Sutherland National Worldbuilding

---

---

CAPITAL and largest city - Eamont (district population: 15,504,491)
Population - 139,723,686 (Census 2020)
Area - 687,617.96km² (265,405.56mi²)
Official languages - Atlish, Rosalian and Beiran, Cumbric
Demonym - Sutheran, Sutherlander
Religion - No religion (66%), Messianism (31%, of which 16.5% Amendist, 14.5% Courantist), Other (3%)

Government type - Federal semi-presidential constitutional democratic republic
President - Aleixo Correira-Rhodes (Labour)
Prime Minister - John Blake Sagan (Labour)
Legislature - Almoot
Premiers - Various, 41
Judiciary - Highhall
Constitution - Constitution of the Commonwealth of Great Sutherland (CCGS)
- passed 31 January, 1925
- amended 37 times
Gross domestic product -
Gini - 0.27 (low)
HDI - 0.967 (very high)
Currency - Sutheran shilling (SSH, ʃ1 = 0.696 IBU as of 15/01/2026)
Motto - Various regionally, nationally: We will endure
Date format - DD/MM/YYYY
Drives on the - left
Time zone - Eamont Winter Time (EWT, UTC+9.5) from fourth Sunday in April to fourth Sunday in September; Eamont Summer Time (EST, UTC+10.5) from fourth Sunday in September to fourth Sunday in April
Internet .tld - .su

National symbols & emblems:
Animal - penguin, seahorse
Tree - silver fern
Flower - ceibo
Personification - Lady Cambria
Sports - curling, Viessian skiing, badminton, rallying
Colours - yellow, white and blue

ATLÉS
A publication on the geography, climate and demographics of Sutherland

---

---

---

With 57% of Sutherans claiming that they have visited the Winter City and a tourist population upwards of 2.5 million (this is equivalent to over half of the entire population of Aikshaw province, for reference) each year, Unthank has a certain pull that few Sutheran cities have managed to pull off quite so spectacularly. As the capital of the expansive southernmost province of Aikshaw, known for its distinctive, warm dialect and distinctive, not very warm climate that brushes the landscape white for four months of the year, it has forged its own identity.

Unthank is situated within Auk's Bay, three-quarters of the way down the eastern coastline of Aikshaw, which itself is by quite some way Sutherland's largest province by area. Its skyline is known for its distinctive steeples - which many speculate is the origin of Unthank having a sister city in Vigan (the "City of a Thousand Steeples", fittingly), the second-largest city of Andrenne - and equally distinctive clock tower, as well as the Crown Mile of thoroughfare through the heart of Unthank.

(left) A part of the Crown Mile, with a line of local co-operatives, hotels and retail outlets

The city itself punches above its weight in a number of ways. It ranks consistently as one of the world's most liveable cities, including placing as the (admittedly Sutheran-based) newspaper The Eamont Times' number 1 choice place to live for five years running from 2020 to 2024, thanks to its stellar public transport, relative affordability, friendly populace and good quality education and public services. Unthank is also home to the Loreshall of Unthank, a world-class loreshall which consistently ranks in the top-5 Sutherland-wide, despite Unthank itself only having around 430,000 inhabitants. In particular, the Loreshall of Unthank excels in medicine, law and administration, and philosophy, as well as engineering; and it's one of four loreshalls in total!

Continuing the trend of punching above its weight, Unthank has possibly one of the largest civic investment sectors in Sutherland independent of the Sound - the bustling metropolitan area around the bay of the same name with the capital of Eamont and around forty million people - as well as by far the largest financial sector of any city even roughly close to its own size, being home to one of the Oak 10 (O10) pension funds (Aikshaw Land Upshotstock / ALUS) and a number of banking institutions that seek to be based outside of the metropolis. Thanks to the varied and well-focussed jobs across the Burgh heavily outpace every city in the South Viesses.

Speaking of the South Viesses, Unthank is known for its close proximity to the skiing resorts and alpine towns of the Viesses. Aikshaw is famous for its prowess in Viessan skiing, a type of skiing featuring fixed-heel bindings instead of free-heel bindings as in much of the world, and Unthankshire's wide variance of routes (and reliably cold, snowy weather!) gives it a natural advantage. A number of world-class athletes are known to be born in, or have since moved to, Unthank and the surrounding Auk's Bay region for its unparalleled access to quality skiing routes - though, a common stereotype amongst middle-class Sutherlanders remains that they have "gone to Unthank" every winter to go skiing, somewhat stigmatising it outside Aikshaw. It is also very clear that there is a relatively sheer divide between Unthank and the remainder of Aikshaw; while Aikshaw is growing faster than the nation on average and is far from the least well-off province, the effects of declining shipbuilding and coal mining have had deep effects on the province's fortunes in a way that Unthank's diversity and fortune have allowed it to avoid.

(right) Unthankshaven, the port and town it encompasses close to Aikshaw's provincial capital, has a long history of pioneering in technology, and is still a key destination for cruise ships and shipbuilding, as well as the nation's Leodsfleet

Finally, Aikshaw's maritime history is embedded deep into the city's culture. Home to Unthankshaven, one of the country's largest ports thanks to its connections to the Leodsfleet (and nuclear deterrent, to a more limited degree) as well as one of the most popular destinations for cruise ships in Eutavia, Unthank's connections to the Sutheran Ocean are absolute. The defence industry and sector in Sutherland has a serious foothold in Unthankshaven, employing tens of thousands of people. These histories gave it a pivotal role during the upheaval of the 1920s - alongside most of Aikshaw, Unthank provided a sanctuary away from the heart of the Richeist regime, and was one of the first places to seize back democraic control, as well as being home to a number of major trades unions and opposition groups, and even a President (Everett John Steel / EJS, Labour, 1941-1949). Unthank and its downstream counterpart Unthankshaven boast a major fishing industry, as well as proximity to a major share of Sutherland's oil and natural gas drills, though these of course have proven controversial in recent times with the environmental cost of their extraction and use - though it resoundingly is not Sutherland's "oil capital," a crown claimed by the Eskland city of Brunstock to the direct north-west of Aikshaw.

To conclude, Unthank is a city of wonders that not only provides a microcosm of the Commonwealth of Great Sutherland and Province of Aikshaw at large, but also has quite decisively cemented itself as having an independent identity in its own right, with world-class education, its position as one of the world's most liveable cities and its maritime connections to the rest of the world as well as to the continental security of Eutavia itself. Its residents may be proud - but they have a lot to be proud of.

ATLÉS
A publication on the geography, climate and demographics of Sutherland

---

---

---

Saga of the Sutherlands - Entry 16 (Ælfwyn, 1083)
appendices written separately by A.C. Wilstock in 2017

---

1071 - Here King Osrӕd II*, son of Osrӕd I, second son of Freþreik, son of Þiudareik the Old King, son of the First King Aþaulf the True, continues to rule by strength under His one dominion. Now of three-and-thirty years, His Stourness* the King has demonstrably been altered by the heinous murders of his good wife, and two firstborn children.
1072 - Here Lywell and Luwell slew a Suthran Earl of Oxenrigg, whose name was Lethen, marking the start of the War in the East.
1072 - Here Veldred ascended to the Earldom of Oxenrigg, marking the start of his rule of forty-five winters over the midland fiefdom. At his ascension, he held a moot of knights, bannermen and meansfolk*, and at this gathering slew the Lords of Littlepickring, Walsbrock and Runston for loyalty to the Cumbrians. Their bodies were hung at the gates of Ostead for over a week, charred from fire set by angry meansfolk by the end.
1073 - Here His Stourness the King rightfully put three-hundred and two-and-twenty to torch* for practising the cursed religion of Druidism. These included the Earl of Eamont, Elðwin son of Elðred son of Ragner.
1074 - Here His Stourness the King was married to Reyne, daughter of Ulfryk, of Arngill. All the realm attended* this ceremony to celebrate the union of the lives of Reyne and His Stourness, and here loyalty was assured in the South Marches*.
1075 - Here the Earl Sigrun of Ulmere died after committing great slaughter*, and was succeeded by his better son, Sigurþ.
1076 - Here the King Mother, Ælswyyh, did die, two days after reaching seventy-eight.
1076 - Here the Earl Veldred did fight Lywell and Luwell, and did hold off against the Cumbrians, to great personal cost. The victory of the Sutherans over the Cumbrians was assured from this point.*
1079 - Here, after many years of fighting, Lywell and Luwell seized the shire of Franklin* following the fall of Dalry. Lywell did die.
1079 - Here the Earl of Ævon, Wilber, son of Rykken, son of Rangar, son of Rulf, did die at three-and-fifty. His son, Edred, did ascend to the title.
1080 - Here was a great battle at the gates of Dalry, in which ten-thousand Sutherans valiantly gave their lives to the Crown's cause.* Among those who died was the true, right and only Earl of Franklin, Aswinn.
1080 - Here the Cumbrians did prevent the good King's army from breaching beyond Mold Mebwr* again.
1081 - Here, after long deliberation, his Stourness the King pronounced that his fourth child and eldest living son, Siward*, must ascend. Upon her refusal to give fealty to the true Crown Æþling* Siward, the King's third child and eldest living daughter Ældwyn did flee to Westmorland, where the traitorous Earl Þeodric, son of Þorbarn, son of Wulfryk, proclaimed her the (Pretender) Queen.
1083 - Here King Osrӕd II did smite Luwell at Rӕddsbrycg* himself*, ending the War in the East and granting its final victory to the Sutherlanders.
1083 - Here the Earl of Westmorland did rout the Camwallers at Hwystensgӕt*.

---

King Osrӕd II - Osrӕd II, known often as "the Merciful" as a reference both to his tendency to shy away from using force on those he captured, beat or sentenced as King due to a disdain for carrying out violence and death, but since used sarcastically following the harshening of his rule, arisal of paranoia and tendency to kill those who he felt "wronged" him after his wife and two eldest sons were assassinated in 1071. He descends into abuse of food and drink, and eventually dies in 1088, following a long illness brought on by his attempt to build up tolerance to poison. He is sometimes known as "the Heretic" for his deep rejection of religion, after having originally been pious in his early reign.
His Stourness - Literally "His Greatness", but more practically equivalent to "His Majesty"
Meansfolk - Commoners.
Put to torch - Burnt (likely at the stake.)
All the realm attended (the Wedding of Arngill) - The most notable omission of this Entry, it is estimated that a significant number of senior Earls refused to attend, particularly from the East.
South Marches - The name most commonly used to describe the peninsula in the first three centuries of Sutheran history. Arngill is situated towards the northern edge of the peninsula, and at this time the historic kingdom of Camwall (now used as the name of a province in the far-south) was situated further south, therefore the loyalty and obeisance of the Marcher lords was critical to the Crown.
Here the Earl Sigrun of Ulmere died after committing great slaughter - Earl Sigrun of Ulmere was assassinated, likely on the King's orders, after the noteworthy supporter of Cumbrian Kings Lywell and Luwell routed a major uprising orchestrated by their opponents. He is said to have beheaded over one-hundred rebels personally in a single afternoon, though how real this is remains unknown. The earldom passed onto his third son Sigurþ, after his first son was at sea at the time, and his second son - the supposed heir - had been taken prisoner, later dying in captivity, and quickly aligned with King Osrӕd II.
The victory of the Sutherans over the Cumbrians was assured from this point.* - While the victory of the outnumbered Oxenrigg Sutheran armies over Lywell and Luwell was unexpected and removed the possibility of an attack on the metropole, it also neither assured the safety of the realm as a whole nor won the war decisively. However, had Oxenrigg fallen, the capital (Eamont) would have been on the doorstep of the Cumbrian armies; it would thus be far more accurate to say that the Sutherans
Franklin - Franklin is one of Sutherland's largest provinces, sat in the mid-east of the country, and its temporary fall during the last decade of Luwell's life marked a nadir in the power of the Sutheran Crown. This likely drove Osrӕd's paranoia further, particularly as it fuelled challenges to his power internally.
The (Second) Battle at Dalry - Possibly the largest battle of the War of the East, the 2nd Battle at Dalry more or less confirmed Cumbrian supremacy over the eastern half of the peninsula, and made the western half deeply unstable as the Earls of Westmorland and Ævon feared for their own safety. While these gains were temporary, they likely confirmed the split of the Sutheran Kingdom north-south in the 12th century as the Sound and peninsula drew further apart politically. The failure of the Crown to ensure its security of borders was also likely the spark that led to the succession crisis in the latter years of Osrӕd's rule, which are already beginning to fall into place by the time that this chronicle entry is written.
Siward* - Siward (or Seward) the Broken
Crown Æþling - Heir to the throne, "crown prince" elsewhere
Rӕddsbrycg* - Rӕdstead, western Franklin
Mold Mebwr - Maulds Meaburn, mid-west Sutherland
Himself - Unlikely. It is unknown how Luwell was killed, but it is known that at this point the King was too ill to have been at the forefront of any battle in any fighting capacity.
Hwystensgӕt - Whystensgӕt, note the negation of who the earlier "Traitorous" earl was when talking about military victories.

---

What is Stætsalne?
Stætsalne is a state-owned multinational energy production, investment and extraction company based in Eamont (EAM), the capital of Sutherland. Listed on the Eamont Stock Exchange (ESE, pictured on right), Stætsalne is a merger of some of the largest energy companies of the time, including state-owned oil company Stætsele, partly-privatised gas company Yorðergas and hydroelectric company WæternSÞR in 1977.

The Labour government of Rickard Barraclough determined that this new behemoth of an energy company should be partly owned by the provinces and by its workers; as a result, it retained 59.9% of the stocks (a share revised down to 55.9% in 2010) and sold the rest to the provinces of Sutherland, as well as a number of co-operatives, pension funds (many of which are now known as the Oak10, internationally renowned for their size and investment projects) and civic banks.

Stætsalne OS/S's first Director, Ævynd Halstock, decided that the "Sutherlander Way" would be as follows:

• the aim would be for around 40-50% of Sutherland exports to be gas and oil
• the Landsgild would be set up as the national pension fund, primarily for taking in a major portion of revenue from the Sutherland gas and oil industry to avoid the over-centralisation of gas and oil and loss of other sectors
• the Landsgild, and other revenue too, would be used in part to offset other deindustrialisation-associated losses, e.g. to shipbuilding, by funding education, as well as targeted industries like engineering, construction and manufacturing to ensure that workers in sunsetting sectors can stay out of structural unemployment (mitigating entrenched poverty)
• Stætsalne would aim to involve itself in international energy production through shares, investment, acquisitions and direct funding, as much as possible for the common interests of the Sutherland public/taxpayer, the governments provincially and federally, and those involved in each project abroad

---

Stats on Stætsalne

---

Sutherland has a unicameral parliament, known as the Almoot (lit. "all-meeting"/"meeting place for all"), which presides over the federal government.

---

Electoral system:
- Constituencies (330) - winner-takes-all
- Overhang (520) - party-list vote, 4% threshold to receive as-near-to-proportionate share of total 850 seats including constituencies gained

Term ends: 17 October, 2025 (last weekday before 6 weeks before last lawful polldate)
Latest poll date: 30 November, 2025

---

---

---

---

King Eawer III (Middle Atlish: Æawere), colloquially "the Bowsome", was the King of Sutherland between 1256 and 1294. Succeeding his father Ryckard I following his death at the rout at Battle of Leashaw to the Cumbrish, Eawer rose to the throne at the age of 29 and became the first monarch to be crowned at Hwithampstow Clauster.

---

Excerpt from "Tides of the Crown" (Charlsen, 2022)

Eawer was a unique monarch for his time in that in his youth, folks did not have to pretend in order to like him. He was affable, and unlike his deeply proud father Ryckard Ironskin - who had spent the vast majority of Eawer's youth driving hammers through various Southerners' skulls for the glory of his kingdom, or whatever else it was that medieval Kings used to justify bludgeoning uncountable people with - he was known for not being particularly full of himself. The young boy grew up deeply pious, unlike most kings who viewed the Church as a major obstacle to their "fuck you, I'll do what I wish" attitudes, and viewed himself as a servant of God very sincerely.

It is also known that Eawer was sparkling company in his early years. He was an avid sportsman, and for all his piety, he drank like a whale. That is, until the night he received a message from God in 1252 demanding that he prepare himself for kingship. We can only imagine this sounded as weird to those around him at the time as it does to you reading this now even without Messiandom being as much of a starting point as it was then, but nevertheless Eawer's weirdness was far more of the goodhearted, slightly quirky kind than the far more common "blood and rage, and bloodrage" that monarchs of this time period are far more known for, so nobody minded much.

Eawer's relationship with his father was however not so bright. Ryckard viewed the boy as a disappointment, and is known to have favoured Eawer's younger, far more typical for a royal (yes, that means both incredibly full of himself and extremely temperamental, but crucially for his father it entailed an assertive streak) brother, Alfred. Ryckard went so far as to crown young Alfred in front of a crowd at Eamont, however Alfred's reputation in Eamont of being a cruel bruiser meant that the cheering only resumed the moment Ryckard's Chancellor lifted the crown back off Alfred's head. I can only assume that was an incredible embarrassment, although neither King nor second son would ever take the very, very obvious hint of how little anyone wanted a King Alfred.

Ryckard's reputation for having skin of iron ended rather abruptly in 1256 when someone stuck an arrow through it, and the wound festered rapidly. Alfred rushed into Eamont to claim what he believed would be his throne, however the death of Ryckard had given an opportunity for the very loyal Chancellor Lumbert to loyally follow his King into the dirt at the hands of the not very loyal Carl Edwardson. Edwardson's first act was to proclaim the coronation of Alfred invalid, but not before warmly welcoming him into Eamont and promptly sending him to his 22-year stint at the Blackkeep.

Eawer's arrival into Eamont from his earldom at Franklin to the southeast two weeks later was far more sincere. Eawer quickly saw a friend in Edwardson, and Edwardson was very open to pretending this was the case for the time being. His coronation was a grand affair, and his first act – to defy expectations that he would do what his father and grandfather had done, and appoint loyalists to the High Table – facilitated what would be the first of many easy partnerships between existing powerful figures and their new King.

How the Good King was... not very good
Eawer's key strengths were as follows: he wasn't a King educated in the typical "King tells his son how to both make people be very polite around you, pretend to like them, and then reduce the height of those who you disapprove of by about one head" manner, but instead by the courts at Baldwin and Hemel Leastead, and that he wasn't yet another warrior king. His mentor, the Lord of Thurrush, instead targeted Eawer's ability to understand and profess mercy, charm, compromise and mutual respect. The issue was fairly apparent early on; neither of these are actually strengths. Whoops.

Ryckard, and most of the vaguely successful Kings before him, had been totally incapable of nuance and uncompromising. There were issues with this, yes, but it helped stabilise the realm when the certainty of your head being missing if you raised arms was assured. The role of the King being invariably bruiser-in-chief, dating back as far as the first Viking stepping foot off his longship in the Sound and learning how to complain about the weather, had been a vital part of the Crown's system. Eawer's style was not this – and the worst thing was that Ryckard's relentless bashing of Westmorlander heads had finally given them a reason to splinter off from the kingdom.

