Tauron: A Guide to the Black Country

When I created the Black Country for Trask's background, it honestly hadn't occurred to me that other players might want their characters to have ties to the region. Now that there are several Black Country characters on the grid, I'm creating this repository for those players to detail the hometowns of their respective characters, so as to not spam the main Tauron page. — Trask's player

The following will be reformatted.

Overview

Although once a key part of Tauron's military-industrial complex, the conurbation known as the Black Country never economically recovered from planet's withdrawal from the Colonial Civil War. Many factors were to blame for the disinvestment, deindustrialization, and depopulation in the region, including unionization and its subsequent corruption, the outsourcing of manufacturing to non-union facilities, major contracts going to off-world companies, mining and refinery operations becoming largely machine-automated, and the government's decision to curtail armaments production.

These rationales are often strictly applied along lines of political orientation, and labor remains the most divisive and polarizing local issue. As a result, the area is one of the most economically deprived communities in all the Colonies and suffers from an incredibly high unemployment rate. Urban blight plagues the cities and hooliganism has become a way of life. All the worst proletariat stereotypes apply.

Even by Taurian standards, Blackies are reputed to be particularly hardy, rough-and-tumble people. Not the sort to air their 'dirty laundry', they nonetheless are very forthright. So much so that the term Black Country blunt is part of Taurian lexicon.

Cultural Details

• Ta Moko is the predominant style of tatau.

• Male circumcision is not practiced in the Black Country. In fact, the very notion of it — particularly when performed on an infant — is considered frakked-up for manifold reasons, including but not limited to the beliefs that:
  • The body should be added to, not detracted from;
  • Infants are incapable of true participation in ritual, and body alteration is ritualistic in nature;
  • Good personal hygiene habits completely invalidate any claims of so-called health benefits (TruFax, Caprica!);
  • Only wusses would do that kind of thing to a helpless baby, srsly

• Black Country people tend to worship Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, and Zeus.

Dialect

Black Country folk have an extremely strong sense of regional pride and speak their own dialect of Taurian, in addition to government mandated Colonial Standard. Their accents are very distinctive, at least to other Taurians, and often lampooned in television, film, and the theater — the consonants are guttural; the vowels are softer but nuanced, as if filed down with a rasp and smoothed with a fine-grade sandpaper, but left unpolished; and there is certain vague sing-song quality that is more prominent in certain regions. Rumor has it that a Blackie can determine from where another Blackie hails simply by the way they speak.

(This is keeping in trend with the RL Black Country, which has its own dialect. Although Tauron's Black Country dialect differs from that of England, this link somewhat illustrates the sort of communication issues that might arise.)

Economic Details

• The Black Country is a standard case study for students of economics, sociology, and political science. Mainly, it is a cautionary tale of what not to do.

• Renowned for producing high quality armaments during the Colonial Civil War, many of the factories closed when Tauron withdrew from the conflict. Those that hadn't fallen into a state of disrepair were extensively damaged or outright destroyed during the first Cylon War. The few that were restored never achieved their former glory.

• Part of why the region rose to industrial prominence was a series of waterway shipping lanes running from mineral mines full of ore that was refined into various metals in the nearby city of Steel. Advances in technology, however, ensured increasingly limited employment opportunities, which only exasperated economic troubles and civil unrest. After the notorious 'Slaughter of the Stourbridge Seven' in 1973 AE, mining ceased to be a viable way to make ends meet, and what had been fairly prosperous communities quickly turned into ghost towns.

• For the past 50 years, what little Black Country manufacturing there's been has become synonymous with sweatshop labor.

• In recent decades, the unemployment rate has been among the highest of all the Colonies, and job security is practically non-existent.

• Even those with full-time employment live from paycheck-to-paycheck, and it is not uncommon for someone to hold several part-time jobs in an attempt to make ends meet, provided they can find the work. As a result, the Black Country largely operates under a highly efficient barter system.

Geographical Details

• It is popularly believed that the region was dubbed Black Country due to the blackening of the sky and earth that resulted from heavy industrial pollution. These days, most of the smog and soot has dissipated, but the land remains contaminated and utterly unsuitable for farming. It is more likely that the name existed even before the Taurian Industrial Revolution; outcroppings of black coal scar the surface of the local heaths, and the presence of coal so near the surface renders the local soil very black.

• It is located in the northeastern part of the northeastern continent.

• Earth counterparts: Post-industrial wasteland England; U.S. region known as the Rust Belt