Stratocracies, Junta's, Martial Empires, and Military Republics

>Stratocracies, Junta's, Martial Empires, and Military Republics
Someone's played Stellaris I see.

Yes,

They are an imperial guard regiment called the 44th Vendoland system militant. They are a fairly resource rich planet that has worked out a way of paying the planitary tithe in troops so that the real citizenry of the planet can live quite comfortably. They send ships round to the rest of the local planets in the system, which are mostly feral and feudal worlds, they either barter for soldiers, recruit them and in some cases abduct them. They then take these feudal worlders back to Vendoland to the the massive tent-cities on the planets vast grass lands, and train them in drills such as platoon movement, fieldcraft and agility training aswell as using all the standard kit they are provided with. They model themselves very strongly on Cadian shock troops, however their planet is not a fortress and is moslty covered in vast tracts of grassland and hills and their troops are closer to rangers than shock troops and most of the feudal worlders cannot read. After a grueling 6 month training they are then taken back on the ships and shipped off to whatever warfare the imperium is engaged in. However they are most often called the system militant due to their patrol and policing of the system that they recruit from.
The planet Vendoland itself is ruled by a Junta of 5 field martials. Called the generals castellarn. The chief among them is elected and is presently General Castellarn Grover Mallier.

The Vendoland System Militant are most known for their deployment of stimm injectors to all troops and their ability to travers terrain very quickly, their high toughness, they also have a brutal reputation of close combat oweing to their feral or feudal lineage. They are all issued with bayonets. They are also known for using the vendoland hotshot power pack. Veteran troops carry as many as four hotshot packs in canvas webbing and they use them to take down enemies with greater armour.

But I once ran a space setting where there were two Terran factions, for simplicity, call them the Empire and the Federation.

On Earth and the core territories, genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancement were being continuously developed, which allowed the rich to essentially upgrade themselves into another species entirely. Since they would be bio-engineered to have thinking and planning abilities far beyond any baseline human, they evolved into a neo-aristocracy, while the poor classes became irrelevant chattel since there was no purpose for them anymore.

In the outer worlds, the purists took control and prevented this from happening. As things grew worse in the empire for the common man, militant purists broke away and started the Federation. Being outnumbered, out-gunned and outsmarted, they mobilized their entire population and became an extremely militarized state; while the empire began taking steps to ease the class divide and improve conditions for the lower classes for the sake of appeasement.

So we are left with a dichotomy of two societies: one is relatively comfortable and safe to live in, but without any opportunity for advancement or any political voice for the common man. The other is a nation by the people, for the people, but with mandatory service, rationing, strict law, and basically, very few civil rights due to a state of emergency that has lasted decades and become a way of life; but also there is a sense of community and common purpose, fighting and sacrificing for something greater.

I once made a society were the whole of society is one big tribal army ruled by (not genuine) demigod chieftains. Everyone was just a simple soldier meant to aid the demigod chieftains, whose lineage stretched back to the founding of the tribes in the wake of a great war with a particularly nasty confederacy of city-states

From that point on, the whole nation began obeying their chieftains, who claimed semi-divine status for heroic feats, and descent from the dozens and dozens of children of the first High Chief. Shamans existed mainly to interpret visions for the chieftains, and there some priests following a faith originating in another nation, but they were mainly doctors, medicine men and fraternal orders of monks rather than a missionary faith. Everyone had a rank in their tribe, usually dictated by their skills and age.

Everyone believes its their duty to fight and work for all the tribes, and bring honor to their tribe and chieftain, or else the whole nation could be broken and destroyed in a war by the previously mentioned nasty city-states that absolutely hate them. They hate the cities right back, though the tribes have fortresses throughout their lands now. There is no High Chief, as the first and only one named all his children leaders of his people. Now the Siblings rule the nation in a great family gathering, preparing for a coming war to annihilate their hated foes. The High Chief, Son of Heaven, Firstborn of the Nation died because his people were too weak to follow him to victory. It is the duty of everyone to improve themselves, and purge weakness.

What makes the city states nasty? Sounds like the tribes basically wipe personal freedoms for an idealized collective. Also city building tends to mean technological and social advancement.

I like to think of the Jovian Junta - or at least one faction - as something approaching the UNSC, or the book version of Starship Troopers.

They're MilSF oo-rah rock 'em sock 'em modern-day troopers, out of place in a setting where a lot of people are anarchist free-love Milennials who commit suicide on a daily basis to fit into new bodies, where uplifted animals join black ops squads, where you're not sure what's stopping Firewall from giving everyone hyper-competent training programs and sending them into battle against Earth.

They're conservative - maybe they're ultra-liberal by today's standards, but in this setting, they're the Reagan-era "goddamn blacks and mexicans!11" jerkoffs worried about crime who you think you can't operate a computer.

They can. They're just not going to take what they think is the easy route. Sure, everyone else might pre-fab armor, take swarms of nanites with them, augment their bodies. Sure, your hardsuits may look like bulky, unmanuverable pieces of shit. But you can still twirl like a ballerina and pick up a squalling baby as your massive hardsuit shields the railblasts of the Ny'knikiin ping off your armor.

Sure, you won't "leave your body", as they put it. But you know you're not going to pretend what they pull from the stacks is still you.

Sure, you may be 'conservative nutters clinging to obsolete traditions and magic sky fairies'. But those were a part of your history, and to forget it would be a bigger sin than letting another Fall happen.