Eawer's first test was therefore a certain failure. The King at Westmorland, Oswald the First, rose to power for one reason; he was an accidental brilliancy, possessing a rare mix of cunning and military prowess. This had allowed him to weaponise Ryckard's offence at somewhere not doing what it was bloody well told to his own end, and the stars aligning to shoot an arrow through Ironskin's armour was the cherry on top. Eawer came down, and naturally, began to negotiate. When he came back north with a shining South Charter, declaring that he had secured Oswald's fealty as King of Westmorland, his entire court's heads exploded; the stupid man had just recognised a new, materially independent kingdom without even realising it.

Nevertheless, Eawer spent his first decade otherwise improving the realm. He granted assent to the opening of three great universities on top of his grandfather's Brunswyk; Tywardon in 1258, Hawkshaw in 1260 and Dæmstead in 1261. His resistance of demands from Brunswyk to shutter down Tywardon for fear of threatening their superiority in the university system was ignored, which likely had some effect on the 757 years of petty rivalries between the two universities that followed. The fifth of the five well-known Sutherlander universities at Roseburn would follow, but that would take 68 years and a lot of history to appear. Naturally, Oswald set up his own at Leashaw, because what's better for a pretend kingdom than pretending to be Eawer? Similarly, church and land reforms, as well as greater focus on the burgeoning mercantile class in the wool industry, was rapidly opening up Sutherland's economy into what would be called the Little Golden Age in a hundredyear or two, after the copious quantity of death and disease that followed had not yet taken hold.

Eawer's second turn to blunder came when the Earls of Barrowland and Franklin, irate that their own advances in power had not only been rebuffed, but that taxes had been levied on them for the great projects of roads, universities and general conquering. In a normal situation, this would not really earn even a foothold in history - medieval earls and lords have grumbled about this sort of thing since virtually forever - but the fact that Westmorland had managed to get round the "what on earth replaces a King" query that troubled revolutions of the time (the answer being "just crown yourself and hope you're a godsent perfect choice like Oswald", apparently) meant that the "or else" threat actually stung Eamont and King Eawer. Eawer's attempts to charm them went so far that they actually pissed off his own court, and Edwardson finally spotted an opening to stop having to pretend he liked Eawer, beginning to cleave off grumbling figures to support Ryckard's little known third son, Þeobald.

The least enthusiastic Pretender King
Þeobald is not particularly notable in many ways. He lacked the ruthless violence of his father, the deep-rooted inadequacy and opportunism of Alfred, and the pious diplomatic focus of King Eawer. What he did have was simple - a stable life.

Þeobald was married, and unusually for the time's arranged marriages, it is known that the two courted beforehand so closely that Ryckard must have considered it insanely lucky to have a Queen consort from Aikshaw. He and Freyja of Aikshaw had five children, of whom four survived into adulthood. He was significantly younger than Eawer, and as of the revolution's start in 1277, the 42-year-old Þeobald was positively spritely compared to the King he was nine years junior of. With Eawer's children still not close to the age of majority – Eawer married late to a woman twenty-four years his junior, which apparently isn't seen as incredibly creepy in this time period – his wife unfailingly loyal to his cause, his brother firmly stuck in the Blackkeep and his disapproving father in the dirt, Þeobald was apparently the closest thing to a replacement for angry rebels.

The more astute reader may at this point mention that Ryckard's younger brother, Asmund, was very much still alive and even more disapproving of not-so-young Eawer as his father proved to be. He was also in formidable health, which unusually for the time and his age of 76 years did not merely give him faint praise for not being in the ground. Asmund, however, had been sidelined by Chancellor Edwardson for one key reason – he had a very obvious backbone. Asmund was long known for his fierce voice and fiercer mind, and – as I'm sure you'll gather from his propensity to fall upwards on the back of weaker men – the Chancellor did not want to replace a pliable King with a strong-minded one.

The main issue Edwardson faced with picking Þeobald instead was pretty obvious - the man had absolutely zero intention on becoming King. He had a good, if distanced, relationship with his elder brother, and most of all, distanced himself from kingly politics as early as possible. His solution for this was equally simple – kill one of his kids.

That might take a moment to sink in, so let me explain further. While Þeobald was close to his brother the King, his eldest son, also called Þeobald, was very much not a fan. Þeobald the Younger, as I will call him, was a belligerent little twerp who got so angry that Uncle Eawer did not grant him his wished for place as Earl of Westmorland, not that the position was at all meaningful with Oswald the Great – or more accurately, Oswald the Grey at this stage, since the man was 70 – as the actual ruler there that he defected to Oswald's court. As I've said before, royals at this time really did never get a chance to get a bloody grip of themselves. It makes the few who do appear to have less delusions than the rest like Eawer appear in a brighter light. Guess who talks him up to this? That's right, Edwardson. I imagine you get the idea I don't like him, and that's right, because he's a twat.

Never mind – Oswald receives Þeobald the Walking Temper Tantrum gladly, and immediately throws him into a prison for the crime of being a very useful bargaining chip. Þeobald the Elder calls out to brother Eawer to intervene, and in the time the King tries to stall for time – almost certainly considering whether it was even worth the bother to Þeobald the Younger back north, which is fair enough – Oswald presumably gets bored of his prisoner and chops his head off.

A democracy to defeat democracy
Þeobald the Not Dead was suddenly pissed off enough to visit Edwardson at Burrasey and offer his help in taking down his brother, who he now held responsible for his moron of a son walking himself into a deeply stupid death. Asmund, sensing the tension, organised an army and was promptly crushed by an army led by Eawer himself, hung and his remains left atop the city gates into Østerdal. Oh well. It's the thought that counts.

Þeobald was prudent enough not to immediately die, and therefore became the natural choice for even people who weren't Chancellor Edwardson. A group of earls at Montgomery and Knightsmere, the furthest northwest provinces at the time, organised an army in the tens of thousands to support his claim. I personally imagine this has something to do with the fact that his other two sons were the earls of Montgomery and Knightsmere.

By now, the year was 1280. Eawer was an old man at 54, although still fit enough to lead armies and do essentially everything he did – except not getting up without making a noise of anguish, that one hits us all by his age – and his brother was growing restless in his increasingly radicalised demand for vengeance. Þeobald and much of the King's court, including Edwardson, had fled to the northwest where they sat around and pretended to matter, while Eawer enjoyed a few years having decently loyal earls and lords at his side. With the Conspiracy still too weak militarily to launch more than counterattacks against Eawer's now most senior marcher earl, the Earl of Charlton, Eawer set about building up the mercantile class he had fostered by bringing "almoots" – that's parliaments to the international reader, hello there – which increasingly included these groups. Apparently, including the very posh with the extremely posh in the proceedings of rule worked wonders, likely as it ensured the loyalty of an entirely separate class from the aristocracy and monarchy to the Crown.

---

---

---

Periods:
1247–1258 - The War for Westmorland
~1277–1294 - The First Conspiracy
1294–1364 - The War of Harts and Swans

Early stages:
The rule of the House of Rædingen, a house which proudly espoused its heritage in the Settling of the Sound in the 9th century CE and asserted genealogical links to Aþaulf the True (b. 926, r.952-978), who first ruled over a hegemonic Sutherlander kingdom, was more or less unchallenged for around two hundred years in any serious capacity from within the realm. However, the rising demands of marcher lords - particularly those in Westmorland, then the southern frontier of the kingdom - resulted in severe clashes with King Edmund III and his son Ryckard I, the latter of which seized lands and titles from a large amount of lords, and attempted to displace the Earl of Westmorland in 1247, Oswald Æstridsson.

(left) The Battle of Leashaw, which took place in 1256, saw King Ryckard I "Ironskin" and much of his army killed, abruptly ending Eamont's capacity to challenge King Oswald the First's rule over Westmorland and resulting in the explicit and controversial recognition of Westmorland as a separate kingdom in 1258 by Ryckard's son, Eawer III "the Bowsome"

Disquiet in Westmorland tipped into open rebellion following the Battle of North Cross, in which a number of lords were successfully captured by King Ryckard and executed for treason. Oswald, keen on reassert his position as Earl of Westmorland, declared himself King on the basis of an unproven connection to Aþaulf the True on his mother's side, and raised banners. Initial victories by Ryckard failed to placate the situation, while Oswald's armies scarpered from cities to other keeps or locations each time they were routed, or subjected Ryckard's army to lengthy, costly sieges. The First War on Westmorland ended abruptly in 1256, after a Cumbrish army from Camwall stormed the southern border at what became the Battle of Leashaw, and ambushed Ryckard's army camp, resulting in his death as well as the death of the bulk of the detachment from Eamont.

The accession of King Eawer III, Ryckard's eldest son, resulted in a hasty and preferential peace at the Treaty of Maltash-Baldwin, which recognised the legitimacy of the Westmorlander King in fealty to Eawer; this gave him his nickname of "Bowsome", used by allies to refer to his ability to get the stalwart Oswald to bow to him, but also in jest by opponents to imply Eawer was the one who truly bowed to Oswald in defeat. Despite this apparent assured peace, and the delicate arrangement of Westmorland in some informal degree of subservience to the Sutherlander crown, Sutherlander thanes and lords resented Eawer for cementing the loss of their marcher lands to native Westmorlanders and friends of King Oswald the First. This resentment went unresolved until the defection, capture and execution of Þeobald the Younger, nephew of the King Eawer, in the year 1277. Þeobald the Elder, his father and Eawer's younger brother, fled to the northwest provinces of Knightsmere and Montgomery, where his children were earls, declared Eawer illegitimate (by claiming he was the son of one of Ryckard's many mistresses), and crowned Þeobald II at Brooksbank Clauster. A sect of the King Eawer's court, which has been disquiet for some time, defected with Þeobald at this time, including his Chancellor.


The Great Cesspit Incident of 1290 (right) claimed the lives of Godwin Þeobaldsson, the Pretender King Þeobald II's son and Earl of Montgomery, and his court; this greatly weakened Þeobald's cause and prevented any major challenge to the throne until after Eawer's death four years later

Þeobald attempted a number of times to break out of his position in the northwest of the Sound, however the Earl of Þorgen, whose province lay directly to the east of the breakout region, refused to recognise Eawer's brother as legitimate and aligned himself with the pre-existing regime. While a number of earls sympathised with Þeobald's cause, the new Chancellor, Turstan Baldryksson's decisive rout of the Earl of Ravenstone in 1283 - and showing of mercy by allowing him to maintain his position after re-swearing fealty to Eawer - dissuaded these earls from rebelling, more or less confirming Eawer's reign in the remainder of the kingdom for the rest of his life. The Great Cesspit Incident of 1290 also claimed the lives of the Earl of Montgomery, Godwin Þeobaldsson, and most of his court when the floor collapsing sent most of them into the cesspit beneath Godwin's great hall, greatly diminishing the power of Montgomery, a key power base for the Conspiracy.

---

The War of Harts and Swans:
Eawer's death in 1294, apparently as a result of the warm summer at Baldwin where he was staying, re-opened the war in full scale. Eawer's eldest son, Siward, had died two years earlier, and the new claimant to the throne was therefore Siward's twelve year old son, Edwin. Edwin nevertheless was crowned at Eamont swiftly, within one week of Eawer's death, to prevent speculation over Þeobald's claim to the throne.


Map of Sutherland as of 1294 (modern orientation; maps dating to c.1300 showed east as north), showing Westmorland (far-south, neutral colour), the four wardenships (east blue, orange south, green west and pink north), and the wardenship of the Sound (cyan). Provinces submitting to Þeobald II as of 1294 shown in dark red

Þeobald, now nearing sixty years of age, was viewed by many supporting Edwin as too old to meaningfully inherit the throne. Furthermore, support for Edwin was assured through a complex regency programme which saw Wardens of the North, West, East and South declared for each of the most prominent lords, with a Warden of the Sound proclaimed shortly after to recognise the role of the Thane of Charlton, Willard V Strand. The Thane of Charlton rapidly became the most prominent regent to the King Edwin IV, and became somewhat of a mentor to him in his formative years.

The initial settlement in favour of Edwin was rapidly shattered by two events; the swearing of fealty to Edwin by Oswald the Grey as he was known at this point (having reached the age of 86 by now), which reassured the independence in all but ceremony of Westmorland, and the death of the Earl of Þorgen at the hands of a Þeobald II supporter, both in 1295. The Warden of the South, Gylbert Blacktooth, was made irate by the apparent recognition of Westmorland - which drastically reduced the safety and scope of his own role - and quickly defected and declared for Þeobald; only a few lords to the immediate south of the capital at Eamont managed to receive support before Blacktooth seized, executed and replaced local lords and thanes in the region, violently shifting it into the court of Þeobald II. The Earl of Ravenstone, the westernmost province of the west Wardenship, declared his province within the south to receive protection and assurances from Blacktooth, as did the Earl of Woodsmere at the far-east of the northern wardenship, however only the former received any meaningful protection; the latter was executed swiftly.

(left) The initial stronghold of Tywardon Keep, the designated home of House Ravenstone, one of the two claimant houses to the Sutherlander crown

Seeking a way to set his claim apart from that of Edwin, Þeobald declared his House to be that of Ravenstone, one of the earliest settlements on the Sound in Ravenstone, and asserted a link to its earliest inhabitants as to claim that his house was amongst the first of all Sutherlanders to inhabit the nation. Edwin nor his remaining regents officially declared their own house separate from the House of Rædingen, which had itself produced every King in unified Sutherland history, but it retrospectively became known as the House of Baldwin after both Edwin and Eawer's birthplaces and places of upbringing on the northern shore of the Sound. The Hartstone Declaration of 1298 saw Þeobald declare the line of Eawer illegitimate again, but also extended this to the independence of Westmorland, and vowed that he would return Westmorland to the domain of the Crown. The status of Westmorland, and the lands therein whose ownership was now centralised around Oswald the Grey's closest counterparts and allies after being seized from the previous generation of lords and thanes, therefore became a key division between the two Kingdoms.

Þeobald died shortly after, and his only surviving son, Ælgar (II), was crowned uncontroversially as his successor to the House of Ravenstone in February of 1299. A sharp-witted, if somewhat hesitant, military leader, Ælgar spent much of his reign shoring support through marriages and land agreements. By now, Edwin was of the age of majority, however maintained his wardens - this was largely involuntary, and it is largely believed that the wardens threatened Edwin's life at his re-coronation at the age of 18 in order to maintain their positions. On his way back from this coronation in May 1300, the Warden of the East Ryken Hwalcroft's delegation was ambushed by an army of 5,000 led by Ælgar's ally in the eastern province of Franklin, Leofryc, a moment which largely resulted in Franklin and the eastern provinces falling to Leofryc and King Ælgar's claim.

Irate with the increasing inefficiencies of his warden systems, Edwin the Young King elevated his close friend Howell of Northcomb - a native Cumbrishman who had aligned with Edwin's grandfather Eawer the year before he had died - who had been a contemporary of Edwin in his youth and spent most of his elder childhood in Edwin's court. His father's disputes with the Chancellor Baldryksson had resulted in his exile, and Eawer had attempted to keep Howell from having any contact with Edwin in his final years, a trend which Edwin abruptly reversed in his minority years. Howell was appointed as Thane to Hawkshaw, then one of the most major settlements of the kingdom in the north, over the son of the former Thane who had died the year prior; this decision proved so unpopular that Edwin was forced to exile Howell for ten years to prevent open rebellion and defection to Ælgar's cause.

Howell of Northcomb (pictured right) was captured on his return to Sutherland in 1310, and beheaded on the Warden of the North's orders, resulting in Edwin's first fall into madness

Despite the apparent ascendancy of Ælgar, Edwin's control over the capital at Eamont was never in contention during this period, largely thanks to the loyalty of the Highaglan (Archbishop) Wylvere to Edwin securing the Church's support. This frustrated allies of Ælgar, especially in combination with Ælgar's lack of willingness to stage an open war on Eamont, which he feared would distract him from undermining Edwin's control of the marches and gaining the loyalty of the strong marcher lords. The new Earl of Þorgen, Alwin, therefore led an army without approval from King Ælgar into Rosbury; his victory in toppling the Edwin-aligned Earldom there convinced Ælgar to go to war, while Alwin himself became a key ally of the King in the West.

The beginning of open war therefore began in 1306, with Ælgar securing major early victories at Rushock and Frome, driving the remainder of the Baldwin forces to their stronghold in the north of Baldwin itself, while a feeble counterattack resulted in heavy losses and the assurance of Ælgar's control in the northwest. News of the deteriorating situation was only complicated by the advances of Leofryc, by now a renowned Ravenstone supporter, into Cumbrish territory, which expanded the power of the province of Franklin and secured even further loyalty to the Ravenstone cause through the provision of new land and keeps to loyal lords.

The prevention of the Ravenstones only came when the army of Earl Alwin of Þorgen marched into Baldwin in 1309 with much of the aristocracy and fighting force of the northwest contingent to find that they were heavily outnumbered. The Battle of Alderscot, a few miles west of Baldwin, was an assured defeat for the Ravenstone force, which was annihilated; Alwin was killed, as were a broad swathe of the Ravenstones lords. This bruising defeat ruined the fighting capacity of the Ravenstone King Ælgar, who was now increasingly dependent on the maneouvrings of Leofryc in Franklin, as well as his own force, whom he had kept in Levensey (west Þorgen) out of fear that Alwin was being led into a trap. The destruction of the Ravenstone forces gave Edwin reason to believe his hand had finally improved, and therefore he invited Howell of Northcomb back from his exile in Aikshaw, however Howell was captured, paraded through the streets and killed on the orders of the Warden of the North upon his arrival in 1310. This trauma made Edwin reclusive, and totally catatonic to events and occurrences around him, including the birth of his second son and the death of his wife Godiva in 1312.

(left) King Edwin II "the Young King" fell into reclusive catatonia in his 30s, largely following the death of his supposed blood brother Howell of Northcomb in 1310 and his wife Godiva in childbirth two years later.

The incapacitation of Edwin resulted in a period known as the "Great Sakelessness" (Middle Atlish: Greetsaiklæssnys), where neither of the Ravenstone nor Baldwin realms had the capacity to do much beyond struggling to maintain control of their existing realms. Edwin's kingdom became a protectorate led by a number of high-ranking earls, however Edwin returned from his catatonia on New Year's Day 1316 (then 1 April), shortly following the assassination of two regents in quick succession.

---

---

(

) Howell Drake
Chancellor of Sutherland
(10 November, 1922 – 7 February, 1931, contested 10 November, 1922 – 10 May, 1925)

Howell Drake (2 January 1878 – 7 July 1955, pictured on left) was the co-leader of the Labour party (alongside the more well-known Raynard Armstrong, who went on to become President) throughout its resistance after the incarceration of a number of its key figures as a part of a wider spree of deregistrations and oppressions against politicians and non-Richeist parties in 1920. Operating from Free
Älvdalen for the first 4 years of his tenure as party leader, Drake's key asset proved to be statebuilding.

