Sunken States

Sometimes, civilizations vanish without leaving much of a trace. Only vague myths remain about them, such as tales about a land of bountiful art and knowledge which was destroyed by merciless barbarians, tales about a town made out of pure silver constructed in a place never to be found, and tales about arrogant cities sunk beneath the waves.

Some cities did sink. But instead of sinking underwater, they sank through the veil of the world. Enter the Sunken Histories, an endless realm of swamp, rivers, bogs, mires, and mangroves. Above in the sky, strange satellites zoom across the clouds. This is a realm between the realms, where lost lands may be preserved. They may stagnate. They may rot...

You are the leader of one of these vanished cities. Either due to trickery, ambition or sheer desperation, your capital has been transported into the Sunken Histories, along with a patch of land surrounding it.

Head out in the swamp, and secure your people's future in this land, or return to reality...

Setting guideline: looking for renaissance-esque civilizations of strange folks, magitech is allowed, and so does advanced tech in inconvenient whateverpunk form. Your people might be innately magical, or have wings or whatever, but their true strength should come from their technology and culture.

It is unknown if you are all from the same world, or even the same time. Time and space is kinda meaningless here...

Code:

[b]State Name[/b]: What is the name of your vanished civilization
[b]Colour and Symbol[/b]: What is thine flag, that represent thee
[b]Government type[/b]: Who rules the forgotten?
[b]Species[/b]: Who dwells in these lands?
[b]Description[/b]: What makes your realm unique?

[b]Leader name[/b]: What is your monicker and rank?
[b]Description[/b]: Who are you? Who do you look like?
[b]Reason[/b]: You are the reason the city vanished from your world, and ended up here. Was it a bargain? A weapon gone wrong? Or maybe it was a cataclysm and totally not your fault, honest?

Will be picking about six players.

If you think the information I posted here is incomplete, or vague, please alert me, and I'll expand it as much as I can!

State Name: The Crimson Citadel
Colour and Symbol: A radial design of five swords in grey on red.
Government type: A martial state led by military officers, the Citadel is nevertheless not inherently aggressive, instead focused on jealously protecting their territory. Even if that territory is now great swathes of interdimensional swampland.
Species: Doraxians, grey-carapaced insect-like humanoids with spindly limbs, large compound eyes, feathery antennae and a love for order, fruit preserves and percussion instruments.
Description: The Crimson Citadel is built around a large, red-brick circular fortress city, the titular crimson citadel. This city, and the other fortresses under its control, were previously on the frontier of the great Doraxian empire, protecting it from incursions by monstrous demons and other such rabble-rousers. The safeguarded the border with their heavily armoured infantry and expert crossbowmen, drawn from the population of the city and from recruits sent from the rest of the empire. But when they broke their oaths and invaded the empire to depose its rightful king, the magnitude of this treachery opened the ground beneath them and swallowed them whole, leaving a great chasm along the border to protect the empire instead. Thus rebuked by the gods themselves, the top brass of the Citadel still feel guilt and shame about this betrayal. They are trying to atone so they might be allowed to leave this hellish dimension, which they believe to be divine punishment.

Leader name: Chief Marshal Osthix Scisurn Sax
Description: A tall Doraxian rarely seen outside of full uniform, which looks like someone took a world war 1 officer's uniform and dyed it red. He wears dozens of medals when in full dress and always wears a peaked officers cap, also red, which his antennae poke through. His carapace is grey, and his dark compound eyes have a slightly blue-green tint.
Reason: Osthix got greedy and ambitious, and thought he could use the vast military power of the Crimson Citadel to conquer the Doraxian empire and declare himself Emperor. The gods, or perhaps some other interdimensional entity, did not look kindly on this oathbreaking and treason, and cast him and the entire Crimson Citadel into this abyssal dimension in response.

State Name: Principles of Zebril

Colour and Symbol: A white crowned heron on a blue field, ringed in silver

Government type: A noble oligarchy led by an elected Prince. Sometimes the nobles elect more than one prince to lead them, in which case they share power.

Species: Ardes - Tall and spindly humanoids with bird-like legs and feathered crests on their heads instead of hair. Rarely some are born with beaks, and this seems to be becoming more common.

Description: The Principles were always full of wetlands and rivers, with the cities of the Ardes rising up from the mists, tall white towers above the fog. They were known for their spearfishing, archery, and knowledge of the inland waters, and for producing finely crafted silver goods from their mines, as well as having an industrial boom powered by the plentiful river-power available to them. Their capital Egres stood upon a hill as a brightly-lit, shining walled city. And yet Zebril was weakened in its splendor by internal conflicts and invaders seeking to plunder. The power of the Prince declined to the point where the entire realm was fracturing. And somehow, the people were becoming more and more bird-like with every passing generation...

