Froyalaners
Froyalaners were contractually-obligated servitors who were highly common and frequently encountered performing manual labour and menial tasks throughout the continent of Benacia, typically found in the territories of Kalgachia and Shireroth. The descendants of migrants from Stormark and native converts to their Vanic religion, they had originally been known as the Froyalanish, after the brief period in Elwynn's history when the Shirerithian state had been known as Froyalan, during its first period of Storrish rule by Duke Harald. These Froyalanish, with the benefits of vast and munificent state patronage, enjoyed a significant degree of wealth and power in Elwynn and throughout the Imperial Republic during the reigns of Prince Jonathan, King Noah and Kaiser Hjalmar, a period effectively lasting from 1618 to 1651 AN.
Following the Auspicious Occasion the Froyalanish community was taken into protective custody and evacuated to a national reservation in north-western Benacia so as to shield them from ethnic violence and retribution by their Elwynnese neighbours. In spite of a considerable volume of emigration and natural wastage, the Froyalanish National Reservation (FNR), which was located in the sub-arctic regions of the former Kingdom of Amokolia, proved inadequate to the population it was being asked to sustain. In consequence of which the Imperial Republic was obliged to find a humanitarian solution to reintegrate the protected community into society. "Redemption Through Labour" became the watchword in both Shireroth and Kalgachia, home to an exile community whom it similarly integrated into its own economic and social hierarchy. During this most intensive period of servitude, the Froyalanish came to be known by the euphemistic title of Community Service Workers, which subsequently gave rise in neofeudal Shireroth to the concept of intensive community service as an alternative to a custodial sentence or the ubiquitous death penalty.
The ultimate objective of the redemptive process was to effect a transmutation of the remnant population from being outlandish deviants and the agents of a foreign power into acculturated, loyal and obedient servants of the Benacian powers who had endured their former antics. Higher level Froyalanish dignitaries, typically associated with the House of Ettlingar-Freyu and the Vanic religion were either summarily deported in 1651 or else left swiftly of their own volition. This left the not-inconsiderable bulk of their followers upon whom the rendering process would be focused.
In Shireroth, it is expected that active measures concerning the population will continue to remain in force for one-hundred years subsequent to the Auspicious Occasion, concluding by no later than the year 1752 AN. Kalgachia's Froyalanish population, being rather smaller and quicker to reform, was nominally emancipated in 1655 AN although they remain subject to compulsory sterilisation and a complete prohibition on the practice of their ancestors' memetically-virulent religion.
As community service became more widespread in Shireroth, the bureaucracies of the Imperial Government became increasingly concerned and perplexed by the danger that Froyalaners might escape back into the realm by administrative error or negligence as Community Service Workers intermingled and became confused with Community Servants, the latter group typically only enduring periods of service only twice that of an equivalent custodial sentence. More agonisingly, some Norse community servants, doing time for trivial offences, were mistaken for Vanics and subjected to the full horrors of castration by the Konkordskaya Bratva before the mistake was realised.
Following reforms to the Lawbook introduced in 1664, the Froyalaners of the Imperial Republic were re-categorised as Protected Persons[1], better reflecting the Octavian reforms of 1659 & 1661 which had removed them from the labour pool[2] and assigned them to Workers' Colonies distributed throughout the Imperial Republic under the control of the Lord Lieutenants[3]. This reform reduced the need for the FNR which was subsequently reduced down to three territorially isolated city states in the Amokolian county of Oleslaad.
Demographic decline
Derived from Ministry of the Interior census data
| Year | № of Froyalaners |
| 1633 | 58,606,700 |
| 1651 (<AO) | 60,393,726 |
| 1651 (AO>) | 55,148,907 |
| 1656 | 31,274,194 |
| 1664 | 17,278,815 |
| 1669 | 2,745,615 |
Contemporary Shirerithian perspective on the Froyalanish
The official position of the Imperial Government is that the Froyalanish population suffered from such extensive. culturally ingrained, psycho-sociological conditioning, as to have reached the point where "overtly tumescent-satyriasis" had become their most distinctive, indeed overpowering, attribute. It was therefore for the safety of those trapped in the Froyalanish and Vanic mindset that they were removed from the civil population, and have subsequently been resettled in workers' colonies.