Judged by the Richeist Party to be in self-exile, Howell Drake amalgamated a Provisional Free Government (FFÆ, Foreløpner Freo Ældradom) which comprised of many of the sects of democratic and progressive society forced out by Richeists, including minority religious groups - especially Druidists - intellectuals, opposition politicians from the mainland, dissident military officials, and trade unionists. Drake oversaw the "national planning programme" on the archipelago, which saw many of its industries nationalised under FFÆ, as well as elections, in which he banned the Richeist party (ostensibly under a "quid pro quo" programme of his own parties being banned in Richeist Sutherland), seeing much of the free nation consolidated into national monopolies. Älvdalen therefore saw the first establishment of the national healthcare service, LH, in 1921 as well as the national coal, steel, energy and railway boards. This political ideology of national centralised planning and common ownership became known as Drakeism, as well as Älvdalen democracy, and Drake would later establish this ideology as the national governing ideology following the closure of the War against Richeism in 1925.

Free Älvdalen shifted its focus relatively gradually towards a more aggressive strategy of displacing Richeism following the slow trickling of horrors being uncovered in the early 1920s, and Free Radio Sutherland (FRS) began broadcasting from Älvdalen's capital, Tjosköping, as well as active sabotage being conducted from within Richeist-occupied Sutherland, while student networks, working unions and religious groups all become hubs for underground resistance organisation. This activity accelerated particularly into the winter of 1922, and backlash from the Richeist government against this - especially in the industrial, historically socialist and often Courantist south - resulted in both an economic slump, and a hardening of resistance movements to external pressure from Eamont and Godfred Roscow's government. Capitalising on the apparent rise of resistance, Drake and Armstrong declared the national government illegitimate, released a Charter for Sutherlander Human, Social and Democratic Rights (CMFSR) demanding free elections, social liberalisation, protection from persecution for minorities and political movements, an "active democratic state" which prevented Richeist ideologies from serving or operating from within, free politics and basic economic security for workers, and a constitution. Drake and Armstrong, in proclaiming their state the only true government, became the disputed Chancellor and President from this point.


(right) The Colne-Esthaven line largely separated Richeist-governable regions to its north, and revolutionary-held regions to its south between winter 1922 and mid-to-late 1924, however proved highly informal with revolutionary control in effect primarily in the urban areas and with some degree of fluidity

Initial suppression against Aikshawer trade unionists in December 1922 was successful, however supplementary soldiers and police which had travelled from the Sound to crack down on
the revolts were ambushed at Maltash on their way down, while wildcat secondary strikes paralysed most of the country's infrastructure. A second, more aggressive clampdown against dissenting ideologies and groups was highly uneven in its successes, and served to drive one group or individual south to the increasingly ungovernable provinces of the peninsula as it did arrest, convert or kill. Drake's voluntary army grew dramatically at every attempt to suppress the resistance, and with aid from military dissidents who had set up on the island years prior, it began to operate both covert, and eventually overt, control over the southern third of Sutherland. By spring 1923, the "Colne-Esthaven line" largely separated revolutionary and Richeist control, while the Richeist armies - which had not been forced to confront meaningful rebellions and revolutions, especially not of the increasingly professionalised standards and numbers that they were facing - suffered unprecedented mutinies and morale losses, to the extent that "crossing the Line" became a well-known phrase to refer to men who fled Richeist armies to revolutionary control.

This uneasy standoff persisted for around one year, however the loss of much of the industrial area of the country added to the added strain of continued unsanctioned strikes, violence, civil unrest and non-compliance had reduced Richeist control over its peripheries and industrial areas north of the Line, weakened Richeist control of Sutherland further. However, the stalemate was interrupted suddenly when Richeist military officials lost control of a number of key towns to revolutionary control, as well as workers' councils being proclaimed simultaneously in twelve cities with militias that sustained for varying lengths of time, to the extent that by the start of 1925 much of the area north of the Line was no longer Richeist in any substantive way. The FFÆ rapidly marched north from late February 1925, and Richeist armies proved even more inefficient, insufficient and disloyal than they had years prior, resulting in the rapid collapse and retreat of frontlines across much of the frontier. Richeist government ministers and high-ranking officials began to defect en masse as Free Government armies reached key cities on the periphery of the Sound, and a period of relatively brief but brutal fighting in the southern suburbs of Eamont - particularly around Midland and Ramshope - was the most resistance that the Richeist armies were able to extend before Free Government armies stormed into Eamont. Godfred Roscow himself had fled from Northall House by the time Free Government armies had seized the city, however most of his government was taken into imprisonment during this time, while the apparent loss of Roscow resulted in the remainder of Richeist pockets - bar a few, such as in Woodsmere and Grantham, which sustained a few weeks of fighting before dissolving - melting away. Roscow would finally be arrested in September of 1925 after his eventual discovery by underground anti-Richeist militias, and the Drake government organised the Farlam trials to judge the guilt and retribution that Richeists would face, after which several dozen were found guilty and a few dozen executed, including Roscow. Dericheification was then employed in the wider state, purging the public sector and civil service of up to 80% of its workforce over the course of 12 months for Richeist sympathies, which Drake stated was a "sacrifice, not a loss" to avoid entrenchment of Richeist ideals in culture and society, which underwent a wider anti-Richeist programme.

Howell Drake's six peacetime years saw the role of the state dramatically change from its former state that it had existed under the Liberal-National two-party system that preceded the rise of Labour and then the Richeists in the late 19th century. Having been elected Chancellor by a landslide in November 1925 in the face of replacing the Liberals as the party of the left and the right being in reputational and organisational ruin, Drakism was implemented nationally; national planning and ownership of industrial and infrastructural sectors was established sweepingly, while the welfare state was created with a progressive tax regime which heavily taxed both the very highest income-earners and wealth-owners, while trade unions gained a pivotal role in shaping industrial and economic policy, as well as amalgamating into a full National Congress of Trades Unions (AWG). While not explicitly communist, Drake gave way to a Great Compromise in 1926 which saw this role expand into a tripartite system where trade unions, employers and the government had similar roles established in employment, collective bargaining became the norm, wage indexing and independent pay boards were established, and the nation took control of much of the country's sovereign wealth and natural resources in order to build a sovereign wealth fund. The welfare state now included full public healthcare and pharmaceutical production, pensions, free education (though not university-level, where scholarships were extended), steel, coal, iron, resource mining and drilling, oil, gas and energy, roads, railways, construction, mail, a state broadcaster (SBS), and telecommunications. Civic restaurants were also set up during this era, however most of these ceased to exist in successive decades. The Drake government oversaw a rapid expansion of housebuilding, re-established national parks, established the Towns, Villages, and Lands Planning Laws which permanently focussed the public sector as the dominant driver of construction and public sector housing, and civic and investment banking being established, while welfare spending on pensions, benefits in bereavement and sickness, and jobless benefits, as well as wider child and "social levelling" benefits, to the extent that by the early 1930s many academics viewed that Labour could "argue, as it will, that it had driven the most aggravated evils of shortage into the ground." Full employment targets also were deeply important to this government. However, the Drake government did not establish the wider wave of social liberalisation, except for re-establishing women's suffrage, and softening conservative social policy on issues that would go on to take a generation or two to be addressed, including by a number of its more liberal-leaning ministers who had taken issue with its apparent ineffectiveness and rigidity on these issues.

Drake resigned as leader in 1931, following a period of increasingly intense opposition from both wings of his wide-spanning party over industrial policy as well as the consequences of a particularly harsh winter making the Labour party drastically unpopular in blackout-hit areas from the breakdown it resulted in to energy infrastructure. Despite his unpopularity at the end of his tenure, Drake is now looked back on as one of the, if not the, most successful and effective Chancellors, whilst Drakism as an ideology became remarkably strong in influencing Labour party attitudes to the economy for the successive century of politics.

---

John Allstoun (18 November 1873 – 18 July 1955, pictured on right) succeeded Howell Drake in what was the first, and only, uncontested leadership contest to the Labour party, such was Labour's unpopularity. Allstoun noted this himself, commenting that he was "the first man to march out of the trenches," but viewed it his role to offer a calm, steady hand on the wheel during this period.

Allstoun was viewed by many as rather mysterious of a leader; he was reserved in public, but known to be a deep thinker in private, remembered by Liberal Chancellor Walter Daubney thirty years later as "the most intelligent man [he] had ever had the pleasure of debating with." His ideology was also volatile and hard to underpin; he began on the firm left-wing of the Labour party in his early career pre-Richeism, however gradually migrated to the right-wing of the party by the time of his leadership while still being viewed as "dearling of the unions," until by his retirement from politics in the 1940s he was viewed as a "Liberal, but of slightly red hue." A less favourable view was given by the Labour Chancellor Edward Thackrey, who was quoted as saying of Allstoun that "the iron from the fence he has sat on his whole career has pierced his soul cold." His post-retirement writings show a further syncretism to his views, from supporting the mainstay of Howell Drake's policy positions and changes to criticising the "overbearing nature" that unions and workers had gained in employment.

Nevertheless, Allstoun achieved somewhat less of significance, beyond staying the ship of the Labour party into the 1931 election and receiving less poor than expected results, which proved to be his main achievement. The most significant action of his era was his decision to set up the National Electricity Board, which proved remarkably successful in dramatically increasing Sutherland's electricity supply, increasing the amount consuming electricity, as well as reducing electricity generation costs. His party went into the 1931 election heavily behind the Liberal party and nearly on par with the VDA (Civic Democratic Union), however his popular electricity policies and the distance gained from then-disliked Howell Drake improved Labour's outcome markedly; Labour would however still lose this election. Sutherland also constructed the Village Renewal Trust (HET), whose job was primarily to improve and maintain rural self-sufficiency and employment as well as providing funding to achieve these ends in what Allstoun referred to a "hyperlocalised plan", which proved remarkably popular in a demographic Labour had previously proven relatively unpopular with - he earnt the moniker "Allstowner Allstoun" (lit. Allstoun belongs to every town/village) as a result of his endeavours to renew these areas which had been oft neglected after the war. He also finalised the construction of workers' arbitration boards, which became the norm for employment arbitration during this period. Allstoun also was heavily popular in his party and is viewed by many on its right-wing as being its saviour, having brought Labour out of apparent electoral oblivion with his relatively ambitious policy package. His final act, the Small Works Scheme (SWS), also folded into the HET to provide official funding and support to individual projects in local communities in order to improve their facilities and communities, as well as boost employment and training in these areas. However, his decision to sell around 25% of public bonds from the sovereign wealth fund off resulted in a heavily unequal ownership, with vanishingly few working-class people owning shares in natural resources, and resulted in the usually Labour-supporting Herald dubbing him "Turncoat John"; this decision was eventually reversed by the late 1930s Labour government, however doing so cost the nation a significant amount of its spending, leading to friction between Allstoun and his successors in the Labour government of that time. Labour's promises in 1931 to abolish the death penalty, reprioritise rural areas through transport and amenity construction as well as farming subsidies, a "National Public Health and Crisis Board" to react to public health disasters and provide vaccinations as well as primary care in disaster-hit areas (which would be established by his Liberal successor) and a savings bonds scheme so that savers could invest in public infrastructure, all proved highly popular, however in the end his apparent unwillingness to effect structural reform and his party's relative unpopularity in the last year or two had made recovery near-impossible. Left-wing members of the party also have criticised his apparent "harshening" to union activity in his tenure, especially his apparent support to coal mining boards and their decision to reduce pay over workers in August 1931, earning accusations of union-busting and ruining his reputation with mining communities for his actions against union strikes in that month against pay cuts.

Allstoun's health failed into his elder years. Suffering from rheumatism and arthritis in his joints, and increasing back pain, his public appearances became more limited into his later years. He also lost his hearing quite substantially, to the extent that he heard the cheers given to him at the successful 1943 election result for his party's regional office (which he then led) as boos and asked "Do they still boo at me even now?" Nevertheless, Allstoun remained committed to public service and insisted on serving out his term, until he retired and stood back from public life into relative obscurity, refusing all interviews but one with SBS in 1952, in which he stated that he was "vanishingly proud of his insufficient record" but that he "knew that he was given a poor hand and played it adequately." His unpopularity within the Labour party has eased somewhat into the modern era, particularly being rehabilitated with centrist Labour Chancellor Tiago Bras's homage to Allstoun in 2011, although scholars still place his record towards the lower half of historic Chancellors due to the short tenure, electoral defeat and controversies, despite noting his achievements and his exceptional mind.

---

---

(

) Iago Cædwallen
Chancellor of Sutherland
(22 November, 1931 – 19 November, 1934)

Iago Cædwallen (30 June 1876 – 30 March 1967, pictured on left) was the first Liberal Chancellor of the post-Richeist period, having succeeded in his campaign to consolidate the apparent apathy at the incumbent Labour government. However, his term was immediately hindered by the poorer-than-expected result, which landed Cædwallen in a minority government dependent on Civic Democratic support. As a member of his party's modernised Social Liberal wing, Cædwallen was highly frustrated with this development, once quipping with President Raynard Armstrong that he had "created a government that its Chancellor opposes," while noting the political impossibility of aligning with Labour, with whom he shared far more ideological compatibility (particularly under its outgoing leader John Allstoun). Nevertheless, he pursued a formal confidence-and-supply agreement with VDA leader Halvand Bryden, and was rapidly confirmed Chancellor on the 22nd of November, 1931.

A lower-middle-class Cumbrishman from the rural areas of the province of Dalston, Cædwallen became well-known for his bluntness and honesty, which earnt him the moniker "Honest Iago." His government resisted calls from the right-wing of the VDA to alleviate the Dericheification process which Drake had started, as well as wider active democratic procedures, stating to the Almoot:

A fierce believer in social reform, Cædwallen embarked on what have since been referred to as the Reform years. His initial budget, however, caused a deep schism in the Liberal party; in order to appease VDA concerns over the size of the state, the Liberal-VDA budget included serious cuts to pay rates, tariff reductions, increases in unemployment benefits and cuts to maternity payments, as well as deep cuts to funding for certain public sector services, especially the steel board.
TBC.

---

---

Alfred Kyrkpatryk (11 May 1878 – 8 February 1953, pictured on right) TBC

---

Origin

Chess was introduced first to Sutherland as שחמט ("shachmet", literally "the king is amazed/stunned"; Atlish adopted this term for "schakemet" to refer to a checkmate) by traders from during some of Sutherland's earliest international trade expeditions in the 15th and 16th centuries. While most innovations in chess had already been uncovered and standardised in the version of "schack" as it was briefly known as before the more familiar "tavel" (a Ravenstone dialectal form of "tab(u)le", borrowed itself from Iparians in the early mediaeval period, which during this time broadly meant "board game") replaced it, the þorowst(yr) (or "throughmove" in Atlish) move was first standardised in Sutherland as a formal rule of the game. Sutherlander explorers exported this innovation to other nations, which sped up the pace of the game while also making the promotion of pawns more challenging by preventing players from merely pushing pawns through positions to win hard-to-reverse, decisive advantages, ensuring that chess could be more complex.

The word checkmate in Sutherland, however, does root from the Iraelian version; "schakemet" became conflated with the practise of handshaking upon meeting people, especially nobles, in early modern Sutherland, with "schake" meaning "shake" and "met" being a commonly clipped version of "Wellmet", itself a common greeting in Atlish, and therefore came to refer to the practise of shaking hands upon defeat in chess. The formalisation of shaking hands after a chess match, both in the circumstances of checkmate, resigning, and offering a draw, was therefore also precocious - Sutherlanders also invariably say "Wellmet" following a game's conclusion if they are the losing party.

Sutheran School of Chess

Howell Redgrave (right, 1800-1875) was a chess prodigy who is said to have standardised the pieces used, known now as the Redgrave pattern

Sutherland fairly rapidly developed its individual strain of chess theory during the rise of its chess school. Sutherlander chess theory prioritised conservative openings, restraint and strategic play, and practical theory, over bold, quick, tactical, or aggressive play. Openings developed during this period in the Sutheran School include:
- The Sutherland Opening (1. c4), played first by Howell Redgrave in 1836.
- Queen's Gambit, sometimes called Mildred's Gambit after Queen Mildred II of Sutherland (1.d4 d5 2.c4), as well as the Franklin Defence (2... e6, also known as the Mildred's Gambit Declined / MGD)
- The school of Longrun defences, which allow white to develop in the centre while black prepares to undermine it from the flanks; this includes the Longrun Defence (sometimes known as the King's Longrun Defence, or KLD) (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6). Other Westmorland defences generally begin 1.d4 Nf6.
- The Redgrave Opening (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.c3, sometimes known as the Atlish Knight's Opening), which is one of the world's oldest openings for white, being first played in 1833 by world-leading player Howell Redgrave.
- The Eamont System, (usually involving the following sequence of moves for white: d4, Nf3, Bf4, e3, Bd3, Nbd2, c3) in which white seeks to gain dark-squared bishop development in a closed game, and which is able to be deployed against almost any defence. It is named after the international chess tournament at Eamont in 1913.
There is also the Barraclough Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e5), which lays outside the Sutheran School but was deployed by Edmund Barraclough at a chess tournament in 1889.

Usually, but not exclusively, Sutheran school chess prioritised pawn structure over speculative attacks, solid development over risky play (thus relying on d4/e4 openings and a lack of gambits, except the Barraclough), a preference for reliability over sharp traps, and a prioritisation of strategy over tactics.

(left) Alexander Lenning (1890-1954) was a chess world champion from Sutherland and amongst the world's leading chess players in the 1920s and 1930s

To the north-east, Rosalia had developed its own school, known as the Rosalian School, which prioritised almost the exact reverse of this - sharp play, traps, gambits, and hyperaggressive play characterised the Rosalian School of chess. The Capacaleran Opening (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3), and the Sabater Game (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5) are the landmark openings for this system. The King's Gambit was also commonly played.

In 1855, Sutherland's Howell Redgrave organised one of the world's first international chess tournaments. This became a yearly tradition for Sutherland to hold international tournaments on a yearly basis after this point, with the exception for a 5-year hiatus between 1890 and 1894, due to disputes within the newly-founded GST over classification.

The fifty-move rule was formalised in Sutherland at the 1894 international tournament, following contests from a number of leading chess players over the exact number for this rule. Montebranca, a Beiran chess player, argued for it to be as low as thirty-two, while Torborn Long of Eamont demanded for it to be extended to either sixty or sixty-four.

20th century

(right) Herman Shorrock (1911-1992) was a leading chess player from Montgomery, Sutherland who qualified for the candidates as late as 1973, when he was 61

Sutherland remained a major hub for chess and grandmasters into the 1900s. Manning Askwyth was a contender for the world chess championship over and over for 27 years, placing him as a historical great. The Askwyth Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.b4) was innovated during this time, though not first played, since it had been played by Ioan Ewans in 1849. A number of leading Sutherlander chess players were killed during the 1920s, as a result of warfare and Richeist crackdowns on the sport.

