The Freemen Commune
A good place to raise your kids!
A haven for those that could afford to get away from both the bustle of the
megacities and the quiet desperation of corporate rule, without resorting to the dangers and uncertainty of
the undercities The Freemen Commune is the largest community of middle-class, suburban households in the New
World. On the surface, it's a postcard of detached two story houses with white picket fences, 2.4
children and mowed lawns, but under the veneer is a population rife with petty murder, grand treachery, and
insidious techno-cults; all a product of the excruciating boredom of being away from the sleaze of the
undercities.
In Lieu of CEOs, The Freemen Commune has the Homeowner's Association, a
council of the most petty-minded and anally-retentive bastards that put even the tyranny of Samen Von
Würstchen to shame. The self-proclaimed leaders of this council are Stuart and Karen Terwilliger, their
names striking fear into the hearts of garden gnome enthusiasts everywhere.
History of the Freemen Commune
The Freemen commune finds its origins in the heady decades after the Megacities
had become the norm, the nationstates had begun to slip into a fading memory of the past, and the Ronin
Expedition was just getting its start. The Bezosphere was growing strong, and the hyperrich were steadily
falling into the patterns of secret, clandestine warfare for market share and share value that has dominated
the world to this day. A real middle class had managed to emerge in the Megacities, before they began their
total descent into hedonism and perversion, and some people saw the writing on the wall. These people
organized infant Digital Realms, and pooled the resources to buy up the island that they wished to settle,
and the necessary equipment to properly terraform it, buying it at enormously reduced rates from the various
dissolving national firms. Using these, they proceeded to build their peaceful, suburban paradise, a place
where their children could grow up under the open sky, and walk the streets safe and sound, and no one had
to worry about perverts or murderers bringing harm to their families.
The Freemen Commune has been through different phases throughout its 400 or so
year history. Sometimes it becomes a nest of pirates and vermin, the locals afraid to let their children
walk the streets and the schools heavily defended, other times it becomes choked with corporate sponsorships
so heavily that it kills the atmosphere. There have even been times where it actually managed to live up to
the expectations of the founders, being a safe haven where people can raise their families in a normal,
balanced, nice environment of neoliberal capitalist glory. Most recently it has passed through a piratical
period, where bandit clans, smugglers, and pirates ruled the streets and the Homeowners Association was all
but powerless to stop it.
60 years ago, a young couple bought their first house jointly and joined the
Homeowner's Association. Stuart and Karen Terwilliger blazed onto the scene, using a combination of
inherited wealth, charisma, political acumen, and some very targeted and incredible violence to take the
HoA's pool of community funds into buying off the biggest and baddest of the bandit clans on the
island. Using them, they passed an ultimatum. Fall in line or die. Much to the surprise of everyone, they
managed to make it stick, even with their own hired mercenaries. The power couple brought peace and good
manners back to the Commune. For about 10 years, things seemed to be going well, efforts focused on
beautification and the restoration of standards. Yes, the measures were harsh, but they had to be! They
still had problems with pirate attacks and other nonsense, people let morals slip, invited back in the
troubles, and so had to be removed. The Terwilligers were considered harsh, but fair. Then things began to
get stricter and stricter. First it was on how often your lawn had to be mowed, to a regulation height, and
on each day, even if it didn't need cutting just YET. Then it was the ban on certain plants for even
backyard gardens, that were considered 'problematic' for how wild they grew, their growth
restricted to those with a license. Suddenly, even children needed to purchase a license to become a
paperboy, or to mow the lawns of their neighbors for a few creds. Things have only spiraled since then, with
Karen Terwilliger in particular radiating the sort of cold hostility normally associated with the most
ruthless of executives in the new world. Everything must be perfect, standards can never, ever, be allowed
to slip. Those who don't toe the line are given first a warning, then a fine, and then the Morality
Enforcers 'disappear' them. Sometimes, they return, their eyes and smiles glassy, strange things
such as the sound of a hot tub refilling, or the pop of toast from a toaster sending them into nervous
shakes and near catatonic states. More often, they are never heard from again.
- The Strange Goings On
Administration and Structure of the Freemen Commune
Since its founding, the Freemen Commune has been run by the Homeowner's
Association. Every plot of land is ultimately owned by the Homeowner's Association's subordinate
holding company, which exists simply to oversee the sale and purchase of houses, and that essential utility
services are maintained. No one is permitted to own more than a single domicile, though this law is rarely
enforced if one can prove they are simply 'holding onto' a house for one of their children (or
as a place for their retired parents). Homes can be owned jointly or singly, and if a person finds that they
have come into ownership of more than one house through inheritance, then the HoA begins to rigorously
pressure them to sell one of the two buildings unless they can prove that they have a pressing reason to own
more than one building (A child about to graduate or get married, parents who are reaching retirement age,
or having a mistress and fucktons of bribe money).