Kalgachi perspective
The Kalgachi approach to the Froyalanish differed subtly from that of Shireroth in accordance with its own circumstances; although initially without a Froyalanish population, Kalgachia did inherit a marked disdain and mistrust of the Vanic peoples from the arborial bureaucracy of Minarboria - an empire subjected to various attempts at contractual bondage by the diplomatic corps of Stormark, often with attempts to inflate and leverage the legacy of historical Storish activity in territories joined to Minarboria through the latter's ruling House of Rossheim. The unremorseful speed with which Stormark, upon Minarboria's collapse, moved to annex the Eastern Hemisphere territories of that fallen empire only served to confirm the prejudices of those who survived the ruin of Sansabury and found their way into the service of the Kalgachi government. From the latter nation's mountaintops, they looked with concern upon the seemingly unstoppable spread of the Vanic class known as the Froyalanish in neighbouring Shireroth - the spectacle contributed significantly to the dire parables of archonic avarice which underpinned the theology of the emergent Ketherist church. The hand of the Kalgachi, a nascent and somewhat destitute people at the time, was ultimately forced by a burdensome influx of refugees fleeing the culmination of Froyalanish oppression in Mishalan, whose flight elevated the excesses of the Vanic race to the status of a continental problem and enabled all that followed.
After the Auspicious Occasion, being in dire need of a cheap labour force to build out its foundational infrastructure, the Kalgachi government eagerly imported Shirerithian Froyalaners in numbers throught to be in the low millions (precise records remain witheld from public eyes, if they were made at all). Unlike Shireroth however, Kalgachia was without a pre-existing Froyalanish population and its government adamantly sought to prevent them from ever gaining a cultural foothold by instituting a programme of mass sterilisation upon entry to the country, even it meant paying Shireroth for replenishments - the notion of breeding an indigenous population of Kalgachi Froyalaners where none previously existed was considered, in light of their effect upon Shireroth, to be nothing less than cultural suicide.
Ironically, such adamant measures allowed Kalgachia's Froyalaners greater scope than their Shirerithian counterparts to participate in the more modest strata of civil society with the understanding that their presence would be historically fleeting and self-terminating. Their eventual 'emancipation', whilst retaining the most essential fetters to the unholy virulence of their ancestral culture, removed all obligations of unpaid compulsory labour and transmuted them into a respectable, if humble, segment of the wage-earning citizenry. In parts of Kalgachia the steady toil of these people, quietly accepting the inevitability of their genetic extinction and the traumatic memories of their previous treatment, was even considered an admirable example of redemptive penance to be meditated upon and if necessary followed by their indigenous Kalgachi neighbours. The proportion who strayed from this path and persisted in trying to re-connect with their ancestral heritage was sufficiently small that the Kalgachi secret police, the Prefects, found no difficulty in quietly removing them from public view and giving them the oppurtunity to nourish the Garden's thirsty soil with help of a more decompositional nature.
Colonisation of Elwynn
Aside from the native Vattnalanders who have been living in the Vatnaland area of Amokolia since time immemorial and a pre-existing community of Storish merchants in Wintergleam - some of them descendants of Valtian traders and others being associates or staff of the Sameinaða Erlendur Kaupsýsla Einokun Félagið - Froyalaners came to Elwynn in four waves:
- The first wave happened when Harald of Froyalan was Count of Araxion. A signification portion moved to Wintergleam with him when he was appointed Count of Wintergleam several Elw years later. Those people were sometimes known as Haraldian Wintergleamers;
- The second wave took place during Harald of Froyalan's Reign as Dukeand the name of the Elwynn was Froyalan;
- The third and largest wave was triggered by the ascension of the Storjarl Thorstein Noah to the Elwynnese throne;
- The fourth wave, which has an overlap with the third wave, occurred when the Jarlorð of Jorvik became a part of Elwynn.
