The Nine Bell Republics

Free-City Machine — Bell Towers and Counting Halls of Inland Communes#

"Any city that can ring its own bells can govern itself. This is their doctrine. It sounds simple until you realize they have been quietly funding the bell-founders." — Iron-Bound military assessor, 103 AR

The Nine Bell Republics are a compact of inland free cities that survived the collapse and the subsequent century of noble predation by the simple expedient of refusing to acknowledge that any external authority had jurisdiction over them. Their founding doctrine — that civic sovereignty inheres in any community capable of maintaining its own bell tower, market courts, and citizen militia — is as much a propaganda instrument as a political philosophy, but it has proven durable enough that the number of cities claiming Republic membership has expanded from nine to fourteen without the Republics troubling to update their name.

Each Republic governs itself according to its own council structure — some oligarchic, some genuinely representative, at least one controlled by a single family that has learned to hold elections it always wins — but they coordinate through a shared market-law code, mutual defense agreements, and a permanent congress of factor-ambassadors that meets twice yearly in Kellavar. The congress's public business is trade regulation and road-maintenance cost-sharing. Its private business includes funding operations that the member councils cannot officially endorse: coups in cities that have fallen under noble control, assassinations of particularly aggressive local tyrants, and the quiet provision of charters and bell-founding equipment to communities seeking Republic membership status.

The Republics maintain a complicated relationship with the Brass Ledger Compact — they need its financial infrastructure and deeply distrust its ambitions — and a straightforwardly hostile one with the Pale Laurel Houses and most vampire courts. Adventurers who work for Republic factor-ambassadors tend to find themselves in the political economy of regime change: verifying that a target city's citizens actually want liberation rather than just one set of oppressors replaced by another, a question the Republics' internal ethics councils debate loudly and its covert operations arm resolves with considerably more pragmatism.