Owning a home is the primary means of participating in politics in the Commune.
The value of your collective real estate determines the level of authority your voice has in the Association
meetings, with the only superseding virtue being membership on the Association Board. Association Board
membership has a bare minimum property value requirement to be nominated for a position on it, and each
subdivision elects a representative to the board. The Board president is elected by vote among the board
members, with Karen Twerilliger having been elected unanimously for 20 years running, ever since the last
time she disappeared not only the person who received votes besides herself but everyone who voted for them.
All facets of life in the Freemen Commune are ultimately the decision of the Homeowner's association.
In theory, all major new rules must be passed via a majority vote between the subdivisions before
alterations to the HoA contract every citizen of the Commune signs upon buying their house can be altered.
In practice, the board, and especially the president, are able to pass unilateral measures in cases of
'immediate and/or overwhelming threats to property values', a function of the contract that has
been abused to the breaking point by Karen Twerilliger.
Commerce of the Freemen Commune
The Freemen commune has almost nothing going for it beyond some fair trade
currents and enough space to live on. The large island mostly has a highly internal economy in many
respects, importing goods from other companies that are then repackaged and sold in a less pornographic
manner. The island populace leverages their skilled labor and lack of drug or porn filled haze to actually
complete tasks in a reasonable time frame and competency level, often working by remote or for short jaunts
to their places of work from one of the Entry Ports. Credits are then leveraged externally to bring in
goods.
- Remote Professional Work: The primary
export of the Freemen Commune is professionalism and expertise. Lacking the drug and sex soaked work
environments of almost every other territory, the Freemenites represent a unique pool of talent that is
actually very useful for filling in spot positions. The idea of hiring an expensive contractor to do
what you could've just invested in an actual employee for still holds true in the new world, and
very often this is what the Freemen Commune engages in. None of them will ever become spectacularly
wealthy, but they rake in enough money to support a middle class existence unknown practically anywhere
else in the new world. Such activities are always done through the Digital Realms, specifically on
corporate subrealms.
- Traveling Professionals: While there
are many freemenite adventurers, the majority of those leave the Freemen Commune and never look back,
except to send mail to their parents or siblings. The majority of traveling Freemenites are
professionals such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and other high skill, high paying
professionals. They tend to travel between settlements, doing jobs for small independent areas, jumping
from caravan to caravan, and then returning with their money afterwards. Sometimes they operate on a
middle to lower tier company's dime, sometimes they're entirely freelance. Often traveling
professionals rely on old relationships with pirate and other independent groups and settlements that
once held relationships (and sometimes still retain blood ties) with the Freemen Commune despite the
Homeowners' Association's bloody purge of such undesirables from their shores.
The Freemen Commune has special trade relations with the following Territories:
- Nazzdack: The Freemen Commune has no form of local scrip, and
instead
all transactions are made
using credits. For this reason, almost all Freemenites utilize Nazzdackian online banking for their
transactions, though a small credit union does exist on the island, those who wish to hide their
transactions from the Homeowners' Association find it better to use foreign banks. In addition,
the Freemen Commune has the widest population of minority shareholders anywhere in the world (most
holders only owning 1 or 2 shares out of millions or billions of tradable shares in any given company,
and almost always third or fourth string corporations), with every Freemenite dreaming of one day owning
a tiny bit of equity and some dividends in some company or another.
- Cardinal
Holdings: Given the absolutely frantic pace at which corporations
rise and fall in Cardinal Holdings, it's no wonder that many remote workers find jobs there.
Companies often need fast help when getting started or dealing with some bit of sabatoge, and in those
cases, it's best to hire an outside consultant, one who can't possibly be working for their
opposition and likewise aren't high or getting railed while they work, slowing down their ability
to make up for lost ground. Cardinal Holdings fashions, cosmetics, and fabrics are often imported to the
Freemen Commune, both secretly kept slutwear which is not ACTUALLY illegal to own in the Commune (such
as teddy nighties or even more extreme outfits for home use), and the 'Stepford Chic' that
dominates the Freemenite stripmalls and streets.