Froyalaners generally lived on the northern coast - as well as the islands along that shore - and in the far western part of the then Kingdom of Amokolia (today's Francia). They also lived in and around the areas of the Sjöhöfn, a Royal Precinct which was composed of a group of seven port cities, to wit: Avaldsnes, Esthersbýur (today's Esterion), Fjǫrleifsbýur (today's Thrallshafen), Haraldsby (today's Thorgilsby), Hyfrost, Joelsby (today's Adlerhafen), and Noahsbýur (today's Spring Valley). The Froyalanish also formed the vast majority of the population of the Principality of Arietta, the Jarlorð of Jorvik and the Duchy of the Lady Esther Isles.
There were also notable Froyalanish communities in the Pale of Angularis and in the Bairbank. The same applied to County of Araxion and the Greater Eliria region.
Following the Auspicious Occasion and the Partition of Elwynn, the remaining Froyalanish, those who were not deported under Imperial Decree 969 and who proved unresponsive to reclamation by their ancestral ethno-cultural communities, were evacuated west for resettlement in the Froyalan National Reservation for their own protection in the face of the simmering ethnic hatreds that their misrule had occasioned.
Álfarnir
Álfarnir was a demonym bestowed upon Elfinshi who collaborated with the Vanic State and acculturated to more closely resemble the Froyalanish and Wintergleamish. For this reason they were administratively treated as being part of the Froyalanish community during the era of the Elwynnese Monarchy. Following the Auspicious Occasion many of the so-called Álfarnir were redeemed from servitude by the Elfinshi community and restored to liberty as Elwynnese denizens with full civic rights in the Elwynnese Union by virtue of the charity of those kinsmen who they had once disparaged as lesser folk.
Cultural peculiarities
The Froyalanish claimed to belong to a separate, superior, race of humanity known as the Vanamaðr. The more extreme amongst them also claimed to be elves, dwarves, merfolk, faeries, halflings, and zotrians. The Froyalaners who renounced their humanity undertook extensive body-modifications to become clans of so-called otherkin. The Elwynnese state under the rule of the Froyalanish monarchy was massively committed, for ideological reasons, to establishing and verifying the claims of these otherkin to have been born into the wrong bodies. Whole branches of psychology and reconstructive plastic surgery were given over to the realisation of these delusions in physical form.
The Froyalanish were in fact a broad cultural coalition rather than a specific race or ethnicity per se, deriving from Storrish migrants, Wintergleamers, Amokolian collaborators and indoctrinated Elw.
The Froyalanish Vanafolk practiced a form of public nudity which they termed being loftklæddir (skyclad). It formed an integral part of their ideological claim to be a divinely-blessed master-race who celebrated the golden liberty provided by their proportedly perfect phyiscal forms. The ideology of the Daemonic Vanic State held that the preference for their fellow citizens of other cultures to remain clothed was attributable to "guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-loathing, fear, and suffering" occassioned by the normative values imposed by "an unholy alliance of patriarchial religions and commercial exploiters".
Economic life
The Sameinaða Erlendur Kaupsýsla Einokun Félagið (SEKEF) played an important role in the Froyalanish economic system with its Elwynnese investment and asset management branch incessantly monopolising contracting opportunities, and its Elwynnese social-economic think tanks providing pro-regime propaganda and indoctrinating the public on socio-economic issues. The purpose of which was to lend credence to the sometimes questionable economic decisions of the White Orchid Throne. Froyalaners greatly benefited from royal patronage, which was used to stimulated and encourage inwards Storrish migration.
Other key features of the Froyalanish economic system was the desire to appropriate lands and funds to provide for all Froyalaners as well as collaborators who supported the Elwynnese Monarchy and the Vanic faith.
