Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh sits at the forks of the Ohio River, amidst the ruins of an ancient city that once stood there. The name now applies to the wider region and the confederacy that inhabits it.
#History
At the height of civilization, the city of Pittsburgh produced more steel than anywhere else in the world. As civilization began to collapse, the steel industry likewise collapsed, but Pittsburgh used its wealth to pivot towards medicine and universities. As these, too, began to collapse, the myriad neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, reinforced by the divisions of three rivers and limestone hills carved by millennia of steady erosion into a patchwork of elevations that paved roads never entirely overcame, began to transform into ever more self-sufficient villages. Community gardens became the centers of fully-fledged new communities, and over time, those communities began to drift apart and become villages.
During the Rusting Age, Pittsburgh’s downtown area fell under the control of a domineering warlord who mined it for scrap metal to arm his followers. The warlord extorted tribute from surrounding communities. Many used potatoes and other root tubers to try to hide their true abundance from the tax collectors, but all of the communities in the region suffered from the warlord’s tyranny. This prompted the foundation of the Pittsburgh Confederacy, as several of the communities banded together to foment an uprising against the warlord.
#Confederacy
The Pittsburgh Confederacy persists to this day. At its core lies the Gatekeepers, a community that inhabits the area from the Point to Nine Mile Run. With the confluence of the three rivers, and the secret fourth river (an underground aquifer called the Wisconsin Glacial Flow), locals believe that the Point represents the gateway to the underworld. The Gatekeepers help pilgrims reach the Point through the dangerous ruins that surround it, and perform a variety of rituals throughout the year to placate the lords of the underworld.
In addition to the Gatekeepers, three other "sentinel villages" bear responsibility for protecting the Confederacy, named for the region’s three rivers: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio.
A number of other villages also belong to the confederacy, many of which continue to bear the names of ancient neighborhoods. Many of these villages have begun to question the relevance of the confederacy so many generations after the last warlord’s death, causing consternation between them and the sentinel villages.
Every village in the confederacy chooses a councillor, who speaks for that village on the council of the confederacy. This council settles disputes between villages and makes any decision that the confederacy as a whole must decide. The council works on a principle of nested consensus, in which the councilors return to their villages to achieve consensus there. and then returning to the council to achieve consensus among themselves. This can take many iterations, but it means that the decisions reached by the confederacy embody the consensus of everyone within it.