The Mortarchate of Ashur-Rem is a vast desert-spanning empire where law, death, and divine order intertwine. Ruled in the name of Kelemvor, Ashur-Rem presents itself as a realm of impartial judgment, sacred bureaucracy, and reverence for the proper passage of souls. To its people and neighbors, it is a land where death is respected, documented, and ritualized.
Yet beneath its immaculate rituals and lawful veneer lies something colder. The Mortarchate’s rulers wield faith and tradition as tools of control, shaping every stage of life—and death—into a system that benefits the state. Obedience is framed as spiritual duty, and dissent as disruption of cosmic order.
Ashur-Rem is a land of shifting sands, sun-scorched plateaus, and fertile river-valleys fed by life-giving waters that cut through the desert. Most major cities lie along the coast or rivers, where trade, shipyards, and grain storage flourish.
Monumental tomb-cities, necropolises, and temple-complexes rise from the sands, often older than the current regime. Caravans traverse well-maintained desert roads marked by way-stations, shrines, and watch-forts.
The Mortarchate is governed by a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy modeled after both imperial administration and priesthood.
At its head stands the High Mortarch, @Ashur-Setekh Ra-Emhet considered Kelemvor’s supreme earthly adjudicator. Beneath them operate layers of viziers, judges, mortuary-priests, and record-keepers who oversee everything from taxation to burial rites.
Key offices include:
Viziers – Administrators of death records, funerary taxes, and inheritance law. @Nephren-Ka, @Nefru-Khalid ibn Ma’at
Justicars of the Scale – Traveling judges enforcing doctrine and imperial law
Mortuary Clerks – Census-keepers who track births, deaths, and soul-tithes
Law is exhaustive, codified, and relentlessly enforced.
Worship of Kelemvor is paramount and mandatory in all public life. Death is not feared but ritualized, scheduled, and audited.
Every citizen is registered at birth and pre-assigned funerary rites according to status. Burial without sanction is illegal. Undeath is publicly condemned—yet tightly controlled necromancy exists within the state under clerical oversight, justified as “administrative necessity.”
This contradiction is the Mortarchate’s greatest hypocrisy.
Ashur-Rem culture blends opulence with monumentalism:
Flowing robes, turbans, veils, and layered silks
Gold-inlaid armor, curved blades, ceremonial masks
Grand domes, minarets, obelisks, and stepped tombs
Public life is formal and ritual-heavy. Processions, judicial readings, and funerary parades are common. Respect for the dead is absolute—but the living are expected to accept hardship with quiet dignity.
The Mortarchate fields disciplined professional armies supported by levied auxiliaries. Elite units include:
Scale Guard – Fanatical cleric-warriors
Sepulchral Janissaries – State-raised soldiers indoctrinated from youth
Ashur-Rem maintains a strong navy to protect coastal cities and trade routes.
Ashur-Rem presents itself as lawful, reliable, and indispensable—especially in matters of inheritance, burial rites, and treaty arbitration.
Privately, neighboring realms fear its quiet manipulation, its obsession with records, and its unsettling interest in foreign deaths and bloodlines.