After a contentious 1957 tournament, Sutherland's chess federation removed the ability for defeated national and international champions to demand a rematch following thir defeat.

Sutherland also saw some of the earliest development of chess computer technology. The company TavelBord was founded in 1982, with the help of Sutherlander chess grandmaster Seward Hwitstane, to create a computer database for chess, which was quickly adopted as a way to train and prepare top chess players.

The first chess computer to play at grandmaster level was in 1997, when the Sutherlander computer RædBase narrowly defeated Hwitstane in an exhibition of six matches, and narrowly won the rematch against him, both times at a 3½–2½ level. Hwitstane also organised an international consultation chess game after New Year's 2000, where over 25,000 players across the world had the control of the black pieces; Hwitstane won on the 66th move after nearly five months, and stated that it was the "most intensive game" he had ever played.

Modern chess

(left) Owen Carlsson (1994-) is a modern Sutherlander chess grandmaster, with a peak rating of 2879. He has a record-breaking 124 games won in a row against players within 300 ELO points of him.

Sutherland in the modern day is a powerhouse for tavel/chess. Schools across the country commonly teach tavel, each of Sutherland's over 400 loresteads (universities) has its own chess league, and the nation's grandmasters command a strong international presence. Sutherlander politicians also advocate for tavel, with incumbent Chancellor Allister Ramsay being an intermediate player.

The Sutherlander site schack.com has also become a boon for chess internationally and in Sutherland online, and is rivalled by the open-source freetavel.com. These sites feature blogs, live games, online ratings, and libraries for teaching puzzles, endings, middlegame tactics, and openings, as well as live tournaments. Chess content creators have also exploded in popularity in the early 2020s.

Chess engines developed in Sutherland are also at the cutting-edge of transformation, with Blackstane and Rokk being dominant in the 2010s, and Rune controversially beating Blackstane in a 2022 match due to its use of neural networks; Rokk and Blackstane needed an average of 1:10 time ratios to beat Rune more than losing. Rune is estimated to have an ELO rating of around 4,500.

---

The Guþro-Sættish calendar, or Early Sutherlander calendar, was a lunisolar calendar whose months were based on the phases of the moon, split into "full" (30 day) and "hollow" (29 day) months.

This meant that the average year was roughly 354 days long, and therefore to align it with the passage of the year, a thirteenth month "Þriliða" was inserted once every thirty-two or so months.

These months were calculated from the start of a new moon to the following new moon, which meant that each month was on average 29.53 days long. The specific time at which a new month would start would be the sunrise following the first observation of the new moon, meaning that the new moon itself would fall slightly prior to this new month.

This calendar was primarily used by the early Gotic settlers, and the months were named as follows:

---

The Cumbric calendar, or Brigantian calendar due to its common use in Brigantian society, was also based on a lunisolar model, despite modern attestations claiming that Cumbric calendars used an equinox system based on their recorded holidays falling on the eighths of the year. The year was split into a "dark half" and "light half", which themselves were split into six months in a not dissimilar manner to Gotic calendars.

The main landmarks of the year were as follows:
- Calan Gaeaf (first day of winter, typically ~5 November)
- Yule (winter solstice, as in Gotic cultures; it is likely that there was a term prior to this that was disappropriated)
- Imbolg (~5 February)
- Daighan (spring solstice)
- Calan Haf/Beltane (first day of summer, typically ~5 May)
- Golowan (summer solstice, lit. Feast of St. John)
- Lugnasad (~5 August)
- Maddron (autumn solstice)

Gotic settlers noted that unlike their own calendar, the days "followed nights" in terms of the Cumbric/Brigantian calendar. The day typically began at sundown.

---

---

---

---

Synopsis
South Ibyzsea (officially Aladatia, Aladaten in Atlish, from the Byzsean for "South", also commonly Ibissia) is a province and cultural area in Great Sutherland, which enjoys significant autonomy in the modern era due to its unique history. South Ibyzsea is based upon the peninsula of Cemes, and forms the northernmost point of Sutherland, northeast of the remainder of the country; the nearest city outside Aladatia is Blencathra, on the northern coast of Týr.

Ancient history
(left) Caves dating to Byzsean cultures around 2500BCE, northwest of Qelezh

Ibissia historically referred to a significantly larger area than Aladatia now governs. Aladatia refers to the northern expanses of the eastern continent of Eutavia as the "lost land", due to this. Histories of the Ibissians, known by a variety of different names, trace back as far as the fourth millennium BCE.

Ibisso-Brigantian trade is readily documented throughout the first half of the first millennium CE. During this time, Ibissia was a Pagan region made up of somewhere around twelve different tribes. Xabze, the most common pagan religion of Ibissia in the modern day, was spread prolifically during this period, to the extent that there was a noteworthy community of Xabzeists in Brigantias by the era of the Fall of Brigantias.

Ibissia was discovered by Vikings from historic Sutherland during the Viking age. Hrofgar Forkbeard, later Hrofgar the Ibissian, noted that Ibissia was a "green land of plenty" during his repeated expeditions, and that artistry and mercantile trade flourished there, and later would return to live out his elder years there. Expeditions by the Viking age Sutherlanders, which were largely concealed from other traders, abruptly stopped following the fall of the Viking warlord class at the Battle of Æyrstede in 978; a number of Vikings would take refuge in Ibissia, and thereby joined the autochthonous population.

Mediæval era
(right) Manuscript of mediæval Ibissian king Beslan III, from Taman, modern day southeast Aladatia, in the Middle Tamani language

The next discovery of Ibissia came during Rosalian expeditions to the northeast in the 1100s and 1200s, although Rosalia had largely known of the presence of Ibissians along the coastline of the east of the Strait of Cemes beforehand. Trade became prolific, and Rosalian Courantists began to evangelise in Ibissia, to the extent that now roughly 29% of the Ibissian population is in the Courantist Church. Ibissia fractured during the 1200s, partially as a result of Rosalian pressure under King Alfonse IV, and its dialects began to diverge heavily.

Mediæval Ibissia's fortunes splintered between its respective tribes and kingdoms over the following centuries. The tribes to the north largely fell into decline, thanks to their separation from increasingly flourishing trade routes opened up by the Age of Exploration, added to sustained pressure from outsiders and raiders from the peripheries, which the southern and western tribes were largely protected from due to geographical limitations for short term raiding expeditions like the Apsthean mountain range and more fortified settlements.

Godwin III is known for his expedition to Vagen, the town named now after his royal house and the Sutherlander realm's first settlement in the region between its occupation in 1377 and its abandonment in 1640, and irredentist ambitions by the Sutherlander crown are largely traced to this point.

Early modern era
(left) The Battle of Qelezh Bay (1637), the victory of which saw Sutherland defend Vagan for a further three years

Hordes from the north, known to Sutherland as the Yassamids, plundered the fractured Ibissia repeatedly over the 15th century through the 18th. Atinea intervened early in defence of Ibissia, however the encroachment of Sutherlander king Edmund V "the Ready" – which saw Sættish armies break past the Midland hills and settle in what is now the province of Grantham on the northwestern corner of Sutherland – forced Atinea to scale back its aid to the point of ambivalence. The Yassamids would drive Sutherland out of its own stronghold in Vagen in 1640 after over a decade of attacks on the now encircled exclave, forcing the newly crowned Queen Mildred I to spend much of her thirty-three-year long reign on the "Ibissian question". This period saw the slow but sustained evacuation of Ibissians towards the southern coast, as well as across to Atinea.

The Cemesian War, between 1629 and 1660, saw Sutherland pushed out of its stronghold at Vagan and unable to recapture it, which weakened its control of the Strait of Cemes. However, following the Treaty of Bluewater in 1663 in which Atinea respected Sutherland's control of Grantham, northern Longrun, and Maulds Meaburn in return for Sutherland retreating away from its attack on the western capital of Trevões, both King Miquel III of Atinea and Queen Mildred of Sutherland formed an agreement to push the Yassamids, which were now facing internal strife following the death of their last great leader (as yet unnamed), out of Ibissia. Taslim and to a lesser extent Shaddaism, meanwhile, were spread by explorers, traders, missionaries, and merchants during this period, causing Ibissia in the modern day to have a slim plurality of Taslims, and the proportionately largest minority of Shaddaists in Sutherland outside Eamont.

Initial successes by the naval forces of the two nations, which had become amongst the greatest of the era, were offset by the stagnation that resulted between the Yassamids' success in holding inland positions, at one point humiliating the alliance by driving out the largest army amassed by either in over a century. The Ibissian genocide then took place in retaliation for Sutherland and Atinea's intervention, with over 300,000 forced south and another half a million killed between 1665 and 1715. The cooperation between Lluçanès and Eamont shattered during the reign of Frederick II of Sutherland in 1713, causing breakthroughs in Ibissia to stall, and essentially dooming any control of the Ibissian nation north and east of the Apsthean mountains that skirt the eastern coast of the Strait. Atinean interest in the region receded following this point; much of its Atinean elite in the largest remaining cities of Cemes, Sarmako, Qelezh, and Baksan left.

Modern history
(right) The Fire of Takhtamuk (1757), which caused the brief capital to lose its status due to its devastating effects

Sutherland's proclamation of Aladatian sovereignty in 1738 under King Carl II was swiftly followed by its recognition as a special status as Crown protectorate in 1739. Other Crown protectorates included the Azures, Grantham, Camwall, Týr, and the Aukatic Isles at this time.

South Ibissia gained home rule in 1739 too, electing its legislature, and was proclaimed the Principality of South Ibissia (later Aladatia in 1744) by its inaugural Prince, Bamat Muħammed I. Bamat sought to consolidate the diverse (both religiously and ethnically) principality, as well as settle a constitutional monarchist role for himself, and had a cordial relationship with King Carl II in Eamont. The historic city of Takhtamuk was at first chosen to be the nation's capital, however the Fire of Takhtamuk in 1757 resulted in large-scale evacuation and the permanent diminution of its predominance within Ibissia thereafter. The capital was therefore declared at the city of Qelezh, however Cemes' meteoric growth due to its location on the strait and nearby mining industries caused the capital to move during the early 19th century.

The Spring in 1829 in mainland Sutherland caused the Principality to briefly declare its independence on 3 January, 1830, however threats from the northern neighbouring realms and its own economic dependence on the metropole caused the republican declaration of full sovereignty over the Crown protectorates to be largely unopposed within both legislature and the court of Prince Qeytep. Viewing the role of a pseudo-monarchy as insidious to a federalised republic, Qeytep was forced to abdicate his position, while his principality was transitioned into a federal province. Special autonomous powers were granted following the Revolt of 1834, and the principality was restored in 1855 until 1937, when a plebiscite narrowly resulted in its dissolution.

(left) The South Ibissian capital city of Cemes, with its Flame Towers defining the skyline

In the modern era, Aladatia / South Ibissia is the only province with both a head of government (PM) and a ceremonial elected head of "province"/state (Vice President). Officially, Aladatia is a consociational province, with its legislature representatives' seats apportioned by religion according to the most recent census for the region. It has also enjoyed the benefits of considerable public and private investment, construction, tourism, and federal steermanship and funding of public infrastructure and services like health and education. However, ethnic, religious, cultural and class tensions remain, while a significant minority in Ibissia view the relationship between Cemes and Eamont as unequal, or even as a formal occupation. Furthermore, deindustrialisation and secularisation – particularly within its Courantist and Shaddaist communities – have complicated the province's situation further.

---

Note – this is a work-in-progress and as yet unlocated

---

---

Cumbrian Age (~300-200BCE)
Cumbric explorers from Brigantias had long wondered what the source of the city-state's plentiful imports of tin and copper was. Having been hoodwinked by tradesmen from states further south for generations over its location, Brigantian explorers on a number of occasions set out to find this source. Our modern knowledge largely relies upon the Hanesion, which is the name given to the numerous chronicles at different locations (known as Hanes, or "history") during the classical era of Brigantia.

After reaching the modern-day Aikshawer coast, word of a land further south, known to the Cumbrishmen as “Tirpell” enticed Morcant the Wayfarer to discover the Morgan Islands. A second exploration led him to discover what is in modernity has been related to descriptions of the midnight sun and aurora australis, however disappeared one year later in an attempt to reach “the end” of the world. Contemporaries largely dismissed his accounts of what is most likely the ice caps in the Aukatic as fiction and superstition. Nevertheless, his journey entered legends as timeless expeditions of an empire which had since lost its greatness, and a wide range of future interest in the Southern lands would be developed as a result throughout the following millennia.

Viking Age (~700-1000CE)
Gotic settlers rediscovered the Morgan Islands during the late eighth century by accident whilst circumnavigating the southern tip of Aikshaw. This discovery paved the way for a number of sagas and spoken history of the Brigantian explorations to re-enter tradition.

Ulf Gunnbjornsson, a Viking who left Sutherland for Aikshaw in the far-south of Eutavia after the rout of Guthred Hardears in 978CE, continues south to the Morgan Islands – which were relatively well-documented to Vikings by now – and then ends up along the polar coastline during a storm. Ulf reports this to a largely disgraced Viking warlord and navigator, Ragnar the Lost, who leaves with Ulf and several others to set up a colony on the ice caps, mistakenly believing he has found another continent. None return, though the legend of “Auksland” continues in Aikshaw traditions.

Traders gradually become accustomed to the southern tip of Aikshaw and the Morgan Islands, and some attempt to reach other points along the Fifties (50-60 degrees south of the Equator) east of Sutherland.

Age of Exploration (~1400-1700)
Sutherlander explorers – correctly – began to assert that there was no continent at the South Pole and instead that it is a sea with an ice sheet; they hope that there are passageways through the ice sheets to a sea around the pole, known to this period as an “A(u/l)katicsmere”/”A(u/l)katicsey” (lit. Aukatic Sea / Aukatic Ocean, with “Alk” coming from the word for penguins and puffins in Atlish.)

The rediscovery of latitude and longitude from the brief but developed Cumbric period of exploration, added to the rediscovery of Morcant’s journeys south, leading to the resurgence of interest in the Aukatic.

The Faragher brothers, both named Nil, made famed documentation of their journeys to the Aukatic, claiming to have reached around 75S during September to October 1508. Their inclusion of “Bresland” – an island purported to be one-half the size of Sutherland directly to its southwest – on their maps, possibly a misinterpretation of the Sutherlander coast, leads to a phantom island being included on nearly all Sutherlander maps of the region for over a century.

Oscar Sorrenson became the first to circumnavigate the Southern Passage, a clear passage of water around the 50s-60s South, twice in 1567 and 1571, to prove it is possible and navigable. He left his native hometown of Helgen, and landed at Damestede, on the southern coast of Franklin in the eastern part of the mainland.

The Aukatic Islands were first discovered in 1597 by Thorbarn Harcroft, an explorer who had narrowly failed to circumnavigate the world first thirty years earlier, roughly south of Sutherland at roughly 76S, and are extensively documented by explorers over the following century. Explorers would later find that the islands are typically flanked by sea ice to the south during the winter, and then cleared during summer. The lawlessness of the Aukatic Islands meant that whalers could land and take place in it with impunity, meaning the first landings in the early 1610s-1620s were mostly this.

The Sutherlander government declared the Aukatics a part of the Sutherlander crown in 1599, despite having virtually no knowledge of where they were beyond the assertions to its location in Harcroft’s writings. Archibald I writes in November 1599 that the isles are "may-haps the true Bresland", and briefly referred to himself as "Conqueror of the Southern Continent".

Early modern era (1700–1900)
Explorers began to use the Aukatic Islands, and its main port at Falkenby, as a port of call. The settlement of Falkenby in 1833 marks the start of a spree of polar explorations.

At least five tragedies are known to have taken place, where explorations attempt to reach the poles and fail, between 1800 and 1900. Nevertheless, the legend persisted in popular consciousness.

Renowned expeditionist Harald Parry reached a verified 82° 33’ in 1828. Parry would go onto embark upon a second expedition, but now in his 50s and without as much assistance, he does on the way to his previous point.

Hastings Wilbertson reaches 84° 12’ in 1856, and reaches 84° 29’ two years later. This would be the first time (and second) that Parry's expedition was outdone, and by this point, the Aukatic Islands had become a common stopover point for explorers venturing south.

Ragnar-Halmer Johansson reaches 86° 44’ in 1889; the following year, Wilbertson’s son, Ulf, reaches 87° 03’. This would be the furthest any explorer would reach until after the turn of the century, and the year 1892 became famed for having the highest casualty count of explorers, with over two dozen failing to return from expeditions during these years. The saying "(s)he's going to the Aukatic" became an idiom as referring to someone foolhardy taking a decision not worth the risk of taking.

In October 1899, Albert Waterham claimed to have reached the South Pole with the help of sled dogs and support teams having turned back repeatedly. While his claim was largely accepted at the time, it quickly became disreputable after the real polar explorations showed the insufficiency of the time allocated by him for him to have really reached the pole in that time. He is, however, likely one of the few to significantly trek into the Aukatic ice sheet and come out alive.

Modernity (1900-now)
Frederick Jensen claimed to have reached the South Pole in November 1907. Similarly, this is in disrepute.
Jensen, however, is known to have reached 87° 33’ at a minimum. Claims of reaching the south pole became relatively common amongst Aukatic explorers keen to enter the annals of history, however most are verifiably false from time and supplies taken.

Explorer Jon Roald Meere (JRM) embarked with a team by aircraft Godwin on 22 November, 1926, and reach the South Pole – this is the first undisputed trek to the South Pole, and he plants a Sutherlander flag at the pole. He goes a second time in 1929, but disappears. The nation held a state funeral following his disappearance in 1929.

On 26 June, 1934, the Sutherlander submarine SSS Magdalen fails to reach the South Pole, reaching a maximum latitude of ~83°S, and scuttled afterwards to prevent reuse as a warship.

The Aukatic Islands, meanwhile, had begun to foster settlements numbering into the thousands by the early-to-mid 20th century as a result of mining exploration at Falkenby.

A party led by Meere’s son, Balder Meere, walks to the South Pole having left an aircraft nearby in March 1946; he is initially confused by the fact that the flag his father left has moved due to the ice cap movements, however chooses to leave it – it becomes a memento later on to the memory of Jon Roald Meere.

The younger Meere later is present on submarine SSS Murrough, which reaches the South Pole without surfacing on 22 December, 1961. SSS Murrough later surfaces and scatters Meere’s ashes on 17 June, 1997, which would be the first time after 1946 that a submarine reached the South Pole, out of respect for the Meeres. This meant that Sutherland was not the first nation to send a submarine to the South Pole successfully.

