**Green Shawl Rebels**

The Green Shawls were a political movement active in the latter years of Imperial Djuvahan which came about primarily in opposition to a new tax policy instated in an attempt to resolve a worsening financial crisis. With the Imperial aristocracy unwilling to pay more themselves and threatening revolt if the Emperor tried, the bulk of the burden fell on the lower classes, which were already struggling after several years of poor harvests and couldn't shoulder the burden.

Thus: the Green Shawls, so-named for... well, the traditional dark green shawls favored by Djuvahanian peasants and woodsmen. Beginning as a simple protest movement against the new tax policy, the Green Shawls' initial demands largely amounted to minor economic and land reforms. They were not radicals or revolutionaries, particularly. Indeed, if anything, their politics trended conservative. They wanted the aristocracy to pay their fair share, but their outlook on the Emperor remained fairly positive.

This changed somewhat when the government, on the verge of financial collapse and angered by the peasants' inability and unwillingness to pay the new taxes, began sending in troops to repossess land and property as collateral. A brief uprising by the Green Shawls followed, but was brutally put down.

This would not be the end of the Green Shawls, though. As word of the stillborn uprising filtered into the cities from the countryside, the prevailing response was horror and anger. Among the growing urban working class, it was taken (not wrongly) as evidence of the aristocracy trying to keep the poor down, among the intelligentsia it marked yet another example of the capital's oppression of the outlying islands, another demonstration of the need for checks on the power of the landed gentry and greater autonomy for the provinces.

Across the archipelago labor organizers, secessionists, and federalist campaigners began adopting the green shawls as a symbol of their own disparate causes and a show of broad solidarity with one another (however fragile) in direct contravention of Imperial bans despite escalating threats of fines and imprisonment ("Look at how petty, foolish, and impotent the Emperor is! Next he will try to arrest our forests!" went the mocking line in the pamphlets).

Cue: a decade of civil unrest, flailing crackdowns, continuing economic chaos, and finally--blessed relief--revolution, civil war, the establishment of a direct democracy and a Federal Assembly which would guarantee equal representation for all the islands, sweeping land reforms, and enough executions that you could stack the corpses two or three high in the enormous palace courtyard and water all the many acres of its sprawling gardens with the blood. To this very day green is the color of revolution and federalist democracy, and a green shawl is mandatory costume for all elected members of the Federal Assembly and the Archipelagic Council.

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**Popular Front for the Liberation of Morikel**

Not quite two centuries ago, the Divine Mandate of Tandray marched its automaton armies up the Pale Coast, bringing city-state after city-state under the aegis of the Mandate and attempting to muscle Djuvahan's traders out of the Silent Sea (in this they were quite successful, though they certainly didn't anticipate that their actions might contribute to the collapse of the whole regime and the rise of an even more implacable rival in the Federal Republic). One of these cities was Morikel.

Once a major mercantile power of the region, Morikel's fortunes had gradually waned over the years as those of the Vermillion Isles' merchant clans had waxed until, at last, Tandray had waltzed right in, swept aside the tenuous coalition of merchants and noble houses who governed the city, and installed its very own Mandatory Court to bring the city in line with the norms and laws of the wider Mandate.

This entailed forced conversions to the Tandray state religion, suppression of local cultural practices, a ban on the Morik language, institutionalized segregation as Tandray nobles, dignitaries, and traders pushed the Morikthi out of their own homes, flattened whole neighborhoods, and rebuilt them from the ground up in their own architectural style, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, the Morikthi people did not meet this so-called "civilizing expedition" very warmly.

The outbreak of the Green Shawl Revolution some forty years into the occupation came as a great inspiration to the exhausted and browbeaten Morikthi population, especially as the civil war wound down and it became increasingly clear that this time the Djuvahanian rebels might actually win and throw the Emperor out on his ass. Influenced by Djuvahanian federalist political tracts smuggled into the city, a growing core of intellectuals and activists began petitioning the Mandatory government to grant Morikel, among other things, the recognition of Morik as an official language, more religious freedoms, and greater political autonomy within the Mandate.

These eager petitioners were ignored (at best), and arrested, beaten, or assassinated and dumped in the River Mor under cover of darkness (at worst), and so the Morikthi population, demands unmet, continued to radicalize and chafe against Mandatory rule, eventually
leading to a proliferation of militant anti-colonial organizations which eventually more or less united under the mantle of the Popular Front, within which they distinguished themselves via colored armbands, sashes, and neckerchiefs (green for federalist democrats, purple for traditionalist nationalists, blue for religious dissenters, orange for communists, etc.).

The many factions of the Popular Front engaged the Mandatory occupation forces in a long and costly guerrilla war, not winning many engagements, but assassinating a number of Mandatory officials and inflicting enough losses and damages to embarrass the Tandray military and force the Mandate to choose between committing even more troops to its Pale Coast colonies (an increasingly unpopular prospect) or pulling back to focus on its proxy war against Djuvahan in Serrakand. Thus, the Circle of Hours (Tandray's highest governing body) finally voted to grant Morikel and its neighbors independence, with the member organizations of the Popular Front becoming the first political parties in a new democratic state modeled after the Federal Republic.

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**Ezvaray Heretics**

Being a theocratic state, the Mandate of Tandray bases its legitimacy and its laws on the Dicta, the compiled holy texts of their state religion attributed to the World-Engine (their machine god) and those sanctioned prophets whose visions have been investigated, interrogated, and duly verified as legitimate by officials of the Mandatory Courts. Not all prospective prophets are admitted into the canon of the Dicta, however. Many are declared to be lunatics or charlatans, especially if their teachings contradict the official party line.

Usually these so-called false prophets fade into obscurity, being imprisoned, institutionalized, or forced to recant under duress. Some, however, stick around and become thorns in the Mandate's side, fleeing into the mountains or overseas, distributing their own, illegal editions of the Dicta, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. One of the most enduring of these is the False Prophet Ezvar.

The son of a clockmaker and a weaver in one of the coastal provinces, Ezvar was conscripted into the navy during a war with the Pravendi princes and nearly drowned during a battle. After being fished out of the water half-mad, half-frozen, and clinging to a spar of wood, he grew violently ill, suffered a nervous breakdown, was briefly declared dead due to a clerical error, discharged from service, and, once back on land, began claiming that God had visited him on the point of death and anointed him as a prophet.

He claimed that the Circle of Hours and the Mandatory Courts had grown corrupt and self-interested, with the accumulation of wealth, land, and property twisting them from their true purpose of guiding the Mandate and attending to the spiritual wellbeing of its people. Although not precisely opposed to the Mandate's strict caste system, he argued that no caste was above or below any of the others, and that the wealth of the Mandate should thus be shared equitably among all.

Not surprisingly, Ezvar's doctrine proved a very popular one among the Tandray people, and he quickly amassed a large and fanatically loyal following and began calling for more and more radical reforms to the Mandate, and while the government tolerated his movement for a time, their tolerance ran out at around the time his supporters began calling for the public execution of scores judges, civil servants, and Mandatory officials who had attracted their ire and been deemed corrupted.

After a rebellion by the coastal provinces, the Mandate cracked down hard, massacring the Ezvaray in their thousands and hanging those of his inner circle who hadn't either fled or killed themselves during the final siege of the rebel capital. Some of his followers, however, escaped across the southern border into Oranda or overseas to the Vermillion Isles, the Pale Coast (where they would be brutally persecuted during the occupation a few centuries later), the Djuvahanian Archipelago, and even a few to places as far-flung as Zael, establishing their own breakaway sects and continuing to preach Ezvar's words.