- Sarajevo
Seven: Much like cardinal holdings, the constant warfare between
spires and corporations means that lost time on projects requires outside contractors, or even delicate
work must be outsourced to the Freemen commune specifically to keep it as far as possible from the hands
of competitors as long as possible. Where Cardinal Holdings produces the majority of fashion, media, and
other entertainment or cultural products that the Freemen Commune imports (often with heavy alterations
or redactions), for industrial goods and utilitarian gear of one sort or another, they most often import
from Sarajevo 7 companies.
- Czarina
Tropical: Over 70% of all food consumed in the Freemen Commune is
produced in Czarina, with a few gardens, aquaculture, greenhouses, fishing, and imports from other
territories rounding out the diet.
- J.A.V.
Digital Entertainment: Relations with J.A.V. are, at best, frosty as
far as the HoA is concerned. J.A.V. represents everything that Karen Terwilliger sees as wrong with the
world today, the cancerous rot at the heart of all things good and decent that must be cut out with a
chainsaw. That said, absolutely nowhere else in the new world has as brisk a smuggling trade as J.A.V.
does with the Freemen Commune, with the pent up and bored out of their skulls Freemenites often
bypassing firewalls or getting the latest toy from J.A.V. to use in the privacy of their own bedrooms,
or at clandestine meetings with like minded pervs.
A massive amount of the income of the locals goes into various blackmarket
schemes, from sabotaging one another's topiaries or vegetable competition entries, to morality
enforcer bribes to look the other way when a tree house is just slightly off from spec in the backyard. Not
to mention the enormous smuggling of goods banned by the HoA into the Freemen Commune itself to bring some
variety or spice to the lives of the locals.
Prominent Races of the Freemen Commune
- Humans make up the vast majority of the population of the
Freemen Commune, and a certain level of suspicion is leveled at anyone not human.
- Nayalings make up the second largest population, though usually
they are of the members of the race who most wish to blend in and not draw attention to themselves.
Locals tend to treat any Nayaling they know personally as exceptions to the rule of 'those
oversexed, blood thirsty goats', while treating others with careful suspicion, making life
difficult for any Nayaling who moves into a new neighborhood.
- A few relatively large family-clans of Gobbos
exist on the Freemen Commune's island. Each of
them having taken responsibility for one area. They are treated as the most eccentric, borderline
criminal group on the island, but have the best inroads into the smuggling network. Only the fact they
are some of the most 'cleaned up' gobbos in the world (and possessing between themselves
enough black mail to bury almost any high ranking morality enforcer) has allowed them to survive the
burning gaze of Karen Terwilliger's suspicion.
- Elfs are incredibly rare in the Commune, and are mostly
street elfs, born from the occasional union of a lucky Freemenite who managed to afford to undergo the
ELF procedure (becoming an executive Elf in the process), with a single group of undercity elfs having
moved there to oversee the single datacenter buried beneath the island.
- There are no Artificiates who have
awoken in the Freemen Commune, the commune
looking down on any form of robot based automation, with imports of such servitors on the banned list by
the HoA. Any Artificiate who manages to secure residency by buying their own plot of land and a home is
inevitably from outside.
- Almost any Freeminite who has made enough to undergo the Remake
engramification
process has almost certainly either
moved away from the Commune in the first place, or spends that money on the far more prestigious and
almost entirely worthless C-tier company shares as bragging rights at the next HoA meeting.
- Jerboans (among a few other races) are out and out banned from
the island, not that any would want to visit at the best of times. If encountered it would only be in
the Entry Ports.
Culture of the Freemen Commune
The exact culture of any individual of the Freemen Commune depends on the
subdivision they live in, as each one has a slightly different set of HoA contracts that determine what is
and isn't acceptable behavior. That said, there are also the universal rules passed down by the
president and the board of the Homeowner's Association, and as those have gotten more strict, so too
have the the number of differences between subdivisions.
The most common thing people notice about the Freemen Commune is that it is by
far the most prudish of territories. "Stepford Style" Fashions dominate the market, men wear
button up shirts, women wear long, knee length dresses, with miniskirts or shorts being considered
scandalous. Swimsuits, while common, tend to be one-piece. What one gets up to in their own home, is to an
extent, their own business, but even there there are rules, with Morality Inspectors occasionally giving
homes inspections to see that everything is in proper order inside as well as out. Everyone is expected to
keep up appearances, and above all else, not allow the value of their neighborhoods to drop too far.
This causes two things to by and large define the lives of Freemenites: Paranoia
and Ennui. Ennui is the first one, the constant boredom of having everything in their lives perfectly
regulated and kept to a specific set of standards with no variation, from entertainment to how they dress to
what media they consume. This means that many of them engage in hacking, smuggling, black market purchases,
murder, intrigue, petty politicking, eldritch worship, and technocultism in an attempt to alleviate their
boredom. This, in turn, leads to Paranoia. Everyone knows that everyone else is up to SOMETHING that would
get the Morality Enforcers to drag them off to a moral rectification site if it became public knowledge.
