Huddles, Part 1 (Fermi Resolution)

Working on this in case we make an upcoming stretch goal for The Fermi Resolution Worldbook.

Huddles

The Universal Dominion does not have towns, and it only has one city (Grand Moingoana, squatting on what was once the blameless city of Des Moines, Iowa). The basic political unit of the Dominion is the Tower, which are to Sephiroths as baronies are to duchies. Sephiroths are self-sufficient, with no external trade, very little internal trade, and only a limited need for industry. Their only real exports are tribute shipments to Grand Moingoana. Even their agricultural capacity was deliberately kept low, as a form of population control. All of this means that the usual conditions that produce towns are simply absent in the Universal Dominion. 

What they had and have instead are huddles: collections of shacks and hovels with just enough associated farmland to keep the population mostly alive in any given year. A huddle was usually large enough to support spinners and blacksmiths, but metal in particular was extremely difficult to acquire. There were no roads, and no trade; huddles were dependent on whatever raw materials their magical overlords deigned to toss at them, or what they could themselves dig out of the ground. The Dominion avoided putting huddles on the site of an Old American town or city, but even the foundations of a long-vanished house can have useful metals in them.

Life in a huddle was typically miserable, stunted, and unrewarding. The population was expected to keep themselves alive, stay where they were, speak English in a way that Dominion mages could understand, and hand over any babies with magical potential. Aside from that, they were ignored.

Well, until the Dominion needed raw materials. The unpleasant truth is that huddles were largely human farms, deliberately placed out in the woods and surrounded by monsters. When the Dominion needed slaves for a particular purpose, they’d take what they needed from a huddle. If they took too many people? Well: there were other huddles. Every so often Dominion breeders would collect a few young people from other huddles, and transport them to one that had lost its population. The system was wildly inefficient and hideously cruel, but then: so was the Universal Dominion.

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