”
• “In public spaces, [the Kamaki people] wear dark, heavy garments even in the rare spates of warm weather. Sleeves are worn long enough to cover the wearer’s gloved hands; hats are large and shapeless, covering most of the traditional Kamaki hair-braids. Collars are trimmed with fur; boots are massive, with detachable cleats for icy weather. Most importantly, the lower part of the face is always hidden behind a voluminous scarf or half-mask, exposing only the eyes and soulgem.”
• “This secretive quality extends to all features of Kamaki public life. Privacy—an alien concept in most of Autochthonia—is all-important here. Citizens generally avoid one another in public so as not to intrude. When they must interact in public, they speak softly, as loud speech is considered crass. Much is conveyed by body language: subtle gestures and postures that mean little to outsiders but speak volumes to a native. Public personal space is quite large, such that coming within arm’s reach of anyone but immediate family is deeply offensive. Prying questions are never asked, while circumlocutions are employed to avoid using proper names where someone might overhear.
• Noise is inevitable in cities and workplaces, but machinery is fitted with sound-damping baffles to minimize noise pollution. Commuters hear only the groan of distant engines, the faint hiss of pneumatic trams and the muted chiming of the shift-change gongs. Citizens known to labor in noisy environments suffer some social stigma, as though the clamor of the workplace clings to them like a bad odor.”
• “The Kamaki are as open in private as they are withdrawn in public. At home or in the workplace, away from inquisitive eyes, they can show their faces, smile and laugh, consume intoxicants and play games. Their personal space contracts markedly in private, permitting easy, intimate contact among co-workers, friends, neighbors and family. Indoor clothing is lighter and more brightly colored, marked with intricate patterns and precious metal embroidery.”
• “Hospitality is vitally important in Kamak. Other than Sova, this is the only nation where travelers risk death from exposure. As a result, a citizen may sometimes have to admit a stranger to her home to save their life. The Kamaki have evolved elaborate social customs over the millennia to deal with such situations.
• Any guest in the home is escorted first to the hearth-gem—a fist-sized mass of red jade set into the base of a wall niche, its flat upper surface radiating as much heat as a small fire. The guest is offered food and drink, an overture which is rude to decline. The meal is then warmed atop the hearthgem. Only after it has been served can any sort of business proceed.
• Petitioning someone for hospitality is distinctly uncomfortable for many Kamaki. No matter the need, intruding on another’s private space—or having another intrude upon it—goes against the grain of their upbringing and culture. “Vethem’s Solace,” a classic song in the lector’s repertoire, narrates a traveler’s death as she, unwilling to trouble the strangers who live in an unfamiliar commune, succumbs to the elements just outside the commune’s door. Of course, not everyone is thus troubled. Invoking the hospitality rule to maliciously intrude on a stranger’s—or enemy’s—privacy is a crime punishable by ostracism among the Lumpen.”
• “Kamaki cuisine tastes strange to visitors from other nations. It is heavy and fatty, often with strong acidic or salty notes, and is invariably served hot. Moreover, despite its overall high quality—the wealthy nation imports Gulaki master chefs to train its food handlers—the food sometimes has faint metallic or chemical undertones. This arises from long-term storage of nutrient slurry in holding tanks before processing; slurry conduits have been known to freeze solid when the nation passes through the very coldest parts of the Reaches, making it necessary to preserve large amounts of slurry to ward off the possibility of famine.
• Meals are accompanied by water, flavored dilutions of ethanol, or kaff—a beverage whose recipe dates back thousands of years. Reminiscent of Southern coffee, kaff is a dark, sludgy, bitter drink consisting of boiling water brewed with powdered triple-roasted nutrient paste and laced with trace amounts of synthetic cocaine. It is occasionally consumed in other nations, but only in Kamak is it traditionally blended with rat lard and salt, a savory combination that provides warmth and energy—not to mention soothing chapped lips.”
• Kamaki people have a small supply of food and water stored in case of bad weather, at least three days worth for even the Populat.