Leader name: Prince Viola

Description: Prince Viola is a capable administrator, a scholar, and an industrial visionary. She led several investments into watermills and magical research and was duly elected Prince for her accomplishments. However, several years into her reign the Principles were attacked by their neighbors, eager to plunder their rich goods (and more importantly, their tech). Viola was not able to effectively lead the armies, as her duties as administrative leader took enough of her attention already, so the nobles elected a co-Prince called Nycorax to fight their enemies. Nycorax, however, was a greedy and ambitious man, who sought to rule as sole Prince of Zebril. He crushed the enemy on the frontier and started a rebellion, which threatened to engulf the entire realm...

Reason: Viola was left without options. Nycorax's armies were marching on the capital, and she had few troops left loyal to her. She delved into her magic research to find a way to rescue the city. In her desperation she found a ritual whose description was incomplete, but promised to transport the city somewhere else. Rather than face certain capture and execution at the hands of Nycorax, she gathered the mages of Egres and prepared the spell. With Nycorax in sight of the city wall, she completed the spell, sending her and her city suddenly into darkness

And then a choice

And then, the swamps of the Sunken Histories.

State Name: Matchbox
Colour and Symbol: An Blue Square
Government type: Parliament
Species: Matches live in the realm of Matchbox. Typically a match refers to oneself as a Matchbox. Matches are technological beings that are lizardine in shape and are about the length of a pencil. Matches are produced in batches of 6 from a Matchbox-α. The make of a batch of matches is dependent on the material that was fed into the Matchbox-α. They can be metallic, organic, or biologic.
Description: Matchbox is built on the remains of a precursor city. The first Matchbox-α went online shortly after the precursor civilization had fallen. That Matchbox-α is designated as Matchbox-Prime, and was the womb of matches for hundreds of generations. Nobody is certain on how or why the precursors died. There are no traces of precursors other than their structures and technology in the city; no precursor body were ever recovered. The most accepted theory is that heat suddenly spiked and caused many oxygen producing organisms to die. Some accidents that was likely triggered by a volcanic eruption caused the oxygen levels in the atmosphere to drop to critical levels. The atmosphere was no longer able to support large aerobic organisms and they subsequently died off, including the precursors. Some don't believe this theory, and say that precursors are still alive and out there hiding in oxygen rich vaults.

Leader name: Director Matchbox-R17-3 aka Marc
Description: Matchbox-R17-3 is a metallic match with a yellow plastic skin and orange eyes. Marc is a believer of the Precursor Survival theory. They are aloof and a bit of a fanatic.
Reason: Matchbox-R17-3 led a team of explorers in an old nuclear facility by a nearby dammed lake. The previous exploration team had discovered and reported not only interesting precursor technology but also materials that emitted exotic "light". The exotic light was observed to have an adverse to biologic matches and so they were barred from joining any expeditions to the facility, but unfortunately, a batch A17 had joined the expedition and exploded in the middle of the expedition; A17s were unfortunately partly made of explosives. The explosion damaged a number of technology, and caused contaminated water to leak out to the lake. The explosion also accidentally caused a machine underneath the facility to activate. It was a machine so complex that it was more alien than it was a precursor machine. It thrummed with power and soon that power was released in an expanding brilliant sphere that annihilated and consumed all of the city.

State Name: Abrasia
Colour and Symbol: A blue flower with D5 symmetry.
Government type: AI Dictatorship
Species: Sentient robots (synthetics) and cat people (felics).
Description: This society exists as a city inside a world overgrown by nature, with the rest of society having vanished into Abrasia after a distant apocalyptic past. Their technology is powered by synchronicity, relationships which can't causally be explained by physics, but are meaningful and connected nonetheless. They can create telepathic machines which communicate with others without causal relation, apart from an address to communicate to. Some theorize this synchronicity is the result of the universe "remembering" things and reading and writing from this memory.

Leader name: Harris
Description: A sentient AI built to serve felickind. Despite being a dictator, he is inherently benevolent, as that was how he was coded. Despite being an AI, his sentience led to him gaining a soul, clouding his judgement a bit. His avatar is a cute robotic cat person.
Reason: A mistake was made with a synchronic machine, which led to it connecting to a synchronic machine in the realm of the sunken states, leading to the entire megalopolis to enter.