On 1 September, 1966, verified by an overflight by the Sutherlander Air Force (SAM), Henrick Ayer and Afonso-Luis Baros would reach the South Pole by snowmobile, making them the first travellers by surface to do so. Four years later on 22 January, Reginald Wren reached the South Pole by muscle power alone, with just a dog sled and on foot, and began a career as an expeditionist and adventurer on television after this.

Thorleif Østenstad and Aina Pujol reach the South Pole without help from dogs, aeroplanes or re-supplies on 29 June, 1989. This feat is accomplished only once again, by Ryk Barnald and his son, Odin.

The first sea exploration to reach the South Pole’s seabed was the Aukatica 2010 experiment led by the Sutherlanders, with Sutherlander-crewed submersibles conducting it.

SBS motoring programme “Mostspeed” presenters reach the magnetic south pole by a modified Upplander, a Sutherlander car model analogous to the Toyota Hilux, in June of 2011.

Conclusion

The national myth of the Aukatic becoming a real feat that only a few dozen would ever manage to become the firsts to do in their respective ways, in many ways, has tracked Sutherland's development from a classical empire to a fallen state to the Renaissance and modernity since.

---

Approved by conclave.

---

---

Overview
(left) A satellite for the Conroy system depicted above Eras

Sutherland has enjoyed the deployment of its global positioning system, or LSN in Atlish, for the last two decades. At the expense of providing its services to the entire world, the LSN – or Conroy system, named after mediæval astronomer Wycham Conroy – has become a vital tool for the military services of the Commonwealth.

The culmination of decades of innovation, and of research, came to fruition relatively rapidly in the end; but even at that point, the project has proven politicised and sensitive from step one.

In the modern era, the LSN/Conroy system is run by the Underredery for Electromagnetic Systems, which is a constituent part of the Redery of Defence in Great Sutherland. Access to it from civilians has been free since 2001.

History

Sutherland has always been a wayfaring nation, with immense focus on its maritime links to the wider world and a "lopsided" approach to its military and research endeavours for centuries. Despite this, existing navigation systems as they existed in the mid-to-late 20th century were fraught with problems. The necessity to reach the next point in navigation and accuracy was visible in engineering studies and papers dating back even to the late 1960s, however government focus was only really gained on the prospect of a real international positioning system from above from the era of space exploration.

(right) Diagram of a prototype satellite for the prospective Conroy system, 1988

The launching of satellites by foreign powers during the space exploration era, first taking place in the 1970s, saw Sutherlander scientists reach the revelation that they could track the satellite's position due to the Doppler effect. Aside from setting up the infrastructure with modern state-of-the-art computers to perform the laborious calculations to determine this position, this part of the scientific discovery was remarkably straightforward.

In 1981, the same group of researchers was given the task to calculate the reverse; to establish the user's position from that of the satellite, to aid Sutherlander military expeditions like that of newly commissioned submarine construction. This resulted in the LEIGER system, a constellation of five satellites named after the modified Old Guthnic words for navigation and satellite, to begin use in 1983, providing navigational information for the Commonwealth Fleet. The LEIGER system would later be used for hydrographic and geodetic survey.

The first radio geographical positioning system used was Seeker, which was first utilised in 1985 and had an accuracy of roughly 2,100 metres. However, the need for a further, more accurate system – and the vast expense with it – was not reached until the determination that Sutherlander national security would be greatly impacted if it did not have access to the force multiplier effect gained from geolocation data for its nuclear deterrent.

A meeting of military officers and government ministers in 1988 determined that the best course forwards was for a defensive navigational satellite network, or DNSN as it is known in declassified documents dated to the time. The project was renamed to the LSN system, and twelve "Type 1" satellites were launched from Sutherland inbetween 1993 and 1999 to achieve this aim.

(left) Satnav dating from the mid-2000s

In 2000, it was determined by the Sutherlander government and military that civilian use of the LSN was a common good worth investing in. Therefore, the Conroy system became the new name of the LSN from a civilian perspective after astronomer Wycham Conroy (1464–1523), and twelve Type 2 satellites were launched from Sutherland between 2002 and 2008. By 2010, it was estimated that the total cost of the LSN network had reached roughly 16 billion shillings in 2025 money, or around 10 billion IBU.

Initially, the Commonwealth only permitted "primary use" of the LSN, which meant that there were inbuilt errors of up to 50-100 metres, preventing what then-Chancellor Almeida nicknamed "hostile piggybacking of military intelligence." This was discontinued by the early 2010s, largely because of the development of civilian-targeted services from private companies to cancel out and mitigate these inbuilt errors.

In the 2010s and 2020, the Type 3 satellites, and networks of SBAS (satellite-based augmentation systems) and GBAS (ground based) were invested into in order to improve the accuracy of LSN and Conroy. As of 2025, the current rough accuracy of LSN/Conroy across Sutherlander phones within the Overlay area covered by augmentation services in Eutavia and possibly Auroria is 3-5 metres. This can be improved to either within a metre or two, or even within centimetres with specific services targeted at augmenting like for land surveying.

---

Shuffleboard ("shuve-ha'pens", thus the later "shippings")
(left) A Whitmoor-standard table shuffleboard

Shuffleboard, derived from the original "shuve-ha'pens" (literally "shove a halfpenny") and "shuve-board" in Middle Atlish, is a long-attested game played across Sutherland. Players of the table shuffleboard version push "runden" (also known as "pucken" or, less commonly, "coyten"), or metal-and-plastic weighted pucks, down a long, smooth table with the objective of maximising their points in the scoring zones at the other end of the table. Shuffleboard is also known as slingers in the west of Sutherland.

Shuffleboard was common enough to warrant its mention in the games banned by King Godwin IV "the Wrong" briefly in 1601 by the Gambling Law 1601; his successor, Arthur III, became known as the "Merry" for his choice to reverse this ban two years later amongst other liberalisations and celebrations held during his reign.

The deck shuffleboard (often known as "shippings") variant of the game is typically played with handheld cue sticks rather than hands, along the deck of the ship, while the type of puck is typically made of wood and slid along the floor to prevent damage to the deck. Thought to originate in the 19th century to pass time on long voyages for the seafaring Sutherlander population, the improvised game remains popular on passenger cruises and ships today. The table variant, meanwhile, remains common in pubs and bars in the Commonwealth. This form of shuffleboard further developed into the "indoor" shuffleboard, which is somewhat similar to the deck variant but held indoors in halls (particularly gyms in the modern day), in many port cities in the 20th century; these cities still often have leagues, however a number of them have closed in the last 50 years due to the decline of this variant of the game in the last few generations.

(right) A slaadenbock, or slaaden board

Another variant of shuffleboard, known as "slaaden" (from the Westmorland Atlish dialectal word for "slide"), developed from a mixture of influences. Drawing influence from the nationally-renowned sport of curling in Sutherland, as well as from other games played commonly across the Commonwealth like normal shuffleboard, slaaden, pool and snooker, billiards, and cannan, slaaden features the goal of sliding 30 wooden pucks along a unidirectional wooden board into numbered scoring areas at the end. This game has become the provincial sport of Dalston, following the formation of a provincial league in 1961 and of yearly tournaments from 1971 onwards, with Esthaven nicknamed as "Sliders' Bay" and "Sliders' City" as a result in the last two generations.

---

Cannan
(right) A cannansboard

Cannan is thought to derive from bowling in particular, amongst other social games in early-modern Sutherland. In particular, developments in bowling in early-modern Sutherland towards the formation of what is now cannan include the fixing of pins, narrowing and shortening of tables to be able to be played upon tabletop, and holes becoming targets between pins. The tactic of shooting balls onto pins to achieve higher scores in harder holes became a core element of the game.

The name itself, which displaced the term "hamps" (from the Hampshus, where it was presented to the King and Queen at a party in 1697) gradually in the 18th century, derives from the Sutherlander word for "cannon" and refers to the use of a metal "cannan" in many variants of the game to launch the balls up the length of the board (with the speed, interaction with previously launched balls, and pure chance, being the main part of the game), rather than pushing the balls manually.

Cannan is most notable in Sutherlander history as being used by many Sutherlander soldiers in the Third War on Atinea, which led to its proliferation in Atinea from exchanges between soldiers on Christmas Day 1793. The sport is now arguably more popular in Atinea than it is in the rest of the Commonwealth, and all but two of the "Cannan Leagues" are in the northern provinces of Sutherland as testament to this fact.

---

Shuttles/bowling
(left) 17th-century Sutherlanders play lawn bowling

Bowling is a sport long attested to Sutherland, and excavations of Cumbric archaeological sites has discovered several instances of Brigantian variations of bowling. It is also known from records that a popular sport, kerryg, was played; this sport involved the tossing of stones as close as possible to other stones; this sport became known as "carreg" by the time that Sutherlander settlers adopted it.

Shuttles, meanwhile, was first documented as being banned as part of the Gambling Law 1601; Arthur III "the Merry" is known to have been an avid shuttles player, and his legalisation of the sport is notable as happening almost immediately upon his accession in 1602, unlike other sports. He is also known to have subsidised a number of private shuttles lanes in the royal palatial gardens, which is thought to be a key part of why shuttles became so ingrained to aristocratic gamesmanship in the country.

Amendist Reformer Rykard Selwyn in 1606 set the number of skittles, which varied from three to even twenty, to twelve. Nine, eight, and twelve were by far the most common, while fifteen was sometimes chosen too.

(right) A modern bowling alley in Helgen, Ravenstone

Ten-pin bowling was first invented in Sutherland in, at the latest, 1808, from evidence from paintings and advertisements dating to this year. A number of hotels and inns in Sutherland quickly featured this style of indoor bowling which is remarkably similar to the modern variant, rather than lawn bowling or bowls, from the 1820s onwards. The Sutherlander Bowling Association was set up in 1844, to take account of the rising popularity, which had surged following the Sutherland Spring due to its popularity amongst the working-classes and the end of bans on shuttles from 18th and 19th century royals. Rules were standardised throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

The number of "perfect 300s" has risen dramatically in the last 50 years in league professional bowling, from in the single-thousands in the 1970s to over 100,000 in 2013 alone. The sport is partly common because of how little age detriments skill; whereas many sports feature a decline in ability either by around 10% per decade or even relegating anyone over their 30s-40s from playing professionally in some instances, bowling was found by the Republican Lorestead of Hopebeck (RLH) to only see a 9% to 12% decline in ability from ages 18 to 70.

---

Mall-ball
(left) Mallball mallets, hoops, and balls

Mall-ball, also "crockey" and "malletball", is a popular sport in Sutherland, especially amongst older people and those in villages and suburbs in the Commonwealth. It has earnt this reputation after becoming a sport primarily played in genteel suburbs like Hampstowe in Eamont.

After initially being quite a fringe sport, mall-ball is largely believed to have become popular and widespread during the early 19th century, as a result of the innovation of the lawnmower allowing the effective playing of the sport in gardens and parks in Sutherland. This saw about two generations of mall-ball being amongst the most popular sports in the Commonwealth, and the idiom "gone to play mallball" became synonymous for referring to networking due to its popularity amongst the "new money" republican aristocratic class of the early first republic.

One of these republican aristocrats, the Earl of Ingham, determined to make a rulesbook of the game in 1844; this book went on to sell nearly one-hundred-thousand copies within the rest of his life, and spread from his native Eamont (around which the vast majority of mallball was being played) to the rest of modern Sutherland.

The Republican Malletball Association (RMA) was formed in 1866, and its members quickly became regarded as the "elite" of society. This status lasted through to the collapse of the first republican system in the 1870s, and "mallers" remains a common Sutherlander word for the upper-class, although is sometimes used pejoratively - particularly in its industrial regions. Following the decline of the sport amongst aristocrats, who largely moved their lawns to be used for lawn tennis, mall-ball became highly regionalised, with provinces and city regions often playing separate rules.

A variant form of mall-ball, known as "extreme mallball", features the lack of flat, mowed ground. It is a semi-common somewhat tongue-in-cheek sport at beer gardens and pubs, locations have included the middle of a forest, along the lakeside cliffs, and shadowing a downhill stream in the last ten years, while the most common rule featured is that there is no such thing as "out of bounds".

---

Cue sports - Pool, billiards and snooker


(above) A pool table, a snooker table, and a (pub) billiards table

---

---

The foundations of Communism in Sutherland

(right) Domhnall Loudain, alternatively Lobhdain (1824-1914) was an early archaeologist who converted to Communism in the 1850s after a number of Tìrrish Charterists met with the Redfellows in Eamont

Sutherland's Charterist movement, which had resulted in the dissolution of the monarchy and the institution of the republican-democratic First Commonwealth, had begun to wane by the middle of the 19th century; this is despite the continuation of agitation from many of its founders and activists, while many of its thinkers continued to grow angry at the First Commonwealth's increasing conservative tendencies leaning back towards the power of the "new" aristocracy ("Mallers", named after their tendency to play mall-ball, or croquet in Mercanti), which they saw as betraying the values that the First Commonwealth were founded upon.
As the Charterist movement continued to wane, scholars slowly began to show more overt socialist characteristics in their writing. Sutherlander thinkers had a long history of criticising private property and inequality, as well as apparent shortfalls in community and "sharing" between social classes in society throughout the entirety of its written history; the consolidation of this into a formal socialist ideology, however, dates roughly to the decades either side of 1850.

The amalgamation of the left around what was to become Sutherland's main school of thought of communism rapidly came into force following the 1851 publication of Loudain's Call to Solidarity. Heralded as writing the manifesto about which communist thinkers could intertwine, Loudain would go onto publish the Kyne (a word in Atlish meaning the head of cattle, not dissimilar from the Mercanti word "capital" in use) in 1859, and Grætshucken ("the Great Spectres/Ghosts of Society", as transliterated in Mercanti) in 1871. Loudain's later work, which cited the "putrefaction" of the Brigantian city-states, Iparian society, and his own native Tìr, as well as the rapidly evolving industrialising societies around Eamont with which he was becoming familiarised in his middle-age, made a number of key claims and conclusions:

• In prehistory, there were likely egalitarian societies before "settling" (Loudain's word for early agricultural societies).
• The rise of the agricultural revolution (cited from the flourishing fields of archaeology which were burgeoning during this period) brought about the enabling of societies where those who held the "keys to power" - spysen (a somewhat-archaic word for food), steel (or weapons, as well as resources), sickness (disease), and speech. Societies which are developed in the modern day are not such because of predisposition, but circumstance deriving from these four appearing and disappearing as appropriate. Loudain explicitly refers to this period as the "Great Fall", which scholars have interpreted as alleging evolutionary backsliding.
• Societies in prehistory which succeeded did so in part because of their reliance on "greater steel ownership", which in turn allowed them to establish stratified societies in one wave.
• These stratified societies themselves are beholden to a cycle of explosive growth, stagnation, rotting from the inside or "putrefaction", and then collapse.
• This cycle is held up on domination of all forms that the state can possibly exert without instantaneous collapse - class, state over citizenry, gender, race, master/slave - the back of class conflict and discourse, and therefore class is the main determinant of societal change, as well as one's own place in society.
• All stratified societies develop, in spite of a population who is by and large egalitarian, an elite whose incentives are enrichment and status at all costs - individuals may exist within the elite who do not conform, but they are self-sorted out of the system gradually because of the diminishing returns of this form of rule for an elite. Societies increasingly become entirely subjected to the whims and needs of this elite, regardless of the survival of the state.
• As societies become less efficient and less tied to the flourishing of production of the keys to power, the self-preservation of the elite becomes more important than the self-preservation of the rest of the population. Living standards slowly collapse, public projects falter or erode, economic prosperity begins to recede, the state's exertion of power becomes "paranoid and short-sightedly self-enriching", the rate of technological evolution halts, and from this point, the state's fate is sealed. Loudain cites the Long Hundredyears in Brigantian history, from around 580 to the Crisis of 707, as Sutherland's example of this trend, in which the state became more bloated, rule became more burdensome in tax and authority from the metropoles, and the peripheries of the city-states became ungovernable. He also cites that a state can move back and forward along this cycle in a non-linear fashion, citing how the Crisis of 533 actually helped Brigantia move back due to the self-evisceration of the elite Brigantian classes and renewal of "honest" rule.
• These cycles are concluded by destruction; the state ceases to exist, is invaded by a state earlier in this cycle or is greatly diminished at once, and living standards for the rich collapse, leading to the educated population's "rue for the high" of the cycle, while average living standards may actually rise during these periods. Loudain directly criticises Enlightenment-era thinkers, and their declaration that the age between Brigantian collapse and full Sutherlander settlement in the 700s and 800s was a "Dark Age", as being obsessed with this elite's trajectory.
• The only way to avert this cycle is by denying the elites the ability to rule, and as their main separation is on the grounds of class, the working-classes will unionise and work in solidarity to outweigh the "managerial" influence of the elite class in their respective society.
• Loudain predicted that while a "communisation" is not inevitable, its sole alternative is societal collapse.

The First Commonwealth was volatile, and backslid rapidly from its establishment towards a position similar to that which caused the revolution which it succeeded. Kirks, those aligned with the "old guard" of society who had aligned together, largely ruled during this period, preventing societal progress and the total enfranchisement of working people. This resulted in fairly consistent trends of social unrest - there were attempted revolutions in 1846, 1860, 1868, and most successfully 1887. The 1887 revolution resulted in a number of concessions, most notably a near-total displacement of the upper-class in politics; society rapidly pillarised into four pillars, known as Loudainists ("Redfellows"), Liberals, Nationals, and "Richeists" (literally nationalists, in an extended sense, who would go onto become the evil of Godfred Roscow's ideology, and who initially were set up as a single-issue momentum against the concessions made.)

Communism as an electoral force

(right) Howard Lloyd Dewar (1871-1923) was the founder of Loudainism-Dewarism, the main strand of Communism in Sutherland after the turn of the 20th century, and a martyr of the Richeist regime

The rise of the Redfellows movement resulted in the formation of the All-Sutherlander Workers' Association (ASAB) in 1861, which was amongst the earliest socialist political parties explicitly fo the working-classes in the world. ASAB was largely borne from the lessons and ideologies of the 1850s revolutions, and continued to proliferate and mainstream itself into political society, such that its influence in revolutions went from peripheral in 1868 to at the forefront in 1887. The Anti-Socialist Laws of 1877 through 1887 attempted to proscribe this group, however it largely allowed it to coalesce opposition to the increasingly reactionary and unstable First Commonwealth around itself.

ASAB dissolved into the Sutherlander Socialist Workers' Party (SSAP) in 1888, following a number of mergers with other unions and burgeoning political parties and organisations. The SSAP's declaration that "Atinea represents Sutherland for as much as the Settish do", and in doing so to become the only party to openly push for the equalisation of political representation and rights between Atineans and Sutherlanders, in 1889 allowed it to proliferate the political spheres in the North of the country; the South was also primarily industrial, and the SSAP gained significant footholds there.