My setting was heavily based on Naruto so yeah.

Setting creator for this. Glad to know people like the idea.

>What are some child races?

Gnomes, ogres, elves, sylphs, giants, sárkán (dragonborn essentially), pixies. Child races are the species intended as inhabitants of the world, child as in 'children of the god.' One of the ways in which the child races differ from the servant races is that they're not at odds with the world and themselves in the same way. They simply do not have many of the deep seated racial insecurities that we recognize as part of the human condition, and often drive the formation of societies like those in the OP. They see the world in a more objective manner, they know what they are, where they came from, and such. An elf can be a dickhead, he can by shy or insecure or prideful as an individual, but he will never think "fucking ogres, being stronger than me an' shit, it's not fucking fair. I should start a race war against ogres because they make me feel small."

>Tell me more about the rebellion?

So essentially, the servant races are created by an unwanted intrusion from Beyond. They evolve into being due to the influence of radioactive eldritch horrors scraping their teeth along the skeins of reality. They're not meant to be there, and unlike the child races, they are needy. They very pointedly feel the insecurities of being a random cosmic event, of there being no meaning. They feel the urge to accomplish themselves, to wrestle meaning out of the world, to vindicate themselves. Life real life humans, they want to belong, but there is no indication in the universe that they belong to anything, that they are more than a mistake. In the early days many of them, particularly the orcs, found meaning in worship of the beings that created them, and sought to wage a war of conquest, believing that they had to pop the bubble of reality and let their creators in order to have world that is not at odds with them.

These first wars were immense in scale and resulted in both the gods and the things beyond creating new races (like giants, or trolls, or many types of beastfolk) to tip the scales in their favour, the gods bringing beings into existence from immaculate fire, and the creatures of the outer dark mutating life into being, often intentionally but also sometimes by pure happenstance. Eventually, the child races approached victory, but many of the servant races were pretty much benign consequences of malicious acts, wholly without fault, guilty only of existing. The agents of the gods decreed that they had to be scrubbed from reality, but ultimately, the vast majority of those races that had fought to preserve the world decided they simply didn't want to do that.

So nations turned on nations and children upon children, until eventually, the gods, saddened and bitterly disappointed in the actions of their creations, told them that they would rescind their decree and the fighting could stop, but they were on their own from now on. They left and locked the doors to the world behind them, only one remaining, seemingly abandoning creation and leaving it to mortal hands.

City states enslaved other people and destroyed their homelands, and don't really fight wars of conquest, just extermination. The tribes ended up being a target at one point, and were hunted for decades before uniting and driving out the confederacy. A neighboring kingdom from which the priesthood came also got ravaged even harder later on, and the tribes joined the war after some hesitation to aid the kingdom, and they feel guilty over not joining earlier. So, the two nations have fought off and on ever since, but neither has destroyed the other.

There are also cultural differences, mainly centered around the city states freaky mystery cults and the burning of the forests on a sacred mountain of the cities that keep up the hatred.

The cities can marshal more men and better weapons, but loathe fighting long wars. They're semi democratic, so while they have wealth and industry there is no political will for anything other mass slaughtering of enemy populations. The tribes militarism is in part just a way to survive living next to the confederacy.

There is individualism in the tribes, especially as they've all begun mixing. One big war and the chiefs might lose their prestige and rendered as important as the pope or king of Spain

A long time back there was a world building thread about a world where there were different "schools" that hired themselves as mercenaries.

One of them was basically a mix of Big Boss' Outer Heaven mixed with Catachan Jungle Fighters.

They recruited from orphans of villages attacked by monsters and would indoctrinate into a massive "family" of sorts. The training is grueling and could after result in death but afterwords they would become nearly psychotic soldiers who were highly self reliant and tribalistic. They referred to each other as brothers and sisters and the leader was the found called the Old Wolf whom everyone referred to as grandfather

But why do they seek extermination? There is always a REASON for that kind of over the top violence. Have the tribes raided caravans, note I'm not saying this is a bad thing. You said the tribe purged weakness, would that include destroying priories, libraries, or inns. Is it religious, and if so what was/is their trangression? Pizarro didn't murder the Incans just because they were hethens, he attacked when their king tossed a gifted Bible away like it was garbage, and even then his priority was finding where the Incans got all their gold.

Also city states aren't just cities, you need massive amounts of land and smaller villages to feed the city. Unless they have modern farming techniques these city-states need land. They don't seek conquest? Why? They would be throwing resources away in both lossessions in battle and missed opportunity.

TL;DR the city states seem more like an attempt to subvert democracy= good meme rather than fleshed out civilizations.

One of my regions that I have yet to run a game in/near is a loosely organised group of pseudo-independent city states. Independent because they are self governing and control their own regions, and pseudo because the theocratic governor of the region is essentially Cesare Borgia, who doesn't have time to govern cities, and gets along fine with them as long as they provide taxes and/or levy soldiers on top of his own armies to subdue whoever isn't paying taxes and levying soldiers. It isn't very developed, but I haven't had the incentive to play or develop it past that.

based game.

Yeah, the Jovian's are basically the one bodybuilder in the gym who isn't taking steroids, so he knows he has to work twice as hard as everyone else just to keep up, but he does, and everyone gives him crap for it.

>They are all issued with bayonets.
now that's what I call unique