Everyone knows that if THEIR secret came out, it would be THEM who was dragged off. And so, in order to
deflect suspicion, many of them seek to form alliances, black mail one another, point the fingers at their
fellows for the least infraction, all in an attempt to keep the eyes of Twerilliger and her morality
enforcers from falling upon THEM.
Special Locations of the Freemen Commune
List of Special Locations Types
- Community Centers: The Freemen Commune
is organized into burbs, each of these has a few key facets. A corner store, a strip mall, an assortment
of mom and pop stores, and, of course, the community center. Each community center is a combination
library, meeting hall, gymnasium, and usually attached to the local school. The community centers act as
the hub of activity in every burb, and each of them is both the nerve center for organizing it, and the
place where the Homeowners' Association, the Morality Enforcers, and the Community Watch network
their activities to ensure that everyone in their burb is properly attired, acting upright, and that
there are no trouble makers or 'wrong sorts' about.
- Entry Ports: Ingress into the Freemen
Commune is very strictly controlled. Most territories don't care who enters or leaves them,
provided they're not employees seeking to run off with company assets, but people migrating
between territories are handled simply and easily. The Freemen Commune, officially, only allows entry or
exit through it's official Entry Ports, specially cordoned off walled ports that are run by the
Morality Enforcers to ensure not a single piece of illicit material or unscrupulous person is able to
make it into the commune. In truth, these places become small dens of hedonism inside of the Commune,
only instead of being run by criminal gangs, the proceeds flow into the pockets of the Morality
Enforcers, who also keep a careful eye on any local Freemenites who visit the dens of iniquity, building
up blackmail material to turn them into informers, or to arrest them when they stop being good
customers.
- Morality Enforcement Kiosks: These
unassuming, even friendly little kiosks can be found at every major intersection of every major burb, at
the entrances to the gated communities, outside of the schools, the community centers, and the
stripmalls. Each one is colored in the bright blue and white of the morality enforcers, and manned by a
cute, adorable, and approachable member of the Enforcers! They act as guides for people lost, and act as
the friendly face of the Morality Enforcers, all the while monitoring the various surveillance feeds and
information drips from the community watch members and their informers. While everyone is terrified of
the jack booted enforcers, nothing chills them more than the gentle, adorable, smiling face of their
local morality enforcer representatives, always happily manning their kiosks, ready to help!
Organizations of the Freemen Commune
List of Organizations
- The Homeowners Association -
Administrative Body: The founding organizational body of the Commune, drawing membership from every
person who owns their own piece of real estate on the island. Since the coming of the Terwilligers, it
has become the iron fisted body that sets the standards of everything from proper dress to what shows
can appear on the local broadcast net, to what subrealms are legally accessible, as well as the
punishments for lack of acceptance. Now, only the richest of gated communities lie outside of the grasp
of the HoA, paying a hefty tithe to the Terwilligers and their cronies to retain even a semblance of
their autonomy behind their aesthetically pleasing walls.
- The Morality Enforcers -
Corporation: A series of rent-a-cop groups that draw their roots from the pirates and mercenaries that
once occupied the Freemen Commune. Officially, the Morality Enforcers are a publicly funded corporation
handling matters of peacekeeping and cultural curation for the Freemen Commune. In actuality, they are
like any corpo-cop group, a set of backstabbing corporations beholden only to their next paycheck and
utterly ruthless in their application of violence. Unlike other corpo-cop companies however, the
Morality Enforcers take a great deal of effort to give themselves a positive spin PR wise, and prefer to
avoid looking intimidating on their day to day activities, instead focusing on a 'service with a
smile' approach to hide the iron fist inside of their HoA approved blue-and-white velvet
glove.
- The Community Watch - Guild: Composed
entirely of perennial curtain twitchers and paranoiacs, the community watch is an expansive group split
into cells across each of the burbs. Some are enthusiastic in their commitment to the HoA's
standards and guidelines, while others operate out of jealousy of their more successful neighbors, or
fear of the blackmail material other Community Watch or Morality Enforcement members have on them.
Whatever their reasons, they form the chief source of information on ne'er-do-wells and
troublemakers in the Freemen Commune... even if they have to fabricate their crimes whole
cloth.