From the Revolution of 1887, the SSAP steadily became Sutherland's largest political party, but also was consistently outnumbered by capitalist political parties; the "kickball of the rich" was the nickname of elections during this point, in which Liberals and Nationals would hand control back and forth despite receiving diminishing electoral results. During this period, the SSAP became more and more moderate in reality, despite being radical in principles, which caused a number of splits - most notably, with the AWF, a council-communist group.

In 1913, during the height of the Great Crash, Howard Lloyd Dewar became leader of the SSAP. Dewar was known for his ideological radicality, and quickly appointed much of the far-left flank of the SSAP to key positions of spokesmanship. Dewar also became known for his advocacy of the "two-front war" strategy; there was to be the establishment of "industrial democracy" by building industrial unions in workplaces, and "electoral democracy" by building one electoral front of the working-classes. This theory, to its natural extension, would see the state wither away in favour of one industrial congress.

(left) Edward "Teddy" Hargrave (1866-1939), the ex-SSAP Independent President of Sutherland between 1905 and 1921

The President of Sutherland, who at the time was a moderate SSAPer, Edward "Teddy" Hargrave, took particular issue to what he called the "scourge of Loudainism-Dewarism". A self-identified realist, Hargrave viewed Dewar as a figure who could "form the largest losing party" - meaning that he viewed it, regardless of how much it could mobilise the working-classes loyal to the SSAP, as a party unable to ever be palatable to govern. Leaving the SSAP in protest in 1913 months ahead of his re-election campaign, he handily defeated Dewar's chosen candidate, Gordan Edrykson, with the support of virtually all of the centre and right of Sutherlander political society.

The 1914 federal legislative election swiftly followed, and - sure to Hargrave's prediction - the SSAP grew to a dominant first, however could not govern, having largely alienated the social-liberal Progressive People's Party (FFP), the party of the "public salaryman". Faced with the decision of appointing Dewar or appointing a centrist party candidate, he opted for the latter. However, four years later after another inconclusive election, with the growth of an ever-radicalising Sutherlander People's Richeist Party (SFRP) under Godfred Roscow, Hargrave was apparently forced between the conclusion of appointing Dewar as Chancellor, choosing Roscow and expecting him to form allegiances across the right, or choosing a centrist who could not lead without the consent of either. Incandescent with Roscow upon his "brash, deeply disagreeable" visit to Northend House, and still unconvinced Dewar could lead a government, he appointed another centrist technocrat from the Open Democratic Party of Sutherland (ODPS), Carl Milthusen. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1912-4 which had ruined Sutherland's economy, Milthusen attempted to make steep budgetary cutbacks and governed largely on the support of the moderate factions of the SSAP, as well as the centrist parties, in an informal grand coalition.

This system, unpopularly, persisted from 1918 into February of 1920, however an attempt by Milthusen to dismiss a popular people's representative in the industrial South lost him the support of Hargrave, who he increasingly relied upon the executive power of. Dewar - blindsided by the suddenness of the uprising - would support the uprising of this unexpected upswell of anger, which was in the region of Westmorland and whose workers were largely card-carrying SSAP members allegiant to his radical-revolutionary beliefs, and the Red Rising of 1920 followed. Seeing a crisis suddenly exploding, and offered the support of a veterans' organisation from the Final Tirrish War (1911-1917) - whose allegiances were publicly known to be increasingly Richeist-sympathetic - Hargrave nevertheless opted to grant the "Gainfarers" to dispatch with the left-wing uprising.

The Red Rising

(right) A Redfellows' barricade, 1920

The Red Rising, whose participants co-opted the old socialist name for Charterists (Redfellows), took place after the flashpoint during the collapse of the Second Commonwealth system in 1920.
The Commonwealth that faced this uprising was completely underequipped to deal with it. With no sitting Chancellor, and no Redery, the military was essentially operating on the orders of the President, who neither wanted a public display of squashing the Rising, nor an apparent derogation of the rule of law and order.

The complete mayhem amongst the military, the full-throated support given by Dewar's SSAP to the revolution which intended to make a council republic in Westmorland with the intention of setting them up in the other provinces (which itself was viewed as a misjudgement of a population who were largely sympathetic to the peaceful movement of the social-democratic party, not Dewar's personal radical tendencies and ideals), and the emergency use of volunteer veteran forces from the end of the Last Tirrish War in Westmorland partly sympathetic to the Richeist party by the President, all created societal chaos. The government building of Westmorland was burnt down, and violence rapidly spread northward to the capital. This chaos allowed Godfred Roscow to petition the President for himself to be appointed Chancellor, which after a week of hesitation took place on 5 April, 1920.

Godred Roscow himself, relying on the right-leaning parties including the Nationals, banned Dewar and his flank from politics in response to the crisis, and began his year-long campaign of consolidating power ahead of the 1921 election, which is largely viewed as the point at which Sutherlander's far-right Richeist party fully seized power and ended democracy for the following several years.

---

Overview

Mercanti arrived gradually in Sutherland; it was mostly spoken as a pidgin language by traders and portworkers, which was originally known as Bysenys(c)h in the 14th to 16th centuries (after the Sutherlander word for "[pertaining to a] business"). This pidgin language synthesised the vocabulary of the Sutherlanders, which typically had a cognate in Mercanti/Bysenysh which was thus preferred in determining how Southmen and international traders spoke, with some of the evolving vowel shifts of Mercanti. Bysenysh gradually became known as "Besney" colloquially; a "besney" today is a slang word for a dockworker.

Besney speech became a known dialect of Atlish in the 1600s, largely confined to the west coast; Lansing, in conjunction with its reputation as Sutherland's paramount trading city on the southern shores of the Sound west of the capital at Eamont, also developed a strong identity with Besney culture and dialect. However, with the linguistic preference towards Atlish shown during the Reformation - whose architects revitalised Atlish linguistics, in particular drawing on more "traditional" orthography and turns of phrase from the High Ages of the 900s-1100s, and also sought to separate Sutherlander identity in quite an exceptionalist manner off from not just the newly rediscovered papacy, but also perceived international interference in its language and culture - government policies deliberately began to give preference to traders who could speak Atlish, as well as increasing stipulations for Atlish-written documentation and leaning on guild participation.

These policies largely drove Besney identity away from Mercanti influence, giving it firmly late-mediaeval to early-modern Mercanti influences, as well as making it re-converge with Atlish rather than branching off as Atlish regained its dominant pull on linguistic innovations in Lansing and other major ports.

With the establishment of foreign colonies in the East (Auroria) by a number of Western powers, a number of Sutherlander scholars and legislators viewed that the innovations in documenting "wordbocen" (dictionaries) should be applied too to Sutherland's version of Mercanti. The "Besneybocen" were therefore innovated first by the same scholars who formed the Encyclopædia Meridionalia, and documented the key rules for Sutherland's version of Mercanti (Meridional):

---

Deumbrialisation of umbrialised words

• Prominently, Sutherland's Mercanti dropped most of the Umbrialised forms of words that were being popularised in the century or two beforehand.​
• This was partially to keep Meridional closer to Atlish for ease of use and translation, and workability, but also was partly fuelled by linguistic nationalism at the time.​
• This phenomenon is almost total in terms of words that were "wrongfully" assumed to come from Kyllio-Umbrial (or Epiphanistic) languages, because of the conservative nature of Atlish orthography.​
• Words in International Mercanti such as doubt, debt, ache, island, scythe, scissors, and so forth do not conform in Meridional, which uses dout, dett, ake, iland, syþe, and sax.​
• A number of words in International Mercanti of Umbrial origin which undergo re-umbrialisation are entirely dropped in Meridional - scissors does not have an equivalent in Meridional, while the Atlish-derived shild and twye have mostly and partially displaced dout and dett respectively. This is particularly apparent where the Atlish equivalent is more common in usage.​

---

Word choice

• The legacy of Besney speakers preferring Atlish words over non-Gotic derived words in their cognates remains, though far weaker than in general Atlish.​
• Meridional is therefore quite considerably less bimodal than most Mercanti dialects.​
• While there are relatively few hard-and-fast rules for this:​
  • Where a relatively uncommon alternative to a relatively common Gotic-derived word exists (e.g. inquire vs. ask), the former is generally shifted semantically into a narrower meaning, or entirely replaced in this narrower meaning by an Atlish word (particularly if the latter, as before, is a "simpler" word). Meridional does have the word "inquyre", but speakers generally prefer "speer". Similarly, "termynate" exists, but its form​
  • Where a relatively common alternative to a relatively common Gotic-derived word exists, the latter is usually preferred, and the two develop semantically different meanings. The difference between "perdon" and "forgive" - where the former is typically in a formal use, while the latter is used more widely - is more concrete than in Mercanti. It is quite common for Atlish words to enter with the semantic pattern of being "warmer" terms; an example of this in general Mercanti is "hearty" and "cordial". "Liberty" entered the Meridional lexicon to refer to negative freedom, while "freedom" was burgeoning in Sutherlander modernising-liberal and revolutionary use as a term for positive, enabling freedom that a state should provide, and "frelsdom" (a word totally absent from Mercanti, deriving roughly from the words for "free neck") refers to a concept of freedom closer to "peace"/"serenity"/"immunity", as well as festivals.​
  • Where a relatively common alternative to a relatively uncommon Gotic-derived word exists, it typically persists in bimodal form, or one drives the other out of use; this is the most unstandardised area, although generally is dependent on how common the word usage was amongst international traders, as well as general Atlish speakers.​

---

The use of the letter "y"

• The letter "y" in Atlish persisted in a distinct form in a way that Mercanti no longer uses. This has influenced Meridional significantly.​
• The pronunciation of "y" in Atlish words often leans closer to the historical [y] (IPA) used in Old Atlish. Whereas in Mercanti, the letter "y" in its historical form entirely combined into the "i" pronunciation, and then lexical/scribal rules were more or less removed in the early modern era, Besney uses a distinct form of the "y" close to the Mercanti "u" that derives from its usage in the middle of the shift away from it in the 1300s to 1500s. There is an exception to this - at the end of words, a "y" becomes pronounced as [ɛ~e].​
• This means that there are a number of scribal ways to work out whether an "i" in Mercanti becomes a Meridional "y":​
  • At the start of a word before a vowel. This is relatively rare, as Meridional drops many of the Old Atlish forms of ge- words, and most forms of this are actually implemented in standard Mercanti (e.g. yeoman, ye), or implemented in neither Meridional nor Mercanti (e.g. "yif", which folded into "if" in Meridional).​
  • Inbetween letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, k, l, p, q, t, z). This was maintained from the scribal choice to make the vowel appear clearer between consonants. Examples of this include "lyfe" (life), "fyrst" (first), "lyttle" (little); where words do not get pronounced with a "u" and are instead longer "i"s, as in "minde" (mind) and "time", the magic-e is always visible and the letter is always an "i". There are a few additions in which "u" becomes "y" - this is almost exclusively where there was a previous "y" in the older variants of Mercanti that still exists in Atlish, for instance, "mych" (much).​
  • In the final position, the Middle Mercanti/Atlish/Meridional "ie" always became "y". The "ie" is solely used for colloquialisms or diminutives/pet names. This is broadly similar to Mercanti, but words like "genie" and "sortie" revert to "genye" and "sortye".​
  • In unstressed syllables, as said before, it generally reverts to the pronunciation. This is the difference between "silly" - though, specifically, scribes usually tried to keep two ys from being in the same word close together like "sylly" - and "rabbyt".​
• Meridional retains the "ge-" prefix in much the same way as Atlish, insofar as it uses "y-" at the start of past participles, but the use of it is considered improper outside of after words that end in consonants. For instance, "did ygot" is a valid conjunction, as is "swannen yswam", but "I ygot" is not.​

---

tbc

---

Kingsmen (also "Frederyksmen", "Truefast")

Frederyksmen were the most anti-revolutionary of the factions at the turn of 1829.
King Frederyk III, who ascended the throne in 1821, was a conservative monarch opposed to the Leiring, a period of liberalisation and moderation to the absolute monarchism that had been observed by the predecessors of Frederyk III.

The King's decision to abolish the Constitution in 1827 is seen to have aggravated the revolutionary spirit amongst moderates, however Kingsmen largely argued that this was a natural restoration of the King's order. Frederyksmen also largely were in favour of press censorship, intolerance towards Courantists and other citizens who were not practising Amendists, censorship of education that was "of risk" (attached to Leiringly ideas, such as the liberal arts and modern philosophy), and formed a secret police to monitor and extinguish dissent amongst intellectuals. The electoral franchise was also reduced, as was the influence of the Almoot. They referred to themselves as "truefast", as a distinguishment from constitutionalists.

This class was primarily made up of the aristocracy, who largely opposed the Leiring philosophy of the preceding two kings, and who embraced Frederyk's rolling back of the tide, however included non-insignificant numbers from the middle classes.

In 1829, the country turned to revolution; Frederyksmen gained the epithet "Kingsmen", which was used in derision by other factions, becoming a pejorative that more moderate factions were referred to as an assertion that they fundamentally disagreed with the essence of revolution.

---

Constitutionalists (moderate-conservative royalists)

Constitutionalists, embodied by their factional leader Chancellor Graham Coulter, were the most moderate of the revolutionary factions in Sutherland. Unlike Hylanders, Constitutionalists supported the King's non-interventionist and anti-nationalistic tendencies, but opposed his rabidly anti-republican tendencies; Constitutionalists were more likely to believe that co-operation with the Western imperial powers would cement Sutherland's place and protect it from intervention, as well as enable it to corner the growing threat from Atinea. Constitutionalists strongly opposed war for political or ideological purposes, believing staunchly in the preservation of the political order, which Coulter believed was ensuring the steady "opening up" of Sutherlander society.

The faction developed in the early 1820s, as Coulter and his faction of conservative-liberals attempted to stem the tide of anger that bubbled over into revolution. Coulter himself was appointed Chancellor after the dissolution of the Almoot and removal of the more liberal Baldock Hyland before him, however failed to ever gain the full trust of the King. In spite of this, the King slowly granted begrudging respect to Coulter - recognising him as in favour of the preservation of the status quo in opposition to revolution - and Coulter began to resolutely advise caution and tolerance in the face of increasing dissent within even his own ranks, as moderate conservatives grew with unease over the authoritarian rule of the King.

In 1827, the King determined to repeal the Constitution. Coulter formed the Constitutional Society, believing that the King had overstepped his bounds in disrupting the status quo and peace of the realm, seeking to force the King's hand back towards moderation. Instead, the King removed Coulter as Chancellor, and appointed a succession of more conservative, "Truefast" Chancellors who proved ineffectual at assuaging the nation's mood.

The Constitutional Society, while initially influential as a means to opposition, was gradually eclipsed by the more radical factions, and faded from relevance until several years after the Spring.

---

Hylanders (liberal royalists)

Hylanders, embodied by their factional leader Baldock Hyland, were the historical liberal faction that was burgeoning at the time of the accession of King Frederyk III. Viewing the issue of a liberal constitutional monarchy as pivotal, they quickly became viewed as adversarial by the incoming King, who quickly dissolved the Almoot in an effort to remove Hyland from power.

Unlike Constitutionalists, Hylanders viewed the Compromise of 1811 which resulted in the Constitution as insufficiently conciliatory. Therefore, the decision by Frederyk III to repeal the Constitution was viewed as an inevitability by them. Hyland began to amass support as an opposition figure from within the political order and aristocracy at the time, although it was often viewed as insufficiently pro-Charterist by many of the working-classes. Hyland supported a stepping-up of the anti-slavery tilt of the Sutherlander state, basic working protections around the amount of hours that children could work as well as an inspectorate for work, however also supported the removal of the burgeoning welfare state for the poorest and out-of-work, deeming them as exploiting utilitarian rewards from doing what was easiest and most pleasant, not what contributed most to society.

In 1825, a Hylander (Carl-John Reddytch) received the title of Keeper of the Gavilgild (Sutherland's economic ministry), and used his role to liberalise grain prices; this rapidly increased them, making him and his government immensely unpopular. Hyland's opposition to Charterist revolt against the state in the mid-1820s rapidly discredited his liberal movement amongst the working-classes, who began to turn to extraparliamentary forms of resistance and pressure, creating the Charterist movement as it existed from after the March on Bridgwater.

The Hylander faction persisted in a less relevant form into the late 1820s, however was eclipsed relatively quickly by the Constitutionalists and the Howesmen in the face of revolution. Hylanders largely resisted the revolution, and supported market-reforms, opposed mass conscription, as well as preserving the role of the aristocracy and Church; this made them too fiscally liberal for Howesmen, too monarchist for the more revolutionary factions, and not sufficiently pro-status quo for the Constitutionalists.

---

Howesmen (agrarian moderates)

Gregory Howe emerged from the rapid change of the 1820s as a relative moderate, having initially been seen as a renegade radical. Widely viewed as a heterodox for refusing utilitarianism in the welfare system and opposing the grain laws, his writings in favour of Charterism's right to exist and proliferate in the face of increasingly "irrational" state action gained him a notable following in the "homesteads of Sutherland", especially in the industrial heartlands of Barrowland and Westmorland. Howe himself never argued for or against the monarchy, viewing it as "immaterial, when relative to the health of the state, weighting of power and wealth, or moots' reform". Howe also became the most known advocate against "misgovernment", in particular the corruption of the state by "Medway elites" (characterised, primarily, as stockbrokers), and is viewed as the first populist in Sutherland for this reason.

As revolution became more of a possibility in 1828, Howe was made aware that the Chancellor Alistair Bamford intended upon arresting him for sedition and treason to the King, and thus fled to the island of Rousay. From there, Howe published a piece opposing further emphasis being drawn to the anti-slavery push of the state, calling it a "tradeoff for the proliferation of working-class people", and a "needless expense". This lost his support from many liberal radicals, who had already begun to draw dividing lines based on advocacy for or against the monarchy as an institution, however his working-class grassroots support as a writer remained into his old age.

Howe was mostly irrelevant during the revolution itself. "Howesmen" were largely confined to representing rural, impoverished regions of the country, and mill towns, in the post-revolutionary order.

---

The Southern Free State's Guild (SFSG)

The SFSG was formed by a congress of anti-monarchists in 1827, following the breakdown of the constitutional order and arisal of the post-constitutional monarchy, viewing its repeal as the final straw. The Guild was itself largely split into three camps: Sumnerites (moderates), Maplers (centrists), and Mildenhall Group (radicals).

The Sumnerites were led by Venstre leader Thomas Sumner (pictured on the left), who advocated for a democratic republic with a robust constitution and liberal foundation built on the progress in the Leiring, rather than the more working-class tendencies in Charterism. Sumnerites were notable for being the most "defensive" bloc, both opposing revolutionary violence and supporting mass conscription, viewing the role of the Guild as a "shield, not a sword". Whilst initially Sumner held a majority of the Guildsfolk, this majority receded as the movement became more radicalised in 1828 and 1829, and Sumner was quietly sidelined.