• “Singing and chanting are the most common sorts of Kamaki music, but instruments are used on occasion. Drums are beaten outdoors to keep time in work groups; though audible at long distance, the sound is pitched low enough not to be intrusive. Indoors or in communal courtyards, stringed instruments may be played softly.
• Storytelling and music are slow, sonorous and utterly formalized. Many tales and songs have remained unchanged across thousands of years. This has anchored their discourse against change, making the Kamaki dialect sound archaic and stilted to other Autochthonians, closer to Old Realm.
• Dancing is only performed indoors and in communal courtyards. Certain traditional dances are performed solely between husband and wife, and they are passed down to one’s children. Those who do not master the dances in childhood can ask for training from their lectors.”
• Marriage is most important to the Kamaki, with many social and professional options based around the spouses sharing their life. Unmarried people face ostracization and discrimination, and adultery is punished by exile.
• The bow is associated with their founder, and commonly wielded as a result.
• Meanwhile, religion is much less pompous than other nations, and festivals simple and brief. Conductors and Surgeons are respected for their efforts, Harvesters less so.
• “The more sapient the automaton, the more the Kamaki see it as a person with regard to their sense of personal space.”
• They've developed a Morse code equivalent called Tominic to communicate on taps through pipes.
• Due to their wealth of magical materials, prosthetic limbs to replace those lost are not the least bit uncommon.
  • “The Conductors also harvest a wide range of useful materials from the region’s autochthonous entities. These include bristlefur, a mass of soft furry bristles harvested from caterpillar-like pipe-cleaning elementals and used as a cheap substitute for rat fur; yeglum, a temperature-sensitive adhesive extracted from the webbing of arachnoid elementals; and trasu, a suede-like fabric made from the hides of certain elementals and biomechanoids, worn by Kamak’s plutarchs and adjudicators instead of artificial leather.”
  • “Kamak has a long and storied history with rats, having bred countless new species for various purposes. The giant Ein rat, a plump beast the size of a donkey, is farmed for meat, fat, fur, leather and sinew. The giant Trantec rat—a leaner animal—is used to carry heavy loads and to pull sleds in snow season. When cold weather draws feral rats into the warmth of inhabited areas, terrier-rats root them out. And trained watch-rats help guard entrances to the Reaches against intruders.
  • Most peculiar is the pet rat. While pet rats occasionally come into fashion in other nations, they’re always intended to somehow wring greater efficiency out of the populace—such as Claslat’s “productivity rats,” which increase efficiency by making their keepers happy, only to be euthanized if they cause any drop in productivity. But in wealthy Kamak, there’s no ulterior motive. Their pet rats serve only to make their owners happy.”
• Due to their privacy policies, conspiracies are harder to expose than many other locations. In Vanilla two major ones are the One Tier conspiracy, demanding equal rights for the Populat, while another is the Disciples of Mog praying for him to wipe out Estasia.
  • The former is easy to translate to the Gunstar, the latter is probably a pass as is.
• “The people of Kamak don’t see themselves as rich. They see the folk of other nations as poor. This is when they think of others at all—they are as parochial as any people, and they are more distant from other nations than is common even among the widely-distributed nations of the Octet.”
• “On an individual level, foreigners deride Kamak’s people as lazy, effete and decadent. The Kamaki obsession with privacy comes across as arrogance, while their subdued religious practices suggest an atheistic streak.”
• “Whereas Alchemicals in larger nations are rarely-seen figures, Kamak’s surfeit of Champions combines with its low population to render them commonplace. They are viewed with respect but not awe. Most citizens interact with an Alchemical sooner or later; many Tripartite members have close—or even intimate—contact with various Champions.”
• Gunstar: “Innovation is encouraged and rewarded, with stipends of magical materials and exotic reagents paid out to those whose designs and inventions hold promise for the Realm’s future. It is said that even the humblest mortal savants may live in the same splendor and opulence as their Exalted rulers, if they have the talent and genius to earn it.”

