(Director's) Office Politics

For most of Terminus, the lines of power have been unclear to the denizens of the Underground. This is because, ultimately, the power was entirely with them, however much of that fact was deliberately obfuscated.

The Director’s Office relied heavily on its perceived legitimacy to have any sort of veto power over the Underground. However, it never had power it could not be separated from, as both the emergence of the Republic/Order and martial law proved. The enforcers are essential to maintaining the Office’s power, and without them, the Office struggled to achieve anything.

The style of the Directors was also crucial to the way power manifested. After the initial descent into the Underground, Dane Lawrence was able to act as a very paternalistic authoritarian Director due to the already-established hierarchy at the company of Principium. After Dane’s passing, Mai took over as a much more distant Director, essentially establishing the Office’s role as a non-interfering entity with the manpower and resources to put into practice the legislation produced at the town meetings. (Incidentally, it was under Mai’s Directorship that the town meetings were created. This was in part an effort to lessen the Office’s power.) Avgust’s Office could neither practice non-interference (Mai) nor did its leader have populist charisma (Dane. I mean, surely, his charisma must have been enough to carry him through. Surely. There has to be some explanation for him).

The biggest actual power that the Office had, besides the legitimacy that came from the Underground’s endorsement of it, was from its ability to control (most of) the resource management. The real veto power of the Office came from this ability to control most of the logisticians, and therefore the logistics, of the Underground. However, this was yet another power that was weaker than it seemed; when Vicus and Viculus were routinely underfed, the Republic emerged to ensure its needs were met. Logisticians also routinely went against the wishes of the Office, which undermined the only real power they had.

In short, the politics of the Underground were entirely dependent on the relationship of the five hundred with one another, and defined by the geography and real resource limitations of the place in which they lived. It was always in the hands of the community to shape the Underground as they wished.

As for the future? Well, who knows… with Director Mirax Caspian and the representative of the Republic, Amandine Jackson, working closely together, perhaps the people of Principality will learn about their own power.

The following are some handy logistics maps diagrams of what power approximately looked like over three points in the game: the early/pre-game, after the emergence of the Republic and the Order, and during martial law. (After martial law, the system reverted to something similar to the emergence of the Republic and Order.)