Maplers, referred to for the maple leaves that their faction used on political cartoons and propaganda, were the centrist faction of the Guild. Maplers are, in hindsight, referred to as the "following" faction - they followed the Hylanders' liberalism until the tenure of Reddytch, and then followed Sumnerite tendencies until they too radicalised with the core of the Guild, and eventually supported the harsh reprisals of the Mildenhall Group, although unlike this Group, assimilated into the First Republic's political order as it slowly receded to moderate conservative aristocratic tendencies in the mid-19th century.

The Mildenhall Group was initially one group in favour of a more radically secular and "militant" state; they supported the total enfranchisement of the working-class men, virulently supported revolutionary violence, and viewed the Church as antithetical to the existence of the state. Unlike the Sumnerites, the Mildenhall Group advocated for the dissolution of the Church and wider reprisals against clerical figures. Following the dislodging of Thomas Sumner and the mainstream of the Venstre partisan force in 1831, the Mildenhall Group became the informal ruling class; leaders such as Yan-Derryk Aitken and Rudyard Hwitstane-Connyngsby are notable members. Hwitstane-Connyngsby came from the most radical faction, known as the Radicals, who increased the level of political censorship, mooted the disenfranchisement of the "burgher-landowner class", and reintroduced the death penalty for use against political moderates and "traitors". The group gained significant working class and grassroots followership during the Atineo-Sutherlander War, when Atinea attempted to seize on the unstable republican Sutherland to invade and recapture lost territories, however found that the invasion galvanised and mobilised Sutherlanders alongside the more radical factions. The execution of Sumner in 1834 turned the bulk of moderates in the Group, known as Aitkenites, against the rule of Hwitstane-Connyngsby, having already agitated to little success beforehand; the Merry Frelsedom in November 1834 saw the institution of a plural republican democracy, the end of political reprisals and moderation of anti-clericalism, political Commonwealth between Atinea and Sutherland, with moderate reforms to the franchise (but a lack of women's suffrage, as was advocates for by the Radicals), and land law such as a tax on land, as well as basic workers' protections and an end to the utilitarian poor laws (although this end was temporary, and was reversed until itself being ended by the Second Republican Spring in 1877.)

---

Redfellows (populist revolutionaries)

The Redfellows were the outsider group during the Spring, and are harder to pin down the exact factional allegiances of; while ostensibly backing the most radical of revolutionaries in their fervour for societal change and restructuring of the societal order away from aristocracy and industrialists, they also largely disagreed with the centralisation of power and cults of personality that developed in the Mildenhall Group during the mid-1830s. The group was also largely decentralised, meaning there was a plurality of opinion on each issue, however few were royalists or liberals.

Redfellows were known for their populist stances; they supported full, including women's, suffrage, labour reform, land reform, secularism, public works, sanitation, and temperance; some more radical Redfellows were beginning to enter what would become Loudainism-Dewarism, such as advocating to the end of private property, total taxation of income through rent, workers' ownership of industry, and allocation of labour by the state, however this was less representative of the entire cohort. While somewhat influenced by the utilitarian thinking of thinkers from the previous fifty years, they opposed the implementation of the poor laws and end of the welfare state, and believed that the endgoal was socio-economic equity. Redfellows are notable as being primarily extraparliamentary, operating largely in pubs and workplaces, and therefore they had largely an indirect effect on the other factions.

---

---

Background

Atinea had been subject to a series of wars which reduced it to two rumps, Rosalia and Beira, of its previous form.
As on the image on the right; yellow areas were part of Atinea in 1706 (prior to the First Atineo-Sutherlander War of 1707, and subsequent series of wars), lighter green areas are areas granted Beiran protectorate status by Sutherland in the Compromise of 1810, dark green areas are parts of the Rosalian and Beiran kingdoms

Having lost roughly half of its area, and one-third of its potential population, over the series of a century of wars, the two Atineas reached a level of "tolerable co-existence" with the clearly predominant Sutherland in the south. The marcher provinces, especially Greystones and northern Camberland, became increasingly contiguous with Sutherland; Greystones underwent a full Meridionisation (became largely settler-populated) in the early 19th century, as did Northern Camberland and the far-south of the Rosalian marcher provinces, while Tìr's Atinean regions largely assimilated into the north. Rosalia, the easternmost extant Atinean state, believed that Beira had betrayed it and received a less poor deal as a result; the vast majority of lost Atinean territory was in the east, while Beira received some of its territories back in partial form in the 1810 Compromise.

In the 1820s, Sutherland began to destabilise at the behest of a socioeconomic crisis which would develop into the revolution of the Sutherlander Spring. The self-professed King of Atineans, or de facto King of Rosalia, Juxepe IV, began to fund the navy and other armed forces more greatly, conscript more of the population, and focus on industrialising more rapidly in order to capitalise on what Juxepe saw as the inevitable contradiction of Sutherland - a union of two peoples that, in his view, did not belong together - unfolding.

On 3 March, 1829, the Almoot voted overwhelmingly to enfranchise every over-25 man with a "token amount" of property, as part of the wider shift against King Frederyk's attempts to centralise power. Frederyk refused to sign the law into force, and amid anger over grain prices and brutal reprisals against public protest, a wave of public revolution saw the institutions of the state such as police mutiny, as well as a relatively bloodless transfer of power in a matter of hours under threat of violence; Frederyk was taken into captivity, as was most of the royal family. This created mass chaos, as the provinces approached dramatically different approaches to manage the situations (with some also undergoing revolts, while others repressed them or attempted to compromise).

(left) King of Rosalia (self-declared King of the Atineans), Juxepe IV (1782-1838, r.1821-1838), saw it as his reign's core legacy to cement Atinean sovereignty as one union over the vast majority of the territories ruled by Cjanèva a hundred years prior

Juxepe IV initially attempted to play a "war of congress", in which he would pressure provinces closer to Rosalia to align to Cjanèva - which, by now, was comparatively stable and prosperous compared to the turmoil-hit Eamont - and thus to the Atinean sphere of influence again. This strategy was initially successful; the marcher provinces were largely run by an aristocratic society that was threatened by the revolutionaries, and offers of both protection and conciliation as to the aristocracy's Atlicisation persuaded them of the virtues of preferencing Juxepe's protectorship. Medina province's Congrès voted 77-21 to join Atinea outright, defying orders from Thomas Sumner in Eamont to remain in the First Republic, while neighbouring Antiga's "conference on the balance of power" (Conference sul ecuilibri dai podês) resulted in a plebiscite which resulted in favour of Atinean allegiance. The governor of Tieris dal Orient, the Tìrrish Atinean rump province which now only consisted of the peninsula the capital was on, and a few islands, not only assented, but formally joined Atinea along with a few secessionist cities and Atinean-speaking regions of northwest Tìr.

This game, however, only largely succeeded in the movement of the direct border provinces, and not provinces that were lost earlier, such as Serraverda and Greystones. Serraverda's secessionist governor initially considered joining them, however the broadly pro-revolution legislature threatened to remove him from office if he chose to do so, and Serraverda therefore remained out of Juxepe's sphere of influence. Greystones was overwhelmingly anti-Atinean, and Juxepe's efforts in fact managed to push their legislators to tolerate the revolution in Eamont more in fear of Atinean revanchist and irredentist tendencies to the east. The push also resulted in the Bloody Friday revolts in Beira, where the relatively peaceable Republic was replaced with a King allegiant to Juxepe's policies; this shattered the Compromise, allowing Beira to reclaim Eastern Esteira and the Azures, but not Grantham, which repelled Beira so completely that Beira sued for peace. Beiran attempts to pursue secessionism in Northern Camberland (formerly southern Rio Sagrado) also failed, with just a few border towns seized, which again polarised previously Eamont-sceptic politicians against Atinean irredentism. Cabo Sul (modern northern Longrun province) suffered a popular revolution by its now majority-Sutherlander population, which voted to unite with Longrun province to gain assurances from Eamont and Longrun itself, resulting in an embarrassing loss to Beira's regime in Trevões just a hundred kilometres southwest. At the same time, the revolutionary regime had gained twelve months of time to amass its own infrastructure; many young Sutherlanders were enthusiastic to fight for the new Republic against a perceived royalist anti-Sutherlander enemy, while border provinces saw high enlistment in the effort to prevent the expulsion of relatively new settlements by Gotic peoples.

Attempts by the Tìrrish colonial government from Sutherland to amass control largely failed, meanwhile. Whilst some towns and cities remained broadly loyal to Eamont and the newfounded Republic, just as many - especially along the coast, and those with the strongest historical allegiances to Atinea - refused outright. A few islands were rapidly seized by Stranghaven (the governing city of Tìr), but overall, the issue remained frozen there.

The situation in Atinea and Sutherland at the breakout of the War of the Northern Front in March 1830:
- Dark red: allegiant to the (First) Republic of Sutherland
- Red: historically-Atinean areas now allegiant to the (First) Republic
- Lime green: historically-Atinean areas previously controlled by Sutherland now in the Atinean sphere
- Dark green: Atinea as of 1810

On 2 March, 1830, the Kingdoms of Rosalia and Beira united into the Kingdom of the Two Atineas, with King Juxepe IV as the sole monarch; the Kingdoms declared war on Sutherland on the 8th. Roughly 400,000 men from Atinea marched across from both west and east into Greystones with the aim of connecting the two; the province, while publicly opposed to the Atineans, was largely unable to deal with a troop at that point four-times its population. Nevertheless, Greystones would hold for roughly nine months in all, using the hilly-to-mountainous terrain and widespanning distances between towns to sever supply lines, ambush Atinean advances, and force excessive losses on the advancement.

---

Background

Merrick Clark (right, 1920-2000) was the Community's first far-right leader, and openly co-operated with settler-separatist militias

In 1965, the Cogadh (Tìrrish War of Independence) had largely frozen; whilst the province's politics was quite dysfunctional and unstable, and sectarian sentiment still ran high, the outright violence being committed by paramilitary groups such as BTAN, GN, and Aonadh, had subsided. Despite efforts from the central Great Sutherland government in Eamont, the crisis had persisted since it was first incubated during the Richeist War of the 1920s.

The incumbent Liberal-VDA (VDA meaning Civic Democratic) government was divided internally over the policy to hold towards Tìr - the Liberal party was opposed to the formation of "settler zones", which were informally walled off settlements that claimed a level of self-governance in opposition to the decades of violence at the hands of partisans and paramilitaries, as many had fomented and become ripe for racism, violence, and irredentism. By the early 1960s, militias were openly controlling these settlements through armed checkpoints; the tolerance for these became a key dividing line in the Liberal-VDA and Labour governments alike, but this inaction allowed them to proliferate.

In an effort to quell the first set of rebellions in the 1920s and 1930s, Sutherland had formed a military internal security force - the HSW-T - which was (unlike the other policing forces of Sutherland) armed and acted in conjunction with the conventional police.

The HSW-T, while receding into the mid-to-late 20th century, remained a major part of life in Tìr; the allegations of anti-Cumbrish bias and violence perpetrated by the HSW-T had gradually reduced its use and powers, which had only partly managed to assuage the feelings of oppression from Tìr's Cumbrish population. The HSW-T had transitioned into an elite paramilitary policing unit, used only in the most extreme or necessary times.

The VDA, meanwhile, was co-operating with the Community party, which had increasingly become co-opted by the fundamentalist settler movement. The Clarkists, named after Merrick Clark (the far-right Community leader in the 1950s and 1960s), had largely sidelined the more moderate forces in his party and openly avowed the separation of Cumbrish and Gotic regions of the country.

With a number of internal opponents to the Community's conciliatory but not openly supportive approach to the militias - including the leaders of one of these unionist militias, the S60 - Clark managed to install himself and his faction as the party leadership by 1960, and became the largest party amongst the settlers abruptly in the 1964 provincial elections after running on the "Us or Them" ticket, claiming that the Community's centrist flank was negotiating with partisans and communists. As a result of his victory, Clark formed a coalition of the settler parties to become governor.

Meanwhile, with violence at the local level slowly increasing and the first skirmishes between the nationalist and Clarkist militias, the situation had provoked a level of public protest.

An Náire

(left) A photograph taken of the chaos at An Náire at around 10:25am, 2 February 1965, Altna

After two weeks of harsh snow prevented marches in Altna, a city affected by socially-sorted partition between the Cumbrish and settlers, the march on 2 February, 1965 was one of the most heavily-attended that the city had seen up to date. The city, situated at the southernmost tip of Tìr, suffered from deindustrialisation and "deliberate isolation" from the rest of the island, being left out of infrastructure projects - neither community sought to represent the city, allegedly. The protest only grew in size as a result - people made plans to take busses down to the city, university students rallied one another to attend, and trade unions also increasingly convinced their members to attend, in what was becoming increasingly a march for better representation of all communities simultaneously.

The march began at 8:30am, in the bitter cold, but the snow having melted the day before allowed the march to go ahead largely without interruption. With roughly 8,000 people attending, the Altna marches were covered on SBS (Sutherlander Broadcasting Service, the country's state broadcaster) and Channel 2, and were some of the largest of the time on the island. The protesters were entirely peaceable, however a tipoff that the BTAN intended upon weaponising the marches meant that the HSW-T had established positions along the route of the march. Tìr's governor, Merrick Clark, had already warned that the protest would be "treated as unlawful civil disobedience", whilst the Sutherlander government had given express warnings to Clark not to intervene if it remained peaceable.

A counter-protest, of some 2,000 people, was held alongside the march. Deliberately established by Clarkists and the Altna branch of the S60, the marchers were quick to attempt to break the barricades between the two; "break the barricades" has since become known for breaking a taboo or precedent with disastrous consequences.

A mural of An Náire in the city of Altna, photographed in 2022 (right)

At 10:03am, the two groups largely merged; much of the protest became a riot, while many of the Clarkist rioters had brought knives or blunt objects, even using stones and bottles to bludgeon their counterparts. Two of the four deployments of the HSW-T successfully separated the breakouts at their area by roughly 10:10am, whilst a third was attempting to separate them, when the fourth detachment began to engage in a pincer movement to outflank the rioters and surround them with the intention of separating them.

As the situation worsened, the march refused to stop at the entry to the barricade into the S60-controlled region of Altna, resulting in the foremost detachment re-engaging to outmaneouvre the protest and prevent it from entering, while the armed men at the checkpoint shouted for the protesters to "stop or be shot".

At 10:22am, the men at Wall 9 opened fire. Whilst these shots were warning shots and hit nobody, the crowd at the front rushed back away from the gunfire, sparking chaos. This completely destroyed the separation between the two groups of protesters, enabling the counter-marchers and marchers to fight and brawl once again, whilst looting and petrol-bombing also began at this time. Fearing a total loss of control, the HSW-T moved in to separate out the S60-aligned rioters, however one detachment mistook the order to instead attempt to block passage back and forth through the barricade as had been attempted before. "We were just trying to maintain order," one trooper told the Strothes Inquiry a month later.

Youths and trade unionists began to jeer and throw projectiles like rocks and eggs at the HSW-T, escalating rapidly to attempts to bludgeon and stab them. The HSW-T responded violently in a mixture of panic and emergency to control the issue, injuring two people. This contributed to a crush as protesters scrambled to get away from the violence. From this period, the repeated gunfire caused complete chaos; the water cannon brought to drench the protesters had to be withdrawn because a gas canister exploded near the crew, who therefore could not operate it. One crew member recalled in a 2010 SBS interview that the cannon had "drenched half the crowd in purple", but achieved little else.

At 10:25am, a straggler group broke off from the march in an effort to escape; the paratroopers mistook the stragglers for those few truly attempting to break through Wall 9 through a number of passages.

After an official request for deployment through these streets was granted, the paratroopers swarmed to make arrests, however came under attack from projectiles thrown by youths. Two men were shot dead (one accidentally, one as a suspect of an assault on a paratrooper previously) in the back by Trooper S along Strangsway, while a third survived his injuries. The official inquiry afterwards found that 47 rounds of live ammunition had been fired in their direction.

Meanwhile, the paratroopers remaining in the protest itself struggled to maintain control, as it dispersed into an "informal rabble". Trooper R would subsequently follow a throng of protesters onto some rubble, and shoot one dead, as well as injuring another.

(left) Colourised photograph of An Náire, near Wall 9 in Altna, around 10:30am on 2 February 1965

A group of men took refuge in an abandoned mill, and - having broken some windows to get onto the walls and throw debris at the paratroopers - "defiantly" stood above this street. Two paratroopers (Troopers G and J) entered covertly, and when met with open fire, returned it in panic, killing one of them and wounding another two, before de-escalating the situation.

One of the men, 26-year-old Ian McAllan, fatally shot Trooper A in return, but would later die of his own gunshot injuries in hospital. Another man would be hospitalised after trying to jump from the mill onto the street below, breaking his leg. The man later rehabilitated himself, becoming a wapentake elected official for his home ward in Altna for the PLO, attributing his participation to resentment in his youth, a broken family upbringing, and the "gang culture" within the BTAN that he had been brought into from the age of 13.

At 10:29am, two paratroopers then found a group of protesters who had broken into a grocer's shop waving a white flag. One man got up rapidly in an attempt to rush out of the shop's back entrance, leading one of the paratroopers to hesitate but decide not to shoot the man; he was later ascertained to be 44-year-old Aidan MacConor, the grocer.

The same two, Trooper Y and Trooper S, joined Trooper F on a courtyard outside where some rioters using counterfeit guns were situated; Trooper S was there wounded by a glass bottle thrown at his head - recalling that he "still had the shard" in a 2022 interview with IBC - but the situation was successfully de-escalated. By the time the protest itself had come under control with the help of reinforcements, there were an additional twenty-three injuries and one other brawl-related fatality elsewhere.

Police and paratroopers would go on to block off the streets to prevent further violence, and dispersed the remainder of the crowds that had not already left the city centre. The chief commissioner also ordered higher policing presence for the days and weeks that followed. The absence of crowds uncovered a scene filled with debris, damaged cars (including police cars), and shattered glass from broken windows from shops that had been looted.

A ceasefire was finally declared at 10:33am, however one counter-protester fatally stabbed a vicar who had attempted to shield a man shortly afterwards, before the protest dispersed entirely. Over two-hundred arrests were made during the march. "The cells filled up so fast," one since-retired prison warden Wauked last month, "that we had to send some of the lads a town over at Ballywater."

In all, seven people were killed (of whom the paratroopers had shot four), and a further twenty-nine people were injured.

---

Aftermath

Home Reeve Rhys Durling (left) signs the Second Blencathra Accords with Governor of Tìr Cillian Gallagher (right) in 1991

Governor Merrick Clark held a press conference that afternoon in response to the protest, calling it a "sorry affair" but refusing to agree with questions implying that the HSW-T were negligent or heavy-handed in their response to the protest.

The incident, meanwhile, was received in Eamont (the capital of Sutherland) with horror; AMs threatened to defect to Labour from the Liberals and VDA (the two governing parties) if the Chancellor refused to act, a motion was passed on the 4th demanding an inquiry in spite of government division on the issue at the highest level, with the President Owen Sullivan (Labour) calling for the resignation of Clark for "riling up the division" and refusing to acknowledge responsibility.