Physical Descriptions

• “A funicular as large as an apartment block hums softly as it descends a precipitous eighty-degree slope of ice-crusted brass and steel. Its cloaked Populat passengers sit in warm, comfortable booths, lowering their muffling scarves to sip from mugs of hot kaff as they peer out through the funicular’s broad, tinted windows. Outside, beams of light leap from the funicular’s lamps to illuminate the veils of snow falling from above. Blue flashes flicker distantly, their source hid-den in the icy mists—lightning, perhaps, or a firefight with Estasian raiders.
• Of all the Eight Nations, Kamak may fall farthest from the norm. Its orbit through the Reaches is the most eccentric, taking it into the coldest zones of the Pole of Metal; this also gives it access to the largest deposits of the magical materials outside of Xexas and Loran, making it the richest nation in the Octet. The Kamaki are a people of extremes, ruled by their code of privacy in public, while privately obsessed with family and romantic love. They are an uncouth enigma to the other nations, isolated by wealth and pride.”
• “Where other nations are comprised of rounded or tubular chambers that run parallel or perpendicular to gravity, Kamak’s chambers are both unusually shaped and laid at odd angles, like a fistful of three-dimensional puzzle pieces tossed into a jumbled heap. Shapes range from regular polyhedra to kinked and twisted tubes to amorphous, irregular spaces. Sizes likewise vary, with shafts fifty miles long situated alongside cysts less than a mile in diameter. Their conjunctions often lead to mild temblors.
• Flat horizontal surfaces rarely occur naturally in Kamak. Most of those which exist have been engineered into that shape over the millennia. Some of the nation’s settlements stand atop slick metal summits or saddle-back ridges; others cling to narrow ledges or jut out from escarpments. Still others are spread across multiple ledges or outcroppings, connected by swaying metal bridges. But most lie embedded within the nation’s walls: networks of corridors and chambers built of concrete and steel, tucked away from the cold and the winds and the stark cliffs and chasms.
• Sophisticated trams and funicular lines run across the icy slopes and through miles of illuminated tunnels, steam rising from their heated tracks. Obelisks of red jade three meters tall, their surfaces inlaid with convoluted thaumaturgical sigils of orichalcum, hover above settlements and stopping points, emitting zones of warmth to stave off the encircling cold.”
• “Kamak is the coldest of the Eight Nations. Its course through the Reaches takes it through areas whose temperature often drops well below freezing. When combined with water vapor ejected from steam conduits, this makes it the only nation whose larger chambers are subject to snowfall.
• Unlike Creation, Kamak has no regular seasonal cycle. Temperatures change erratically as the nation moves through the body of the Machine God. Nonetheless, its people divide its climactic variations into three seasons. “Warm season” encompasses those times when the temperature is above freezing. Sometimes these periods are actually warm, or even hot, but they never last for more than a few months. “Snow season” encompasses times when the air is cold and dry; breath steams in the air, while frost crackles on metal and glass. Worst is “ice season,” when rime and freezing rain encrust every exposed surface with ice.
• In settled areas and along thoroughfares, red jade obelisks and steam conduits are employed to alleviate the worst of the cold. Surfaces that need to be kept free of ice—such as tram tracks, walkways, stairs, ladder rungs, door frames, and the like—are typically warmed with an Essence-charged mesh of red jade alloy embedded in a layer of corrugated artificial rubber.”
• “The nation’s irregular cycle of freezing and thawing damages exposed surfaces—whether concrete, metal, rubber or plastic—by broadening existing cracks and fissures. As a result, fix beetles and other biomechanoids are more prevalent here than in other nations. They boil out from the Reaches just after significant temperature changes, swarming into Kamak’s nation-chambers to repair damaged surfaces and subsystems, and are often so agitated that they can overcome minor wards against their presence. Kamak’s townsfolk know to stay indoors in swarming weather. Whenever possible, Kamaki regulators lure invaders into contact with biomechanoid swarms, and Octet generals know that a protracted siege of a Kamaki city risks being caught by swarming weather.”
