Necroanarchies of the Stormcircle
For centuries, the Spirelords have claimed dominion over the Stormcircle, the great central grasslands around the Awakened Wood. However, as the skyways become ever more vital arteries of trade, the Spirelords have concerned themselves less directly with terrestrial matters. And so many smaller polities exist on various tentative sufference across the land.
Many of these are fueled by Necromancy.
Necromancers by temperment are mostly artists and philosophers, vividly aware of life's fleeting nature and easily bored by material concerns, and rarely ambitious of rule. No one is more aware that you cannot take it with you.
Thus, their settlements are places where skeletons work the fields and bonework automata overseen by adepts or inhabited by ghosts handle heavy labour, construction. This leaves Necromancers and flats free to pursue art, study, and community. Their settlements are frequent sites of parties, famous for cuisine and fashion, the source of some of the world's finest music and literature. Likewise, they make great advances in the mundane sciences.
Crime is almost unheard of, since food is sufficient and no one needs money to live. Murder for any reason is easily deterred when someone can call the victim's ghost to testify. The closest to real unrest they see come from petty squabbles over personal taste, clashing artistic movements, and ideological purity.
At the centre of the commune is an Anchor which forms the unliving heart of their society. When you join the commune, you agree that your body becomes part of the labour pool when you die. When that day comes, your ghost is offered a choice - be bound to the Anchor until you're ready, or pass on.
Those who choose to remain help with admistration, continue to study, watch for monsters and raiders beyond the bounds. Necromancers can provide temporary physicality to ghosts so they're not left out of the casual debauchery that defines the communes for outsiders. Naturally Power despises these communities, so the threat of outside violence is present, and the Union of Necrocommunist Kaer out west often condemns the communes for bourgeois counter-revolutionary revisionist decadence. But a gunline of zombies can be a fine discouragement to those who would threaten the community, and states often speculate on what terrible powers decades of long practice may have conferred on the otherwise peaceful Necromancers to bestow such a sense of security.
