Remedial Ravenloft: Garancia

Before - No one expects the Spanish Inquisition to get totally left out of a setting that calls itself Gothic, but there it was, left out.  I suspect that it was Satanic Panic hangover and the notion that putting a Domain in that evoked the Spanish Inquisition would upset the Catholics upset at D&D because Spanish Inquisition and the Protestants upset at D&D because Catholics (and yeah, this was the 80s so Protestants who thought Catholics were Mary-worshipping heretics of questionable loyalty to America were still around in numbers, before anti-choice policies brought them all together).

After - The Spanish Inquisition gives not one straggly fuck if you expect it or not, you're still getting a turn in the scavenger's daughter.

Where is it - A nominal kingdom (actual theocracy) located on a peninsula in the southwest corner of the Core.

Technical Advancement - Technology is unevenly spread in Garancia; while the cities and the military enjoy technology close to contemporary to the rest of the Core (equivalent to western Europe, mid 18th Century CE), the countryside gets by on advancements that can range to centuries behind.
Supernatural Advancement - Officially there is none in Garancia.  That said, members of the church are often accomplished occultists.  The church also enslaves those found with psychic abilities, particularly clairvoyants and telepaths and presses them into service as witch finders.  Traffic in any extra-normal ability is a crime in Garancia punishable by death or induction into the witchfinders, depending on the ability.  Three guesses who gets off easier.

The Land - Garancia is surrounded by water on three sides, and has three smallish coastal mountain ranges, covered in rainy forest on the ocean side.  Inland is a low-lying drier plain, broken up by birch, cork oak and pin forests.  Terrain gets slightly hillier in the center.  Granacians are packed within or around the ancient castles and fortresses; larger cities often incorporate more than one castle into their land.  Cathedrals dominate the cityscapes, and the ones in the larger cities are all larger themselves grander than even the grand cathedrals in Dementlieu and Borca.  Garancian architecture is designed to intimidate and no wall over 30 feet tall goes without a suspended cage.  Public squares are dominated by instruments of torture, some built into the architecture as a grim decoration, some fully functional and perhaps in use at any given point in the day.  Garance has a weird fixation on the gaunt and attenuated human form in their art and architecture as well, and at least two suffering stone figures will be silently entreating you for mercy from any angle you choose to look in the poulous areas.  Richard Riddick might have gone a different way.

The People - Garancians expect the inquisition.  They expect the hell out of it.  The church has gone to great lengths to isolate each individual from community, family and friends, and it's created a strongly reactionary and suspicous culture.  Garancia is currently suffering from the same kind of population decline that Falkovnia has been suffering and for similar reasons - people do not trust one another enough to have children together, let alone raise them.  The church's practice of widespread oblation motivates parents to keep their children well out of sight, if they cannot have them in secret, and Garancia's cities, in particular appear to be utterly without children.  Oblates are raised by the church in similar environments of suspicion, informancy and backstabbing.  The army is just as bad.  Garancians range from olive to fair skin, though much darker skin tones are common along the border with Valachan, and pointed ears along the borders of Sithicus and Kartakas.  Garancians speak Cuervo and follow the Garancian Ezraist church with all their heart and soul in intense, white knuckled devotion because the other option is getting the penitant's pear.  Granacian culture has also become deeply, deeply chauvanist in the last generation or two, which many attribute to the Archbishop's own personal misogyny.
Wag's Eye View - Ezra said that life was pain, they decided it wasn't painful enough, and their company is almost as bad as the things their priests dream up to scare them.

The Boring Stuff - Garancia is a monarchy, they even have a king and queen and a royal family, and sometimes the Archbishop even lets the king sign his name on things that the Archbishop had written for him to sign.  The country is, in fact, a totalitarian theocracy controlled by the Ezraist Archbishop and his cabinet.  Whether it is actually the Archbishop in charge or a member of the cabinet (because it might be the Chief Patriarch of the Inquisition).  Almost all social order, maintenance and justice is administered directly by the church.  There is a fairly large noble class who handle some of the commerce and, in theory, administer the army, but, in practice, they are almost exclusively employed in turning one another in to the Inquisition to increase personal holdings and discipline in the army has decayed to the point that the church and, really, anyone who feels they need people to fight for them, employ foreign mercenery companies.  Recently, a lot of the ones in service to the Church have come from Falkovnia, a development that makes no one nervous.  Not at all.  Garancia has a great climate for agriculture and rich soil and they export a lot of food, rivaling Falkvonia in their exports (again with Falkovnia... I wonder if there is anything going on there).  Garancian-employed merceneries have made some small-scale raids on neighboring Valachan and Kartakas (and probably Sithicus, not that anyone in Sithicus would let any other nations know), but those were just mistakes.  Really.  We swear.  Die, heathens.