• “Kamaki architecture is plain and subdued. Metal and concrete are left bare or painted in muted grays and blues. Structures go unadorned except for essential informational glyphs and simple, understated architectural motifs—stylized gears, huge bronze masks depicting the austere, emotionless visage of the Maker, and the like. The propaganda posters and murals found in other nations are conspicuously absent. Only the ubiquitous red jade obelisks splash the scene with color. There are exceptions, such as grandiose administrative buildings and ostentatiously ornamented Sodality chapterhouses. But most Kamaki facades convey little and conceal much.”
• “Entering a Kamaki dormitory commune is like going from night into day. The interior of a commune is a warm, brightly lit place, painted in vivid colors not to be seen outdoors. Furniture is ornate; floors are covered with plush carpet or elaborate parquet tile; walls are hung with jewel-toned reproductions of great paintings and murals from across the Octet.”
• “Kamak’s wealth and luxury is apparent in its distribution of living space. Rather than being crammed by the dozens into cramped barracks, the rank and file of the Populat dwell in dormitory communes. A commune is a block of four apartments surrounding a central courtyard. Each two-room apartment is as large as that inhabited by foremen or shift chiefs in other nations, and may accommodate anywhere from four to eight people, depending on their status.
• The courtyard itself is a shared space for spending time with one’s neighbors and for local social and religious events. Even larger than any of the surrounding apartments, its walls blaze with vivid murals and its floor shines with bright mosaics. Communal property shared by everyone living in the commune, such as small vehicles, snow shovels, cleaning equipment and emergency food and water storage tanks, are placed in small sheds at the corners.
• Social outcasts among the Lumpen are reassigned from their communes to special Lumpen-only public dormitories. There they experience the lack of privacy—both from being crowded in with their peers and from being surveilled by animating intelligences and regulators—that is normal to the Populat in other nations.”
• “Kamak’s eateries are as luxurious as its accommodations. Public commissaries are smaller and cozier than those in other nations, resembling coffeehouses more than cafeterias. Food is procured from banks of automats and consumed at small booths, allowing citizens to dine with a minimum of social interaction while observing adjoining corridors or avenues through windows of one-way glass.
• Mochi and beverages, dispensed in self-heating containers, are available from vending machines in isolated areas. This gives travelers opportunity to eat and drink when weather impedes their journey. The use of such machines is on an honor system, though regulators have been known to surveil the devices to stop vandals, while preceptors do the same to harangue gluttons.”
• Gunstar: “Kamak traces out the widest orbit of the Eight Nations, circling through the mineral-rich edges of the Pole of Metal in accordance with the Solar Deliberative’s designs. Kamaki citizens oversee the largest mining operations in all the Realm, directing swarms of arachnid harvester-automatons or operating magitech excavation machinery. Hover-skiffs and hydraulic trams transport materials by the ton to the other nations, feeding the coffers of the Realm and the Gunstar Defense Line. Even after the steep taxes imposed by the Solar Deliberative, there is plenty left over for the Kamaki, supporting such luxuries as the nation’s sky mantis grid and clockwork servitors.”
• Gunstar: “But Kamak’s riches are not without their cost. As the nation drifts along the outermost edge of the Pole of Metal, it is the most vulnerable of the Octet to demonic incursions. Stellar behemoths or deva swarms have invaded the nation through access hatches and spatial portals on the Gunstar’s exterior, while direct fire from hellstar battleships have threatened to breach the exterior hull that shelters Kamak from the deadly void of space. Workers caught in these incursions find themselves fending off monsters with little more than mining equipment and industrial tools, one-sided engagements that all too often end in mortal bloodshed. The Solar Deliberative has commissioned a disproportionate number of Gunstar Defense Line bases in Kamak to safeguard their greatest source of magical materials, and the clarions of the Immaculate Dragon Aeries have become a familiar sound to the nation’s citizens.”

