Maqeti Ideas

Traditions
yes May Raid Coasts
+1 Naval Combat Bonus off owned coast

Island Of The FreeFew peoples know the echo of the whipcrack as well as the Maqeti. Practically every citizen of Dasmatuš has family across the water, still under the yoke of the gnolls, or else maintains a family history of enslaved ancestors. From the green-hemmed bricks of the freight docks to the lantern room of the Aqtara lighthouse, almost everything standing on the island was built by freedmen or their direct descendants.\n\nThus, though men may grow as influential and wealthy in Dasmatuš as anywhere else, the Maqeti revile slavery and the lottery of birth, and have great respect for physical labour and toil. They observe no castes like the Raheni, no hierarchy between lightbearing races like the New Sun Cult, no ossified hereditary aristocracy. Among the human peoples of wider Bulwar, they are stereotyped for their bluntness and lack of niceties, but also for their honesty, directness and tenacity.
-10% Advisor Cost

Heirs of MaqetMorningbringer, Noonbasker, Chainbreaker; Maqet’s exodus in 930 still dominates the cultural memory of the people named for him. Centuries later, statesmen and rabble-rousers make constant reference to his example and exhort their followers in his name. Both Dasmati court politics and public discourse maintain an ongoing debate over the legacy and intent of Maqet and his son Dasma.\n\nIndeed, in a country famed for its lack of hierarchy, a single exception has been made for Maqet’s sprawling cast of descendents. It is the only family tree that is publicly tracked, and to fraudulently claim descent from Maqet is a capital offence. A direct heir and representative of Maqet, the Dasmati Akal is popularly perceived to embody the national character and even freedom itself. He is cast as a defender of the many against the power of the wealthy merchant class, who are stained by association with the nemesis-figure of the Raheni slave trader.
+2 Tolerance of the True Faith

Maqet's ChosenFor almost three hundred years, beginning in the thirteenth century, Dasmati raider squadrons sacked coastal towns all across the Raheni Gulf. In the process they freed hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. The freedmen crews who sailed these ships were notorious for their ferocity and mercilessness, adopting a policy of zero tolerance that went far beyond the customary rules of maritime warfare and involved the wholesale slaughter of any free crew found aboard slaver ships. Feted as heroes, these raiders were, over time, incorporated into the formal military as amphibious shock infantry.
+25% Marines Force Limit
+20% Chance to Capture Enemy Ships

The Garden FortressLike their distant Bulwari cousins, the Dasmati hold formal gardens as almost a prerequisite for civilised society. Dasmati garden design has over the last few centuries diverged from the Bulwari mainstream, emphasising high walls and private gardens within the home. Decoration on street-facing walls is limited to murals, usually in a dark red-and-white colour scheme known as birmi, though the rich find myriad ways to squeeze innovation and beauty from this limited palette. For those allowed across the sturdy threshold of a Dasmati home, a paradise garden awaits, faithfully tended even in the most modest of tenements.\n\nIn place of the many public gardens of cities like Brasan, Dasmatuš has just a single enormous park encompassing the entirety of Lašni Hill. While officially a mausoleum complex for the Dasmati Akals, it is not a place of grief or sadness. Instead, the Dasmati venerate their ancestral rulers through recreation - the laughter of children, the murmured conversation of lovers and the gentle splashing of the pleasure pools is finer than any chorale.
+10% Fort Defence
-5% Development Cost

Chainbreaker TacticsDasmati naval strategy evolved continually in response to generally larger and better-funded Raheni powers, and increasingly came to focus on mass manoeuvre of narrow cannonboats and mage-staffed saboteur ships. Aiming to reduce casualties among the enslaved as much as possible, Dasmati tactics focused on destroying sails and targeting the abovedecks to thin the crew, then coming in fast and boarding en-masse. These tactics, combined with a policy of automatic enlistment for all ship-slaves willing to defect, meant that Dasmatuš never experienced the kind of chronic manpower shortages or piloting skill gaps that forced press gangs in other navies.
+10% Galley Combat Ability

Legacy Of KerusahThe clash at Kerusah was the single largest battle of a decades-long low-level conflict with the slaver states of the Gulf, referred to in Dasmatuš as Attin Ehar, "the grinding years". In the late summer of 1426, after a year of raiding campaigns on the Raheni slave-road in Dreksaret, the main force of the Dasmati army found itself cut off far inland with limited supplies. Realising that there was no realistic route west towards home, the Dasmati marched directly north towards the coast, voluntarily engaging a force almost twice the size of their own. They would withstand constant assault for almost fourteen hours.\n\nFirst, the Dasmati rebuffed a series of elephant charges, deploying successive layers of palings to gruesome effect. When that failed, the slavers attempted to use their numbers to swallow the Dasmati from the flanks, only to choke on the effort. The Dasmati, having resigned themselves to a last stand, inflicted heavy casualties and freed almost three thousand men.
-10% Shock Damage Received

UnyieldingThe final gnollish assault on Dasmatuš was fought uphill through narrow, winding streets in the middle of a punishing storm season in late 1733. The few veterans left organised the population into neighbourhood groups that built barricades, collapsed buildings onto major throughways and raided the invaders incessantly.\n\nIt took the gnoll armies more than a week to make their way a mile and a half from the Aqtara to the tomb of Dasma. Maqeti mages booby-trapped rats with explosive sigils and let them loose to run back towards the docks where the gnolls had made their camps. The entire water supply downstream of the Inner Lock was deliberately contaminated with corpses and then polluted with toxic reddish tattav-root dye, poisoning hundreds. When the gnolls finally pushed through the final line of defences, they were confronted with a mass suicide on the mausoleum steps. The Maqeti, the Dasmati, died free.
-0.02 Monthly War Exhaustion

Ambition
+10% Global Trade Power