It's What You Oughtn't to Do, but You Do Anyway - Garancia's recent history centers on the struggle between the previous queen (sort of a distant cousin to the current king) and the archbishop, which took the form of years of maneuvers and counters as the queen fought a desperate holding action against the Archbishop's growing power and the sickness that had plagued her since childhood and was slowly killing her.  I don't expect the fact that the Archbishop won that race and that the queen's execution (public, burning, preceded by the sort of treatment the Inquisition has become famous for) is the frontrunner for events that brought the kingdom to the Mists.  In a way, it's almost boring; utterly predictable.  Where it gets interesting from our point of view is in figuring out what religion was the archbishop archbishop of?

The current Grancian church is Ezraist, with a scripture that is based on the Borcan church but heavily edited by, we presume the Archbishop himself.  In fact, new editions with further changes and refinements of the Ezraist faith in Garancia come out every couple of years, and aren't you expected to know it.  Preaching from last year's scriptures will ... well I won't say it will get you burned faster than anything else, becuase the Inqisition likes to take its sweet, sweet time with errant priests, but it will get you burned.  The thing is that, any serious scholarship on Ezraism reveals that it's a religion utterly fabricated, in a number of different Domains at different times, it can be utterly ahistorical, or, at least the histories of Domains tend to range between cheerfully ignorant of Ezraism to downright contradictory, claiming an entirely different religion (or differently characterized religion) held sway (though extant holy texts that predate any given Domain's arrival in the Realm are suspicously and conspicuously absent).  With Garancia, it's hard to tell, since just about every word written to paper which is not the Archbishop's latest and greatest gets thrown in the fire (often along with the writers), but if Ezraism is, likewise, a post-induction addition to the kingdom, then the Archbishop would have, logically, been cognizant of it, and likely the only religious scholar to have survived with any chance of having remembered.  None of the other Domains that birthed a branch of Ezraism are or ever seemed to be particularly religious, and very few if any who were alive at the time of induction survive to this day.  Sadly, it seems that the Archbishop hates scholarship slightly less than he hates women, and slightly more than he hates everything else in the world and not in the world, so any insight he might possess into Ezraism and the rise thereof is probably never going to be ours.

The Darklord Could be... Well, the obvious choice the Archbishop Juan-Miguel Celadaron de Constancia.  The kingdom, if not the Domain is certainly bent to his warped ego, he has made each and every man, woman and child in Granacia as alienated and suspicious as he is, if not as hateful (and more often than not, as hateful).  He's also over a century old, which is kind of telling, especially since he looks to be in his 60s, but then, a lot of his cabinet were well into three digits even before induction; sorcery is pretty common in the higher offices of the church.

Run All Day, Run All Night, Keep Your Dirty Feelings Deep Inside - Garancia doesn't have a lot to offer the adventurer other than a turn on the rack and a toss in the fire, but it has become a popular place for important people to send their enemies.  It turns out that keeping an entire country under the level of repression that the Archbishop's ego seems to require is extremely expensive, and so opening up one's torture chambers to those willing to pay a premium to put people there has become a popular revenue generator.  And for every market, as the graverobber reminds us, there is an opportunity for adventurers to generate revenue sneaking in and retrieving the people sent in.  Preferably before they are broken.  If one is too late, there are rumors of a very well-hidden and cagey coven of Hala witches who know how to restore the psyche (to an extent, at least) of someone broken completely by torture.

Closing the Borders - The Archbishop keeps the borders closed as often and as long as he can as a matter of course and has the comparatively small land border locked down under fortifications, but keeping the border shut seems to tire him out, eventually, and it's only then that even those on official business can leave Garancia.  When the borders are closed, the smoke and screams from all the people burned to death fills the air, getting thicker as one tries to move into the mountains to Kartakas or Sithicus.  The smoke eventually blots out all sight and asphixiates anyone trying to leave. Those who have found protection from the smoke report that, eventually, it's just a curtain of flame, destroying anything it touches.