Cities

Ein: 'The Web' (Metropolis, Starmetal caste?)

• “Hanging in midair where a dozen mile-wide diagonal shafts come together, the metropolis of Ein resembles a starmetal egg snared in a steelweaver’s web. It’s anchored by slim, graceful buttresses that stretch out in all directions, with pneumatic trams and funiculars gliding silently atop them. Cables strung alongside crackle a brilliant blue as they carry lightning to and fro. In cold weather, the lightning burns frost away amid gouts of steam. Yards-long icicles gather underneath the buttresses and beneath the city-heart. Every so often, an icicle breaks free with a thunderous crack and plunges into the freezing fog that swirls through the abyss below.
• Ein is the nation’s heart and its monument. As rich as the rest of the nation is, Ein is richer. Corridors are wider and brighter; housing is larger and better-appointed. The architecture is less subdued, more intricate, more baroque, with every façade gilded with flamboyant glyphs made from magical materials. Personal vehicles and automatons are more prevalent and more impressively built. Even the food is of higher quality, being prepared by Gulaki-trained chefs in a variety of styles.”
  • Ugh...Like Wisant, goes on in great detail with emphasis on great. p. 76. Seriously, read it.

Trantec: 'The Black Height' (Patropolis, Jade caste?)

• “The immense, gloomy nation-chamber that contains the patropolis of Trantec is over fifty miles long, eight miles wide and nearly three miles high. Its brass-webbed steel floor follows a shallow grade that is deeply etched and grooved. Conduits run along many of these grooves; others are beds for running water in warm weather—or thick with ice when the cold comes.
• The patropolis himself rises from the slope to the distant chamber roof as a vast, twisted pillar of dull black metal threaded with a dimly-glowing matrix of dark red jade. A handful of airships travel to and from his high-altitude docking posts, serving in turn as cargo vessels, rescue boats and sentinels. His mile-thick wings sweep out to either side, forming a rampart extending from one wall of the chamber to the other. These wings hum with power and industry as they tap the hundreds of conduits running through the chamber. This power is supplemented in warm season as meltwater spins turbines linked to hydroenergetic dynamos.”
  • p. 77, read all of it.

Idasna: Ground zero for the Coldheart Plague.

• “Tucked away in a tunnel network between two of the nation’s irregular chambers, Idasna—like many other Autochthonian towns—has no exterior structures. The settlement consists of several dozen rooms of various sizes and shapes linked by a maze of confined corridors. A vertical shaft lined with conduits runs through the middle of the town; at one of the town’s edges, the corridors debouch onto catwalks running along one wall of a huge space packed full of thaumetabolic engines lined with prayer consoles. The town’s public areas are painted in bland, forgettable shades of ivory and pale blue, in sharp contrast to the vivid colors found inside its communes.
• But for all that Idasna looks like a typical Kamaki town, it is not. Something has gone wrong with its citizens. Out-side their homes, they are as cold and distant as might be expected in Kamak. But inside their communes, where they should be open and animated, they’re still cold and distant. Aloof. Empty. There is something missing from the people of Idasna, something essentially human that has been taken from them. Worse, though, is that people from elsewhere in Kamak who visit Idasna as a part of their duties are likewise coming back changed.”
  • Ehhhhhhhhh.

People of Note

Kedemna: Populat director of Ein.

• Compassionate and driven, loved by the population. Dude loves to bang though, and Kamak is not very open on that front in marriages. Now he's being blackmailed with proof.
  • Probably not something worth translating, though it is a mentality to keep in mind in Kamak.

Tuk'tanorn: Master surgeon is Ein.

• Finds exile wasteful and murderous, and is testing implants to irreversibly rehabilitate criminal minds.
  • ...Wasn't this also Xefin's thing? Good thing we can just combine them in Gunstar if we use them at all.

