Pan-Southern Senate
The South, officially a loose coalition of city-states, is governed under the auspices of the Pan-Southern Senate, a bicameral body of elected and appointed officials with a nominal head.
The lower house, the Chamber of Commons, consists of 55 elected praetors—five from each of the eleven Southern States. Most praetors are moneyed elite, and the Commons represents the interests of the industrial and mercantile class. Election of the praetors takes place every five years, on a rolling basis; therefore, one praetor from each state is reelected or replaced each year. Once elected to office, however, most praetors never find themselves ousted, and many serve until voluntary retirement or death.
Above the Commons is the Blooded House, a body of eleven quaestors. Each quaestor represents his or her state’s aristocratic line, and the quaestors currently in place are that state’s most historically regal (although far from the wealthiest, given the rise of the merchant class). In the past, struggles for appointment to the Blooded House were common, with different families vying for the position, but in the last hundred years, each state’s aristocratic lineage has come to be widely agreed upon.
Presiding over the entirety of the Senate is the Princeps, a position appointed by a viva voce vote of the Blooded House members. Princeps is a largely ceremonial position and does not carry any real power, although he is officially allowed some control of Southern military forces under emergency law.
Democracy in the South
While states carry different official political organizations, the pan-South is at least formally a republic. Although requirements vary from state to state, participation in the republic is available to property owners or the learned. (Graduation from the Companions Academy, the Wizarding Academy, the Four Walls or military service in the militia of any Southern state is requirement enough to vote.) Three of the South’s eleven states allow women the vote, and nine allow any race to vote. (“Any race” being limited to humans, the rare elf or half-elf and dwarves—although a halfling business owner in Eastring was able to successfully lobby to gain a vote there. In no Southern state are orcs or centaurs allowed to vote.) As can be expected, democracy is limited to and beneficial for the merchant class and the vestiges of the aristocracy. Most residents are not considered “citizens”—citizenship being a function of access to the ballot—and most have little or no interest in the Senatorial goings-on.
This disinterest can change precipitously when residents of the South are faced with an outer threat, and the growing power and influence of the Eastern Empire, coupled with the orc and centaur threats to the western states, have brought the politics of the Senate to the attention of more and more people. Faced with such threats, the concept of a united and militarily powerful South is becoming a popular one. The praetors of Trowe, united with that state’s quaestor, Petrus Bound, have pushed for allowing the Senate more military power and to amalgamate the militias and small armies of the disparate states into a larger, better-organized Republican Army. Here, Bound was given support by the quaestor of Rygge, Turstan Leadbeater, as well as those of each of the Aedoc States. No decision has yet been made for the unification of armed forces, as such a move is opposed by Courte and by the aging (and some say ineffectual) Senate Princeps, Milo Alder—who is from Courte. Debate in both chambers of the Senate was paused when Bound, who had requested the hearing and had until now provided fiery invective on the topic, was called away on urgent family business.
—Excerpted from Notes of Interest, Nils the Recordist, the Library of the South in Sysson.