- The Esoteric Order of Garden Gnomes - cult: A mysterious cult they popped up sometime in 2367, this
group worships
garden gnomes as if they are gods. Most of the time, it is complacent middle aged something-or-others in
bathrobes wearing traffic cones (legally purchased), using their lawn care equipment to be like their
porcelain overlords. Currently, the cult is ran by Overgnome Stephen Smathers, a humble human who works
in an office to provide for his wife, son, and two dogs. He didn't really intend to fall into the
cult, but "there's a little crazy in every paradise, I guess" as he says. They're
mostly harmless, known for having slightly eccentric gnomes within the HOA's ball crushingly tight
fisted restrictions in public eye, and otherwise having custom or imported hidden away on alters in
their homes. While harmless,lately members seem to have been manifesting abilities commonly found in
Streamers or Ordinators, which most try to hide as best they can. Currently the cult is less than a
threat- just a bunch of people in bathrobes and traffic cones bowing and offering things to a lawn
ornament of all things.
Settlements of the Freemen Commune
The Freemen Commune is a mixture of mixed together sudivisions, the occasional single story downtown office
area,
strip malls, and some green spaces in the
forms of parks and playgrounds. To enter the Freemen Commune is to feel like you've stepped back
almost 400 years but kept the cool tech.
- Dozer Camping Grounds: A park community
on the very edges of the Freemen Commune, it was once a despicable drug growing commune of Gobbos. Today
the vastly extended Dozer family of Gobbos have become, if not pillars of the community, then acceptably
eccentric members of the straight laced society overseen by the HoA under Mrs. Terwilliger. They
regularly win awards for their horticulture during the annual contests for flowers and vegetables, and
the Shady Greens park and camping grounds is a wonder of the island that even the Morality Enforcers
admit gets the barest nod of approval from their fierce chairwoman. Underneath the park however
lays several miles of UV lit and sound proofed tunnels and chambers. Here the Dozer family plies their
traditional trade of drug cultivation and debauched partying, leaving their more lazily sedate
activities like sunbathing and faking 'hard work' to the surface
- White Pickets: On the surface,
this neighborhood is the kind of place where doors are left unlocked and children play sports in the
streets. But behind closed doors are several families that are in a secret war to control the area due
to what lies beneath the neighborhood. While unable to dig up the area and claim the prize due to zoning
laws the families must work in secret, hiring out jobs to those with plausible deniability to do their
dirty work while keeping the Homeowner's Association in the dark about what lies underneath the
neighborhood.
- The Honeymoon Hills: Built off of
preconceived notions of ancient 20th century television, The Honeymoon Hills is a suburb of The Freemen
Commune that is entirely monochromatic. White roses, gray walls, black roofs. White shirts, black suits,
grey skin. White checkered dresses, black hair, gray eyes. Genetic manipulation from the local stem spa
has made stepping into The Honeymoon Hills like walking into an old television. There is even a filtered
hard ight dome around the entire suburb that -from the inside- makes the sky look greyscale.
The
residents of The Honeymoon Hills are incredibly odd. More robotic and routine-driven than an unawoken
artificiate, men simulate the act of going to work by driving anti-clockwise around the suburb from 9am
to 5pm, after which they are greeted with a pipe, slippers, the same copy of newspaper they've been
reading for years, while the wife returns to her well-worn post beside the antiquated oven, cooking the
same meal for decades at a time. Children, all male, all seven years old, all known as Junior, ride
their bicycles throughout the town delivering the same newspaper day after day, after which the act of
pretending to go to school involves lining up and staring blankly at a wall.
Travelers are strongly
advised to avoid The Honeymoon Hills. Even Karen Terwilliger refuses to make mention of what the fuck is
going on over there. But hushed rumors, whispered across picket fences, PTA meetings and drive-in
theaters, has made one thing very clear.
There is something under The Honeymoon Hills.
- The Nuclear Neighborhood: Just outside
the commune, built upon an artificial island chain, is a thriving community that represents all that is
good and wholesome. The residents all reside in quaint family residences that are surrounded by parks,
community centers, and a picturesque downtown with a gazebo. The residents have no worries as all the
men are gainfully employed and all women stay at home and raise the children. The only issue is the
everyone died in a nuclear explosion a few years ago.
This did not deter the walking corpses that
keep going about their business and don't seem to noticed the fact they are dead. As a side
effect from the radiation they are immune to rational arguments and any form of persuasion or diplomacy.
They cannot be convinced of the truth of anything outside their own world view and anyone who tries to
convince them otherwise risks being killed and eaten. Their favorite dishes are the flesh of the living
and and jellybeans.
People of the Freemen Commune
List of Major Figures
Events of the Freemen Commune
List of Historic Events
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