Yep. I will probably go more in depth entailing there mission. They might move in and get a bit better settled. I could have them obtaining minor neighboring kingdoms with the end goal being the power block. Or I could have one of them planning the big score while the other makes a name for he kingdom. The goal here is to send in am assassin then to negotiate the new leader which should work very well on a small scale.
I am just exploring my options. I expect my next few posts to be the ground work for the heist. Can you give me any more info on the Mormon power?
And remember that not every single place on the continent is a nation-state. Though there are a lot of larger powers, remember that even in today's United States in the middle of the country there is a lot of land that is pretty much unsettled. Not everyone is going to set themselves up as a king or warlord or whatever. In the wake of a catastrophe like the Fall, a lot of people are just going to circle the wagons and try to ride it out as best they can. There's going to be a lot of small towns, farms, ranches, etc. between the Mississippi and the Rockies that have a lot of empty space between them and the next vestige of civilization, and that land isn't really arable enough or valuable enough for anyone to stake their necks on a territorial squabble over.
The east and west coast are densely settled population areas, ergo it makes sense that a lot of new nations set themselves up there and snatch up as much land as they could until they ran up against a rival power. The middle of the country is
much less densely settled, so you'd run into more organizations like Gloria Dei and the Three Crows, little settlements and enclaves that have a couple powerful bearers running the show and providing a measure of stability and protection to people under their aegis, some small towns claimed by either a couple bearers and turned into a stockade or others that have been overrun by an organized crime ring like the Black Hand, just without the population density of the New York area. There's also going to be farmers and ranchers who don't necessarily have to bearers themselves, but in the chaos of the Fall were able to say "Hey, look, I've got all this farmland that produces a good amount of food. If you come here and work for me, and you bearers protect my interests and my folks, I'll make sure you're fed." And they would basically be sharecroppers, not answering to a higher power than their farmer. They might not necessarily be as stable, and certainly nowhere near as aggressive, as a place like Oberon or Galletia, but they would be able to keep their people safe and fed. It'd be a big collection of steadholts, holdfasts, etc. So if a warlord out west wanted to scoop up territory on the Great Plains, you certainly have the opportunity to do so, though as your infamy grows people are going to band together to try and put you down.
As far as Mormon power structure goes, do some digging on how the Mormon compounds in real-world Utah function. It would be very much like that, though on a larger scale. Agrarian communities centered around a small governing council, and those communities answer to a central authority, a larger council of elders, that I'm just gonna say is based out of Salt Lake city. So basically, if you want to take them down, you're gonna have a rough time because even if you do successfully kill all the elders in Salt Lake City, those agrarian communities can function pretty well autonomously. You'd have to lead a full on military campaign to subjugate as many of them as you could, probably either killing or at least displacing thousands of people as you did so.
The Lakota, I envision, are something of a polar opposite society, hence the culture clash. While the Mormons are settled agrarians, the Lakota are more nomadic herders with a similar MO to Genghis Khan. They would exist as a single tribe, however with many smaller tribes under that umbrella that travel around their domain herding livestock and hunting. They would have claimed outpost cities and towns where some people do live and tend crops, but the majority of them are nomadic herders and hunters with no real centralization except answering to a head chief, meaning Running Horse. Elder Smith was not the Grand President of the Church of Latter Day Saints, but he would have been highly placed enough on the higher council that he would not have insulted Astor by being sent in the President's place.
