The Fractured Cities

Between the rock of Shaster and the hard place of Lepazzia (with I guess a second hard place made of the abs of screaming maniacs over on the one side) lies the self-winding time bomb that is the Fractured Cities. The Fractured Cities are comprised by over fifty eternally bickering city states within a somewhat secluded territory, and all of them are awesome. Technically the whole mess is one big country, but that's basically just a legal fiction maintained by whatever Hierarch managed to win the last civil war and claim the Sovereignty, and everyone else goes along with it because they don't want to have to deal with a repeat of the whole Very Definitely Independent States situation. Plus you just know that if you brought all fifty-six Hierarchs into the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns, the session would end with two thirds of them dead, a handful of bystander casualties, and the building on fire.

The signature cultural activity of the Fractured Cities is called, no shit, a "bloodmoot," and it's basically this giant game of assassination chicken where both sides pretend it's a peaceful diplomatic conference until one of them has their assassins shoot first. But then maybe they find that the assassins were bought off and now they're getting shot in the back. Or possibly their food had an extra poison besides the one they already took an antidote for and they don't even get to give the signal. It's possible for neither side to make a move the whole time, of course, but then you've lost because you just sat through a whole diplomatic conference and how long will those agreements stand up in the Fractured Cities anyways? Television turned the lot of you into brain-rotted zombies, but televised bloodmoots with expert commentary nearly redeem the whole enterprise.

See, entropologists detail two strategies people take to dealing with the inevitable breakdown of all order and goodness. The first strategy is the one adopted by most modern societies, and it's fucking terrible. They try and impose order on the natural chaos that is people trying appease their stupid animal brains, and invariably the whole thing grinds itself into disaster and stupidity; see also Incendia. But in the second approach, people embrace chaos and don't pretend like they're better than feral monkeys just because their mating contests are more ambiguous. That's the approach the Fractured Cities took. Sure they're at war all the time, but they've been in a pretty stable state of unrest since like a thousand years ago. Most so-called "organized" nations have collapsed, like, twice in that same time period. Three times if the Disarrangement Act passes. You can bet the Fractured Cities will survive that shit.