The Froyalaners inherited a developed export-oriented economy featuring a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labour force which is aided by oil, natural gas, huge quantities of fertile arable lands, timber, hydropower, aquatic resources, and mineral ore. These constituted the resource base of an economy oriented toward foreign trade. The main industries included motor vehicles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, precision equipment, offshore construction and shipbuilding, chemical goods, home goods and appliances, fisheries, agriculture, forestry, iron, and steel. Following the Froyalanish assumption of the Elwynnese throne in 1623 (check) the large, somewhat inefficient, state owned corporations were broken up and apportioned out to regime favourites via patronage, building the Elwynnese branch of SEKEF up from next to nothing.
Large agricultural collectives were broken up and parcelled out to members of the royal family and the newly established nobility. This sudden reversion to a manorial farming system resulted in a shocking drop in productivity and output. For ideological reasons, the Froyalanish were obliged to continue to insist that Elwynn under their rule remained a divinely blessed land of plenty, and mandated the export of grain to other famine hit portions of the Imperial Republic and its allies even whilst experiencing shortfalls in production at home.
This tension in the declining agricultural economy explains to a degree the ravenous land hunger of the Elwynnese Monarchy, which launched huge expansion drives westwards to gobble up the Vale of Angularis (Trans-Elwynn & northern Tellia) and Batavia, before overreaching itself when it tried to annex Mishalan.
Stereotypes
The following stereotypes concerning the Froyalanish are widely held: Self-regarding religious fanatics who carried the stench of mead and their own fornication into whichever land they infested. Blasphemers who defiled the highest divinity. Shameless land-grabbers who insulted and humiliated their victims by falsifying history. Petty bureaucrats bedevilled by an inexplicable love of meaningless titles and self-aggrandisement. Carpetbaggers and parasites. Betrayers. Storrish cuckoos in the Elwynnese nest. Vermin.
The propaganda ministry of the Daemonic Vanic State on the other hand valiantly strove to depict the Froyalanish as being: Strong and tall. Tough as nails. Inhumanly handsome. Hardworking and hard-partying. Well-endowed high-fantasy fertility culters. Nudists. Vikings. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here. Legal eagles. Dashing gastronomes and bon vivants with schwung and joie de vivre. Excessively fond of pomp and circumstance, pageantry, extravaganza, hólmganga, and pit fighting.
Unfortunately, many of the behaviours that the Froyalanish considered to be most praiseworthy caused them to be even more detested by their neighbours. As such, once their political power faltered, the community that shared the values of Froyalan was on borrowed time.
Notable Froyalanish
- Audun Joel Hallbjörns- og Esthersson
- Æsileif Haraldsdóttir
- Fjǫrleif Hallbjörnsdóttir
- Geirbjörg Gefialdrsdottir
- Gudrun Eriksdottir
- Hallbjörn Haraldsson
- Harald Thorstein
- Inga Hallbjörnsdóttir
- Maltína Höggjasdóttir
- Thorstein Noah Hallbjörns- og Esthersson
- Yumi Zotrasdóttir
Aftermath and legacy
"How swiftly, in the name of diversity, they overturned and set at nought the ancient customs and proud traditions of the Elw. How readily they sought to divide the population and set communities against themselves, identifying no longer with the nation but with ever more reductive ethnic groups whilst these Storrish invaders heaped the spoils at their own tables, around which hangers-on from their wretched "High Realm" soon came to cluster. Quietly and patiently we endured the perversions of their religion, the abominations and presumptions of their propaganda, and the material and carnal greed of their so-called King."—Malarbor, in a rare moment of semi-lucid reflection.
In the decade since the Auspicious Occasion the Froyalanish, first reduced to servitude and now banished to "workers colonies", leave in their wake a legacy of fascination and revulsion. Even those who lived through the era were unable to come to terms with the extent to which the Froyalanish believed their own propaganda, the seemingly overwhelming imperative to force everything that had existed before to conform to their orgiastic conception of the sacred, and the boneheaded unwillingness to compromise in any way shape or form when confronted by the objections of their neighbours. They thought that the law was their immutable and impervious shield, forgetting that the law only exists whilst the will to uphold it maintains. With their conduct over the span of a quarter-century they eroded the good will of the custodians of the law to such an extent that when the push-back finally began there was scarcely a person to be found who took their part.