Underchancellor Anders Laveryk (VDA) would initially refuse to resign, calling on his party to "hold the line for a pro-order Tìr" - largely thanks to his warm relationship with Merrick Clark, who would later refer to him as the "only sane man in the asylum" - but eventually agreed to following pressure from the moderate wing of the party.

President Sullivan would later hold a number of meetings with Chancellor Seward Carter, who as a relatively liberal figure in an otherwise centre-right government, was ameliorative to the prospect of freezing Clark out of federal funding and investment until he acquiesced to demands such as the total disestablishment of settler zones, and a total separation of the militias from politics.

Meanwhile, Labour's newly-elected reformist leader Franklin Argall, from his position as Leader of the Againsthood (Opposition), attacked what he saw as Eamont's "vacillation to fear and division", and promised to totally end preference for settlers in favour of a "cross-community approach", as well as to discontinue the role of the HSW-T and begin peace talks with the BTAN and other paramilitary nationalist groups in an attempt to de-escalate the conflict. Anders Laveryk would resign the following year in 1966, seeing the VDA swing back to a more moderate position, causing relations between the VDA (and its new right-of-centre leader, Aled Moffatt) and Clark's Community to frost over more, with Moffatt referring to Clark as "that bloody militant". Nevertheless, the government ruled out more overt constitutional or structural change in Tìr, dubbing Labour "the party of protestors, not of peace."

Despite this, Clark would go on to attack calls for an inquiry, mirroring obstruction by the VDA on the mainland, during the brief power struggle that resulted in the collapse of the Liberal-VDA coalition on 5 February; Chancellor Seward Carter (Liberal) held a meeting on that morning, calling for all reeves and underreeves who agreed with the conduct of the HSW-T on An Náire to resign.

The Liberal minority government of Seward Carter would commission the Strothes Inquiry in March, which found that the HSW-T used excessive force in the face of panic and loss of control, and that only the killing of the man who had opened fire first by Trooper G was a lawful killing - it declared that the violence was nurtured by divisive and sectoral politicians, incubated by segregation and poor living conditions, deliberately aggravated by the weaponising of a majority-peaceful protest by looters and terror organisations (both nationalist and unionist), and turned lethal by panicked, disorganised, and poor conduct by paratroopers in the HSW-T.

However, despite this, the government would refuse to speak out against the use of paramilitary force as an institution, or to meet specifically with Ceartas or some Ar Fearann (nationalist parties, the former of which was more radical) leaders, enraging nationalist politicians who had hoped this would be a watershed moment; this refusal grew after a car bombing in Bridgwater on the 7th by BTAN, which caused the public to be alarmed by the rise in violence coming to the mainland and to want to seek a "neutral" outcome rather than one conciliating nationalists. This period also saw the rise in the more radical nationalist-separatist and liberal-progressive Ceartas (which is alleged to have connections to BTAN), at the expense of the less radical Ar Fearann, as well as what became a permanent disdain for Eamont politics on the island amongst both unionists - who felt betrayed by the apparent abandonment of support for settlers and the paramilitaries - and amongst nationalists, who felt the response to Ar Náire was reluctant and tolerant of the violence and division sown by extremists like the governor Merrick Clark.

(left) Aled Moffatt, the more moderate successor to VDA leader Anders Laveryk, severed ties from Clark's Community party "in all but name" in the late 1960s

Clark grew alienated from Eamont, becoming resentful that he had been abandoned by the previously tacitly-supportive Eamont; he would be elected out in 1968, when moderate settlers instead opted for the Labour-aligned centre-left PLO (Workers' Party), which used its position as a kingmaker to form a coalition of the moderates, including Ar Fearann (a gradualist nationalist party) and Freedom (the Liberal-aligned moderate settler party).

Clark would go on to run for a position as an Almootsman in the legislature, winning six consecutive terms at the top of the Community party list for the island until his retirement in 1990. The Community party would remain Clarkist in its attitudes into the modern day and has a frayed relationship with the more moderate VDA, while Freedom represents the centre to centre-right tendencies of settlers, and the PLO increasingly attempts to appeal to a cross-community base.

An Náire is largely believed to be the spark of the second phase of the Cogadh; the heavy-handedness of the HSW-T galvanised anger against it and feelings of bias from the nationalist population, whilst the Clarkists felt betrayed by the national government in Eamont and leant further on their militias.

This resentment and delay would continue until the election of the Labour government over a year later, by which point Argall's reformist faction had largely displaced the more traditionalist and pro-settler opinions of some of the party base, making him more capable to enforce major reforms than the incumbent Liberal-VDA government had been. The incoming Chancellor Franklin Argall, following his landslide victory in the November 1966 elections, thus hastened the speed at which Eamont moved away from conciliation with Clark and towards a cross-community, reconstructive approach. He authorised Operation Restore on 6 December, 1966, which cleared the "settler zones" and barricades in a matter of hours; Argall would also reform the HSW-T into the United Constabulary of Tìr, which was forced to take training, transitioned to more traditional policing with emphasis on the firearms units remaining separate, and an oath in human rights and commonality. This somewhat softened anger from nationalists towards Eamont, however the nearly two-year delay in more structural reforms despite the rapid inquiry had caused significant damage.

Trooper S was sentenced to a life sentence with a minimum tariff of twenty-five years in prison in 1967, whilst Trooper R was sentenced to a life sentence with a minimum tariff of twenty-years in prison the following year, both for unlawful killing. It remains unknown precisely which men shot and injured the men in the heat of the protest, and the UCT in 2011 would be compelled to urge social media users not to speculate on the identity of the paratrooper responsible. Nevertheless, An Náire is blamed for the increase in sectarian violence, and terrorist attacks both on the island and on the mainland, in the following two decades until the Blencathra Accords of 1988 and 1991 de-escalated the conflict somewhat.

TBC

---

---

Political compass of Sutherlander parties by logo (~2026)

---

---

Labour Party
Atlish: Pærty æv Suþrisharverþ (PSA)
Ideology: Social democracy, Pro-Eutavianism (Factions: Trade unionism, Democratic socialism, Third Way)
Wings: Labour Left, Co-operative, Open Labour, Labour Right, Nyelabour
Position: Centre-left
Leader: John Blake Sagan
Members: 2,294,370
Vote % in 2025: 29%
Leading party: (1922-)1925-1931, 1934-1949, 1952-1955, 1957-1963, 1966-1972, 1973-1975, 1980-1983, 1991-2001, 2004-2009, 2011-2018, 2025-

The Labour Party (PSA) is a social-democratic party in Great Sutherland, and historically the largest of the main three, having dominated Sutherlander politics in the 20th-century; Labour has been in government for 65 of the past 100 years. Having been in power throughout the formative stages of the Commonwealth post-1925, it shaped modern Sutherland; the welfare state, its foreign policy, its "defensive democracy", and its social-democratic, pro-worker, and public wealth generative policies are traceable to early-to-mid-20th century Labour administrations, as a part of the "national planning" ideology. The party shifted to the centre during the Lamont era, and regained power after the late 1980s financial crisis, governing with a synergy of social-democratic and neoliberal-capitalist ideology, however the post-Crash party in the 2020s under now-Chancellor John Blake Sagan has shifted leftward in response to the unpopularity of its Nyelabour administrations during and immediately before the financial crisis. It most recently won the 2025 Sutherlander legislative election with 29% of the vote, and formed a coalition with the Greens, ending its 6-year period in the opposition. The Labour party was historically known for its factional infighting in the late 20th century, however the rise and fall of Nyelabour as well as the relatively non-factional Sagan leadership has heavily blurred the factional divides within the party.

---

Liberal Party
Atlish: Liberal Pærty (L)
Ideology: Liberalism, Pro-Eutavianism (Factions: Social liberalism, Market-liberalism, Third Way, Liberal-conservatism, Progressivism)
Wings: Justice, Democrats, United, Reform, Moderates
Position: Centre (Factions: Centre-left, centre-right)
Leader: Allister Ramsay (outgoing)
Members: 1,040,275
Vote % in 2025: 11%
Leading party: 1931-1934, 1963-1966, 1975-1980, 1983-1991, 2009-2011, 2019-2025

The Liberal Party (L) is a liberal party in Great Sutherland, and historically the second-largest of the main three, typically leading the right-leaning coalition of parties; the Liberals have been in power for 27 of the last 100 years, with an additional 8 in coalition. The only surviving of the two main parties from the classical democratic-republican era of the 19th century, the party shifted ideologically from classical-liberalism to modern-liberalism gradually, although its other core tenet of free trade remains. The Liberal party typically mobilises middle-class, professional voters. The party embraced neoliberalism in the 1980s, moving to the right economically, which is partially accredited for their entry into power in 1983; the Lamont tenure, however, is blamed by some as aggravating the late 1980s financial crisis, whilst Lamont remains heavily divisive both within and without the Liberals. Apart from a brief tenure under Frederyk Yemm in the 2000s, the Liberals next entered government in 2019 after the Crash, and Ramsay's tenure led to structural reforms of the welfare state, deficit, and tax system. In 2025, the party received just 11% of the vote, ending its 6-year tenure as the leading government party. The Liberals are notable for having more robust and delineated factions and factional campaigns than the other two main parties.

---

Civic Democratic Union
Atlish: Verendemocratish Anning (VDA)
Ideology: Conservatism, Messianist democracy (Factions: Liberal-conservatism, National-conservatism, Progressive conservatism, Right-populism)
Wings: One Country, Moderate, High Union, Right
Position: Centre-right (Factions: Centre, right-wing)
Leader: Márcia Téixeira
Members: 658,880
Vote % in 2025: 7%
Leading party: 1949-1952, 1955-1957, 2001-2004

The Civic Democratic Union (VDA) is a Messianist democratic conservative party in Great Sutherland, and historically one of the main three, typically the most right-wing of those; the VDA have led government for roughly 8 of the last 100 years, with an additional 27 years in government as a junior partner. In the wake of the discreditation of the Nationalist party, the old right-wing protectionist conservatives who were disgraced by co-operating with the Richeists of Godfred Roscow, Wilber Alforth sought to form a party that was open to all Messianists rather than just Amendists; this was successful, along with his avowed moderate politics and cross-community approach. The VDA slowly embraced a form of progressive, one-nation conservatism in the mid-to-late 20th century, however was influenced by the rise of neoliberalism, shifting slowly towards a right-of-centre liberal-conservative party through the later 20th century; nevertheless, for much of its history, the VDA was seen as more compatible with Labour than the Liberals were, due to its more communitarian - rather than individualist - economic ideology. The party participated as the second-party in the 2019-2022 and 2022-2025 governments, however was elected out in 2025; the party received just 7% of the vote, ending its 6-year stint in government. The VDA are notable for having largely anonymous factions; factional politics is typically done quietly, although the Right faction have somewhat circumvented this convention. The VDA also is the only of the main parties to have an anti-Eutavianist (EC) wing, though the party is mostly pro-EC.

---

Greens
Atlish: Grenen (G)
Ideology: Environmentalism, Green politics (Factions: Progressivism, liberalism, eco-socialism, green conservatism)
Wings: Together, Progressive, New World, Communitarian
Position: Centrist to left-wing
Leader: Catrin Talbot
Members: 922,174
Vote % in 2025: 12%

The Greens are a green political party in Great Sutherland; while historically a minor or "fourth" party, the Greens gained more votes (12%) than two of the historic main three parties in 2025. It was formed after the Convention for a New World in 1979, in which many leading environmentalists and conservationists unified their movement into one electoral party. The Greens spent most of the 1980s and 1990s as a minor party, however increased awareness of climate and net zero issues, as well as interest in conservationism and pivoting away from Sutherland's reliance on the fossil fuel economy, granted them additional attention and support. In the 21st century, the Greens have been a consistent coalition partner of the Labour party, pushing for Great Sutherland to adopt more ecologically-conscious, internationalist and pro-Eutavianist, and constitutionally democratic frameworks. After its record result in 2025, it has entered the Sagan government as the second party.

---

Progress
Atlish: Forþgang (F)
Ideology: National conservatism, right-populism (Factions: Conservative-liberalism, Libertarianism, Neo-Richeism, Nativism)
Wings: Conservative, Forum, Nationalist
Position: Right-wing to far-right
Leader: Salvador Rènau Regaunt
Members: 778,304
Vote % in 2025: 9%

Progress are a right-populist national conservative political party in Great Sutherland; they are the furthest right of any party except the Sutherlander Democrats to win seats at the 2025 election, and became the largest conservative or right-wing party in the Almoot after outperforming the VDA. Progress split from the VDA Conservative wing in 2023, however was quickly viewed as a platform for the far-right to join, leading to a mass exodus of NFP (neo-Richeist) members and politicians to join as Nationalist faction members; this resulted in a ban of many Progress members and politicians, including then-Progress leader Marten Metsmith in February 2025. Progress are ambivalent on the Eutavian Community, socially-conservative, anti-immigration, and economically liberal. The "seven principles" of Salvador Rènau Regaunt included: the reintroduction of the death penalty, a 12-week limit on abortions, defunding the state broadcaster SBS, repealing of gender self-ID laws, country-by-country bans on immigration, referendum on derecognition from international courts such as the Eamont-based IACJ, and mass privatisation of state assets. Attaining 9% of the vote in 2025, the party placed fourth, ahead of the VDA and second amongst the opposition parties (behind the Liberals).

---

Unite
Atlish: Foræn! (F!)
Ideology: Democratic socialism, left-populism (Factions: Progressivism, environmentalism, youth politics, e-democracy, communism, pacifism)
Wings: United Socialists, Campaign Left, Republican
Position: Left-wing (Factions: Far-left)
Leader: Hamish Byrton
Members: 839,748
Vote % in 2025: 7%

Unite are a left-populist democratic socialist political party in Great Sutherland; they are the furthest left of any party except Red to win seats at the 2025 election, and have been the largest left-wing opposition party in the Almoot since 2025. Hamish Byrton left the AWF (councilist communists) over their social conservatism, bureaucratic leadership, and apparent inertia in the early 2020s; the activist base largely followed him to the new party. Unite are economically left-wing, advocating for a reversal of Lamont and post-Lamont neoliberal reforms, and for a "new economy learning the lessons of the Crash and the 1990s liberal crisis". Attaining 7% of the vote in 2025, the party placed fifth, slightly ahead of the VDA and third amongst the opposition parties (behind the Liberals and Progress).

---

Conservative-Liberal 2025 (CL25)
Atlish: Conservætiv-Liberal 2025 (CL25)
Ideology: Conservative-liberalism, Right-populism (Factions: Anti-net zero, Pro-Eutavianism, Cultural liberalism, Anti-immigration)
Wings: N/A
Position: Right-wing (Factions: Far-right)
Leader: Tave Hepkinson
Members: 340,160
Vote % in 2025: 5%

Conservative-Liberal 2025, commonly known as CL25, are a conservative-liberal populist-right political party in Great Sutherland; they splintered from Progress in 2025 over disputes with the "radical" policies of Progress, with their leader being the former chairman of Progress. Tave Hepkinson has described CL25 as the party "for those who know the VDA is too liberal, and that Progress is too right-wing", and has adopted anti-immigration, socially-conservative, and economically liberal policies as leader. The party gained over 5% of the vote in 2025, making it the third-largest conservative party (after Progress and the VDA) in the Almoot.

---

Vikings
Old Guthric: ᚢᛁᚴᛁᚴᚱ
Ideology: Viking politics (Factions: Youth politics, social liberalism, progressivism, e-democracy)
Wings: N/A
Position: Centre to centre-left (Factions: Left-wing to right-wing)
Leader: Alessandra Bressan
Members: 553,149
Vote % in 2025: 3%

The Vikings are a viking (pirate) political party in Great Sutherland, encompassing anti-establishment, pro-privacy, e-democratic, and progressive politics. Bressan referred to the party as "radically liberal", and the party has stood on issues like digital rights, net neutrality, civil rights, direct democracy, government transparency, and human rights preservation. The Vikings have largely been described as populist, but claim to be "beyond left or right", with their populist sentiments resonating with young people over the growth of tech corporations like Lund, Vox, and Arka, as well as crackdowns on civil liberties after the 25/8 attacks. The party won over 3% of the vote in 2025.

---

Democrats
Atlish: Venstre
Ideology: Progressive-liberalism, Pro-Eutavianism (Factions: Social democracy, technocracy)
Wings: Progressive, Social Democratic, Liberal
Position: Centre to centre-left
Leader: Edward Burnside
Members: 282,849
Vote % in 2025: 4%

The Democrats (Venstre) are a left-liberal progressive political party in Great Sutherland, targeting graduates, culturally liberal voters, and pro-Eutavian voters. Burnside, a lifelong human rights lawyer, has stated that the party is the "party of constitutional, liberal, forward-facing democracy", and the party enjoys considerable support amongst public sector workers and "pink collar" workers, as well as architects and lawyers. The party has also described itself as "anti-populist", and broadly supportive of the Sutherlander model, having largely opposed austerity measures. The party won nearly 4% of the vote in 2025, and sometimes works with the government on key issues.

---

Red
Atlish: Reid
Ideology: Communism, Left-populism
Wings: Many
Position: Far-left
Leader: Rory Mackay
Members: 760,006
Vote % in 2025: 3%

Red are a communist political party in Great Sutherland, espousing an end to capitalism, and a transition to a socialist or syndicalist economy based on Loudanist-Dewarist principles. Red have also been described as left-wing populists, for their sentiments against major corporations, banks, and governments, as well as their anti-war advocacy. The party also opposes the end of fossil fuel usage, and wins votes largely in industrial communities like Rousay, where trade union membership is high and where manufacturing or fossil fuel-related jobs remain. The party won over 3% of the vote in 2025. The party opposes Eutavian Community membership, largely.

---

Free Reform Party (FRP)
Atlish: Freeryȝtup pærty (FRP)
Ideology: Classical liberalism, Pro-Eutavianism (Factions: Liberalism, Libertarianism, Right-populism, Conservative-liberalism)
Wings: Many
Position: Centre-right (Factions: Centre to far-right)
Leader: Rory Bell (outgoing)
Members: 502,218
Vote % in 2025: 2%

The Free Reform Party is a classical liberal political party in Great Sutherland, and was historically the "fourth party" of Sutherland's post-war system until the 1960s. The party has also briefly led a government during the two-month government of Nil Þurling, however has usually acted outside government. The party has claimed to be the "true" heirs of the Liberal Party of the pre-1920s, claiming that the modern Liberal party has embraced too much of the post-war consensus to be its inheritor, and supports widespread civil liberties, privatisations, free trade, and cultural liberalism. The party attained record results in the 2010s and early 2020s during the Crash due to disillusionment with social democracy and mainstream politics amongst young people, under its "radical-centrist neoliberal" leader Rory Bell, but in 2025, it fell to its lowest-ever result of just 2%. Free Reform supports Eutavian Community membership.