Ragni Star-Bear: Overseer of Defense Line in Kamak (in Gunstar), Dawn Caste.

• “She has little patience for the softness and cowardice she sees in Kamaki culture. If she had her druthers, the entire nation would be placed under permanent martial law, and damn the complaining of Twilights back in Hadal. For now, she settles for making her will known through the oppressive presence of her Dragon-Blooded peacekeepers, keeping the fat bureaucrats and absent-minded savants in line with her martinet discipline.”
  • Good thing she has nothing to jumpstart her coup.

Vars Meelak: Sub-director of some city in Kamak.

• JUST a sub-director. (also I guess he loses the last name? Autochthonians.)

Fovek: Autocrat of Trantec.

• Chick who was saved from an airship wreck by extensive prosthetics, more machine than human. Her wife is worried she's suffering from Clarity.
  • Kinda weak hook in general?

Avri: Plutarch-Consul in Trantec.

• Promoted quickly due to being married to Excellent Inquisitive Analyst, and ultimately beyond his competence. Analyst is sure he will get into his role in time, and helps him in subtle ways until then. But as trouble arises, she will be less available and he will have more room for mistakes.
  • Kamak doesn't have the strongest hooks!

Excellent Inquisitive Analyst: 'Haunted Incarnation,' Starmetal Caste of Trantec.

• “Analyst’s previous incarnation was that of Radura, a tiny research patropolis in an isolated corner of Kamak. Eight years ago, Radura unexpectedly destroyed himself and his scientist-citizens in a conflagration of lightning and raw Essence. The devastation was thorough; only Radura’s soulgem survived, heavily scarred but intact. Analyst cannot recall the end of Radura’s life nor the cause of his suicide. Dwelling on her opaque past, she grows more troubled with each passing day. Was Radura acting to save Kamak from a disaster his researcher-citizens were about to unwittingly unleash? Or did he go mad—and if so, might Analyst share his madness?”
  • I stand corrected.

Brilliance of Shadow: 'Living Ghost,' Adamant Caste of Kamak's Reaches.

• Pretty standard five hundred-year-old Adamant caste – he wanders around in a number of disguises, but finds the loneliness of being himself too much.
  • Another not so strong hook.

Eternally Vigilant Bell: Explorer of the Reaches, Jade caste.

• Bell was Exalted only a few years ago, when the government realized that other nations are aching for resources far worse than Kamak. She holds no illusions of solving the problem herself though, instead willingly to be the instrument through which it is worked.
• “For now, she trains groups of Populat volunteers in combat and small-group fighting tactics and leads frequent expeditions into the Reaches. Bell has discovered a passion for exploration, and her mining groups are consistently among the nation’s most productive.
• All of Bell’s former incarnations lived among the ranks of the Populat, and she feels a sense of kinship with her volunteers. Moreover, she’s slightly uncomfortable around high-ranking members of the Tripartite. With no memories on which to draw to empathize with their elevated position, she sometimes finds herself feeling that her own high station is some sort of fluke or mistake. Her mining groups are fiercely loyal and take great pride in their association with the young Jade Caste, to the point that a few have been reprimanded by their factory supervisors for undue arrogance.”
• She fears that it is only a matter of time before another nation attacks for resources, and that her closeness to her crew would make her a poor commander, unwilling to endanger them.
  • “Bell is relatively short, standing less than five and a half feet tall. Her force of personality and great charisma make up for the fact that she often has to look up to address her soldiers. Her skin carries a light green tint, and ice-blue eyes peer out from beneath a shock of short, flame-red hair. She’s one of the more immediately recognizable Alchemicals of Kamak. Bell covers her externally visible Charms with jade armor in order to minimize the impact of her implants on her outward appearance. Since she broke up with her last lover, a young plutarch, she has become acutely aware of the artificiality of her body and does her best to downplay it. She wields the storied beamklave Final Division in combat.”